Francis McKee: Room 7 The Late Twentieth Century Fracture The Works of Phillip Lai
In: Phillip Lai. London: The Showroom in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1997.
The future doesn't exist, or if it does exist it is the obsolete in reverse. Robert Smithson
This gallery brings together the remaining fragments of the work of Phillip Lai, locating it in its historical and social context.
Two centuries after the events of this turbulent age, it may seem difficult for us to understand the precise reasons for the collapse of the culture in which Lai moved. The hand-to-mouth barter society which followed has also ensured that many of the most valuable artefacts of the period have been lost or tested to destruction through prolonged use. Perhaps the trajectory of the lost culture can be traced via a brief history of Soya.
The early discovery of this bean, called the 'treasure-house of life' by the Chinese, remains shrouded in legend. It is said that it was found by two warlords, Yu Xi-ong and Gong Gang-shi, who became lost in the desert and managed to survive on the beans of this unknown plant. Later records of Soya continue to link it closely with survival strategies - Chinese monks lived on it as they moved across Asia, spreading their religion. Japanese soldiers in World War II carried a simple bag of Soya flour as their only survival rations.
The Soya bean reached the West in the eighteenth century where it was grown experimentally in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the Botanical Gardens in London and then promptly ignored. It took Ford Motors to ignite a new interest in the plant in the second half of the twentieth century when they began to manufacture plastic car accessories form the residue of Soya oilcake.
It may have been these industrial connotations which made it difficult for Westerners to consider eating Soya. In 1973, the film Soylent Green equated Soya foodstuffs with a vision of the future in which an overpopulated and polluted America was forced to feed its citizens on the processed remains of the dead. A year later, the Western economy received its first body-blow as the oil crisis brought cities to a standstill.
From the records we have been able to piece together, the works of Phillip Lai appear to date from at least twenty years after this time - that is, thirty years before the final collapse. One of the most famous exhibits in our display - the bottle of soy sauce - can be dated fairly accurately to that period. Random accounts speak of his brewing and stockpiling of large quantities of the sauce. It is difficult today to imagine what his contemporaries must have made of this. After all, at the time, the handmade, or home-made, product was simultaneously prized and held in contempt. If the sauce was made in 1996/97, when genetically engineered Soya was introduced on the world market, then it may have had a particular resonance as it pointed back to the origins of the foodstuff and forwards to the future of this increasingly 'all-purpose seasoning'.
The Berlindina Codex records that a priest approached Phillip Lai while he was making this work and offered to buy five whole bottles of the soy sauce with the intention of using them in the preparation of several meals for his friends. Lai agreed to the sale and the Codex notes that both the artist and the priest were intensely satisfied with the transaction. Obviously nothing in the Codex can be verified but the story tallies in general with other rumours of Lai's enjoyment of trading or the peddling of goods. In his work, Petrol Station, (now missing) this pleasure was again evident in the commercial display of lemonade bottles full of fuel - a stripped down, transient version of the West's great architectural features. The petrol station, a classic mooring point in the great machine enterprise, was reduced to the makeshift sale of its stockpiled essence.
Echoes of the vanitas tradition can also be seen in the casts of skulls which survive from this period of Lai's life. While looking at these, it is important to remember that although the petrified landscapes they evoke are very familiar to us today, in the late twentieth century such vistas were still a part of their future. Society at that time had marginalised death and the exploration of mortality to the comic book or horror film. Lai's casts recuperated the tradition while paying homage to sequences of drawings such as Conan the Barbarian which we now revere.
Unfortunately, many of Lai's own drawings have only been preserved in photographs - partly because of the ephemeral nature of their presentation. This transiency was, however, an important facet of their production. Biro drawings on newsprint or on a wall underlined their existence solely in the present tense. Much of their power derived from the obsessive quality of the drawings which seemed at the same time to be involuntary and over determined. For viewers, the apparently random nature of the drawings immediately stimulated them to discern patterns of intention at an instinctual level. Some reports likened the drawings to the effect of Rorschach blots, evoking meaning from the viewer through their striking ambivalence. Others spoke of their hypnotic force, pulling the viewer into an abstract world through the very materiality of the inky gestures.
This gravitational pull exerted by Lai's objects has caused incessant debate among the leading theologians of our time. His Yellow Bin, Enema and Tyre are said to have exhibited elements of an animistic nature. The Bin, in particular, has incited something close to fury in one religious commentator who feels that the object seemed to mock him by its implicit autonomy and its blatant refusal to acknowledge its own obsolescence. The Bin, he said, appeared to control its own fate, was causing itself to exist and was clearly investing in its own production. A professor of genetic aesthetics countered such claims when she argued that the human mind was no different, as the unconscious also had its own propagating logic.
Whatever. The Tyre remains one of the touchstones of our newly improvised culture. As a near-perfect copy of a motorbike tyre it functions as a handmade shadow of the original. Like one of our smart new viruses (or one of the ancient twentieth-century body-snatching aliens), the Tyre resembles its prototype, conscious of its unseen flaws, passing itself off as the real McCoy. The significance of this artefact to our people during the rebuilding programme cannot be overestimated.
Finally, every visitor to this gallery should be reminded that little of any certainty is known of Phillip Lai's biography. In the Collected Apocrypha of 20th Century Art there are several highly unreliable accounts of his life, including a celebrated anecdote in which he wanders through the streets of a small town, hears a station clock strike and, immediately anxious, makes his way to the station booking office. There, the clerk looks up from his newspaper, tells him its 'high time', and sells him a ticket for the next train out.
Among the statements most commonly attributed to him in the Apocrypha are
1. Truth is a formality which can be dispensed with.
2. You can't even sweep the road with ambivalence.
3. The fact that functionality and ... keep cropping up in my work so often suggests ... not only are objects somehow inves... in their own production, but, like ...st machines, they are designed to function virtually autono...ly [Fragment 128b]
4. The tyre says things twice.
The last, of course, is virtually an adage in our own culture.
Francis McKee