My friend Lee just pointed out that
The Grey Islands has an uncanny resemblance to a Douglas Adams story. It becomes a little more canny when I reveal that I was inspired to do this project partly by the story of Wonko the Sane in
So Long and Thanks For All The Fish.
Wonko, you see, had given up on the world and decided to build an insane asylum in which to keep it. The final straw, the thing that drove Wonko to construct the asylum, was a set of instructions printed on the side of a package of toothpicks: "Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."
"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost it's head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."
So Wonko the Sane simply turned his California beach house into an asylum.
"It was like this:
"It was inside out.
"Actually inside out, to the extent that (Arthur and Fenchurch) had to park on the carpet.
"All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe.
"Where it got really odd was the roof.
"It folded back on itself like something M.C. Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which it is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one with all the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up after have been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were outside pointing up.
"Confusing.
"The sign above the front door read 'Come Outside,' and so, nervously, they had.
"Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done pointing, gutters in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.
"And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened at the end, as if, by an optical illusion which would have had M.C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself."
Wonko never left the outside where he could sit next to the ocean all day long, while the rest of the world went busily about its affairs safely contained within his thoughtfully constructed asylum.
At this point I feel the need to point out that I read the
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy obsessively. It's not that I once read through the five books of the inaccurately named trilogy a few times. Since my cousin Sinead gave me the box set during my visit to Ireland six years ago I've probably read each book twenty times. The only reason I haven't been reading them obsessively in the past two years is that when I left Regina I put the books in storage. Last week I picked up a copy of
So Long and Thanks For All The Fish from Afterwords, and I've read it twice already, much to the detriment of my plan to reread Nicholas Bourriaud's
Relational Aesthetics. Over the past two years my obsessiveness has been otherwise directed - if you have any idea how much I watch
Buffy the Vampire Slayer these days, then you know how much I used to read
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
You see, I believe that
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy explains a whole lot about everything, particularly, and this may be on account of my interest in art practice and theory, postmodernism. For example, the antagonist, Arthur Dent, is thrust into an existential quandary when Earth and everything on it except him and the pyjamas he is wearing is destroyed by the Vogon construction fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Following years of aimless wandering through the galaxy Arthur somehow finds Earth - brought back from oblivion by superintelligent dolphins - only to leave it again, this time willfully, to follow a woman. Doesn't he learn anything?
And the story of Wonko underlines the principle that there is no privileged frame of reference from which one part of the universe can objectively observe another part of the universe. What is insane to one is sane to another, and what is inside can be outside from a different perspective. The only actual definition of an art object is a relationally determined consensus between individuals. The Grey Islands won't be ceramic art because their soils contain a particular ratio of silica to alumina.
The Grey Islands will be ceramic art because I am bringing it into a discussion of what, exactly, ceramic art is.
