Ten after Ten in Samoa: The Art of Lizzie Hughes
“Hello, could you tell me where you’re located please?”
“Hello?”
“Hello, could you tell me where you’re located please?”
“OK, we are located right across from… right across from Geordano’s Pizzeria.”
“And which country is that?”
Lizzie Hughes has described her current practice as an attempt to make “re-representations of structures and networks that through scale and complexity defy a singular visualization.” To this apparently paradoxical end, she has condensed buildings, streets, cities and countries, architectural, geographical and social phenomena into highly focused texts, videos, installations, and sound works that reveal a startling beauty and strangeness—and often an unexpected humour—in the outwardly neutral, mundane or repetitive. Striving to define the inherently elusive, even her failures are revelatory.
Hughes’s earliest projects are attempts to quantify and embody various phenomena, often by relating them to direct human interaction through the self-reflexive modification of architectural interiors. In Measuring Piece, for example, the artist has annotated a room with its own measurements, drawing lines and inscribing numbers directly onto the walls and fixtures. In 25 Kg Weight Piece, she takes a more visceral approach to the alteration of viewers’ experience, connecting the only door to a weighted pulley system and transforming the process of coming and going into an unnerving test of strength. In the similarly confrontational Barricade Piece, a row of chairs is arranged in unbroken procession, claustrophobically wedging shut the room’s solitary exit door.
In subsequent projects, Hughes’s focus is at once broader—she works with sites far beyond her immediate surroundings—and narrower—she relies increasingly on her own research skills and powers of recall. Memory Piece—Street Map, London is part of an extended sequence derived from the memorization of specific bodies of information; here, the artist attempts to render from memory a plan of the city in which she lives. The even more ambitious Paris, 2005, describes, in the form of a 52,000-word printed text, a route around the French capital that incorporates every street within the Peripherique. The mental labour involved in producing it recalls Phyllis Pearsall’s extraordinary physical efforts in walking every London street en route to compiling the first A-Z. The Gallic subject of the piece also links an outwardly fact-based exercise in completism to the Situationists’ psychogeographical plans. Paris’s directions eventually bring us full circle—the journey, while patently absurd, is apparently possible—but the information, while accurate, is so hard to absorb that the final effect is curiously, wonderfully, abstract.
Hughes’s video UTO 7S also attempts at a complete overview of its subject, and like Memory Piece—Street Map, London, it too is founded in memory—though not the artist’s own. In this sixty-minute video, Hughes prompts her father to describe all the cars he has ever owned (as we learn, there are more than forty of them), which he does with relish and in exhaustive detail over the course of a meandering drive around his island home. The result constitutes a kind of “metering” of the senior Hughes’s life, a personal history related through a specific history of ownership.
The role that Hughes performs in UTO 7S—something like that of an interviewer—reemerges, in a slightly different form, in Second Empire State Building Piece. Here Hughes constructs a thirty-eight minute, twelve-second long multi-stage exchange (one hesitates to call it a conversation) by telephoning one company on each of the iconic building’s eighty floors, politely asking every respondent the same disarmingly simple question “Could you tell me what floor you’re on, please?” The varied responses (which range from bored to baffled, reticent to enthusiastic) accrue to form a composite portrait in sound that recasts the powerful symbol of American capital as a more human, and thus more tentative and mutable, edifice (it is impossible not to think too of telephone calls made from the doomed World Trade Center). Spin/Still, in which Hughes ’phones one location in each of the world’s thirty-four time zones to request the local time, follows a similar template. The two-part work (in the first half, the time reported gets incrementally later as the piece progresses, in the second it is forever one o’clock) reinvests, through sheer methodical thoroughness, a ubiquitous technology with a measure of its original magic.
Again exploiting the backdrop of Manhattan,Hughes e-mailed several hundred people working in the same area to make 34th Street, 2002. Having initially requested that each participant describe his or her office space, Hughes not only amassed some extraordinary descriptions but also saw a dialogue arise between the participants (who had previously been strangers to one another as well as to the artist). For “East End Academy,” at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2004, Hughes developed a variation on the project titled E1 6RU after the postcode of Brick Lane, a similarly busy local route. The practice of “hacking” into (public) networks that these works represent is an extension of the artist’s preoccupation with the fact that outwardly quantifiable systems tend to conceal layers of unpredictability. derived from the ways in which people actually make use of them.
Hughes’s interest in the possibilities offered by the web also extends to its role as an ever-expanding open-access visual archive. A triptych of videos, 134 Contrails, Rockefeller Tree and Eiffel Tower uses shots sourced from the photo sharing website Flickr. Collecting multiple images of the same subject taken at different times and places by different photographers, Hughes pieces her findings together into mesmerizing animations whose obsessive focus gradually transforms the way we regard each subject. The triptych eventually led to a longer work, Four Thousand and Seven Horizons, 2007. Depicting exactly what its title describes, the video represents a year’s work compressed into a crystalline two minutes and forty seconds. It is too fast to take in, but quite impossible not to try. Without moving, and in the duration of a pop single, we have circled the earth.
“This is Samoa.”
“Samoa. Could you tell me what time it is in Samoa at the moment?”
“OK, the time is ten after ten.”
“Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Bye.”
—Michael Wilson
