Su Ballard
The Ecologic Foundation of New Zealand has recently advised drivers to not "use your car boot for permanent storage. The extra weight exacts its price in extra fuel consumption." (1)
Despite the warning, the Australian naturalist Merilyn T. Grey keeps a "car-boot library" for use on field trips.(2) Grey is particularly interested in threatened species such as the Squirrel Glider, Brush-tailed Phascogale, Regent Honeyeater, Swift Parrot, Pinktailed worm-lizard and the Woodland Blind Snake, who all live in South Australia's Box-Ironbark country. With his car-boot library Grey is able to travel into the wilderness comfortable in the knowledge he can identify any inhabitant species he may encounter.
This tension between the weight of storage and the necessity of carriage is even more pronounced in the mobile libraries that still operate weekly circuits in most major towns in New Zealand. The mobile library offers an opportunity for direct physical access to visual, textual and sonic materials. The Palmerston North Mobile library website records the history and necessary adaptations of its book-bus as the increasing weight of books determined first the replacement of the bus's wheel-base in June 1970, and then the strengthening of the chassis in August 1971.(3) Key to a mobile library is a diversity of materials and resources mapped through an anticipation of the tastes of the visiting public. The constant repairs document the maintenance of a delicate balance between the weight of information and necessity of transport. The book-bus, like the car-boot library, is less an information-companion and more a mobilised and networked distribution method.
It is in this context that Anna Muirhead's Back-boot project can be located. Back-boot is temporary, peripatetic and contained gallery space that challenges a sense of fixed cultural storage and data access. It is an informational container, yet mobile, and the works within are less didactic than exploratory. Despite their limited and itinerant shelflife the series of installations that Muirhead has curated over the past six months form a new kind of car-boot library. This library is paradoxically non-archival and the collection is not readily available for loan. Temporally and spatially limited, it exists through documentation and memory. It is relational; dependent on the activities of its visitors and determined by the shifting locations of road transit. The various installations that make up the library have variously inserted themselves into the fragile
ecology that is the back-boot.
So, how to catalogue such a library? Cataloguing is the process of finding relationships and generating order. It is a temporary, provisional, activity. For the meantime, I am going to form my own car-boot library by indexing the Back-boot project through a set of meta-data labels. This process of information collation based on direct encounter means that like Grey, if confronted with another, I can locate and identify, observe and document.
Most teens desire some version of the "back-seat of the car" story. But aging populations and contoured ergonomics mean that the wide berth of a Holden is no longer available to all. Victoria Bell's installation Horseplay offers likely punters the opportunity to catch up on missed opportunities, and re-live hidden fantasies. Horseplay is a strangely erotic fur saddle centred on a tartan rug. Located in a liminal space the visitor to this back-boot is encouraged to picnic and frolic. Such human animal relationships play on the essential anthropomorphism of the car. It is more than a stable; it is the horse itself.
Without strictly adhering to "Bensley's Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit," and yet designed to satisfy a basic interest in zoology, Michele Beevor's bunnies also challenge the reproductive fumblings of the backseat.(4) The film crew are on set and Carnage awaits the poll results. How will the viewing public receive this cautionary tale? Beevors introduces a hierarchy of stardom to the traditional rabbit ecosystem based on equality and distribution of wealth. Carnage and his crew no longer participate in the formation of huge egalitarian burrows. Instead they play close to the edge. Through the machinations of this feral brand of Hollywood the individual may triumph. Conducting their own stunts and gambling with more than their lives they beg the question: why did the rabbit cross the road?
It is not only animal species that have limited tenure. Inflationary pressures can often render small monetary denominations extinct. Small pockets live on in the back of sofas, and collectors race to secure the final issue. Scott Eady's Small Change enables a coded access to the back boot. To melt a coin is a criminal offence – the question is, of which kind? It only became illegal to melt coins in the United States of America on December 14 2006.(5) This is the moment at which the value of the metal outgrew the value of the currency printed on it. Interestingly, the New Zealand mint lists the melting point of each metal used in the minting process.(6) Is this as encouragement? Eady takes up the challenge. The result is a talisman – something to protect the driver and in which they place their trust.
Like God, a general must always understand the movements of his troops. In Petraeus Michael Morley slows the speed of transmission, but amplifies its effects. US Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus has been heralded as "the military's warrior-scholar" because of his "adaptive thinking." (7) The general principles of anticipation and change come into play both on and off the battlefield. Petraeus says "The truth is not found in any one school of thought, and arguably it's found in discussion among them … This is a flexibility of mind that really helps you when you are in ambiguous, tough situations." (8) Morley combines this understanding of collaborative movement with a sound track that both entices a listener to dance and makes it impossible to continue. Anticipation and change becomes capture and release.
Desire is a strange force. It is a momentum that kicks in from a young age and can propel people well beyond their comfort zones. Instead of fire-fighting and space travel, Ben Smith suggests that childhood desires does not need to extend further than wanting a small red car, and the possibility to make a critical or creative contribution to society. Or is it simply that he shows us a desire for freedom, movement and the breath of wind on his face. This kind of physiological desire is more than procreative, it offers an opportunity for animals to move beyond their common environment, and to travel at speed.
Bekah Carran’s Cosy Dell: A Portable Garden documents another kind of desire. Taking the oil companies at their word and planting more than a tree for each leg of travel, Carran established a complete ecosystem within the Back-boot. The tomatoes, calendula and pansys offer a model of sustainability by emitting oxygen to combat the fumes of a not-so-modern hatchback. This is not simply utopic modelling; Carran’s garden grows. Over two weeks of sustained growth, the tomatoes fruited, the flowers sprouted, and the strawberries appeared to have been pollinated by some unseen force. This literal ecology also suggests that the formation of community gardens need not be in fixed locations, as Cosy Dell: A Portable Garden brought together groups of engaged viewers keen to tend and protect. Relationships were fashioned and ideas were seeded.
The result of any closed ecosystem is that at some point emergent growth will occur. Small changes at the bottom of a hierarchy will mean new forms emerge: new structures, new species, new technologies. In Untitled (The End) Emily Pauling points to the inevitable side-effect of systemic change. At some point individual elements within the system will be left behind. A car will break down, a flower will pollinate and fruit, a book will tear, a body will fracture. Pauling offers a sombre monument to these passings. Like the car boot itself Pauling’s veneered interior conceals as much as it reveals. It is an object for transport within a space of transit. It reminds me of a revamped 1960s hearse with the number plate MORBD that cruises my neighbourhood at the weekends. The length of the car, the sheen on the chrome and the deep black gloss of the paintwork speak more than the plate. This is a car about love. That is loved.
For a few months a man lived in his car outside my office. Each morning he would be standing outside the car cleaning something, doing his housework. We never conversed, but as I walked past on the way for a morning coffee I tried to surreptitiously read the titles of the books he had stashed hard up against the back window. He isn’t parked outside any more. Now I wonder more about the contents of his car-boot library. Maybe he has read of a place to travel and simply moved.
Back-boot presents a library of objects in formation. Within the car boot of a small red hatchback, Muirhead has established a specific location for networked and mobilised sculpture. Like a library the Back-boot is both a surface for inscription and the inscription itself, or put another way: an object and an installation. What does this mean for sculptors who like to divide themselves along the semantic divisions of installation and object? Is it possible to continue to make ‘objects’? The Back-boot renders all objects within its bounds kinetic. And when kinetic, sculpture shifts disciplinary boundaries; it is space and time read together. Here in the Back-boot the object is networked, the installation is mobilised, and the library no longer redundant.
(1) Based in Nelson the Ecologic Foundation wants a sustainable world. “We believe such a world can only be created by bringing Ecology, Economy and Ethics into harmony. We can claim sustainable progress when all three are improving together – but not otherwise.” See http://www.ecologic.org.nz/ (visited 10 November 2007).
(2) I have taken some liberty with Grey’s statements in The Victorian Naturalist. See Merilyn J Grey The Victorian Naturalist vol. 123(2), 2006. The Victorian Naturalist has been published by the Field Naturalists Club since 1884 and is issued six times a year. It accepts articles on natural history relevant to Victoria and Australia. All articles are refereed, and the aim is to have a mixture of scientific research reports, naturalist notes and articles suitable for a wide audience. See http://home.vicnet.net.au/~fncv/vicnat.htm (visited 12 November 2007).
(3) Palmerston North City Libraries. “The Mobile Library, with its award-winning design, goes to 39 stops around the city. On board you will find: books (including large print), magazines, audiobooks, music CDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs and more, a friendly, personal service. Use the bus timetable to see when the bus will be in your neighbourhood.” See http://citylibrary.pncc.govt.nz/mobile-library.html (visited 12 November 2007).
(4) B. A. Bensley, Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1948. For broader contexts of Carnage and his film see This Day in Disney History: “where there’s always a great big beautiful tomorrow.” http://thisdayindisneyhistory.homestead.com/Apr01.html (visited 12 November 2007).
(5) The change in law was reported on a number of news sites, see for example: Barbara Hagenbaugh “New rules outlaw melting pennies, nickels for profit” USA Today, 14 December 2006. http://www.usatoday.com/money/2006-12-14-melting-ban-usat_x.htm (visited 12 November 2007); and Quiana Burns “U.S. Mint Moves to Ban Penny Melting” ABCNews 14 December 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=2725597&page=1 (visited 12 November 2007).
(6) See The New Zealand Mint, Te Kamupene Whakanao o Aotearoa. http://www.newzealandmint.com/nzmint.mv?page=bullion_brochure (visited 12 November 2007.)
(7) Julian E. Barnes “An Open Mind for a New Army,” U.S. News and World Report, 31 October 2005. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051031/31petraeus.htm (visited 12 November 2007).
(8) Quoted in Barnes “An Open Mind for a New Army.”
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