We have all dreamed of finding hidden treasures,
another Tutankhamun, or a Terracotta Army. But what if, searching
closer to home, we unearthed the decaying crypt of a man, preserved
for eternity in his own flat? In the murky depths of the gallery,
artists Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson have created the tomb
of a modern recluse – a man they call King Tat.
 |
Enter the
gallery and a corridor leads you to the antechamber. Gaping
holes in the walls afford views into a room, scattered with
flimsy household goods. Grimy mattresses loll against peeling
flock wallpaper and a small car nestles in a corner, a carriage
for the afterlife. Two four-foot high polystyrene dogs guard
the burial chamber, which is barred by breeze-blocks. |
Shaun Doyle & Mally Mallinson,
Antechamber, King Tat, 2005. Photo by Steve Shrimpton..
The corridor leads on to reveal the burial
chamber itself, dominated by a hulking chest-freezer,
the sarcophagus. The chamber is adorned with housing estate
murals and gaudy street-racing imagery, visions of a ‘live
fast’ modern culture, a distorted echo of Egyptian
tomb decoration. The corridor leads out into the gallery,
where the exterior of the construction is visible
. |
 |
| Shaun Doyle & Mally
Mallinson, Burial Chamber, King Tat, 2005. Photo by Steve
Shrimpton. |
Shaun Doyle & Mally Mallinson, King Tat, 2005. Photo
by Steve Shrimpton. |
Just who is King Tat? A loathsome figure,
who has memorialised his own lazy existence? Or an embodiment
of loneliness, seeking solace in the afterlife, surrounded
by shabby possessions and images of escape?
Doyle and Mallinson have created a darkly humorous work
exploring Western society’s voyeuristic obsession
with death and ceremony. Constructed uniquely for the
gallery space, it parodies the facsimile of Tutankhamun’s
tomb created for the ‘amusements’ section
of the 1924 British Empire exhibition. Contrasting the
extravagance of ‘high’ culture, with the mundane
and everyday, it asks the crucial question: what creates
spiritual value in the modern age?
Artists' interview |
| Complementing King Tat will be Waiting,
1974, a film by British artist Elisabeth Kozmian-Ledward,
shown in the Project Room. A man in his room speaks of
the things that surround him, the possessions that possess
him. Melancholic, part philosophic, part poetry, he waits
to be reborn. |
Elisabeth Kozmian-Ledward,
‘Waiting’, 1974. © Copyright the artist.
Courtesy Lux
|
King Tat has been organised by the
John Hansard Gallery.
Project Room film courtesy of Lux.
King Tat has been financially supported
by Arts Council England 
Artists' Interview
A 25 minute video interview with Shaun
Doyle and Mally Mallinson:
Please note: due to problems with the sound recording, a downloadable
mp3 file and podcast will not be available for King Tat. We
sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused and will ensure
that this service is reinstated for our forthcoming exhibition.
Watch with Windows Media Player
- Instructions on viewing the video can be found here
SD: Shaun Doyle
MM: Mally Mallison
BB: Dr Bernadette Buckley,
Head of Education & Research, John Hansard Gallery
BB I would like to welcome
Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson to the John Hansard Gallery.
Welcome and thanks very much for agreeing to take part in this
video interview, for which we will share copyright if that’s
okay with you?
MM Yes.
SD Yes.
BB Okay, let’s just
start by talking about how this work [entitled King Tat and
currently showing at the John Hansard Gallery] came to be. Could
you give me something of the background to the work?
MM The pub basically. Wasn’t it? [Laughs]
SD Yes. In The Mariner’s, you can see
that £ Store over the road. I think we were talking about
archaeology weren’t we? About the Terracotta Army. And
we just made a connection between the two didn’t we?
MM Yeah between a pound store and a Terracotta
Army.
SD Yeah that was it. [Laughs]
BB But the idea about King Tutankhamen, where
does that come from … or why King Tutankhamen?
MM Well we’re both interested in archaeology.
I don’t know. It’s was just the tat wasn’t
it?. Tatankhamen
SD Yeah, they’re the most famous images
aren’t they – the most famous ones from inside the
tomb and it seemed like a good reference to start working from.
BB But you were particularly interested in
the two-chamber format weren’t you? I mean, you were particularly
interested in the show in Wembley – the British Empire
Exhibition of 1924 in which a facsimile of the tomb was shown.
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
SD We’d both done scenic artwork, and
we both worked in museums making displays – we’ve
made some pretty shabby ones ourselves. [Laughs] And seeing
those ones and seeing how stuff like that is exhibited in museums,
we thought it’d be funny to do a parody of one of those
displays as well as the actual idea for the piece. How it was
displayed was part of the idea.
.
MM Yeah and in a lot of the museums we’ve
worked in…you get a lot of… sort of half-themed
stuff. And obviously you haven’t got enough money so it
looks really sort of tatty. And we wanted to reconstruct one
of those. Obviously you’ve got enough money to theme one
piece or one exhibit really well, but not enough to do the whole
museum. So you have this really tacky, tat, half-themed exhibit.
We wanted to do something like that didn’t we?
BB Why is ‘tat’ so important to
you then? What is this obsession with ‘tat’ about?
MM I think it’s because we’re
always surrounded by it. Every Christmas, every birthday, you
just get totally useless goods. Obviously the sender has got
good intentions but it’s all sort of clogs up your life
basically. Do you think?
SD Yeah and we normally work with second-hand
stuff don’t we? We like that aesthetic – you know,
that it’s shabby, or amateurish, or cheap…
MM Yeah most of our sculptures look quite
tatty anyway, don’t they?
SD Yeah we like that finish.
BB So it’s an aesthetic, this shabby
look – as well as being a parody?
MM Yeah… [Laughs] Yeah.
SD Yeah we don’t like that sort of slick
professionalism do we? We like lots of folk art and ice-cream
vans and pub signs and stuff like that. And that’s more
appealing and more immediate to a whole load more people.
MM Maybe we just can’t make clean things…?
[Laughs}
SD [Laughs] We can’t actually make clean
things.
MM Clean and sterile. Because it’s quite
sterile isn’t it – that machine-finished look?
SD And they just look like consumer items
don’t they…those highly finished things? They don’t
look lived in. They don’t have any life to them.
MM Yeah there’s that added history with
‘found objects’. We don’t actually use a lot
of found objects but it’s all sort of based on found objects,
isn’t it?
SD Yeah.
BB I was thinking, certainly when I was looking
at this room, of Peter Blake’s toyshop. Is that the kind
of work that you would look at and enjoy? That also uses found
or located objects which are juxtaposed with each other then
and come to mean something else in situ.
MM I don’t know. With this piece, obviously
some pieces are made, and it’s always quite nice juxtaposing
found objects with made objects. Isn’t it?
SD mmm. I don’t like Peter Blake’s
work. I think he’s a great illustrator but that’s
as far as it goes. He illustrates an idea – whereas we
like to put things together and don’t like to say what
the relationship is. We put lots of things together where, people
can build different relationships or take different interpretations
from them. We don’t want to illustrate what a tomb would
look like. Do you think?
MM Yeah I don’t know. Peter Blake as
you say is a pretty good illustrator isn’t he? I don’t
really know much about Peter Blake to be honest.
BB Without wanting to get too hung up on Peter
Blake’s work then… I think I was asking you because
it represents a moment in Pop Art which looks to using objects
and also to moving into the viewer’s environment literally.
And it was then a new aesthetic (in the sense that you seem
to be talking about an aesthetic). And I’m quite interested
to hear you say some more about this aesthetic of the shabby,
of the tatty.
SD To come at it just from that Pop Art point
of view, I wouldn’t say that he was the first person to
do that. In the History of Modern Art, he might have been, but
you know, we like everything that goes with Church services
– all the art that surrounds them – it’s all
part of the atmosphere and part of the building. And stuff that
goes on in the fairground. All the entertainment and the spaces
you walk through and all the folk art that goes with that. So
Peter Blake’s a good example, but we’re not coming
from an Art point of view. You know we appreciate a church or
a fairground as much as that art aesthetic. And it’s not
that say a fairground or a church is tatty or shabby –
it’s just less ‘Art’ isn’t it?
MM Yeah I think it’s sort of the aesthetics
of the everyday isn’t it? It’s what surrounds you,
if you can call that an aesthetic…I suppose it is, isn’t
it?
SD Yeah. And with the Peter Blake stuff as
well….you feel that a lot of the things that he’s
put on have a fetishistic quality. He’s gone to some little
toyshop. He’s like a big kid and he’s found his
favourite stickers and that. Whereas I don’t think there’s
anything particularly fetishistic about what we choose to use,
is there?
MM No.
SD They’re just objects – more
immediate objects. If we were looking for a chair for example,
we’d just get a chair that was left outside the studio
– we wouldn’t hunt around for a particular style
or anything.
BB Yeah I think that that is a big difference.
Peter Blake does have that kind of reverential attitude to the
‘stuff’ in his work. Whereas here, there’s
a definite sense of irony, even parody about the work. I mean
for example – looking at this sign ‘Simply to thy
Cross I Cling’ – I would read that as being an ironic
inclusion. Could you talk about this ironic tone a little, because
it’s actually quite a subtle one – it’s not
overtly ironical.
MM I suppose it is questioning what people
do fetishise, or revere, object-wise.
SD I think that our irony is ambivalent as
well. Neither of us is religious at all, but at the same time,
we’ve grown up with that in our families. So we can take
the piss out of something but acknowledge it at the same time
– that it’s a part of our psyche that you can’t
get rid of. And the more that you parody or ridicule something,
the more credence you give it really. We’re kind of ambivalent
really aren’t we and that’s why it’s a more
subtle irony really.
MM Yeah.
BB Tell me a little bit more about the religious
references. Because this is not just something that arises in
this work, but in your previous work also – like the Pope
Immobile for instance. There are lots of references to the Via
Delarosa etc etc. And in this work, we’re also, in some
senses, thinking about a religious theme – in that we’re
thinking about what happens after death. Can you tell me why
this is of interest to you?
MM It’s the ritual, to an extent, isn’t
it?
SD I think that a lot of people deny that
religion has any part of their lives at all but you know, when
you’re a kid, you just get it hammered into you all the
time. There’s so much of it around this very sort in the
imagery. I think it is an important. But it’s also something
that we think is pretty ridiculous.
MM It’s a part of your life isn’t
it? Even if you deny the existence of God, or you think that
your life isn’t touched by religion, that early ritual
from an early age is still there, isn’t it? You can’t
really get rid of it. It’s sort of deep in your psyche,
so we kind of acknowledge that, don’t we?
SD mmm.
BB Would you say then, that this was parody
with a kind of moral purpose?
MM An immoral purpose probably. [Laughs] Although
we’ll probably find God one day. [Laughs]
SM That’d be scary wouldn’t it? No neither of us
believe in God. There’s no spiritual quality to any of
this at all.
MM It questions people’s beliefs obviously.
I suppose it questions our belief as well doesn’t it?
The fact that we don’t believe.
SD No. I haven’t got any belief.
MM Yes you have.
SD No I haven’t really.
BB But you can talk about morality without
talking about Belief, can’t you? And there does seem to
be a certain moral theme here, in the sense that you’re
saying ‘Look at what we surround ourselves with when we
live. How much of this, or what would we choose to bring with
us afterwards?’ That seems to have a certain moral implication.
MM Yeah. But morals are also a set of beliefs
aren’t they? Are they not?
SD Yeah. In different parts of the world,
what’s right for one might be completely wrong for another?
I think if you think of ‘Tat’ as a person, and you
look through the tomb, you can see that he’s someone that
has completely hedged his bets with everything. He might be
anti-deist or a non-believer, but he’s got Christian images,
he’s got some Buddhas, he’s got Mecca. You know,
he’s just got it all in – just on the off-chance
that he might get lucky. And we like that as well. We like ramming
as many references into things as possible, just in case one…
works! [Laughs]
MM He’s been to the spiritual supermarket
hasn’t he? He doesn’t want to narrow his options.
SD No. Keeping an open mind…
MM But King Tat isn’t a particular person.
We’re not choosing objects that we think a particular
person would choose to take to the afterlife. I mean who would
take that seahorse radio to the afterlife? He’s kind of
an everyman I suppose. Isn’t he?
SD Yeah. In Tutankhamen’s tomb they
gave him a chariot, but it wouldn’t fit through the door,
so they sawed it in half. And that makes us laugh – I
mean that’s a great bit of humour. So you give a chariot
to someone, no horse to pull it, and you’ve sawn it in
half – so what sort of good is that going to be to anyone?
And that’s funny as well as being archaeology.
BB So there’s a sense of the ridiculous
actually, which is very much on the surface in talking to you.
Is King Tat a ridiculous figure?
SD There’s a bit of him in everyone
isn’t there?
MM Well we’re not taking the piss out
of what people revere, object-wise, or a certain kind of life-style,
are we?
SD No.
MM Anyone could come in here and say ‘Oh
I’ve got something just like that.’ Maybe they could
be affronted because we think it’s tat and they think
it’s beautiful.
SD Half of this is our stuff anyway.
MM Yeah some of it, we’re taking back.
Much to Steph’s horror!
BB In the same vein then, would you say that
King Tat has good taste?
MM No. He’s tasteless. But who judges
taste? The taste police? The art critics really, isn’t
it?
SD When we were talking about putting cheap
stuff in the tomb, it wouldn’t be to imply that the owner
was poor, or working class, or whatever. It might mean that
everyone’s value has been turned on its head. So instead
of the most highly crafted things and most precious substances,
you might revere the quickest made, the shabbiest stuff.
MM Yeah. Something like that might be revered
in 200 years time.
SD Yeah.
MM When they discover King Tat’s tomb,
tin-foil takeaway tins could be worth a lot of money then.
BB But again, there is a kind of moral purpose
in this isn’t there? You’re saying ‘look at
the things that you have around you every day – look at
them again and try to imagine how they’ll be seen in 200
years time or in 5000 years time. Don’t take them for
granted.’
MM Yeah. I don’t know if that’s
a moral thing. It’s a bit like the time capsule isn’t
it? Like Blue Peter. Choose what objects you’re going
to bury and hopefully someone will find it in a thousand years
time, or in a few hundred years time. It’s a big version
of that, maybe.
SD Yeah but that’s actually getting
into the exhibit and looking at what’s in this room. You’ve
got to remember that the corridor and coming into the gallery,
is like coming into the museum display. We want people not to
be carried away by the fear of the thing when they’re
looking at these objects. We want people to remember at the
same time, that it’s like a mock-up of a daft museum display
and to think about that as well – what the museum display
is about.
MM It’s a mock-up of a mock-up isn’t
it?
SD Yeah kind of.
BB So as well as being critical of perhaps
the way in which people can attach themselves to objects throughout
their lives, you’re very critical of the way in which
museums and galleries exhibit things and the kind of aura that
they bestow on the things that they show. Is that correct?
MM Yeah. I mean, a lot of museums don’t
actually hold any artefacts any more do they? It’s all
sort of reconstructed – you know, facsimiles. There might
be a couple of cases of real objects and the rest is reconstructed.
And it’s all conjecture isn’t it? I mean there’s
no sort of definite ‘This is how Stone Age Man would have
lived’. You know, they may have lived like this…which
is quite nice to have that openness.
SD I think as well, that when people go to
museums, they tend to think that the display is quite objective,
but they’re not. There’s always some context that
the things have been displayed in that isn’t immediately
evident. And that’s interesting – how that story
changes. Like the British Museum used to be a display of power
wasn’t it….of the Empire. It’s interesting
to see how that’s changed now.
BB But at the same time, it’s also a
kind of critique of the white cube isn’t it? The Hansard
Gallery is not quite a cube – it’s got it’s
own quirks – but it still is obviously shaped by that
kind of model. Although you wouldn’t know it, walking
into this exhibition, because the cube is literally broken up.
As a viewer, you’re put into corridors. You’re disorientated.
Could you say something about that?
MM Yeah originally, we weren’t going
to have a corridor, were we? The space dictated that.
SD No we did imagine a free-standing structure
that you could walk around and look through the cut-aways at
different points all the way around. But we like the idea of
messing up the white cube – not making, say a commodity
that’s highly crafted…making it shabby.
MM Visitors to a museum are always sort of
shepherded in certain ways. A lot of museums will have you follow
the red line. It’s like a time-line technique. So there’s
always some kind of way of looking which is dictated to in museums…
SD And galleries…
MM And galleries. Normally you start as you
walk in and follow them right round. So yeah with the corridor…and
we still haven’t changed the gallery flooring…we
wanted it to be half-themed, so you don’t get too distracted
from the main exhibit.
BB Do you have a kind of vision for how the
viewer should encounter the work?
SD No. No any reading is all right. Whatever
you want to say about the work is fine. We’re like that
with everything aren’t we?
MM We don’t want to be too dictatorial
about how people should view anything.
SD Work we’ve done in past years, where
people have brought their own interpretations to it, we’ve
found them fantastic – we’d never never have thought
of it.
BB Like what?
MM Well the ‘fascist fruit boys’
was quite a good one. There were various different readings
of that which hadn’t occurred to us when making it.
BB What kind of readings did people come up
with?
SD A friend of ours who’s gay, because
of the ‘fruit-boy’ exhibits, he thought that they
were gay lads who sympathised with right-wing extremists. And
because we’d used a falafel sign in Compton Street, then
that seemed to reinforce that view. Because it was referring
to that part of Soho, he was convinced that it was some commentary
about gay men who flirted with fascism.
MM A lot of gay men wear the skinhead uniform
don’t they?
SD But that wasn’t our intention in
making the piece at all, but he was convinced that that was
the reading. Which was great, wasn’t it?
MM Yeah we were happy with that.
BB Do you have no wish to influence the viewer
then? I mean you’re saying you don’t want to be
dictatorial and obviously you don’t want to be prescriptive
about what the viewer thinks and how they react. But you’re
not saying the opposite are you? You’re not saying that
you have no desire to influence the viewer?
SD No we want to stimulate the viewer’s
mind. The best works of art make you work a bit.
MM Some of our work can be read quite clearly
and people maybe think that’s a bit throwaway, but obviously
there will be deeper underlying meanings to it. Hopefully. [Laughs]
BB Deeper throwaway meanings… [Laughs]
MM [Laughs] I think people will come back
and look at it again. It makes people think.
BB Ok but there is this question about value
coming up again. What do we value? What do we value in a gallery?
And you’ve deliberately put things into this work which
normally might not be valued within the white-cube aesthetic.
This again seems to have slightly a moral purpose. You’re
trying to train us up in a sense, aren’t you?
MM I don’t know about moral purposes
really. I think we’d rather be dictatorial.
BB [Laughs] Okay, let’s just talk for
the last couple of minutes about some of the hand-made elements
in here. Could you tell me something about the Westies and your
obsession with large dogs?
MM Obsession. We’re obsessed with a
lot of things really aren’t we?
SD We’re obsessed with kittens.
MM Shh.
SD Well we do a lot of polystyrene carving,
because it’s a nice material to work with. It’s
cheap and it’s light and it’s easy to carve. So
that’s what the dogs are made of. We like that finish
– it’s kind of like fairground.
MM We wanted to buy a couple of those massive
ceramic dogs. There’s a few shops in Dalston isn’t
there? Stoke Newington…
SD Yeah but they were way too expensive.
MM There are all those tacky giant ceramic
dogs and those mad bedroom ensembles, aren’t there? But
we couldn’t afford it, so we made our own.
BB That’s quite interesting as well.
Because the home-made is something that these days, in a lot
of contemporary art practices, is looked on as not refined shall
we say. People like Damien Hirst (or even Tracy Emin who makes
some of her own)…these people have fabricators to make
the works for them.
SD Tracy Emin has fabricators. We work as
fabricators for people like them. We’ve made some of their
stuff.
MM We like getting our hands dirty.
BB Is it important, do you think, to make
things yourself?
SD Yeah totally.
MM Well to us it is, isn’t it? We enjoy
getting dirty and getting covered in polystyrene and paint.
And we can’t afford to pay any assistants so we have to
make it ourselves.
SD I think it is important to make stuff yourself.
Because it gives a sense of what one person is capable of. And
I think people can relate to that more, than they can to something
that looks like it’s been made by robots because it’s
so highly finished. There’s no shame in showing hand-marks
where something’s been hand-made. In the past that was
revered. It was evidence of craft, of someone’s touch.
MM Some of our work looks quite clinical doesn’t
it? From a distance.
SD From quite a great distance.
MM [Laughs] From a couple of miles away. But
when you get close to it, you can see that it’s slightly,
well, shabby.
SD But the only people who worry about the
finish of things, are people fabricating consumer goods, really
aren’t they? Like the murals that we took from a housing
estate – you know, the kids that did that weren’t
worried about the finish of them because they weren’t
trying to sell them. And that’s what makes them more gutsy,
more ballsy, isn’t it?
BB Well thank you very much Shaun Doyle and
Mally Mallinson for a very gutsy, ballsy interview! Thank you.
SD Thank you.
MM Thank you.
More information about Shaun Doyle and Mally Mallinson
can be found at www.doyleandmallinson.com
