The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Richard Wentworth
RW: I think these photographs are as near as I’ll ever come to trying to pin
down the moment of thinking that kind of thing, of revealing the potential of
reverie.
JK: That’s a very revealing idea, to talk about reverie in relation to your
practice.
RW: But describing it creates one of those telling oppositions; if reverie is a
beautiful engine, who would want to pin it down and reveal it? It’s a typical
human comedy, like saying “Aren’t butterflies wonderful, so bang a nail
through them and stick them in a box.” But I like those spaces which seem
to me to guarantee that they produce reverie, journeys sitting on the top of
the bus, or speaking on the telephone: there’s a completely different space
that you occupy when you’re on the telephone, which allows you to see the
world as a sort of theater, like Jimmy Stewart does in Rear Window. I’m intrigued
by the idea that humans are voyeuristic; it seems to me something
that perhaps we ought to celebrate rather than try and prevent, because it’s
unpreventable. It seems to me that it’s the engine of curiosity that you look,
and as you look you name, and as you name you look more, and the whole
process goes round.
JK: When you’re actually walking on the street and seeing this striking relationship
between the green and the white and the blue and the red object,
to what extent is that something which just gives you pleasure for its own
sake, or to what extent are you using it as a sketchbook, storing it up as
something which will be useful in another place, to do something else—to
make pieces, for instance?
RW: Well there’s no obvious correspondence between the street and my work
at all; the correspondence if there is any is that what I see on the street is a
set of sympathies which I then try and allow in the work. The last thing I
would want to do is to go to the studio and mimic, or mock up, or reengineer
an event. I just want that apparent likeness, or banality, or set of oppositions,
to come across.
JK: So why do you feel the need to create a fix of this?
RW: I feel rather ashamed, but I have realized recently that it’s because I actually
want to tell other people about it; it isn’t enough for me to do it as an
obsessive, private act. I want it to have other lives, even though if I died tomorrow
nobody would know what to do with my slide photographs—most of
them aren’t even captioned—so I’m the only person who really knows anything
about them. Some of these pictures are very articulate, and some of
them are just about the voice-over, or the caption. But there is some sort of