The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Richard Wentworth
RW: It suggests that there are other things you can specialize in, like potatoes.
...
And the junk shop near here, I can’t stand at the bus stop without
surveying it, an automatic act of dawdling.
JK: That’s like shopping malls, which are designed to hold you within one
space for as long as possible to maximize the probability of purchase.
RW: Well in its horrible truth I can feel that it must be so. A friend of mine
who is an art director says that the length of the feature film, an hour and a
half, is based on the average “bladder time.”
JK: So do you sympathize with Walter Benjamin’s idea that it’s from the
fragments, the forgotten bits, that you actually read the world? He collected
detritus, and said that this was the real museum.
RW: I think that idea relates to my work in one way, which is that the physical
size of the most successful things I’ve made is very small, and in that
sense aren’t in the tradition of hefty sculpture—but I always think that
there’s an enormous space that comes with them, which is the space of
imagination. If they’re any good they can provoke that; they don’t need to be
huge. They’re not in the American tradition of “long and wide.” They don’t
come out of minimalism, which is a branch of the American landscape tradition,
simply because I don’t have any experience of that. In Europe there’s
nowhere we can go where someone hasn’t been before, and you grow up
knowing that. We don’t have an idea about wilderness, except in the most
conceptual way.
JK: And cities aren’t as morally damaging or culturally impure in the European
philosophical tradition as they are in the American one either. We
don’t live in the land of Thoreau or Whitman.
RW: Yes, I think that’s so—and anyway we no longer have the space to make
such tidy-minded distinctions.
ON AND OFF THE CALLY
RW: As to why the Cally means something to me, I’m one of those people who
lives somewhere where I would never turn left outside my house, and that
means I come down here. We all have those habits of bias. So in a way I’m
obliged to see it, not like those places which you live very near, but which you
never see. Thus in fact I do live near to Pentonville Prison but I’m not really a
witness to the prison—and obviously you could read into that a kind of psychology.
It’s not that I don’t want to live near the prison, I don’t want to ac-