Why I Made The @ Clock
by Unreacity
In the autumn of 1954, two men in motorcycle leathers walked into Lewisham Hospital in London.
More precisely, the first man walked in supporting the second, who limped on a leg as twisted as the Triumph Tiger he had just wrecked in a race across town against his friend’s Vincent Black Shadow, at the time the fastest production bike in the world.
The mangled Triumph had been left with the rest of a pack of cafe racers: young working class petrolheads, fresh out of apprenticeships, with the disposable income to know the rush of doing a ton-up on the North Circular but with neither the family responsibilities nor the sense to know better.
The Triumph’s equally mangled rider was ambulanced into casualty on the pillion of the very Vincent he had optimistically hoped to outrace.
The Vincent’s owner, having promised his bloodied friend for the hundredth time that he’d make sure the Tiger got home safely, was just mounting up in the carpark when he noticed a young nurse struggling with a misfed chain on her bicycle. He offered to help. They got talking.
She was new in town, it transpired, having moved in from Cambridge to train as a midwife, and could do with someone to show her round. She was living in the nurses’ home attached to the hospital. He offered to call on her there when he came to visit his friend, show her the sights. She said thank you that would be lovely, but she wasn’t going anywhere on that thing.
Within a year, he’d sold the bike and bought a Mini.
In the autumn of 1993, two men in leather jackets argued outside The Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield.
Or, more precisely, the first man argued that he could throw a spinning Muay Thai crocodile kick high enough to take the second man’s head off, and the second man argued the contrary. The two young women they were with, their clothes wet with nightclub sweat growing cold in the northern night, bored by the macho posturing, threatened to leave the two boys to it as they were fine to walk back to their student accommodation on their own.
As this was certainly not the end to the evening the either man had envisioned when arranging the double date, the second man placed an empty beer can on a pillar box and suggested that the matter could be resolved, quickly and without injury, if the first man successfully demonstrated he could crocodile kicked that off, rather than his head.
The first man accepted the challenge, got his balance, twisted his shoulders left and his hips right and whipped his right foot round the clock on the pivot of his left, duly sending the beer can flying across the Glossop Road. This did indeed solve the matter quickly but, fatefully, not without injury.
As the kick connected, the first man slipped, his full weight suddenly stressing his torqued left leg, blowing his knee joint and sending him to the pavement in a howling twisted heap. His friend called 999 for an ambulance from the Northern General, as The Royal Hallamshire, although only a few yards away, had no A&E. When the ambulance arrived, the second man and the woman he’d had his eye on went home. The other young woman joined the shamefaced ninja in the ambulance.
By the small hours, they were chatting at his bedside as the morphine he’d been given loosened both his awareness of pain and his tongue. Forty years less one year before, he told her, his dad the cafe racer from Catford had met his mum the nurse after a similarly macho challenge between similarly over-competitive friends had gone similarly wrong (or perhaps, gone right in a way that had been neither anticipated nor, as yet, recognized). The nurse ended up moving to London permanently and the rest, as they say, is history.
The woman asked where the man’s mum was from.
“Cambridgeshire,” he replied.
“Me too!” she said.
They talked until a nurse asked her to leave and as she parted she promised to visit again the next day.
When I was thinking about my layer of the Async installation for 105collective.uk’s #MoreThanGlass cryptoart project, I found the remnants of both those stories. The isolation of Covid-19 lockdown has sent me back to my own resources: up into the attic; out into the shed; through old photographs, old books, old diaries, old poems, old thoughts. Both of my other pieces for the project, “CK 2020” and “The Manxome Foe?” deal with that experience and so does this final element of the #MoreThanGlass cryptovoxels installation.
One component of my layer of the Async piece is an old clock of mine, which I modified physically with copper foil, MDF cut-outs, metal patination fluid and a collage, which I then photographed and made into series of still images for the project and into a gif in its own right. The collage itself is composed of photographs I cut from a pile of old school library books I saved from a skip: all are from 1954 and most are from London. I wanted the piece to say something about the way we construct our own myth, make coincidences into narrative, to tell us where we are @ when the only place we are ever really @ is now and here. And, without those narratives we generate from coincidence, now/here is nowhere.
Although from my perspective their lives are a mere random jumble of coincidence, every one of the people collaged onto the face of The @ Clock has constructed a private mythology from the unpromising material of chance as rich and complex as the legends of The Tiger & The Black Shadow; The Spinning Crocodile & Lady Morphia.
Neither the artist nor the viewer will ever know anything about those mythologies.
Although now, I suppose, you know something about mine.
