Unclehead at Museu Edp

Alexandre Singh and Rita Sobral Campos presented their collaborative work Unclehead at the Museu Edp in Lisbon, in April.

Alexandre Singh and Rita Sobral Campos, Unclehead (installation view), 2008. Courtesy of the artists.

Alexandre Singh: Hey so when I was at school, people used to throw sticks of glue up at the ceiling, did they do that in Portugal? They would stay up there for weeks or months at a time and then fall off in the middle of class. I feel that spitballs are almost the same kind of activity.

Rita Sobral Campos: I had never heard of that… I just remember the old high schools with years and years of detritus on the ceiling and walls. I guess spitballs and chewing gum was the big thing in my country.

AS: Spitballs were particularly gross because obviously they were masticated in the mouth of the person firing, usually some unpleasant lad. It was anonymous too, you would fire at the person sitting in front of you. It’s the typical activity for people sitting at the back of the class.

RSC: Do you think that in a way this metaphor is quite perfect, after all it’s a really early sign of animosity strategies…

AS: Yes, it’s a form of rebellion, and one that is visual, and well… sculptural. These other activities were however completely parallel, you didn’t need to be acknowledged to be a bad student to do things like that, it was a form of expression available to everyone.

RSC: I actually always thought of them as a form of rebellion against the space of the classroom itself. No one really dared to throw anything at the teacher (well rarely). It was more like reacting to the space that confines you… and also of course to the colleague you disliked…

AS: But for the duration of the teacher’s class, he came to represent the space, the classroom. So if you throw a stick of glue on the ceiling or stick chewing gum under your desk–even if it’s surreptitious–you are in a way attacking the teacher. It certainly annoyed them. Of course once the bell rang, they didn’t care, their jurisdiction moved to the next classroom.

RSC: The spitballs also function as a contamination–they spread out and taint the rival aesthetic. So, not only do they bombard it with this or that ideology, they also carry with it their own image.

AS: Yes it’s like pigeon guano loaded with information. All over the developed world we have these effigies of historical figures, statues of dictators, kings, revolutionaries. In Portugal you see a lot of writers and explorers, in Los Angeles they have the handprints of actors, directors, and talking dogs. These figures are subject to a lot of pigeon excrement. It’s kind of the way for the birds of the city to fight back. Of course when the next regime comes along the populace likes to decapitate or deface the previous statues. It shows you how important theses objects are. Of course in modern Hollywood films it is the national monuments that come under attack, as in Independence Day, Cloverfield, Planet of the Apes–particularly the Statue of Liberty. There’s something more poignant about a defaced copper lady than of fallen Tour Eiffel, or burning Houses of Parliament.

RSC: I guess it’s all about what better embodies the power of a given state. The Tour Eiffel is much more of a symbol of an individual achievement within a universal area. Somehow it has a more personal coin to it. For some reason the spitballs stuck in the “leaders” images resonate a lot more that the ones stuck on a vitrine. One is merely defacing property, the other is defacing ideology.

AS: Yeah, though funnily enough the “leaders” portrayed are entirely anonymous. They’re just these out of work actors from 50 years ago who don’t even own their own identity. We’ve purchased them from a stock archive, printed them up, and suddenly they become the proverbial “man”. It goes to show how encoded the meaning of that kind of portraiture is. I almost feel sorry for these now probably dead thespians.

RSC: I’m not even sure if they are models from 50 years ago. I guess they’re meant to look like that. But what I really love is that we’ve purchased them. It’s a “buy your dictator as you please” kind of thing. Try and imagine if you could actually build from scratch a complete set of fictitious historical figures and spread their effigies across a city. Do you think anyone would notice the difference? In LA, Lisbon, or Paris?

AS: Well, yes and no. You can’t deny that there is a general level of ignorance amongst the general population of a city as to whom these monuments portray; this is more acute in western cities where they more often depict Napoleonic era noblemen than 20th century despots. But each one represents an important puzzle piece in the history of that nation; I don’t think you can fake that for the local. But to the foreigner, to the colonial anthropologist, their veracity is almost irrelevant. They will be analyzed as cultural artifacts, real or virtual. I do like what you say about the act of purchasing. We’re familiar with a contemporary approach to sculpture that involves shopping and consumption. I really like the idea that we also assembled our show from existing off-the-shelf components, in the same way that a computer manufacturer assembles a PC from existing parts and technologies. Yet our approach hints that there is a unified whole out there, that we have perhaps uncovered a pre-existing relationship of ideas and iconography.