For children of a certain generation the illustrator Richard Scarry’s Busytown was a homely but nonetheless baptismal first encounter with a depiction of Being-in-the-World – a particular and supervening awareness of the worldhood of the world. I remember the reading* of his books being an eye-widening experience, verging on a kind of sensory overload, so many details required attending to, while the overall picture beamed out coherently. The bustle and intricacy of his books was for a many a first dawning of the different occupations people can have in the world, even the notion of difference and variety, awaking an itching sense of possibilities.
Annotation of people and the objects that signify, reveal and distil them, and activity-filled cross sections of highly partitioned spaces are, it seems, excellent devices for calling forth this particular form of awareness of the world’s worldiness. The delight of exactly this quality in Richard Scarry’s work can be found in the films of Wes Anderson, when he allows us to see the invested minutiae of the Tenenbaum household, (achieving that impossibility – neat clutter) or the cross-section of the submarine in The Life Aquatic, showing the detail and mere procession of the lives of its occupants.
There is something possibly theatrical about a house without a façade, in the sense that it makes us suddenly alert to and tender towards the everyday: ordinary hard work, day-to-day endeavours, the daily return to the same tools – in short, the miracle of habit. And increasingly the façadeless house recurs to me as a good, and apt, image for what is happening here at New Blood Art – a house made of rooms of great endeavour and activity, open to the world, and without a homogenizing house style imposed on the artefacts created within its walls.
- reading, or viewing, retreating from, returning to, taking in
