Artifices and Bodies in the Artworks of Tony Heaton

Abstract

“Art points beyond itself”; it transcends style, convention, and the maker (Agamben 1999, 33). Take the installation of five large and differently sized blocks of white Portland stone arranged in a semi-circular pattern, some twenty-five foot in diameter. Approaching Squareinthecircle? (2007, see Figure 1) by Southportand London-based sculptor and performance artist Tony Heaton, we first encounter an uninviting fortress made from the same stone as St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, and the Bank of England. Narrow gaps lead to the inside, where hard-edged, solid surfaces are interspersed with zigzagging shapes. Our imagination connects the disparate blocks along a disjointed circle carved into the stones’ tops, mirroring a second ring paved into the floor. Triangular prisms hewn down the middle of three blocks create the illusion of a square in the centre of the figure. Sitting behind an oversized pot of tea in his dusty, cold studio in Southport, Heaton tells me he is obsessed with layers. With some help, I attempt to unpeel Squareinthecircle? There is the majestic opulence of the grand white stone used in the construction of centres of power. The outer rings resemble tracks left by endlessly circling wheels unable to squeeze through the narrow passageways to a centre dominated by sharp edges and steep stairways. Squareinthecircle? points beyond itself as it stylizes the ambiguity inherent in all things that are made: their capacity to include and exclude, protect and harm, create and destroy. Later, I come to think of Elaine Scarry’s (1985) provocation that artifices extend human sentience beyond the boundaries of the body into the outside world: coats mimic and extend outwards our skin; chairs mimic and equally extend outwards the form of the human spine; even rooms or houses act like bodies, putting boundaries around the self while reducing access to the world to doors and windows. Human life is inherently dependent on such prostheses. Even culture can only take shape when the excess of artefacts creates identities: tailors, builders, or merchants; citizens protected by the real or imagined walls of institutional or civic bodies. In Haraway’s (1985) iconic phrasing, we are all cyborgs. Scarry (1985) argues that artefacts absorb pain and, in turn, work inwards and change us. Coats absorb the cold, letting us roam beyond the warming hearth; chairs