Unsettling Houses

Unsettling Houses Commentary by Simon Ravenscroft Cite Share Show Bible Passage Phyllida Barlow’s work untitled: slidingupturnedhouse rises from the ground diagonally, up through a pillar constructed from plywood, and bearing a few sweeping paint marks. On top of the pillar sits a wooden ‘house’. The surface of the pillar has a very sharp incline, however, so that when viewers walk around the sculpture, they will see how the house finds itself precariously balanced. It looks as though it is about to fall off its support. The house itself is covered in paint marks of different colours. It is boxy in character and is sandwiched between flat slats of wood, which are likewise teetering in different directions, pulling away from each other due to the sloping surface at the centre of the work. Barlow has written about the ‘unforgiving’ nature of sculpture: how a sculpted work is not merely an image of something else, but has its own ‘reality’. Sculptures ‘demand space’ in terms of where they can be placed, and the way they perform and express themselves in that space (Barlow & Fecteau: 2013–14). In the case of untitled: slidingupturnedhouse, the viewer might remark that the dynamic of precariousness that it produces—the way it looks as if it will fall—is unsettling. If the work evokes a house, then surely no house could function if it were so constructed? In Haggai 1, much of the action—both human and divine—revolves around precarious, unsettled, dwelling places. The ruins of the destroyed Temple, which was the house of God, act as a prompt for YHWH to demand action from his people. It lies there broken while they ‘busy themselves’ with their own houses. YHWH will bring drought to the land of his people, destabilizing their way of life, ‘blowing away’ the little they are able to bring home, until they get to work on rebuilding it. References Barlow, Phyllida and Vincent Fecteau. 2013–14. ‘Phyllida Barlow and Vincent Fecteau’, BOMB 126: 48–57