In some early works I was using maps, such as The Great Bear, 1992 , where I took the map of the London Underground and changed the names of the stations. Each line had its own logic (to me), for example the Circle line became the Philosophers Line - with each station being named after a philosopher, for example Paddington station became Pythagoras. As I became more and more involved in making the work I became increasingly obsessed with controlling the work’s own apparent internal logic. I deluded myself that I had it within my power to totally control its meaning for others. In reality the work, although logical, was in fact a piece of arch irationality. Instead of taking control of meaning, I realised that I had placed the viewer at the centre of the work and had therefore had relinquished it.
In a later work, General Assembly, 1994, I constructed an enormous wall mounted ‘typewriter’ sculpture: Consisting of a giant keyboard on one wall and painted in the United Nations colours of blue and white were keys spaced out in a line on the other three walls spelling out the typing exercise,‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, that contains all the letters of the alphabet and therefore, potentially, all meanings expressable in the English language. Above some of the keys, placed apparently randomly, were the names of the permanent members of the Security Council, the present and former Secretary-Generals of the UN and some of the places visited by Captain Lemuel Gulliver - the protagonist of Jonathan Swift’s Gullivers Travels.
With General Assembly, the juxtapositions of Jonathan Swift, nationhood and nonesense was a way of playing with the various meanings of the word ‘assembly’. It refers to the General Assembly of the United Nations, assemblage sculpture of the 1960’s and 1970’s, assembling people together in an auditorium/arena or gallery. I wanted to show how side by side with place names such as Lugnagg or Glubdubdrib from Gulivers Travels, UN Secretary-Generals’ names such as Boutros Boutros Ghali or Dag Hammarsköld might also seem like a nonesensical language. You are allowed to laugh.
The work is humorous and aesthetic at the same time. It is not one or the other. Humour is my mode of operation. It is a way into the work, like violence or sex. It makes you react. Also humour, like art, cannot be fully explained. You can explain the elements of a joke but not what makes you laugh. In my art I put a variety of elements in a state of flux; I’m interested in things getting away from meaning.
Simon Patterson.London, 1996.