In which the editors alternately opine on speculations relevant to the issue at hand.
—Robin & Leila

One day in 1972, a strange steel object appeared in the city center of Cardiff, Wales. Cranes had lifted it onto the city street the night before. Black, resembling a large hammer, or the dark mine shaft of a tunnel, the sculpture was impressive, sleek as a wet seal. It was a masterful work of modern sculpture and as such, completely foreign to most residents living in Cardiff at that time. 

The next day, people gathered on the street to look. Some came down after seeing it on the television news, others were just passing by. Without identifying the sculpture as art, Garth Evans wandered with a tape recorder collecting the responses of people on the street. Evans used the tape once as part of a sculpture that was shown in an open air exhibition in Holland Park in 1973, then the tape was put in storage where it remained for the next forty years.

“What is it? “

“What is it?” The voices in the scratchy pitted tape begin to ask. “What’s it for?” “Does it have a purpose?” “Is it made of steel?” Soon, they are all weighing in.

“There’s not much beauty in it. I can’t see no beauty in it at all.”

“What I want to know is…”

“Pictures, that’s what it needs—scenes of Cardiff…”

“Looks like a lamp post to me.”

“It’s just black.”

“Nothing to take my eye.”

“Big dirty girder.”

Meanwhile, voices of children spill like water. They have climbed up and are running along its long straight back. While the adults become more and more upset about their failure to find something familiar in the sculpture, the children love it for that same reason. “What’s it for?” one elfish voice pipes up. “I dunno… I want a hundred more!”

What history teaches. I have been thinking intensively about the implied question of these 3 words for the past five years; first as I set out to transform this archival tape into a theatrical script, then as I worked with two different directors to stage this script as a play, first in New York City in 2017, then in Cardiff, Wales this past fall. Initially I had thought of the project as a fantastic literary challenge—just how far could I use the archival tape as a site for speculation, pushing it toward drama as a theatrical script while honoring the real? But once I began working on the project, I realized that the stories behind it were huge, involving not just a 3-ton steel sculpture, the public’s rejection of it, and an artists’ quest to gain information about the impact of his public work. Every voice on the tape in one way or another told the story of the coal mining history of south Wales, which even today—though mainly hidden from sight, the mines closed years ago—reverberates in Cardiff as a deep sadness and complicated source of pride.  

From those first lines on, the tape completely engrossed me. I felt like I was listening to a Beckett play, absurd and dark and funny, yet deeply sad. Not all of the voices were that of stark rejection, but they swelled into a communal stance of outrage; as if a Greek chorus were in the wings, shrieking don’t wake me up, don’t wake me up.

In keeping with the constraints of verbatim theater, I selected and re-arranged the order of voices on the tape. At times I had voices repeat and overlap, at other times I pulled out words and repeated them for effect, but I did not change any of the actual words people spoke or add new ones. The fun was in selecting and pacing the voices so that they spoke to one another and created a sense of thematic movement. At its heart the tape is about fear and about how quickly fear leads us to “other” what we do not understand. And there was anger, that secret claw.

The challenge was setting the story in motion. I found the answer to this in a photograph of the sculpture with 5 children playing on it. By speculating into that photograph, I imagined one of the children in the photograph looking back at the sculpture forty years later, remembering the day they climbed on it. To push the connection between public art and cultural commentary in the Cardiff production, we added a video montage which featured news footage, music and photographs from the 70’s.

I was nervous about how the play would be received in Cardiff, the literal home of the tape. Would it seem authentic, or be perceived as condescending or worse yet, somehow forced? But something interesting happened. The play had done well in New York City, but in Wales, audiences were deeply enthusiastic. They identified directly and in some way already claimed the story. This was their history, complicated as it was; it was their public sculpture, their rejection of it, their city.

The play was timed to run the same week the historic sculpture was due to arrive back in Cardiff. After being lost to the world (quite literally, but that is another story, how exactly do you lose a 3-ton sculpture?) for over forty years, after a stupendous inter-continental effort involving the artist, the Cardiff community, a crowd-funding campaign, and the heroic efforts of the Art Director of Chapter, an influential community art center in Cardiff, the sculpture was restored and transported back to Cardiff. What had once been an object of controversy, of communal rejection, had gone through the metaphysics of time. History’s alchemy had transformed the sculpture from a great dark beast of otherness to an icon of home, the repository of shared memories and heritage.

On this note, I introduce our new issue, What History Teaches, which offers twelve works varied and spectacular, each one opening up new questions, even as they answer them through content, style, and form. What history teaches or doesn’t teach, or tries to teach, or ignores, or subverts completely. Perhaps Jorge Luis Borges said it best:

Centuries and centuries and only in the present do things happen.

Leila Philip
October 15, 2019