Worstward Ho!
Worstward Ho!
JocJonJosch
54 Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9RG
5–15 October 2013
Worstward Ho! was an exhibition with JocJonJosch, the Anglo-Swiss-Slovakian collective of Joc Marchington, Jonathan Brantschen and Joschi Herczeg. It took place in a disused shop on Tavistock Place. JocJonJosch's work has always been about how three people make one thing together. For this project they turned that question into an object: a round boat, made of chestnut and oak, built to be rowed by all three of them at once.
A round boat has no bow and no stern, and no one sits at the front. Rowed by three people, it moves only if each stroke is timed against the others. If one oar pulls while another is still in the water, the effort cancels out and the boat turns on the spot. The boat is a working sculpture, and it is also a diagram of collaboration: getting anywhere depends on attention, rhythm and a willingness to go nowhere for a while. The title comes from Samuel Beckett's late prose work Worstward Ho, with its famous instruction to "fail better". Moving forward means accepting the stalls and the spinning as part of the work.
JocJonJosch first rowed the boat in a performance for the Art Licks festival. It was then brought into the shop on Tavistock Place and shown as a sculpture, alongside video and photography of the collective at work. Out of the water, it became the backdrop and starting point for two events I programmed during the exhibition. The poet John James read a poem he had written about the boat. The writer Rye Dag Holmboe, who wrote the essay for JocJonJosch's catalogue, chaired a conversation with the boat builders of Lyme Regis about how the boat was actually made.
For me, those events were central to the exhibition, not additions to it. The boat had already lived several lives: as a set of drawings and decisions, as a craft object shaped by the builders' hands, as a vessel on the water, and as a sculpture in a gallery. Each event reached a different one of those lives. The poem put the object into language, and the conversation brought back the physical knowledge of making. The disused shop, a space between uses, felt like the right place for a work about being between states.
The boat has continued to travel. It was later shown at the Musée d'art du Valais in Sion, and JocJonJosch went on to develop Eddy (2014), now in the open-air collection at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
