Counter Culture [delayed show due to Covid lockdown]

Counters, booths, kiosks and desks inspired this work. Booths of behaviour, desks of possibility, altars of human intercourse, simple structures that can elicit mental discomfort or joy or an uneasy stasis where the outcome is unknown. It could go either way. Cashier number three please. These structures are silent helpers, functioning well, doing a good job. A piece of architecture within architecture: analogue, stoic and un-AI. They should be celebrated, especially now after lockdown. WE built new ones for the pandemic: protection but still ostensibly the same as before but a different purpose. They bring people–usually strangers–together. One side demanding something, the other side dealing with those demands. Security, reception; post office counters, check-ins, off licences, bars, pharmacies, government departments, gallery desks, confessionals, visitor centres, food counters, a simple hole-in-the-wall. One day, when the internet finally runs everything, I hope they’ll be remembered with some fondness. I think of this as I’m kept on hold listening to grim looped music, tedious special offers and breathless reminders of where I am in the call gridlock. POSTSCRIPT This show was due to open on March 23rd 2020, the time the first worrying rumours emerged that the COVID-19 virus was deadly. Like many others in a similar situation, we postponed the show for an unknowable period. During–and despite–the ensuing periods of responsible breathing, panic-buying toiletries, confusion, ignoble governmental behaviour, despair of not being able to embrace fragile family members, illness, death by FaceTime and lockdowns 2 and 3, my fondness for humans grew enormously. I missed things about ourselves I’d not really considered before. One-to-one, in-the-flesh conversations, groups acting and reacting, laughter, banter and joy. And, please, no more of it on Zoom. We built new counters and screens to help prevent the infection of each other because we needed one another, whether it was for commerce or for love, or for information or play. These new counters allowed us, whether we liked it not, to be back together again.