The painting that I made for as it is, had three different configurations during the run of the exhibition. It was intended to reflect something of the quasi-organic way that cities are developed and inhabited.
The shifting, accumulative tendency of cities has more than simply physical implications. It is mirrored in various psychological conditions and strategies of city dwellers, who find ways of filtering, fictionalizing or organising their own experience of a city, to lend coherence to an entity too large to be comprehensively known. I hoped that the painting would reflect this in that it was designed to subvert the notion that there must be a fixed set of relationships or 'composition'. It was important that the last configuration should be no more 'final' than the first.
In many ways Birmingham is a typical city, rapidly changing, but home to many different settled communities. It is tempting to take their largely trouble-free co-existence for granted. I wanted to include,within the painting, alongside images of present-day and historical Birmingham, elements of its own 'nightmare': to suggest what might happen if, after some trauma, the network of relationships broke down. I inserted images from the Siege of Stalingrad, (exhaustively and authoritively documented by Antony Beevor).
The idea of a 'glimpse' of an alternative present or future is explored by the writer Philip K Dick, notably in The Man in the High Castle. This kind of 'waking dream' (also exploited by William Morris in News from Nowhere) may be an important key to our own well-being, if, as may be argued, the failure to foresee and avoid avoid political catastrophe is often firstly a failure of imagination.
To live in the malfunctioning, informal, apparently chaotic City is often judged to be a dysfunctional lapse from some more praiseworthy way of life - but perhaps we should instead regard it, for all its faults, as an idyll of co-existence, hard-won.
