Nostalgia Rebranded - Scott King's Welcome to Saxnot at the Studio Voltaire

  • Leila Kozma
Scott King’s current show Welcome to Saxnot, at Studio Voltaire, London, addresses the persevering illusion of nostalgia. Recent years have seen an increase in the political tendency of yearning for a past that isn’t perturbed by problems such as the housing bubble, staggering rates of unemployment and social alienation. Many would like to go back to a quainter, easy, carefree time, when jobs were easy to secure without competition, when the supermarket had less variety but higher quality products and when the members of the neighbourhood communities knew each other well. King’s exhibition proposes the fulfilment of this wistful dream. His exhibition functions as the promotion for an upcoming project, Britlin’s Saxnot. As the infographics comprising the show propagate, Saxnot will be a place of unadulterated fun and simplicity. Who needs the bamboozling present, when you can fully immerse yourself in the materialisation of an illusory past? This is the question the logic of the show asks.
Britlin’s is King’s own take on the Butlin’s camp, a place synonymous with “holiday” in most British minds throughout the 60s and 70s. It was a popular getaway location, but more importantly, it was a carefully curated, utopian world in its own right. It offered a wide range of entertainment shows and thrills; Wobbly Knee Competitions, Grandmother Beauty Pageants, Darts Championships, Dancing Marathons, and all other kinds of activities that attracted every member of the family. Kids were let free to roam the nearby forests on their own. Nursery patrol teams were organised to alert parents every time they heard a baby crying from inside the lodgings. Everyone paid the same amount of money for the camp. “One week’s pay for one week’s holiday,” held the slogan. Butlin’s camps were drenched with the ideology of egalitarianism. It propagated the ethos of sameness as the basis for compassion and collectivity.
The dozen or so infographics which make up the show can roughly be divided into three sections. Some champion the glory of the days gone by. A set of technicolour photographs depict rosy-cheeked children waving at their parents from a rollercoaster, friends unwinding at the poolside, red-bearded midgets shining their gigantic teeth from a colourful flower bed. There is a menu that lists all the meals available on order: Shrimp Cocktail, Pineapple and Beef Roast, Rhubarb Pie, the sort of things which, back in the 70s, might have been fashionable. Other images celebrate the understated charm of Brutalist architecture in their depiction of council housing estates comprised of same-sized houses with identical rooms within.
With another set of pieces, King attempts to step away from this illusory bubble. A few graphic designs point towards the caveat of this system of thinking. There’s a mirror with the title “I’m Going Back” engraved on its surface. Standing in front of it we are to look at the reflection of ourselves with this world in the background. It’s almost as if the piece would position us as not just participants, but the very vessels that carry this ideological bubble within. This is the first piece that makes us consider our own purpose in this environment, about whether it is a sage idea to undertake this journey at all. Do you really know your neighbour? points towards the freakish paranoia without which no egalitarian community could function. All of a sudden, the idealised, pitch-perfect image that was conveyed by previous pieces attains a new significance: that image could only be maintained insofar as there is a commonly shared other, as long as some form of scaremongering fuels the social structure.
Of course, the people at Butlin’s were fond of the rules and regulations: disobeying them would have led to their expulsion. One Bad Apple taps into the same idea. The image shows a few dozen, perfectly identical, bulbous, shiny green apples. There’s one half bitten on the bottom. This detail provides a great deal of contrast, evoking ideas about how the sameness that is so enjoyed by the visitors of Britlin’s is sustained by a rigorous and regimental process of exclusion. Unlike the postcards on display, the images of the buildings, or the menu leaflet, these latter two works make manifest the shoddy ideological core of the utopian model society.
A set of images push even further the daunting idea that inclusion is always the result of exclusion. Belgian Waffle features a gigantic, rainbow-coloured cross placed over the pages of a multilingual dictionary. The colourful patch covers up all too well the non-English paragraphs. Remember Calais consists of a bunch of black dots heaped on top of each other. Only one line, the one that goes across the middle is rainbow-coloured. All of a sudden, the show turns towards a different problem. From the quaintness and simplicity of a pleasurable life that awaits at Britlin’s, King shifts toward discussing the cost of sustaining the such possibilities. From loving families enjoying a great time, our attention is drawn to the cost at which this fantasy is afforded. By subtly invoking the problems of border control, King aims to criticise the developments that have taken place in much political discourse of recent years.
King alternates rather successfully between providing enthusiastic depictions of the days everyone yearns to return to, and chalking up the problems inherent within such wishful thinking. The highlight of the whole exhibition is the kiosk at the back of the room, a consumerist enterprise where visitors are encouraged to pick and mix their favourite souvenirs and memorabilia from the Britlin’s that has yet to be built, from the imaginary location which we have yet to develop an affinity for, the place we have yet to experience in order to fantasise about returning to it. Britlin’s is the ultimate fantasy, the fantasy that embodies how empty yet misguided the act of fantasising about the past actually is. Eventually, the visitors are let go of after having fulfilled a few questionnaires, application forms and after having been given the guidelines. Hugging a lovely Britlin’s logo sweatshirt, one can’t help but wonder whether the past is that which we remember or that which we wish it to be. §