Bill Woodrow

Description

Sitting on History I was purchased by Sculpture at Goodwood in celebration of winning the National Art Collections Fund Prize 1996. This work brings together in one piece the strands of our main endeavours, to provide both major sculpture and excellent seating for the interest and enjoyment of our visitors.

This sculpture was proposed in response to a commission first mooted in 1990, and Bill Woodrow's Tate Gallery exhibition in 1996 gave him the opportunity to realise one of three ideas for sculptures which could function as seats. Woodrow had made three maquettes based on a book form: this version, one with coins as the seat backs, and another featuring two crows on the spine of the book fighting over a gold coin. His idea was to have a sculpture that was only completed conceptually and formally when a person sat on it. Sitting on History I, with its ball and chain, refers not as one might expect directly to chained libraries, but to the book as the captor of information from which we cannot escape. All of history is filtered through millions of pages of writing, making the book the major vehicle for years of research and study. Woodrow proposes that although we absorb this knowledge, we appear to have great difficulty in changing our behaviour as a result.

The real books from which the original maquettes were made came from a box of books given to Bill Woodrow by a London bookseller, discarded as no longer saleable. To Woodrow's wry amusement, in this haul were three volumes on the history of the Labour Party, which he chose to use for the maquettes. Woodrow finds books one of the most powerful democratic tools in the world and still possibly the most advanced form of communication - perversely more so than computers which seem now to dominate our lives.