“They’re building a whole new world…”
What a difference two days make. The level of industry and architectural ambition powering through Muscle HQ on clouds of MDF dust is quite something. Thursday’s tentative, pent-up posse (whose four heads were all cracking their necks in different directions) has undergone some transformative process to emerge as the self-assured power tool-toting team of today.
In the gravel-coated courtyard, big benches support impressive building hardware. The whine-clunk of the band saw devouring strips of 2be4 and spitting out the unusable chunks like redneck tobacco makes vocal mincemeat of Karen O’s stereophonic output. The masking-tape floor plan appears to have been steroid enhanced to become a freestanding internal site office that virtually fills the whole of the foyer. The Muscles shinny up and down ladders, drilling, slicing and hammering as they go, pencils firmly behind ears and fully focused on the job at hand. The four-headed artist moves in a componential, yet seamless fashion as if previously choreographed or working to some secret, insistent timetable. I weave in and out of their industrious wakes hoping to be heard over the din of construction.
The Café Gallery’s imposing identity is gradually giving way to the will of the Muscles. All who enter here now do so under the revised terms of the current tenants. They have taken charge of this large concrete vessel and its myriad rules to create a room of their own. The new gallery within a gallery abutting the glass entrance will cleanse visitors – like the disinfectant puddle between changing room and swimming pool – of all prior assumptions as they prepare to negotiate the site.
Technically detached in property terms, though you would need to be miniaturised to scale its reclaimed bulk, this building (or sculpture?) embodies the clan ethos of the scout hut, the materiality of the art object and the geopolitical concerns of the architectural structure. So what will they do in there? Fight over pin-up posters (I hope ‘the forgotten Muscle’, a ripped D&G model pinned to the kitchen wall, will be at the opening), or meet periodically to flex as one and finalise items on their scarily unified plan for (South) London domination?
No sign of a conch shell, or busted glasses…yet.
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