Photo: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian.
Artist Hans K Clausen is on track to collect 1,984 copies of 1984 for an exhibition on Jura, the Scottish island where George Orwell wrote it.
Is it 2024 right now or 1984? Remember when 1984 seemed a long time in the future? I do. Now it’s far behind. Meanwhile, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to many of us to have stopped being fiction.
The Guardian‘s Scotland editor Severin Carrell writes about a celebration of the novel and author George Orwell, an exhibit on the island where he wrote it.
“Copies of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four,” writes Carrell, “have been arriving at an artist’s studio in Edinburgh for months. Every shape and size, posted from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Peru, Germany, Cape Cod and Sarajevo.
“Some are in mint condition, others are dog-eared, tea-stained, heavily annotated or turned into graffitied art works. One is a water-stained first edition; one is a secret love letter from a married woman to her first love; another, a graphic novel version, came from Orwell’s son Richard Blair.
“Each has been donated to a unique installation in the community hall of Jura, the Hebridean island where Orwell, in dire poverty and desperately ill, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the late 1940s, to mark its publication 75 years ago.
“Hans K Clausen, a sculptor based in Edinburgh, is collecting 1,984 copies of the book to exhibit on Jura for three days in [June]. It will be an interactive, ‘living’ sculpture where visitors are invited to open and read every volume.
“Many have arrived, often with overseas postmarks and customs stamps, addressed to ‘Winston Smith, care of Hans K Clausen.’ [Winston is the novel’s protagonist.]
“ ‘I don’t see my art project as political,’ Clausen said. ‘It has politics woven through it, but it also has a love story woven through it. … I’m interested in all the layers,’ he said. ‘Often people overlook the romance and the love, and this man trying to find his own humanity. It gets lost in the Big Brother-ness of it all.’ …
“One correspondent, a married woman who called herself Julia, after the hero Winston’s lover, sent in her personal copy as a memorial to her first love, a man also married to someone else, her Winston.
“Clausen said his installation, the Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth, is designed to be ‘a monument [to] the defiance of the printed word.’ He is still taking donations. … In return, each donor receives an enamelled pin-badge as a gesture of thanks.
“Clausen wants visitors to appreciate the materiality of each volume: the Russian copy printed on coarse paper; the impeccably printed Japanese edition; the hand-cut Canadian volume on thick paper; the musty odor and yellowing edges of the oldest copies; the intense annotations and highlighting in others, and the inexpert repairs with sticky tape to the ones with battered spines. …
“Clausen has worked with secondary school pupils in Edinburgh, London and on Jura itself, with pupils who live there but go to school on neighboring Islay, who have customized copies using paint, scalpels and pens. A teacher and sculptor at Cape Cod community school in Massachusetts cut an intricate Big Brother artwork into his.
“The installation includes audiobooks on cassette and films on DVD. The audiobooks will be broadcast over two wide-mouthed loudspeakers reminiscent of the omnipresent speakers that indoctrinated the citizens of Airstrip One.
“Visitors to Jura will find a desk with a 1940s typewriter and a paperweight, in reference to the object Winston bought in the antique shop above which he and Julia conducted their illicit affair. The [shop] was a front for the thought police. …
“The project has the blessing of the Orwell Society, a group set up under Richard Blair’s patronage in 2011. … Quentin Kopp, the society’s chairman, whose father, George, was Orwell’s commander in the Spanish civil war, said they spent time talking to Clausen.
“ ‘We satisfied ourselves this was a very genuine initiative,’ Kopp said [adding] ‘This book has a clear modern resonance with many things that are going on. It’s staggering how prescient Orwell was.’ ”
More at the Guardian, here.
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