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Forget the beauty of nature or paintings, Time Out’s art editor Eddy Frankel is interested in something else: accidental aesthetics. This new series is about how to find beauty in the ugliest places, and how to appreciate things that were never meant to be appreciated.
A chunk of east London is being transformed. Over the past few years, its two-lane roads – already heaving with honking, belching traffic – have been narrowed to make way for wide cycle paths. Each path, appearing along the edges of one of the east end’s major vehicular arteries like accumulations of asphalt cholesterol, has taken years to build, gouging at the roads and forever slowing local traffic.
It’s nightmarish for the drivers of the area. For cyclists like me, they’re meant to be a godsend, but the council keeps digging the routes back up. You cycle for a mile on a fresh, safe cycle path, then get forced back onto the roads, which are now busier and more dangerous than ever.
It can be aggravating, frustrating, or if like me you’re unable to resist engaging with the aesthetics of the world around you, it can be beautiful.
On the most basic level, roadworks are rectangular holes in rectangular planes. A road is a long, thick line, its width growing and shrinking as lanes are added or removed. A basic, one-lane roadwork to, say, repair a pipe, cuts a canvas-shaped trench into the asphalt. We’re dealing here with the interaction of simple geometric shapes, rectangular intrusions on rectangular surfaces.
The hole acts as a window into the processes of daily life
During the work itself, the hole acts as a window into the processes of daily life. We’re not meant to see the pipes which bring water to our homes or internet to our phones, but the roadworker exposes the inner-workings of discrete societal infrastructure. When the roadworker themselves enters the hole, we’re being allowed to see society itself being maintained. For just that one day, week or month, a facade is ripped up and the guts are left open to the air; it’s like the Centre Pompidou with its ducts and staircases on the outside. But accidental.
The hole is a layered intervention. We see the upper crust of black asphalt, the crushed brown bricks beneath and the ochre clay or beige soil further down. Like a Mark Rothko painting, the gradations of dark colour descend in steps, a visual composition that then leads to the pipes, cables and wires at the base.
What really makes the roadwork an incredible visual experience though is the way you’re forced both around and towards it. A line of cones will start at the kerb and flay outwards, keeping your vehicle safely away from the hole. But those orange cones serve the exact same purpose as a ray of sunlight in a Renaissance painting, they draw your eyes towards a single focal point. You’re being shown with absolute clarity that something is happening ahead, that your eyes should follow those cones and your body and vehicle should go on that same journey. It’s then up to you to sneak a peek down into the depths of the hole that has been created. It’s an unintentional compositional tool, a leash around your eyeballs, taking you on a visual walk.
Once the hole has been filled in, you’re left with gleaming black keloid scar on greyed tarmac. The fresh asphalt, soft and tacky, will forever be evidence of intervention, never taking on the colour of the surrounding material. The result is, at first, an obsidian nothingness; a blank, black rectangle which glitters with the hot liquid glue of noxious tarmac. It slowly ages, dulling and greying, but never quite becoming a fully integrated part of the whole it’s surrounded by.
Roadworks force you to realise that you are not in control
In those fresh black rectangles you can see echoes of the monochromatic greats like Yves Klein or Ben Nicholson or the tarmac-drenched canvases of the French artist Bernar Venet. As spaces within spaces, you can imagine them echoing the American-flag remixes of pop art master Jasper Johns. What I’m saying is that in a simple rectangle of back-filled roadwork you can find parallels throughout modern art history. Not intentional, obviously, but echoes that resound loudly nonetheless.
On a conceptual level, a roadwork serves the same purpose as a trip to the National Gallery. Roadworks are frustrating not because they delay you, but because they force you to realise that you are not in control, that your path can be affected. Likewise, on the walls of the National Gallery are memento mori and vanitas paintings; images that remind you that, regardless of your success or ego, death is imminent, that fate will catch up. Other paintings are of such beauty that they are links to the sublime, they show you that beyond your corporeal, arrogant, eating-and-drinking-and-sleeping-and-shitting self is a celestial world of beauty.
Yes, I’m arguing that roadworks are like a Holbein or a Piero della Francesca; maybe not in terms of how they look, but definitely in terms of how they shock you out of the deterministic slog of the everyday, how they act as reminders of your impotence in the face of higher powers. Sure, the higher power in Renaissance art is God or fate, and the higher power in roadworks is the council, but we live such self-regarding, obsessive little lives, that maybe we need that shock every once in a while.
Want even more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London.
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