“I really like it if the work’s accessible at different points,” the artist continues. “They don’t immediately want to talk about feminism or the Iraq war, but they want to go and see what’s on the jukebox and all those things happen after that,” she says. In addition to the objects, here you will also find a working jukebox loaded with some 2,200 protest songs, which the visitors are invited to peruse and play.Įwan has a knack for engaging people. The politics come after the people, as can be seen in her present exhibition titled Back to the Fields. In a practical way, she generally works with the public and for the public. We have met for coffee in Whitechapel, London, near where Ewan is working on a commission for a hospital. It’s a very rational, sensible way of organizing your day.” “So, yeah, I don’t see why it couldn’t happen here.” Ewan minimizes the political angle, downplays those beheadings and purges, and says, “Although it’s from the 18th century, as an idea, it is something that seems more future than our time, if that makes sense. “Other metric systems have happened here,” she points out of England. Installation view of Ruth Ewan’s ‘Back to the Fields’ at Camden Arts Centre (click to enlarge) More recently, at the Camden Arts Centre (CAC) in London, she has gathered 365 poetic objects, including a selection of animals, vegetables, and minerals, to go with the days of the metric, Republican year. In 2011, she disarrayed an English town with custom-made decimal clocks as public artworks.
#French revolutionary calendar today plus#
Decimal time consisted of 100 seconds in 100 minutes of a 10-hour day, while the metric calendar consisted of 10-day weeks and 30-day months, plus politically correct feast days.Įwan has made neat and galvanizing shows around the 12-year lifespan of the Republican calendar. The consequences of this event have fascinated Ewan, including the conventions of French Republican time and the Republican calendar - the metric measurements brought in to wipe the slate clean in post-revolutionary France. Our neighbors in France overthrew their king in 1792. Of course, you don’t have to look far to find a working republic. Whether it’s through social struggle, or a natural event, they’re not going to be around forever.” It is this strain of reasonable optimism that characterizes all of Ewan’s work. The Scottish, London-based artist Ruth Ewan is being perfectly reasonable and polite when she says of the British monarchy: “It’s going to have to go at some point.
LONDON - Here in the UK, Republicanism and its opposition to the monarchy can go along with firebrand declarations of class war. Installation view of Ruth Ewan’s ‘Back to the Fields’ at Camden Arts Centre (all images courtesy Marcus J Leith)
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