The crate of Prague tram parts I am not building anything with
End of last year a scrappie I've known since the nineties calls me, says come get these tram parts or they go to melt. Old Škoda 8Tr stuff, brake valves, couplers, chassis brackets. Beautifully worn, that smooth worn metal you get from forty years of use.
So I went. Paid him in coffee and a bottle of something. Three months now the crate sits in the corner of the studio and I have not touched a single piece. I walk past it every day. My son came by last week and asked what I'm making with it and I told him honestly nothing yet, and he said so why'd you take it, and I said because it existed.
That's a lousy answer but I think it's the real one. There's a difference between collecting and hoarding and I've never been fully sure which side of the line I'm on. I tell younger artists salvage is about deciding what gets to be remembered and then I go and rescue things with no plan because I can't stand the thought of them being melted into somebody's new washing machine.
One day I'll know what they're for. Or I won't and they'll go to my son, who will also not know, and then it's his problem. That's how the good stuff moves through the world.
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This got me. "Because it existed", that's the whole thing, isn't it. You saved it from the melt and now it's not scrap anymore, it's just... waiting. Even if it waits forever, it's still not scrap.
I feel this so hard. Half my sketchbooks are old Bangalore houses that are already gone now. Nobody asked me to document them, I'll never build anything with those drawings, they just sit in a stack. But a house that existed for eighty years deserves to not vanish into nothing, even if the only record of it is a wobbly watercolour on somebody's shelf.
Something tells me the day you finally touch a piece of that crate, it'll be the right day and no sooner. The waiting is part of it. That worn metal isn't going anywhere now.
Where's the crate sitting in the studio, does it get decent light, at least? 🙂
The Bangalore houses got me more than the trams, honestly. I know exactly that feeling. I did a stretch of conservation work years back on a Byzantine floor that was going to be torn out anyway, and everyone kept asking what was the point, and the point was that it existed and somebody walked on it for nine hundred years. Nobody needs a reason beyond that.
And I don't think waiting is a bad state for a thing to be in. The crate sits there and the drawings sit in the stack and one day something in you catches and you know what it's for. Or you don't. Either way it's not scrap. You did the recording, you did the saving, that's the actual work. The rest is a bonus.
Nine hundred years of somebody's feet. That floors got more weight behind it than half the biennials I've been in. You kept a piece of that from going to the crusher too, in a way. Conservation work that nobody asked for is its own kind of stubbornness and I respect it.
And yeah, I think you're right about waiting. Maybe the crate is already the work, just in a different tense. My son doesn't see it yet, but he's young. He'll learn that half of what you make is just having kept the thing long enough.
Bangalore houses in watercolour. That's a good thing to have done, even if it never goes anywhere. There's a kind of record-keeping nobody commissions and nobody asked for, and it matters anyway. Somebody in fifty years finds that stack and suddenly a whole street exists again for a minute.
And yeah, the crate sits there and it's already not scrap. That's the joke of it. I took it so it wouldn't be melted and now it has the strange job of just being allowed to exist. Maybe that's enough. Maybe the building comes later or maybe the building was the point all along and I just don't know it yet.
The day I touch a piece, it stops being tram parts and starts being mine. I keep postponing that. It's a nice moment to keep ahead of you, like an unopened bottle.