Underneath Spaghetti Junction (Photo: Tracey Moberly)
When: From 13th March 2014
Where: Birmingham
£: Free
What is it?
On 13th March at noon, Bill Drummond will arrive in Birmingham via the Grand Union Canal on a raft made from his bed.
He will be mooring up under Spaghetti Junction, and with him he will have four hundred and forty bunches of daffodils and four hundred empty jam jars. Drummond will then construct his sculpture 400 Bunches of Daffodils under Spaghetti Junction and leave it there.
Drummond then plans to walk to Birmingham Town Hall with the remaining forty bunches of daffodils. On arriving at the steps of the Town Hall he will give away the forty bunches of daffodils to forty complete strangers. This gesture will mark the beginning of a twelve-year tour entitled The 25 Paintings – World Tour.
For the following three months (14th March – 14th June), Drummond will be working across the city on many of the jobs that are part of his ongoing practice. The centre of his operations will be Eastside Projects, a public art gallery in the Digbeth area of the city. The 25 Paintings alluded to in the title of his tour will also be exhibited within Eastside Projects.
The 25 Paintings are large simple text paintings and act as markers, signposts or advertisements for Drummond’s ongoing practice. These paintings are regularly over-painted when new markers, signposts or advertisements are required. Drummond first began work on the paintings in 2001 and they will not be finished until 2025, at the end of the World Tour. The 25 Paintings also have a double life on the walls of Port-au-Prince in Haiti.
Eastside Projects will also exhibit The 60 Posters, The 25 Second Films, an evolving selection of photographs, a globe of the world and a large map of Birmingham. To coincide with the beginning of the tour, Drummond is publishing three books; Man Makes Bed, Man Shines Shoes and the catalogue for the exhibition The 25 Paintings: 2014. He will also be giving three performance lectures at Eastside Projects; Art Versus Money, Painting Versus Sculpture and Life Versus Death.
The next four cities on the World Tour are:
Berlin, Germany in 2015
Guangzhou, China in 2016
Memphis, Tennessee in 2017
Kolkata, India in 2018
The World Tour will conclude underneath Spaghetti Junction on the evening of the 28 April 2025, if Drummond does not die beforehand.
More info: www.penkilnburn.com and www.eastsideprojects.org