Drawing pin mania

Our latest exhibition, Acting Out of Nothingness, opened last Tuesday. It was one of the most challenging we have ever done, and perhaps the main reason why my colleague Shihoko collapsed in a heap on Thursday.

In collaboration with the APT Institute, it is a group show involving seven contemporary Japanese artists, so the works exhibit an extraordinary range, from photographs to installation pieces, and from the large to (very) small.

The first glitch occurred when the works got held up at customs for two weeks. We had booked our usual technician Rupert for three days, but the work only physically arrived at Daiwa on the afternoon of the third. And Rupert was booked elsewhere for the following day.

We could immediately see that two of the others were going to take a lot of work to install. System or Memories A was significantly bigger than we had been led to believe – as a result it spectacularly overflows the gallery wall, up into the ceiling cornice. The other, Gold Finger, was going to require a lot of assembly. An awful lot of assembly. It needed almost 28,000 drawing pins to be stuck into a board. At least the drawing pins weren’t numbered. Another consideration was that 28,000 drawing pins are extremely heavy. If the work were assembled on the floor, it would be difficult to lift it onto the wall, and probably impossible to fix it there safely. So the board had to be firmly nailed to the wall first, and the pins inserted afterwards, using a stepladder for the top bit.

A quick calculation suggests that if you allow 5 seconds per drawing pin – this turned out to be over-optimistic – inserting 28,000 of them would take about 39 man-hours, or 4-5 full days’ work. Clearly we were going to need help over the weekend. And not just anybody could do it, because the pins needed to be lined up accurately. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and London-based artist Keita Miyazaki took up the challenge, helped by Philip of APT London, and his friend Ellie.

They were pretty much ready to break out the champagne by the time they’d finished the first row of pins across the bottom. By Saturday evening they were only about a third of the way through, and starting to despair of being ready by the opening. Keita, in particular, worked late into the evenings, while Shihoko and Keiko manned the office all weekend, plying the team with cups of coffee and Japanese meals knocked up in our basement kitchen.

Somehow on Sunday a rhythm started to emerge, and by Monday they were really making rapid progress, despite having to work from a stepladder. In the end, the pinning was completed that evening, and we went out for a celebratory meal. But Keita still wasn’t quite happy, and was in again doing some final tweaking on Tuesday morning. We were finally ready for the opening!

Since they’d had so much time to think about it, I asked our drawing pin operatives what “Gold Finger” was all about. Philip wryly commented that perhaps it meant that by the time you’ve pinned 28,000 drawing pins to a board, you’ll have a gold finger – or at least a red thumb!

In fact, this work contains echoes of many things. Suggestions have included chain mail, the popular website Pinterest, and pixels on a screen – the work seems to be trying to tell you something in a hi-tech language you can’t quite make out. It dimly reflects your image back at you as you look at it, and catches the changing light through the window next to it, particularly in the evening sun. Drawing pins are usually used to attach a message of some sort to a board, but here the drawing pins themselves are the message. Or might there perhaps be pieces of paper behind them, obscured by that mighty gleaming wall? Gold Finger is humorously juxtaposed with the smallest work in the exhibition, called Knot (red). Come and see the results for yourself!