Super Tyre Fun – Stuart Robinson
by Robin Dowell
As a child, arcades and fairgrounds were a forbidden world to me; the fleeting thrills and gaudy paint, plastic facades and sugary indulgences symbolised everything my parents tried to avoid. As an adult, I appreciate a full set of teeth and an ability to find interest in the quietest of observations, but in boyhood, these ‘evils’ were all the more enthralling for their taboo.
Everything about ‘those nasty places’, from the squeals of fear and excitement on the waltzer to the tang of vinegar and soft kiss of candyfloss was exotic, alluring and mildly terrifying. Annually, we’d push through the flash and the flicker to the salt cry of gulls and the groan of rocks in the drag of a wave.
‘Well that was horrible’, we’d be told. ‘This is much better’. And we look out, past the stench of the tideline, to the grey horizon.
Held in Falmouth’s Ships and Castles leisure centre, which closed two years ago, Stuart Robinson’s Super Tyre Fun provoked memories of these spaces, other people’s spaces, and their pushmi–pullyu language of appetite and artifice.
The space itself is both bizarre and haunting. Housed under a sweeping, sloped glass roof, a now-dry spiralling flume ends in a drained pool. Above this loom caricature battlements and, as though in extraordinary collision, a structure which alludes to the port side of a liner, replete with suspended lifeboat.
With the majority of sculptures in the confines of the pool-bowl itself, tiled in a frenetic pattern of three blues, Robinson’s work exerts a confident presence that is woven from colour, scale and ambition.
At the top of the pool’s gentle incline, encircled by the descending flume, ‘Dream Machine’ takes its form from penny pushers. Through the panes of this hexagonal, urn-like structure, where we might expect teasing beds of tuppences sliding back and forth, are pieces from the work ‘Namesakes’, smaller ceramic money boxes. These echo their mother form, and are emblazoned with the names of Las Vegas casinos which have arcades named after them in Britain, from Weston-super-Mare to Great Yarmouth: ‘Caesar’s Palace’, ‘Golden Nugget’ and ‘Stardust’. The font of each of these is meticulously replicated from their respective original signage. With the palette of Easter egg packaging, these shiny-glazed, gaudy, matryoshka are compelling, almost edible.
Clearly Robinson is taken by this distinct volume; it is one of the show’s motifs, reappearing in ‘Floor Pieces’ and ‘Carpet Diem II’, among others.
The eponymous ‘Super Fun Tyre’ is a delicious deceit; a palm-sized, high gloss ceramic form, which for all intents looks like a miniature inflatable blow up tyre, sits on an alluring ‘wave’ of reflective metallic blue Perspex. The shine of both sparks an avaricious twinge, and the scale of the work is charming and beguiling.
Like many of the works in the show, these grammatical elements are housed in steel-mesh cages. Suggestive of cable conduit, the grided forms feel like attempts to define and contain the ambiguous mise en scène.It is hard to view the show without thinking of Baudrillard. Is the space itself a third-order simulation? Meanwhile, superficially, it appears that Robinson is obsessed by the materiality of simulacra; ‘Arcade/Facade’, whose cherry red letter forms changed throughout the duration of the show, is loaded with theatrical implied narrative. Their nod, in Robinson’s words, to the ‘roof top hotel signs and arcade facades’ belong as much to the romanticised world of twentieth century Americana seen in his previous shows, such as Ham Fisted Half Cocked, as they do to the British seaside resort. Robinson’s often tongue-in-cheek titling indicates that this is more playful than a diatribe against or celebration of the homogenisation of hyperreality.
To understand the kernel of Robinson’s enquiry, we are better informed by some of the less repeated refrains. Slump, featuring a beautiful pink ‘neon’ curve, adulates the seductive qualities of the arcade or fairground; familiar and subtle, its gentle light emits a very human voice that fluoresces like the skies in Charlotte Wells’ heartbreaking film Aftersun.
Similarly, the crackle of the ever-searching scanner in ‘Marine Band’ suggests both lived childhood memory and a deeper need for connection most felt in its absence.
Leaving Super Tyre Fun, I ruminated on my own childhood memories and the sense of nostalgia that permeated the show. It was not laughter, not the thrill of short-lived winnings, not, indeed, the eye-sting of heavily chlorinated water in which I had been immersed. Rather it was a deeper, quiet longing. Personal, fond and fading. It is this touch, hinting at the autobiographical, a faint fingerprint of memory, that makes the show so moving and remarkable.
Robin Dowell, 2024
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