Three Men in a Skip is the life-sized artwork at the centre of the Steam Donkey Gallery’s latest venture: “Craft Ebbing & Flowing”. Visitors to the Margate gallery are invited to put words into the mouths of the characters in the skip to help construct an archive of Kentish contemporary banter.
The installation, created by Julian Gazebos, focuses on two yachters engaged in cruising down the River Thanet in a skip. Visitors are asked to imagine that the two are undertaking a leisurely voyage that gives them the opportunity to swap “bants”. The exchanges are the vital creative component of the installation.
Visitors to the gallery are invited to lean forward to about six inches from the artwork and speak into a voice-activated microphone to record a suggested exchange between the men.
(The artist’s original intention was to have had three men in the skip – in a punning play on the title of Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel, Three Men in a Boat – but unfortunately the third man was lost somewhere in the sewers of Vienna.)
Participants in the project are asked to make their recordings in the style of a vintage music hall double-act, with a subtle change in tone between the utterances of the two characters.
Gallery guides its visitors’ banter
The gallery offers visitors three examples to help them approach their recordings with confidence:
1. The first speaker announces: “My wife’s been to the West Indies.” The second speaker asks, making it obvious that his voice is not that of the first: “Jamaica?” And the answer comes back: “No, she went of her own accord.”
2. One man states: “I’ve got a sore throat.” His companion quizzically responds: “Oh dear, have you sucked a Fisherman’s Friend?” This banter relies on ambiguity: could the words “Fisherman’s Friend” have a meaning quite different from a reference to the well-known medicinal lozenge?
3. The standing man says: “Ooops! I appear to have farted.” To which the sitting character replies: “Tell me about it! You’ve put my fag out!” In this example, the afflatus has not extinguished the cigarette but the banter is based upon a typical jocular exaggeration of that simple truth.
The The first contribution to be recorded by a visitor comes from an old Kent wag, Eileen Dover, with the following exchange:
“You’ve got the ship’s wheel in your trousers!”
“Yes, it’s driving me nuts.”
The Second Banana publishing house has undertaken to publish The Steam Donkey’s A Load of Bants when recorded contributions reach 1,000.