The artist Michael Landy has unveiled a new piece in East Bank—a cultural and education quarter at the heart of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford in east London—which brings a dying dialect back to life. Landy’s Lemon Meringue work, installed along the waterfront at East Bank, throws the spotlight on traditional and contemporary Cockney Rhyming slang in a series of large fluorescent signs.
Cockney slang, which sprung up in the mid 19th century, replaces words with rhyming terms or phrases; Landy’s signs feature “apples and pears” (stairs); “S Club Seven” (heaven) and “duck and dive” (hide). Landy grew up in Hackney in East London, telling The Art Newspaper: “I can't even remember the first time [I heard it]. My friend used it a lot so I think that's where I picked up on it.”
He adds in a statement: “Like slang for gangs and prisoners, or Polari in the queer community, Cockney Rhyming slang is a codified language that signifies belonging to a certain group or class, it’s about identity.” But the artist points out that, from his experience, a younger generation is largely unaware of the slang (international visitors may also be slightly confused by the seemingly random phrases on display).
Landy says: “Bringing it into the Stratford Waterfront environment, it feels almost like an excavation of the past on this new site. I like the idea that the signs are like archaeological artefacts or hieroglyphics, almost inscrutable, like a puzzle to be solved in the same way as the Rosetta Stone.”
The signs also mimic 1980s shop notices and use a font similar to tabloid headlines. “I’ve used the visual language of bargain basement sale signage in fluorescent star shapes that you would commonly see on market stalls and shops closing down—things that I am familiar with growing up in the East End in the 1970s and 1980s, and seeing the recession in the early 1990s. This visual language of sales and street trading is one that I’ve looked at various points over the years in my work, beginning with Closing Down Sale, an exhibition at Karsten Schubert’s gallery [in London] in 1992,” Landy says.
Landy’s piece inspired the Voices of East Bank project last year, a digital bank of 50 oral histories with words and voices of current residents across the four boroughs surrounding the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest).
Landy’s permanent work was commissioned by the London Legacy Development Corporation with East Bank for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. East Bank comprises UCL East (University College London) and London College of Fashion, a branch of University of the Arts London, and Sadler’s Wells East which is due to open later this year. V&A East Museum and Storehouse and BBC Music Studios are scheduled to open on site next year.
Break Down (2001), Michael Landy’s dramatic performance work from over two decades ago, involved pulverising all his worldly possessions—from a Saab 900 car to a single tea bag—leaving nothing but the clothes he was standing in. This epic act of destruction took place in February 2001, in the former C&A department store on Oxford Street in London.