Mick Hartley

Today – I'd almost forgotten – I was booked for a trip beneath Kingsway, down where the trams used to run, to see Conrad Shawcross's installation Chord. 

Chord is Conrad Shawcross most ambitious and complex work to date. Conceived specifically for the long subway, the artist has built two identical rope machines that will weave a thick hawser from 324 spools of coloured string. These vast machines will begin back to back in the centre of the space and then gradually move away from each other slowly down the subway following the old tram tracks. Like two huge spiders, they will slowly weave their rope behind them as they slowly travel through the space over the course of the exhibition.

I imagine for the majority of the audience, like me, the chance to go down and see the abandoned tram subway was as much if not more of a factor than the actual piece of art. But it would have been impolite not to spend at least some time pondering Mr Shawcross's "most ambitious and complex work to date".

Well…like it says, it's a large rope machine. This morning the two halves were maybe 20 yards apart, with the resultant multi-coloured rope stretched between them, propped up every few yards so it didn't sag too much. I was struck by the amount of effort that must have gone into the planning and construction – all those cogs, all those moving parts – till it occurred to me that this really was a rope-making machine. A lot slower, and with pretty colours, but basically the mechanics of it – the fundamental idea of it – was what you'd find in any rope-making factory. I was admiring what was in effect a fairly straightforward piece of industrial machinery, as produced by the thousands in factories across the world ever since the industrial revolution; the only difference being that here the workings of the machine were pointless. Which is to say; it's art.

Is this a kind of post-industrial nostalgia? Most people nowadays have never been inside a factory. In my schooldays trips round factories were reasonably common: most memorably, living in Sheffield, trips round steelworks. They were – are – astonishing places: the blast furnaces, the rolling mills – the noise and heat and scale of it. Could I get a grant from the Arts Council to set up a steelworks; all the details intact, except producing nothing at all? Or would that count as a museum? [No – if it's all motionless, then it's a museum. If if it's working, but producing nothing, then it's a work of art. If it's working and producing, then it's a factory.]

So anyway – back to Conrad Shawcross. What does it all mean? You can't just go round producing works of art without the art-speak to back them up. After all, what are art colleges for? 

“I didn't know why I wanted to make a rope machine at the time,” he says, “but it became clear that it was about linear and cyclical ideas of time and how we experience it. Metaphorically and humanistically, that is. Because on a cosmological level that's obviously not how it is.”

Indeed. Or not.