July 2004
Relax, ok...
To continue with the occasional series on the weird and wonderful people that I´ve met, allow me to introduce Jim Whiting...an artist in the truest sense!
There´s a kind of club in this town, with no equivalent in the world, called "Bimbo Town". Jim built it, and people travel from all over to visit it. One word: bizarre.
First of all, Jim is English, from London, 53 years old, single, and when pressed will say he´s an "artist-inventor". Briefly, he became fascinated with a make-believe world when he was five years old at a miniature fun-fair while watching the tiny machines and activities...but more especially with the fun the creators were having - and so began making his own.
Moving rapidly along...at art school, then engineering school, he also noticed the emotions that puppets were capable of, and built his own. Jim says, they seemed more expressive than humans...but he would also wake up each morning realising with horror that they were of course just mechanical...and started to question the notion of feelings; the falseness humans were capable of, and the infinite range in the innocent puppet world.
This led him into experimenting with more bizarre and even sinister worlds...the Bimbo Town concept evolved (a play on both the usual English meaning, and the German taboo - a reference to black people), and despite the controversy, Jim was prepared to challenge this by continuing to use the name.
Now, in a disused factory in the east of Germany, late at night, 100´s of visitors enter a world of mechanical couches that randomly open to swallow their intrepid and usually lubricated occupants, flying coats, wandering cabinets, mobile beds and even entire rooms, while in the background an act or a band lets rip on the stage..., and the bold venture, often naked, into a series of cascading bathtubs and bubble-bath behind perspex...
Jim left England in ´94 because he thought eastern Europe might be more down to earth, or at least receive it differently. He also left the gallery world, but all without regrets...without criticising what the labelled, boxed in, modern art world has to say ("there´s lots of good stuff...").
We expect, despite the financial constraints, the incredible physical and mental commitment, as well as the threat that investors will close the place in order to develop trendy apartments, that Jim will carry on. He could pack everything he needs into a truck at a moment´s notice and go somewhere else...and do it all again. He would, and that´s what makes him an artist.
There´s the man himself in the pic, enjoying a back massage in the "car wash".
Righto.
See ya,
D
PS: Nothing about the exhibition schedule, or politics, or the weather (ok, this Summer is so far appalling!!!)