DATE: 1998 INTRODUCTION: This proposal was made for an artwork to coincide with the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. The artwork would involve Stan Bonnar travelling for that year, in a straight line between the House of Commons in London and the new Scottish Parliament House in Edinburgh. In the event, the required funding for the work could not be achieved, but the proposal involved the considerable effort of contacting all the local authorities and councils en route to apply for partnership funding; local and national press, and preparing an application for lottery funding. The artwork was ostensibly to be a public critique of democracy, especially at the time of devolving power to Scotland. However, the main underlying aspiration of the work was to devolve art power to people, by opening a democratic space in which the artist needed constantly to justify his actions. On the face of it, the action needed some justifying, as the following press release from 1998 might show! 1998 PRESS RELEASE: 292 years have passed since the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. In the following months, before and after the opening of the Scottish parliament, artist Stan Bonnar will make a journey, on which he will paint 292 acrylic paintings on synthetic silk. Mapmakers will define the straightest possible cartographic line between the Speaker's chair of the House of Commons in London, and the site of the new Parliament house at Holyrood in Edinburgh. (The line passes through Camden and Barnet London Boroughs, Luton, Bedford, Rushton, Corby, Bradford Radcliffe on Trent, Mansfield, Shirebrook, Aston, Rotherham, Barnsley, Wakefield, Morley, Pudsey, Leeds, Haltwhistle, Hawick, Bonnyrigg & Lasswade and Edinburgh.) Starting at the house of Commons on January 1st 1999, Bonnar will follow this mapped line to Edinburgh. Wherever it passes through the wall of a significant building, he will set up an artist's easel, and from a viewing distance of 1 metre, will make a representational painting of a small square section of that wall. In cities, towns and villages, the walls of government offices, multi-national companies, large stores, financial institutions, television and newspaper offices, cinemas, galleries, churches, large farms, small businesses, and private houses will be represented. The walls will be chosen because of the public-ness of their location, and to sitmulate local interest in the project. On the journey north, each completed painting will be removed from its frame, and sewn to the others already completed. In this way, a huge patchwork flag, similar to the Saltire of Scotland, will emerge from the walls. It will be unfurled in Edinburgh in the first minute of the new millenium.Population difference means that this 'other' flag of Scotland would be created by more people in England than in Scotland. It will be an anxious Saltire, a symbol as much for the democratic aspirations of its English Other, as it will be for Scottish democracy. Each small section of the flag will be a symbol for the discussions that take place in the street about its painting. The more public interest there is in this 'painting of hidden views', the more potent will be the symbolic value of the flag. The work aspires to open a democratic space, and it seeks this by asking for its visual language to be questioned. To question the justification for these acts of painting is to create this work of art - the democratic voicing of a new symbolic language, that might germinate in the space between the painting and the question. CONCEPT: 'Democracy does not exist; that is to say, starting from today, and every day, there is a responsibility to invent democracy, to extend the democratic franchise to all areas of public and private life.' Simon Critchley 'The Ethics of Deconstruction' A dichotomy exists between the letter and the aspirations of our systems of art and democracy. Democratic thought is ethical thought, but because of the voracity of modern spoken languages, which appropriate physical things as objects, the ethical impulse of the democrat is always diluted by the flow of her own words. However, by the same token, democratic thought seeks to deconstruct the language structure in which its aspirations are voiced. It lays its own practical democratic structure open to the unpredictable proximity of the other. This is the democratic aspiration. In recent years, through deconstructive practice, artists have sought to interrupt the limits of functioning social structures, and to interrogate the totality of their languages and timebase. Paradoxically however, this ethical activity has been hampered by its linguistic determination as Art, which impedes deconstruction and inhibits art thought from finding a viable public form. This experimental work, Mythogram 292 walls, will seek to open a continuum in which people can take a step back from Art.

This Unknown Structure is on the edge of the area that was part of the Blue circle cement works and i think it might house a pump of some kind but im not sure ...