Small Proposals Book

This project represents, first and foremost, a reflection on the feasibility of art projects and on the relationship between the artist and the commissioning body within the contemporary art system. Through the irony and poetic approach that would characterize his later projects, the artist ultimately questions broader dynamics and meanings.
In this work, conceived when Jonathan Monk was still a student at the Glasgow School of Art, the artist presents a series of proposals for projects that are, by their very nature, impossible to realize — crazy, as he himself describes them. Closely connected to the designation of Glasgow as European Capital of Culture in 1990, Small Proposals Book is a handmade book containing the presentation of six public art interventions for the Scottish city. These are bound together with a (fake) response letter for each proposal from the official to whom the artist would supposedly have submitted the project, the Visual Arts Officer Tessa Jackson. Both the images and the response letters were, of course, produced by the artist himself.
The visual part, through the reuse of everyday images that are exaggerated and stereotypical, aims to emphasize the deep irony and the implicit critique of the dynamics associated with this type of intervention. Jonathan Monk pretends to propose bringing the pyramids to Glasgow Green, moving the Golden Gate Bridge over the River Clyde (although the image used was actually that of the Humber Bridge, which is why the proposal is rejected in the fictional response letter), restoring driving orientation to continental standards, transplanting one of the giant sequoias from Redwood National and State Parks, moving Stonehenge to redevelop the fountain in Kelvingrove Park, and finally relocating Disneyland for a year to the parking lot of the St. Enoch Centre.
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