For 35 years, 12 faux phone boxes in Kingston upon Thames have amused — and bemused — passers by.
Out of Order arrived on Old London Road in Kingston in 1989, when the artist David Mach repurposed a dozen retired phone boxes obtained from British Telecom. With comic and artistic aplomb, he positioned them to appear as if they were gradually 'toppling' like dominoes. As Donald Trump might put it, this was a perfect call.
Despite the inevitable detractors (in recent years, people have dissed the sculpture on TripAdvisor with insightful comments like "Lack of art" and "They are telephone boxes"), it has become an icon; people going out of their way to glimpse and photograph this very quirky, very British artwork. Kingston might be known for its picturesque market square and historic Clattern Bridge — but Out of Order is infinitely more recognisable. It was Instagrammable 20 years before Instagram was a thing.
In 1990, the Kingston Informer revealed that Out of Order had cost £37,000 (steep for the time), although few would now deny it was worth every penny. Someone who might was another keyboard warrior who squinnied: "The artist, if you could call him that, probably got paid thousands of pounds for it when all it needed was to put a line of old telephone boxes in a line and push them over like dominoes."
Over time, Out of Order grew faded and tatty (not to mention allegedly rat-infested), and on its 30th anniversary in 2019, was given a throughout clean-up and cherry-red paint job.
At that time, David Mach — previously a lecturer in the Sculpture School at Kingston University — confided: "It's one of my best outdoor sculptures. I love these boxes and isn't it funny that even in these times and although they were removed from the British landscape, I feel they still bind us as a nation."
Mach himself is still very much at large; one of his recent artworks is a nine-foot-tall crucifixion sculpture made from coat hangers (on display at Anise Gallery in Forest Hill till 6 July 2024). But whatever he dreams up next, we wonder if it could ever be anything so iconic as those 12 tumbling phone boxes.
Something else we wonder from time to time: in the sculpture's three-and-a-half decade history: has anyone ever tried to make a phone call from one of these dummy kiosks... only to find it's Out of Order?
