Installation meant to highlight waste faces being shut off as lack of rainfall threatens wildlife

Maev Kennedy, arts and heritage correspondent
Wednesday July 27, 2005

A water company has given notice to a work of art which has already shed enough water to sprinkle half the lawns in Surrey.
The artist disconsolately conceded yesterday that his installation, The Running Tap, has probably run its course after pouring an estimated 800,000 litres (1.4m pints) down the drain during one of the worst droughts in the south-east in decades.

“Well that’s it, isn’t it?” Mark McGowan said miserably after a formal notice from Thames Water that if he does not turn the tap off, it will cut off the water to the entire gallery. “One way or another, I reckon it will be gone by Thursday.

“The people in the gallery are really, really nice, and they’re a bit worried, particularly about having no water in the toilet, which I can understand.”
He turned on the cold water tap, running into a sink in the kitchen space of the small artist-run House gallery in Camberwell, south-east London, on June 28.

He intended to leave it running for a year – to highlight, he insists, the way people waste water.

Thames Water, already facing fierce criticism over the worst leakage from broken pipes of any water company in the country, was not amused.

The Running Tap provoked passionate reactions – a few supporters and many more enraged. One sent a birthday card with the warning inside that if the tap was not turned off, the gallery would be blown up.

The irony was that in the course of producing the work, McGowan has become messianic about water wastage: yesterday he spluttered with outrage about people washing their teeth or cleaning vegetables under a running tap. At the weekend he denounced a family member for running the washing machine daily for only a handful of clothes.

Yesterday a spokesman for Thames Water confirmed that it had started legal proceedings. “We tried everything possible to reach a compromise – we would have been happy to work with him on collecting and recycling the water. But there was a very strong groundswell of opinion among our customers that we should do something about this.”

A surprising face saver has emerged: the gallery has just received an email inquiry from the United States about buying both the tap and the sink – and replacing them with somewhere to fill the kettle and wash the coffee mugs – in order to recreate the work in exile.

McGowan – whose previous creations include walking backwards for 11 miles with a turkey on his head, to draw attention to the problem of obesity – has never earned more than £400 from his art.

If the tap has to run dry, he is not at all opposed to selling it: the money would probably be split between artist and gallery.

“It would have been really nice to leave it running for a year,” he said sadly.

“But I don’t think people take any notice. They just get really angry. My theory is it’s the people who get most angry who go away and waste the most water.”