THE GREAT BEAR, 1967
signed Simon Patterson, dated 1992 and numbered A/P lower right
lithograph on paper, framed in an aluminium London Underground frame
99 x 124.6cm (108.8 x 134.3cm framed)

Few works of British conceptual art have entered the public imagination as thoroughly as The Great Bear. Simon Patterson took Harry Beck's map of the London Underground of 1933 — one of the most familiar pieces of graphic design in Britain, and arguably the most efficient in the world — left its geometry entirely intact, and replaced every station name with the name of a real person. Each line is given over to a category: philosophers on one, film actors on another, saints, footballers, explorers, engineers, comedians, Italian artists, planets and journalists distributed across the rest. Interchanges accordingly become collisions, and the network resolves into an enormous, absurd system of cross-references in which Aquinas meets Marx and a Renaissance painter changes for a centre-forward.

The title supplies the key. The Great Bear is Ursa Major, and the joke turns on the fact that constellations are themselves an arbitrary imposition of narrative on a random scatter of points — figures, animals and gods mapped onto the sky by people determined to find order there. Beck's diagram performs precisely the same operation on London: it is not a map at all but a schematic fiction, straightening the Thames, evening out the distances, and persuading several generations of Londoners to imagine their city in a shape it has never possessed. Patterson makes that sleight of hand visible by pushing it one stage further into nonsense.

Issued in 1992 and housed within an original Transport for London aluminium frame, the work was acquired by the Tate and did much to secure Patterson's nomination for the Turner Prize in 1996. He had emerged from Goldsmiths and shown in Freeze in 1988, but where several of his contemporaries pursued shock, Patterson's method has always been more analytical and humourous — hijacking systems of classification and observing what happens when the labels are switched.

The result here is a piece that functions simultaneously as a gag, a meditation on how knowledge is organised, and a genuine tribute to Beck.

"There is no code to be cracked in any of my work. Meanings may not be obvious, you may not get a joke, but nothing is really cryptic - I'm not interested in mystification. I like disrupting something people take as read. I am not simply pulling the rug out from people. I am not nihilistic. What interests me is juxtaposing different paths of knowledge to form more than the sum of their parts." - Simon Patterson