To Have and to Hold

If Salvador Dali had painted the fall of Rome, it would look a bit like Whelan's. A vast, chaotic jumble of concrete images, punctuated by giant columns leading nowhere. There are delirious juxtapositions on every shelf, and every customer's trolley. Each item is just one of a potentially infinite supply of identical copies, themselves copied from other copies, in an industry where there is no such thing as intellectual property. If these items had meanings, they are surely long lost.

And yet many customers come to Whelan's for the most meaningful objects in their lives. They adorn their loved ones' graves with concrete angels, and paint up concrete replicas of dead dogs. Concrete lasts longer than people do, and all ornaments are guaranteed for life. They offer a tantalising permanence to those who have experienced different kinds of loss, and can attain the status of surreal fetish objects. Classical concrete figures stay young forever. A fairy on a toadstool can stand as a disavowal of death. At Whelan's, meaning is in the hands of the customer. As one of the film’s subjects says, ‘it's hard to say to people what they mean, when they mean so much to us ourselves.’

This is what's so interesting about Whelan's, and it's why we made the film. The tension between the mechanical and the personal, the destruction and creation of meaning, offers a complex answer to Walter Benjamin's thesis on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.