Joy of joys! We are lucky enough to have an art gallery (currently closed for renovations) on campus, but as if we in Birmingham were not culturally enriched enough we now have a groovy new statue to admire. It’s called Red Stack, and like most things with no cultural weight you can trace it all the way back to Dubai. Dubai, incidentally, is where UoB has a satellite campus, so there is clearly something to this cradle of civilisation that we mere mortals in the Midlands are missing.

Composed of eight pillows sequentially piled (stacked, if you will) atop one another, Red Stack presents a hugely evocative image. Seven is, after all, a number of great spiritual importance. The Lord Our God took seven days to make the world. This is central to the narrative question posed by the statue: what if Yahweh, in a moment of weakness, added a secret eighth day to the week where He pissed everything up the wall completely? Wouldn’t that be so Old Testament of Him? We need not ask these questions in the presence of the Red Stack. 

The general reaction of the student body has been what might diplomatically be described as tepid.

I am not saying here that Red Stack is an affront to divine creation. That is what people on Instagram are doing. User ‘Jackson Bollock’, for example, calls it ‘the perfect symbol of humanity’s separation from God and all things good’ — we will say that is a middling seven out of ten rating. Talk about being damned by faint praise. The general reaction of the student body has been what might diplomatically be described as tepid. One of the joys of Pillowgate has been seeing my friends, coursemates and various nemeses, none of whom know each other, come together to whinge in an online comments section.

…what has Dubai, nay the entire United Arab Emirates, given to the art world hitherto this gift for us?

So it is from Dubai. Here is a brainbuster: what has Dubai, nay the entire United Arab Emirates, given to the art world hitherto this gift for us? (Sex and the City 2 is not an acceptable answer.) Not that I am denying the value inherent to a city of a billion anonymous glass buildings that, er, do not have anywhere to get rid of their sewage — oh, disgusting. The only thing that could possibly make this worse would be if all these revolting skyscrapers were built by thousands of victims of modern slaver— oh, I do not believe this. What a silly absolute monarchy. It is basically a colony of whingeomatic Telegraph columnists and assorted philistines with too much money… but it has the deepest swimming pool in the world!

Sinking to the 35 metre deep bottom of Deep Dive Dubai and never coming back up is a popular Emirati suicide method, rivalled only by being gay or being in possession of one thimbleful of cannabis, but enough about that dump. How has Red Stack ended up here? Eagle-eyed (or just eyed) observers have noted that The Pillows of Doom have appeared in the UK before: in Regents Park, circa 2022. No word of how much they went for, although of course any figure short of the Pillows actually paying you to have them would be a bad deal.

It is worth noting, by the way, that Red Stack has not been paid for with our tuition fees. Alumni and other miscellaneous donors have apparently ensured its presence as part of the University’s 125th anniversary celebrations. This is relying on an increasingly liberal definition of the word ‘celebration’, where the Powers That Be apparently have some vaguely Catholic sense of guilt and as such are working tirelessly to destroy their workplace with gaudy red furniture, lest it last another 125 years. Is this some accelerationist campaign to ensure the end of all prior culture and indeed history? Someone still loves you, Dr. Fukuyama.

But we love Old Joe! It tells the time within four decades of accuracy, so points for utility—it is not as if you can actually sit on the Pillows™…

The PoD (Pillows of Doom, see two paragraphs ago) are slumped near the red bricks for which this publication is named, but outside of colour the similarities pretty much end there. Nearby Old Joe is a bit like the skyscrapers of Red Stack’s native Dubai in that it is a large, vaguely Freudian monument that a wealthy man once had built in honour of himself. But we love Old Joe! It tells the time within four decades of accuracy, so points for utility—it is not as if you can actually sit on the Pillows™—and is a campus landmark that fits in pleasantly and has established history and meaning (‘Neville’s dad is loaded’). 

Well, about ‘meaning’; a lot has been made of the point of the evil simulacushions, or more specifically their lack thereof. Maybe they are just not supposed to evoke anything at all? It is not as if we often find ourselves inspecting pillows at home (Ikea showrooms be damned). The most apparent subtext is simply that we ought not to think about things. Dream baby dream, forever. This attitude will serve everyone but us very well.

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