Bill Heine orders ‘just a little, just a taste’ of the South African house white as we sit down by the stove in the conservatory of the Rickety Press in Jericho. There’s an atmosphere of studied gentility in the pub, as patrons sip their drinks besides walls, shelves and window ledges piled high with books. My guest fits the place like a good book in a well-fitted dust jacket. Â
I open with a couple of questions about the origins of the much beloved Headington Shark and can’t keep a note of laughter out of my voice when I ask what his thought process was.  He is evidently used to this question and sits back to ruminate, observing that he still hasn’t come up with a tried and tested ‘patter’ to help him out in these situations and worries that his answer might descend into ‘chaos’.
But Heine’s story is anything but chaos as he spins a tale which ranges from the 1986 bombing of Tripoli as he lay awake listening to the aircraft flying from their air base above Oxford on his first night in his new home; to evening drinks, perched on a wall, with the artist John Buckley, discussing how to make his house look ‘interesting’; and finally to the installation of the shark on the 15th August, 1986, the forty-first anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. Clearly the theme is destruction, and a certain ‘shock value’: the invasion of something forceful into a place that one feels is as ‘safe as houses’.
I ask Heine whether he thinks that art’s ability to shock is a pre-requisite of great contemporary art. ‘I wonder if I would say shocking,’ he begins. ‘I think most of the important art does have this quality. It jolts people; it shakes them up and it asks new questions. That’s the area I’m interested in: the asking of new questions so that people will settle down again.’
I wonder whether Heine can identify a particular work of art which he experienced in this way. ‘It’s interesting,’ he muses, ‘in the sense that it’s not really a piece of art, but I consider it to be. I used to live in Peru and I lived in a place called Cuzco in the Andes. It was the centre of the Inca Empire and there was a lot of poverty. There were people who were pretty close to the breadline and they wore clothes that were very shredded and old, and sandals, in this harsh terrain. But I remember seeing this one man in particular and he was a campesino – he worked in the fields for a subsistence living – and he was wearing a poncho that he wove himself. This poncho was ablaze with the most intricate weaving of reds and the images were from his life: the birds; the condors, and the alpacas. He was standing there, stooped over a little, and he didn’t have a bean. But he had dignity. And he was just simply covered in something that he had made which was resplendent. So I think that’s my work of art.’
Heine believes art should always be publically available; he explains that his shark was a form of homage to the public spirit of art. In crash-landing the shark ‘way out in lace-curtain land’ Heine avers that he took art out of a certain ‘elitist’ area of Oxford ‘as a kind of gift’ to everybody. The shark can be seen by anyone who takes a trip out to Headington; it can even be seen on the main road going out of Oxford. And, after all, it is the public who saved the shark. After years of debate, raging through the council and even the law courts of Oxford, the question of the shark’s fate ended up at Westminster where a public inquiry was held, requesting the opinions of local residents. No matter that the shark hadn’t had planning permission, no matter that the shark was an ‘eye-sore’ (according to certain members of the council); the residents of Oxford loved it. Heine tells me with a satisfaction still alive after twenty years that his lawyer told him that 95% of those asked wanted to keep the shark.
So that was that. The Headington shark passed its twenty-fifth birthday in 2011, and Heine hopes that it will last another twenty five more. Structurally, the shark is ‘stronger than it’s ever been’ as Heine confesses that he spent £250,000 re-figuring how the shark and the house meet. He admits that now the shark and the house do not technically converge, as the shark now crash lands into a ‘steel structure’ hidden inside the roof, but ‘it looks the same’ and that’s what is most important.
