Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, (Edinburgh: Canon Gate, 2006.}
Rebecca Solnits' previous book, Wanderlust, A History of Walking, follows at least some of the conventions that you might expect from a history book, it traces the development of the subject in a broadly chronological fashion, it draws on a range of sources - historical, philosophical and literary; nevertheless, in its use of anecdote and personal reflection it is very much an idiosyncratic, personal history, and much the better book because of it.
The current book to a large extent dispenses with ;the history' and is much more a personal reflection on the nature of loss. The opening chapter makes the case for regarding loss and uncertainty as a positive - 'leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go' (p. 4)
As you might expect from Solnit, her reflections on this point are wide ranging. A chapter on 'the Blue of Distances' - equates her love of 'blue horizons' to various attempts by renaissance painters to render distance through atmospheric perspective; this is followed immediately by a chapter on 'lost' identity, which concerns the fate of the writer's grandmother, who was unable to adjust to American life after emigrating from Russia, and was incarcerated in an asylum.
Solnit recalls lost friendships and lost loves. 'Abandoned' recounts the tragic fate of Solnit's friend, Marine, who died of a drug overdose in her mid-twenties, a case of a punk-styled bohemian lifestyle tipping over the edge - 'getting lost' is not without its risks. In what is perhaps the most affecting part of the book, the writer's relationship with desert landscape and a particular man is evoked in cool, poetic prose; the opening sentence gives a foretaste of the chapter as a whole: Once I loved a man who was a lot like the desert...
A Field Guide to Getting Lost is by turns, soulful, evocative, uplifting and tragic - here are a few choice quotes:
"I wonder now about Demeter and Persephone. Maybe Persephone was glad to run off with the king of death to his underground realm (...) Maybe Persephone thought Hades was the infinitely cool older man who held the knowledge she sought, maybe she loved the darkness, the six months of winter, the sharp taste of pomegranites, the freedom from her mother, maybe she knew that to be truly alive death has to be part of the picture just as winter must." (p. 91)
"A man omce told me that much of my writing was about loss, that that was how I imagined the world, and I thought about that comment for a long time. In that sense of loss two streams mingled. One was the historian's yearning to hang onto everything, write everything down, to try to keep everything from slipping away, and the historians joy in retrieving out of archives and interviews what was almost forgotten, almost out of reach forever. But the other stream is the common experience that too many things are vanishing without replacement in our time. At any given moment the sun is setting someplace on earth, and another day is slipping away largely undocumented as people slide into dreams that will seldom be remembered when they awaken. Only the continuation of abundance makes loss sustainable.There are more sunrises coming, but even reams could be empied out" (p. 188)
Sunday 25 May 2014
Tuesday 20 May 2014
Wanderlust, re-visited
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, A History of Walking, (London: Verso 2001)
I first read Wanderlust about a year ago. Solnit's survey of the history of walking is a charming, likable book which roves widely around its subject managing to touch on the significance of Rousseau, early hominid penile display, and the rituals of 'gym'culture in its pursuit of the cultural meaning of walking.
It was clear to me at the time, although the precise shape of my 'creative project' was still fairly sketchy, that the ideas in Wanderlust were surely going to influence it. So, as I read it I marked interesting passages by placing 'post-it' notes at each place, fully intending to return to the book as soon as I began more serious research and annotate them. Of course, when I return to the book, the post-it stickers remained, but the notes were never made. Instead, I have decided simply to record a few of the choice passages for future reference.
Walking into the realm of the symbolic
The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of "real toads in imaginary gardens," and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space. [...] In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over, we are really travelling even if the destination is only symbolic, and this is in entirely a different register than is thinking about travelling, or looking at a picture of a place we might wish to travel to. For the real in this context is nothing more or less than the body we inhabit. [...] If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's fee is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not. And sometimes the map is the territory.
p. 70
Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is they cannot be perceived as a whole by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does.....
Just as writing allows us to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before [...} Symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys.
...The songlines of Australia's aboriginal peoples are the most famous examples of conflating landscape and narrative. The songlines are tools of navigation across the deep desert, while the landscape is a mnemonic device for remembering stories: in other words the story is a map, the landscape a narrative.
So stories are travels, and travels are stories. It is because we imagine life as a journey that these symbolic walks and indeed all walks have such resonance.
p. 72
The Path out of the Garden
The formal, enclosed garden and the castle are corollaries to a dangerous world from which one needs to be protected literally and aesthetically. As the walls came down, the garden proposes that there is already an order in nature and that it is in harmony with the 'natural' society enjoying such gardens. The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England's privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish. Too, private experience and informal art were blooming elsewhere, notably in the rise of the novel.
p. 91
The Solitary Stroller in the City
There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude [...]. In the country one's solitude is geographical - one is altogether outside of society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the non-human. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger, surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is amongst the starkest of luxuries. [...] It is an observers state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are amongst life's most refined pleasures.
Not long ago I heard the singer and poet Patti Smith answer a radio interviewer's question about what she did to prepare to go onstage with, "I would roam the streets for a few hours." With that brief comment she summoned up her own outlaw romanticism and the way such walking might might sharpen the sensibility, wrap one in an isolation out of which might come songs fierce enough, words sharp enough to break that musing silence.
p. 186
Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanised Psyche.
If there was a golden age of walking, it arose from a desire to travel through the open spaces of the world unarmoured by vehicles, unafraid to mingle wither different kinds of people. It emerged at at a time when cities and countryside grew safer and desire to experience the world was high. Suburbia abandoned the space of the city without returning to the country, and in recent years a second wave of that impulse has beefed-up that segregation with neighbourhoods of high-priced bunkers. But even more importantly, the disappearance of pedestrian space has transformed perception of the relationship between bodies and spaces. Something very odd has happened to the very state of embodiment, of being corporeal, in recent decades.
p 256
And finally,,,,
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediate practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of the imagination, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time, the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - of wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetites, true crime titillation's, and celebrity crises. [..]
Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, imagination and the wide open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them - drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes - that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions, the lines drawn between the stars are like paths worn between the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but wither it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are travelled still.
pp. 281 - 291
Rebecca Solnit - inspirational writer, great walker and conservationist of inner and outer spaces.
'
I first read Wanderlust about a year ago. Solnit's survey of the history of walking is a charming, likable book which roves widely around its subject managing to touch on the significance of Rousseau, early hominid penile display, and the rituals of 'gym'culture in its pursuit of the cultural meaning of walking.
It was clear to me at the time, although the precise shape of my 'creative project' was still fairly sketchy, that the ideas in Wanderlust were surely going to influence it. So, as I read it I marked interesting passages by placing 'post-it' notes at each place, fully intending to return to the book as soon as I began more serious research and annotate them. Of course, when I return to the book, the post-it stickers remained, but the notes were never made. Instead, I have decided simply to record a few of the choice passages for future reference.
Walking into the realm of the symbolic
The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of "real toads in imaginary gardens," and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space. [...] In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over, we are really travelling even if the destination is only symbolic, and this is in entirely a different register than is thinking about travelling, or looking at a picture of a place we might wish to travel to. For the real in this context is nothing more or less than the body we inhabit. [...] If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's fee is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not. And sometimes the map is the territory.
p. 70
Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is they cannot be perceived as a whole by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does.....
Just as writing allows us to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before [...} Symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys.
...The songlines of Australia's aboriginal peoples are the most famous examples of conflating landscape and narrative. The songlines are tools of navigation across the deep desert, while the landscape is a mnemonic device for remembering stories: in other words the story is a map, the landscape a narrative.
So stories are travels, and travels are stories. It is because we imagine life as a journey that these symbolic walks and indeed all walks have such resonance.
p. 72
The Path out of the Garden
The formal, enclosed garden and the castle are corollaries to a dangerous world from which one needs to be protected literally and aesthetically. As the walls came down, the garden proposes that there is already an order in nature and that it is in harmony with the 'natural' society enjoying such gardens. The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England's privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish. Too, private experience and informal art were blooming elsewhere, notably in the rise of the novel.
p. 91
The Solitary Stroller in the City
There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude [...]. In the country one's solitude is geographical - one is altogether outside of society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the non-human. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger, surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is amongst the starkest of luxuries. [...] It is an observers state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are amongst life's most refined pleasures.
Not long ago I heard the singer and poet Patti Smith answer a radio interviewer's question about what she did to prepare to go onstage with, "I would roam the streets for a few hours." With that brief comment she summoned up her own outlaw romanticism and the way such walking might might sharpen the sensibility, wrap one in an isolation out of which might come songs fierce enough, words sharp enough to break that musing silence.
p. 186
Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanised Psyche.
If there was a golden age of walking, it arose from a desire to travel through the open spaces of the world unarmoured by vehicles, unafraid to mingle wither different kinds of people. It emerged at at a time when cities and countryside grew safer and desire to experience the world was high. Suburbia abandoned the space of the city without returning to the country, and in recent years a second wave of that impulse has beefed-up that segregation with neighbourhoods of high-priced bunkers. But even more importantly, the disappearance of pedestrian space has transformed perception of the relationship between bodies and spaces. Something very odd has happened to the very state of embodiment, of being corporeal, in recent decades.
p 256
And finally,,,,
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediate practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of the imagination, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time, the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - of wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetites, true crime titillation's, and celebrity crises. [..]
Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, imagination and the wide open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them - drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes - that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions, the lines drawn between the stars are like paths worn between the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but wither it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are travelled still.
pp. 281 - 291
Rebecca Solnit - inspirational writer, great walker and conservationist of inner and outer spaces.
'
Friday 16 May 2014
The haphazardness of psychogeographers.- some notes
Coverley, Merlin's Psychogeography contains a useful list of websites relating to the movement. This is a brief survey of what they offer.
or
http://www.earthlydelights.co.uk/archive/nevideos.html
Or perhaps, like me, maybe you have have not yet reached the stage of pataphysical enlightenment to fully appreciate the majestic vision on offer.
An interview from 1997 concerning pychogeographical activities in Manchester. It is interesting in its discussion of why pschogeography is more than just 'new age' local history. Thoughtful too concering northern attitudes, especially male ones. concerning the avante-garde and 'alternative' lifestyles:
Some interesting material here on the New York version of pyschogeography - which seems more allied to community activism the the dada-esque pranks of the European variant. Some good links to material relating to both the Lettrists and Situationalism in France during the 70s.
http://fasica.altervista.org/npu/index.htm
A range of material gathered together by Nottingham psychogeographers - with links to a variety of 'mental mapping' workshops in Manchester and Amsterdam. The case for developing subjective, inner' geography is argued here:
http://fasica.altervista.org/geografie/geo_en.htm
The question is, where does a pschogeographical sense of the uniqueness of place end, and a life-style, Sunday supplement yearning for 'retro' begin. Read this site about the demise of the tubular steel chair and formica tabled local caff; you decide. As for me I'm a philistine if the machiatto is better in the local Costa, I'll go there.
www.flaneur.me.uk
If the classiccafe site led you to suspect that the fate of psychogeography was to mutate quickly through the radical chic phase before being consumed as a cultural canope by the great Wen's chattering multitudes - then 'The Flaneur' mag. assures us all that gentrification has already happened.
This seems to have been taken over by a Californian Media/Graphic design outfit.
www.affinityproject.org
This site is utterly bizarre, mainly linking to on-line dating web-sites but also containing information useful for countering bullying in the workplace or classroom as well as a link to an Ohio nursing organisation. Perhaps I am missing some kind of surreal joke, but I can't quite see the link to psychogeography. I suspect the URL has been hacked. Not useful, unless you are a buddhist looking for someone special in your life......
This site is utterly bizarre, mainly linking to on-line dating web-sites but also containing information useful for countering bullying in the workplace or classroom as well as a link to an Ohio nursing organisation. Perhaps I am missing some kind of surreal joke, but I can't quite see the link to psychogeography. I suspect the URL has been hacked. Not useful, unless you are a buddhist looking for someone special in your life......
www.uncarved.org/AAA/groups.html
For those of you who are feeling that planet Earth is going to the dogs, then this might be the site for you as its stated mission is:
Unlike bureaucratic state controlled space agencies, the AAA develops as a non-hierarchical network of like-minded groups around the world dedicated to local, community-based space exploration programmes. Here is a list of the AAA branches we know about. Make contact to find out about their specific interests and projects, and/or start your own.
Please note that this list categorises groups by country for reasons of convenience only. The AAA does not endorse any ideas connected to Nations and/or States and these ideas will be superceded as part of the process of forming independent communties in outer space.
This archival list was last updated by Raido AAA on 23/4/00.
AAA, by the way, stands for 'Associations of Autonomous Astronauts'. I only explored a few of the links, but by way of indicating the general feel of the site I thought I might share a few psychogeographical nuggets from the somewhat unfortunately named 'Nocturnal Emissions'.
You will be glad to learn that there is a book forthcoming (well was forthcoming in 1999, Messrs Emissions are probably too busy planning the next mission to update the site too often). Anyway, Network News from 'Earthly Delights' promises:
Sinister beasts, earth mysteries, the occult shenanigans of the royal family, the occult symbolism of British currency, time travelling punk rockers, Nocturnal Emissions merchandising and much, much more...
For those of you who are feeling that planet Earth is going to the dogs, then this might be the site for you as its stated mission is:
Unlike bureaucratic state controlled space agencies, the AAA develops as a non-hierarchical network of like-minded groups around the world dedicated to local, community-based space exploration programmes. Here is a list of the AAA branches we know about. Make contact to find out about their specific interests and projects, and/or start your own.
Please note that this list categorises groups by country for reasons of convenience only. The AAA does not endorse any ideas connected to Nations and/or States and these ideas will be superceded as part of the process of forming independent communties in outer space.
This archival list was last updated by Raido AAA on 23/4/00.
AAA, by the way, stands for 'Associations of Autonomous Astronauts'. I only explored a few of the links, but by way of indicating the general feel of the site I thought I might share a few psychogeographical nuggets from the somewhat unfortunately named 'Nocturnal Emissions'.
You will be glad to learn that there is a book forthcoming (well was forthcoming in 1999, Messrs Emissions are probably too busy planning the next mission to update the site too often). Anyway, Network News from 'Earthly Delights' promises:
Sinister beasts, earth mysteries, the occult shenanigans of the royal family, the occult symbolism of British currency, time travelling punk rockers, Nocturnal Emissions merchandising and much, much more...
Nocturnal Emissions feature musicians and video artists too. You might enjoy...
or
http://www.earthlydelights.co.uk/archive/nevideos.html
Or perhaps, like me, maybe you have have not yet reached the stage of pataphysical enlightenment to fully appreciate the majestic vision on offer.
A message from my ISP.....
www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/berndt_dialectical_1mm.html
Another message from my ISP
Not Found
The requested URL /projekte/7:9#/berndt_dialectical_1mm.html was not found on this server.
Another message from my ISP
Not Found
The requested URL /projekte/7:9#/berndt_dialectical_1mm.html was not found on this server.
www.christinaray.cpm
Oops! where have all the pyschogeographers gone - alien abduction, or has Jobcentreplus finally caught up with them?
Oops! where have all the pyschogeographers gone - alien abduction, or has Jobcentreplus finally caught up with them?
www.londonperambulator.wordpress.com
This site provides a very useful archive of activity relating to the literary practices associated with pyschogeography in London over recent years. It features contributions from Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Russel Brand and features the work of Nick Papadimitriou, whose practice of 'deep topography' has been influential. A useful summary of these developments is given in a short piece by BBC Newsnight, which features the work of Papadimitriou, but also presents a slightly more critical perspective of terminology surrounding these writers in an interview with veteran British naturalist, Richard Mabey.
www.unpopular.demon.co.uk/lpa/organisations/lpa.html
Ths site contained a small archive of material from the London Psychographical Association. It is difficult to date the material, but references to to contemporary events - Annus Horribulus, for example - suggest the early 1990's. The material provides an insight into the concerns, styles of expression and communication of the British variemnt of Situationalism. It appears to be more closely associated with the mix of dada styled pranksterism of Lettrist precursors than the style of Debord's post 1968 Situationalism in which evermore convoluted, hard-left discourse, conducted in an increasingly sentorious style, eventually resulted in Situationalism in Paris being reduced to a minority of one - Debord himself.
This site provides a very useful archive of activity relating to the literary practices associated with pyschogeography in London over recent years. It features contributions from Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Russel Brand and features the work of Nick Papadimitriou, whose practice of 'deep topography' has been influential. A useful summary of these developments is given in a short piece by BBC Newsnight, which features the work of Papadimitriou, but also presents a slightly more critical perspective of terminology surrounding these writers in an interview with veteran British naturalist, Richard Mabey.
www.unpopular.demon.co.uk/lpa/organisations/lpa.html
Ths site contained a small archive of material from the London Psychographical Association. It is difficult to date the material, but references to to contemporary events - Annus Horribulus, for example - suggest the early 1990's. The material provides an insight into the concerns, styles of expression and communication of the British variemnt of Situationalism. It appears to be more closely associated with the mix of dada styled pranksterism of Lettrist precursors than the style of Debord's post 1968 Situationalism in which evermore convoluted, hard-left discourse, conducted in an increasingly sentorious style, eventually resulted in Situationalism in Paris being reduced to a minority of one - Debord himself.
www.lutherblissett.net
The prologue sums It up really:
In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity.
They all called themselves Luther Blissett and set to raising hell in the cultural industry. It was a five year plan.
The prologue sums It up really:
In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity.
They all called themselves Luther Blissett and set to raising hell in the cultural industry. It was a five year plan.
They worked together to tell the world a great story, create a legend, give birth to a new kind of folk hero.
In January 2000, some of them regrouped as Wu Ming.
The latter project, albeit more focused on literature and storytelling in the narrowest sense of the word, is no less radical than the old one.
In January 2000, some of them regrouped as Wu Ming.
The latter project, albeit more focused on literature and storytelling in the narrowest sense of the word, is no less radical than the old one.
An interview from 1997 concerning pychogeographical activities in Manchester. It is interesting in its discussion of why pschogeography is more than just 'new age' local history. Thoughtful too concering northern attitudes, especially male ones. concerning the avante-garde and 'alternative' lifestyles:
We have a problem with the "northern hardcase" mentality fostered locally in the upbringing of young males. This is a result of industrial culture, obviously, and something Manchester has in common with lots of other places, including parts of London. We have noticed, though, a reluctance on the part of northern males to ditch older modes of brutalised behaviour and recognise the fact that the manufacturing industries which shaped this behaviour in the past are now no more. The grotesque sexual parodies which the industrial city gave rise to, are no longer necessary to get by.
The hardcase should be obsolete, but hangs on. What future has he got?
Females are changing, because of the possibilities of work that are, apparently, open to them, in the postmodern workplace (an idea Sadie Plant has been exploring in her book Zeros and Ones). Men on the other hand are refusing to change, because to change, sexually, is to cave in to some of the basic fears which have created and reinforced the entire sense of male identity.
Bisexual and transsexual identity and activity were, in the local past, ridiculed, and are ridiculed still, possibly because they threaten the traditional industrial male's sense of well-being. Also the act of ridicule creates an important aspect of the male I.D. Ridiculing the "other" is something the male hardcase does, part of the way he proves himself.
Therefore the history of gays and transsexuals in the north is fascinating to us, especially when we see evidence for its practice in nineteenth century, industrial Manchester. MAP isn't a gay-lobby, particularly. All we are pointing out is that the success of phenomena like the Gay Village/Canal Street zone in Manchester is an obvious example of culture developing in a binary opposite to the male-hardcase version of the city around it. Many people who aren't gay flock to this "opposite" version of the city, simply because it feels safer and friendlier, despite the fact that violence does occur there. Last year, notably, a young female graduate was murdered after getting into a car which she mistook for a taxi, in the Gay Village. The driver was a man with a history of violence towards women. This "hardcase" was possibly cruising Canal Street because it is so popular and crowded at the weekends
Some interesting material here on the New York version of pyschogeography - which seems more allied to community activism the the dada-esque pranks of the European variant. Some good links to material relating to both the Lettrists and Situationalism in France during the 70s.
http://fasica.altervista.org/npu/index.htm
A range of material gathered together by Nottingham psychogeographers - with links to a variety of 'mental mapping' workshops in Manchester and Amsterdam. The case for developing subjective, inner' geography is argued here:
http://fasica.altervista.org/geografie/geo_en.htm
http://devenirnomada.blogspot.com/2005/03/psychogeography-in-prague_24.html
A wide range of psychogeographical activities are recorded here, and an attempt to list actions that might be deemed psychogeographical enacted in different countries over the past 50 years. Looking at the list it includes activities which might be regarded as 'happenings' and some activity similar to 'Land-art' and other conceptual art events. An interesting range, including one artist who decided that selling sausages from a hot-dog stand was a significant cultural act. http://kazil.home.xs4all.nl/advart03.html#poetry
A wide range of psychogeographical activities are recorded here, and an attempt to list actions that might be deemed psychogeographical enacted in different countries over the past 50 years. Looking at the list it includes activities which might be regarded as 'happenings' and some activity similar to 'Land-art' and other conceptual art events. An interesting range, including one artist who decided that selling sausages from a hot-dog stand was a significant cultural act. http://kazil.home.xs4all.nl/advart03.html#poetry
www.psychogeography.ca/
This site contains an extensive blog of psychogeographical walks undertaken by a group based in Toronto.
They describe themselves as follows:
The Toronto Psychogeography Society is a loose collection of relentless flâneurs, explorers and walkers. The word psychogeography was coined by the Situationist Guy Debord. It describes the specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. The streets of Toronto become a playground, and each route presents a new urban adventure as participants step out of their daily routine and explore the city's overlooked corners to imagine the dynamics of a better future urban environment.
One project interested me in particular - a documentary which placed peoples recollections of an are in mobile phone messages posted within their neighbourhood which enables visitors to 'walk through an oral history. An interesting variant of the 'voceti' idea. http://murmurtoronto.ca/about.php
This site contains an extensive blog of psychogeographical walks undertaken by a group based in Toronto.
They describe themselves as follows:
The Toronto Psychogeography Society is a loose collection of relentless flâneurs, explorers and walkers. The word psychogeography was coined by the Situationist Guy Debord. It describes the specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. The streets of Toronto become a playground, and each route presents a new urban adventure as participants step out of their daily routine and explore the city's overlooked corners to imagine the dynamics of a better future urban environment.
One project interested me in particular - a documentary which placed peoples recollections of an are in mobile phone messages posted within their neighbourhood which enables visitors to 'walk through an oral history. An interesting variant of the 'voceti' idea. http://murmurtoronto.ca/about.php
www.xs$all.nl/~kazil/
An extensive collection of material from Rotterdam ranging from photographs of UFOs to accounts of free climbing and articles about 'The Green Man'. as well as the usual algorithimic walks.
An extensive collection of material from Rotterdam ranging from photographs of UFOs to accounts of free climbing and articles about 'The Green Man'. as well as the usual algorithimic walks.
www.bopsecrets.org/
As well as useful material relating to Situationalism - including translations of Debords film scripts - there is an interesting interview about the 'occupy' movement in tthe USA and Canada. http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/occupy-looking-back.htm
As well as useful material relating to Situationalism - including translations of Debords film scripts - there is an interesting interview about the 'occupy' movement in tthe USA and Canada. http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/occupy-looking-back.htm
The question is, where does a pschogeographical sense of the uniqueness of place end, and a life-style, Sunday supplement yearning for 'retro' begin. Read this site about the demise of the tubular steel chair and formica tabled local caff; you decide. As for me I'm a philistine if the machiatto is better in the local Costa, I'll go there.
www.flaneur.me.uk
If the classiccafe site led you to suspect that the fate of psychogeography was to mutate quickly through the radical chic phase before being consumed as a cultural canope by the great Wen's chattering multitudes - then 'The Flaneur' mag. assures us all that gentrification has already happened.
www.notbored.org
An extensive archive this 'autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published journal'.
The contents of this edition give you a taste of what is on offer:
(July 2013): Special 30th Anniversary Issue: Ryan M. Rogers Reviews the NOT BORED! Anthology; Marc Lenot on Guy Debord; Guy Debord in 2009: Laughing or Spinning?; The Real Split in John McHale's Translation of The Real Split; On Gianfranco Sanguinetti's text on The Pussy; On Gianfranco Sanguinetti's text on Miroslav Tichy; What Rachel Kushner Knows About Gianfranco Sanguinetti; What Rachel Kushner Knows About Guy Debord; On Wayne Spencer's Call for a New Situationist International; McKenzie Wark's Stunted Publicity; Non Serviam: McKenzie Wark is Full of Shit; Is McKenzie Wark a Plagiarist?; Omissions and Errors in McKenzie Wark’s The Spectacle of Disintegration.
An extensive archive this 'autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published journal'.
The contents of this edition give you a taste of what is on offer:
(July 2013): Special 30th Anniversary Issue: Ryan M. Rogers Reviews the NOT BORED! Anthology; Marc Lenot on Guy Debord; Guy Debord in 2009: Laughing or Spinning?; The Real Split in John McHale's Translation of The Real Split; On Gianfranco Sanguinetti's text on The Pussy; On Gianfranco Sanguinetti's text on Miroslav Tichy; What Rachel Kushner Knows About Gianfranco Sanguinetti; What Rachel Kushner Knows About Guy Debord; On Wayne Spencer's Call for a New Situationist International; McKenzie Wark's Stunted Publicity; Non Serviam: McKenzie Wark is Full of Shit; Is McKenzie Wark a Plagiarist?; Omissions and Errors in McKenzie Wark’s The Spectacle of Disintegration.
www.nothingness.org/SI/
The nearest thing you'll get to an 'official' archive of the Situationalist International
The nearest thing you'll get to an 'official' archive of the Situationalist International
www.year01.com/forum/issue12/links.html
Another site with an extensive list of psychgeographical sites. Some appear to have been hacked and now operate as on-line shopping sites.
Another site with an extensive list of psychgeographical sites. Some appear to have been hacked and now operate as on-line shopping sites.
www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/index.html
Again, an attempt to pull together a comprehensive list of material relating to Situationists, their precursors and followers. A good timeline - later parts of the site are 'still under construction'.
Again, an attempt to pull together a comprehensive list of material relating to Situationists, their precursors and followers. A good timeline - later parts of the site are 'still under construction'.
This seems to have been taken over by a Californian Media/Graphic design outfit.
www.stewarthomesociety.org/
An entire site dedicated to the legendary Stewart Home, a legendary figure in the London art scene from the punk era onwards, His legendary Wikepedia entry states "The Neoist Alliance was a moniker used by Home between 1994 and 1999 for his mock-occult psychogeographical activities. According to Home, the alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. Check the site out, I am sure you will agree it's legendary.
An entire site dedicated to the legendary Stewart Home, a legendary figure in the London art scene from the punk era onwards, His legendary Wikepedia entry states "The Neoist Alliance was a moniker used by Home between 1994 and 1999 for his mock-occult psychogeographical activities. According to Home, the alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. Check the site out, I am sure you will agree it's legendary.
Sunday 11 May 2014
To Flypost,Geocache or Munzee?
I have just been re-reading my dissertation proposal. In the 'objectives' section I confidently predicted the project would .......
It is hardly normal to spend time staring at lampposts, but the munzee sticker drew my attention to it. The first thing that strikes you is the stencilled number. Some database somewhere must have the location and number of every single lamppost recorded. Sometimes the extent to which the world is mapped, enumerated and quantified just takes you aback. Above it is a municipal homily encouraging responsible dog ownership; below is 230 volt current warning sign.
The latter sign is a fake, actually it's a munzee code disguised too look as official as possible in the hope of discouraging vigilant municipal workers removing lllegal fly posts. Munzee headquaters has a delightfully ambivalent attitude towards officialdom. On the one hand there are statements on the site warning participants to be law-abiding at all times, on the other, its store sells stickers designed to hoodwink over- vigilant officials. There's nothing like a healthy doze of moral relativism to assist you in a quest for world domination. This is what the munzee map of London looks like:
Each green, blue or white sticker represents a place where someone has deployed a munzee. Each munzee has a small webspace attached where players can leave instructions, notes or other information. There are hundreds of people out there in the city, interacting with each other, 'playing out' in the urban space, re-defining it and re-occupying it sticker by sticker. It amounts to a kind of mass-participatory, tabloid psychogeography.
Talking of pyschogeography, yesterday I watched London Orbital, The distributors, Illumination Media, describe the film as follows.
London Orbital is an extraordinary and visionary film by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair about the world's largest by-pass, the M25. London Orbital is a road movie, a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century past, and a film dialogue between two writers who are also filmmakers (and vice versa).
London Orbital is, among other things, a meditation on the difference between driving and walking. On Bram Stoker's "undead", on H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. On time and memory. On the difference between film and tape, sound and image. On trance states and the terror that lies beyond boredom; on shopping and terrorism; on Kabul and the leisure mall. On the invisible triangle of Thatcherism (covert arms deals, Essex gangsters, and drug dealing). On Pinochet and Thatcher as vampire lovers.
Iain Sinclair is the author of London Orbital, a book about his walk around the 120-mile road. Chris Petit elected not to make 'the film of the book' and chose instead to drive, and to capture in images the peculiar hallucinatory state that driving provokes.
The protagonist of London Orbital is a flaneur modernised, a lone, alienated explorer of urban spaces, haunted by a dystopian vision of the mind-numbing effects of consumerism. The style of the film is 'video installation Art School' shot hand held with a camcorder, featuring a spacey, electro-technic soundtrack and a voice-over which, by turns, is pretentiously literary, then sermonising, ending with a sycophantic interview with the 'seer of Shepperton', J. G. Ballard. Though less than 10 years old, London Orbital looks dated. Its critique of late twentieth century consumerism, typified by Bluewater Mall, shares with commentators such as Adam Curtis an apocalyptic vision of recent social history which flirts with conspiracy theory. At the time of the making of London Orbital and Century of the Self, the extraordinary explosion of social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube - was not really foreseen. There has been mass engagement with these 'personalised' media; even though concerns have been raised about surveillance culture and the eradication of privacy, individuals have not heeded this, the majority of us now have an 'electronic footprint' that reveals, not just our whereabouts, but our desires, interests and predilections. What should we now do - feel alienated, or engage with it?
The Munzee app is a new type of cyber-toy, not social-media but spatial-media. The speed with which these technologies are taken-up is more in line with the view that Amber Case put forward in her TED talk from 2010, called We are all cyborgs now. Case argues, from her stance as a 'cyborg anthropologist', that social technologies give us the opportunity to be 'more human' - that their existence is a fact of life, and we need to learn to live with them. This represents a more positive response than the dystopian visions of Sinclair or Curtis, and one I suppose I have more sympathy with. I understand the point, however, that Case is American, and 'she would be positive wouldn't she'; after most social media is a varient of the same business proposition - driven by US dominated global capitalism and a tools of hyper-consumerism.
What do we do, stand on the sidelines and protest, head for the hills and withdraw into some techno-phobic Walden? Instead. as an artist, I might regard cyber-space as a perforance space, an auditorium without walls. Its purpose may be commercial, but you don't have to shop within it, its communicative instincts leaves it open to much more creative uses that reach into new audiences and invite playful, creative or subversive behaviours.
So, back to my original question..."how exactly am I going to achieve 'the virtual installation' of the poems within the landscape?" Simple: I'm going to utilize the munzee global map; its well designed 'deploy and capture' tools, its web-based journal function, make it a ready-made means to place poems in the landscape. Before I start peppering the length of the A38 with munzees I intend to test the technology out by enhancing a local country park - Grin Low Woods - with a few pithy haiku. I'll report back on my progress.
- result in a pamphlet/chapbook of poetry; a companion journal in the form of a blog; a website giving contextual information concerning the locations including photographs, video and audio readings of the poems; a virtual installation of a reading of the poems within the landscape through the use of QR coded markers (voceti).
I am pleased to report that I am making good progress; more than half the locations have been visited, photographs taken, video shot; I have designed the website, noted my progress with the research in this blog, and started to write-up my field notes in another; I have written a few of the sonnets and sketched out ideas for others....but, how exactly am I going to achieve 'the virtual installation' of the poems within the landscape?
My first idea was to design some 'voceti' vinyl stickers, have sheets printed with QL codes on them and place them on street furniture at each location. The QL code would link directly to a short video clip on Youtube which contained footage of the location and a reading of the poem; the same QL codes would be placed beneath the poems in the book, tying together text, utterance and landscape. I had even gone as far as sketching out an idea of what the vinyl stickers might look like, using traffic signs as inspiration.
All of this would work. The issue is, placing branded signs anywhere is 'fly-posting' and, as all 47 pages of the following HMSO 'good practice guide makes clear, it is both illegal, and to a greater or lesser extent, depending where you live,actively discouraged by our much beloved municipal authorities tasked with keeping Britain tidy. You do not need to leaf through much of the guide to realise that any plan to drop a friendly note to the local environmental department to seek permission to place stickers on some lamp-post or other is going to result in either a resounding silence, a definite 'no', or a bewildered shrug. Furthermore, my early forays into the landscape have proven to me just how much so called 'public space' is controlled by warning notices, local bye-laws and watched over by CCTV.
The Control of Fly-Posting: a Good Practice Guide Date published: November 2000 ISBN: 0 11 753569 9
The other problem, is if I do place the voceti stickers out there, who is going to know? I could link them to the book, but realistically, experience has shown, that in terms of sales from a small press, few poetry books ever make it to three figures, if you sell a few score books of your heartfelt verse, you've done well.
While I was mulling over these matters, I was thinking about the work of Anthony Gormley, not just 'Another Place' but some of the other installations detailed on his web-site. In particular I was taken by his work from 1990, Room III.
My first idea was to design some 'voceti' vinyl stickers, have sheets printed with QL codes on them and place them on street furniture at each location. The QL code would link directly to a short video clip on Youtube which contained footage of the location and a reading of the poem; the same QL codes would be placed beneath the poems in the book, tying together text, utterance and landscape. I had even gone as far as sketching out an idea of what the vinyl stickers might look like, using traffic signs as inspiration.
The Control of Fly-Posting: a Good Practice Guide Date published: November 2000 ISBN: 0 11 753569 9
The other problem, is if I do place the voceti stickers out there, who is going to know? I could link them to the book, but realistically, experience has shown, that in terms of sales from a small press, few poetry books ever make it to three figures, if you sell a few score books of your heartfelt verse, you've done well.
While I was mulling over these matters, I was thinking about the work of Anthony Gormley, not just 'Another Place' but some of the other installations detailed on his web-site. In particular I was taken by his work from 1990, Room III.
Gormley describes this work as follows
ROOM III is the minimum space the human body can occupy. I was measured in a tight crouching position, and as with ROOM II, two concrete volumes were made, one for the body and one for the head. I wanted this work to be exposed to the most extreme environment possible, positioned with the horizon visible from 360 degrees. I found that environment in the centre of Australia, and placed the sculpture at an undisclosed location, where the work is still sited today. This is a work that cannot be experienced palpably; no one is invited to see it but people are invited to think about it.
Taking Gormley's position as a starting point, then the fact that my sonnets may be doomed to invisibility could be developed as a tactic. The line of reasoning might go something like: 'poetry is utterance framed within form, the form is shaped by the surrounding silence in which they are spoken, and the white spaces of the page when they are written down. Losing the poems within landscape celebrates the sacred silent space in which poetry is uttered; it celebrates their potentiality not their potency'. This would place voceti firmly in the realm of conceptual art relating it to issues of epistemology and ontology.
ROOM III is the minimum space the human body can occupy. I was measured in a tight crouching position, and as with ROOM II, two concrete volumes were made, one for the body and one for the head. I wanted this work to be exposed to the most extreme environment possible, positioned with the horizon visible from 360 degrees. I found that environment in the centre of Australia, and placed the sculpture at an undisclosed location, where the work is still sited today. This is a work that cannot be experienced palpably; no one is invited to see it but people are invited to think about it.
Taking Gormley's position as a starting point, then the fact that my sonnets may be doomed to invisibility could be developed as a tactic. The line of reasoning might go something like: 'poetry is utterance framed within form, the form is shaped by the surrounding silence in which they are spoken, and the white spaces of the page when they are written down. Losing the poems within landscape celebrates the sacred silent space in which poetry is uttered; it celebrates their potentiality not their potency'. This would place voceti firmly in the realm of conceptual art relating it to issues of epistemology and ontology.
But this is not my intention. The 'strap-line' that I have invented for the back cover of the book and the web portal homepage is "...like graffiti, but poetry"; this signals that my intention is towards human interaction, not subjective reflection - poetry as a performed act in virtual and actual space engaged with social and political matters. It was suggested that I might look into 'geocaching' and that got me thinking about linking 'voceti' to cyber-gaming.
Geocaching began as a slightly nerdy outdoor activity with a certain 'trainspotter' ambiance. Participants would hide 'treasure' is small waterproof containers, post their GPS co-ordinates on a web-site then other players would track the 'treasure' down, replace it with something else, and record their find on a small journal card at the site, or on-line. It merged orienteering with a treasure hunt. What started as an outdoor specialist sport began to grow into a mass movement when GPS handheld devices, costing hundreds of pounds, suddenly became available as smartphone apps available for a few pence. The process of massification has not been without its issues. Urban geocachers, hiding their containers in wasteland, have been mistaken for terrorists prompting whole streets to be 'locked-down'. Guidelines then were drawn up - concerning recommended distances between caches and places of worship, advice about making containers 'non-hazardous' to wildlife, pointing out that caches near children's playgrounds are inappropriate and so on. All good common sense, but regulating geocaching inevitably reduced its spontaneity. As might be expected institutions and authorities have got in on the act. Some seeing an opportunity - The National Trust has set-up geocaching trails on some of its properties. Conversely, Bristol city council, in an attempt to control geocaching have designated certain parks as geocache friendly, and banned the activity from the rest of the city.
As Geocaching becames mainstream, then a slightly more 'edgy' variant emerged. Munzee dispenses with all of the canister malarkey. The game is simple. It involves placing inch square QL stickers on street furniture, 'deploying' them by scanning the sticker using the munzee app on your smart phone then giving it a silly name. Other players with the same app hunt them down and score points. Simple as that. It's not clear just how many people are actively playing this, but it's not a niche activity: "14,890,085 captures since July 1st 2011, the website boasts", notching-up five more in the space of time it took to note down the total. Scanning the munzee map I discovered the nearest munzee had been placed less than 60 yards from my front door on a lamppost, by someone with the unlikely name of 'MossleyMuppets'. Here it is:
It is hardly normal to spend time staring at lampposts, but the munzee sticker drew my attention to it. The first thing that strikes you is the stencilled number. Some database somewhere must have the location and number of every single lamppost recorded. Sometimes the extent to which the world is mapped, enumerated and quantified just takes you aback. Above it is a municipal homily encouraging responsible dog ownership; below is 230 volt current warning sign.
The latter sign is a fake, actually it's a munzee code disguised too look as official as possible in the hope of discouraging vigilant municipal workers removing lllegal fly posts. Munzee headquaters has a delightfully ambivalent attitude towards officialdom. On the one hand there are statements on the site warning participants to be law-abiding at all times, on the other, its store sells stickers designed to hoodwink over- vigilant officials. There's nothing like a healthy doze of moral relativism to assist you in a quest for world domination. This is what the munzee map of London looks like:
Each green, blue or white sticker represents a place where someone has deployed a munzee. Each munzee has a small webspace attached where players can leave instructions, notes or other information. There are hundreds of people out there in the city, interacting with each other, 'playing out' in the urban space, re-defining it and re-occupying it sticker by sticker. It amounts to a kind of mass-participatory, tabloid psychogeography.
Talking of pyschogeography, yesterday I watched London Orbital, The distributors, Illumination Media, describe the film as follows.
London Orbital is an extraordinary and visionary film by Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair about the world's largest by-pass, the M25. London Orbital is a road movie, a cinematic excursion into the futuristic literature of a century past, and a film dialogue between two writers who are also filmmakers (and vice versa).
London Orbital is, among other things, a meditation on the difference between driving and walking. On Bram Stoker's "undead", on H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard. On time and memory. On the difference between film and tape, sound and image. On trance states and the terror that lies beyond boredom; on shopping and terrorism; on Kabul and the leisure mall. On the invisible triangle of Thatcherism (covert arms deals, Essex gangsters, and drug dealing). On Pinochet and Thatcher as vampire lovers.
Iain Sinclair is the author of London Orbital, a book about his walk around the 120-mile road. Chris Petit elected not to make 'the film of the book' and chose instead to drive, and to capture in images the peculiar hallucinatory state that driving provokes.
The protagonist of London Orbital is a flaneur modernised, a lone, alienated explorer of urban spaces, haunted by a dystopian vision of the mind-numbing effects of consumerism. The style of the film is 'video installation Art School' shot hand held with a camcorder, featuring a spacey, electro-technic soundtrack and a voice-over which, by turns, is pretentiously literary, then sermonising, ending with a sycophantic interview with the 'seer of Shepperton', J. G. Ballard. Though less than 10 years old, London Orbital looks dated. Its critique of late twentieth century consumerism, typified by Bluewater Mall, shares with commentators such as Adam Curtis an apocalyptic vision of recent social history which flirts with conspiracy theory. At the time of the making of London Orbital and Century of the Self, the extraordinary explosion of social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube - was not really foreseen. There has been mass engagement with these 'personalised' media; even though concerns have been raised about surveillance culture and the eradication of privacy, individuals have not heeded this, the majority of us now have an 'electronic footprint' that reveals, not just our whereabouts, but our desires, interests and predilections. What should we now do - feel alienated, or engage with it?
The Munzee app is a new type of cyber-toy, not social-media but spatial-media. The speed with which these technologies are taken-up is more in line with the view that Amber Case put forward in her TED talk from 2010, called We are all cyborgs now. Case argues, from her stance as a 'cyborg anthropologist', that social technologies give us the opportunity to be 'more human' - that their existence is a fact of life, and we need to learn to live with them. This represents a more positive response than the dystopian visions of Sinclair or Curtis, and one I suppose I have more sympathy with. I understand the point, however, that Case is American, and 'she would be positive wouldn't she'; after most social media is a varient of the same business proposition - driven by US dominated global capitalism and a tools of hyper-consumerism.
What do we do, stand on the sidelines and protest, head for the hills and withdraw into some techno-phobic Walden? Instead. as an artist, I might regard cyber-space as a perforance space, an auditorium without walls. Its purpose may be commercial, but you don't have to shop within it, its communicative instincts leaves it open to much more creative uses that reach into new audiences and invite playful, creative or subversive behaviours.
So, back to my original question..."how exactly am I going to achieve 'the virtual installation' of the poems within the landscape?" Simple: I'm going to utilize the munzee global map; its well designed 'deploy and capture' tools, its web-based journal function, make it a ready-made means to place poems in the landscape. Before I start peppering the length of the A38 with munzees I intend to test the technology out by enhancing a local country park - Grin Low Woods - with a few pithy haiku. I'll report back on my progress.
Saturday 10 May 2014
Another Place
I have been reflecting on where the ideas behind voceti came from. The aspect of it that involves redefining landscape by 'intervening' in it was influenced by a visit to Anthony Gormley's Another Place, his installation at Crosby beach, just north of the Mersey estuary.
The sculptor outlines the idea behind the work and explains its development on his web-site:
ANOTHER PLACE, 1997
Original proposal for the Wattenmeer, Cuxhaven, Germany (1995):
"To install a hundred solid cast iron bodyforms along the coast to the west and south of the Kugelbake. The work will occupy an area of 1.75 square kilometres, with the pieces placed between 50 and 250 metres apart along the tideline and one kilometre out towards the horizon, to which they will all be facing. Depending on the fall of the land, the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day the work will be more or less visible. The sculptures will be installed on a level plane attached to 2 metre vertical steel piles. The ones closest to the horizon will stand on the sand, those nearer the shore being progressively buried. At high water, the sculptures that are completely visible when the tide is out will be standing up to their necks in water.
The sculptures are made from 17 body-casts taken from my body (protected by a thin layer of wrapping plastic) between the 19th of May and the 10th of July. The sculptures are all standing in a similar way, with the lungs more or less inflated and their postures carrying different degrees of tension or relaxation."
The idea was to test time and tide, stillness and movement, and somehow engage with the daily life of the beach. This was no exercise in romantic escapism. The estuary of the Elbe can take up to 500 ships a day and the horizon was often busy with large container ships.
In the end, the piece stretched 2.5 kilometres down the coast and 1 kilometre out to sea, with an average distance between the pieces of 500 metres. They were all on a level and those closest to the shore were buried as far as their knees. The work is now permanently sited outside Liverpool on Crosby Beach, U.K.
The effect on the visitor is powerful, the statues exude an eerie calm which gives shape and meaning to the empty, semi-industrialised estuarine sands.
The sculptor outlines the idea behind the work and explains its development on his web-site:
ANOTHER PLACE, 1997
Original proposal for the Wattenmeer, Cuxhaven, Germany (1995):
"To install a hundred solid cast iron bodyforms along the coast to the west and south of the Kugelbake. The work will occupy an area of 1.75 square kilometres, with the pieces placed between 50 and 250 metres apart along the tideline and one kilometre out towards the horizon, to which they will all be facing. Depending on the fall of the land, the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day the work will be more or less visible. The sculptures will be installed on a level plane attached to 2 metre vertical steel piles. The ones closest to the horizon will stand on the sand, those nearer the shore being progressively buried. At high water, the sculptures that are completely visible when the tide is out will be standing up to their necks in water.
The sculptures are made from 17 body-casts taken from my body (protected by a thin layer of wrapping plastic) between the 19th of May and the 10th of July. The sculptures are all standing in a similar way, with the lungs more or less inflated and their postures carrying different degrees of tension or relaxation."
The idea was to test time and tide, stillness and movement, and somehow engage with the daily life of the beach. This was no exercise in romantic escapism. The estuary of the Elbe can take up to 500 ships a day and the horizon was often busy with large container ships.
In the end, the piece stretched 2.5 kilometres down the coast and 1 kilometre out to sea, with an average distance between the pieces of 500 metres. They were all on a level and those closest to the shore were buried as far as their knees. The work is now permanently sited outside Liverpool on Crosby Beach, U.K.
The effect on the visitor is powerful, the statues exude an eerie calm which gives shape and meaning to the empty, semi-industrialised estuarine sands.
 |
| Looking south from the location towards the mouth of the Mersey. |
 |
| The statues all stand facing the horizon |
 |
| I think part of the reason why people identify with them is they are life-size , not monumental but human-scale. |
 |
| A key part of the effect is how scale is manipulated; the skies are huge, the figures relatively tiny and sited apart, each one is alone, though within sight of the next. One senses their isolation, even though there are a hundred of them. |
 |
| Light shining on the wet sand contrasts with the dull, metalic bodies. |
 |
| The figures are beginning to weather, time takes its toll. |
 |
| Over the flatness of the sands, from a distance it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which are statues and which are human on-lookers. |
The response to the work has been almost entirely positive, despite early concerns locally. Reading through the reviews on trip advisor it is great to see a work of modern sculpture receive almost universal approval. The reasons I think are clear. First of all it is situated outside, and not in the stultifying atmosphere of an art gallery. Secondly, the individual elements are recognisible as an unadorned human form, this is figurative art, but installed into the landscape in such a way to make a powerful statement concerning the human condition which has universal appeal.
I happened to be re-reading Wordsworth's Duddon Sonnets around the time I visited Another Place; I began to wonder if you could 'install' poetry into the environment in a similar way to Gorley's figures, using recognisable form, but in a way that the juxtaposition of each poem would change the way the space it occupied was percieved by the listener.
Friday 9 May 2014
Psychogeography
Coverley, Merlin, Psychogeography, (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010)
Merlin Coverley has produced a concise, highly readable history of the development of Psychogeography. The aim of the book is simple:
Increasingly this term is used to describe a bewildering array is ideas from the occult and urban walking, to avant-garde experimentation and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what does it mean?
The roots of the movement are traced to Daniel Defoe, whose work are regarded as the earliest examples of the novel to be written in England. However these fictions contain fantastical journeys, most famously Robinson Crusoe, or the setting of Moll Flanders in the labyrinthine streets of the London low-life alleyways. However, Defoe's historical and factual works - his account of the Great Plague and account of his travels in Britain blend biography, local history with personal reminiscence which transform as much as describe the territory it inhabit. There are no maps, the writer narrates his space through trial and error.
The work of William Blake has been highly influential in the development of psychogeography. 'Blake was a walker, a wanderer whose poems describe the reality of eighteenth-century street life, but they are overlaid by his own intensely individualistic vision to create a new topography of the city. His legacy to psychgeographic thought here is clear: the transformation of the familiar landscape of his own time and place into the transcedent image of the eternal city. (p. 40).
However although Defoe and Blake can be regarded as antecedents of psychogegraphy it is De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater that is generally regarded as the first fully realised psychogeographical text. 'De Quincey is a prototype for the obsessive drifter, allowing his imagination to shape and direct the perception og his environment; his purposeless drifting at odds with commercial traffic and allying homself to the invisible underclass whose movements map the chaotic and labyrinthine aspects of the city.' (p.43)
These ideas were further developed later in the nineteenth century by writers in Paris and London. What Coverley terms 'urban gothic' was developed by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle who established a an image of London as a fog-bound maze, seductive, strange and menacing.These essentially fictive responses were rejected by Arthur Machin who fused writer and walker to become the archetypal urban wanderer. 'In books such as Near Things and Far and The London Adventure Machen narrates his own adventures within "those red, raw places all around the walls of London" , outlining his peculiar "London science" in which the aim is to" utterly shun the familiar" in favour of a deliberate attempt to lose oneself in the overlooked quarters of the city.' (p. 49)
In Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century a parallel development occurred which gave rise the notion of the 'flaneur' an urban wanderer who seeks the anonymity of the crowd. a figure tinged with nostalgia for a city under threat from modernisation. The roots of the figure, developed by Baudelaire and Rimbaud can be traced to characters created by the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, whose creations such as the detective, Dupin inhabit a fictionalised London. Walter Benjamin, in his unfinished 'Arcades Project' offers a series of insights into Parisian street-life before the vast glass arcades were swept away by Housmann's wide boulevards.
'Ultimately the flaneur is a composite figure - vagrant, dandy, explorer, detective and stroller - yet, within these many and often contradictory roles, his predominant characteristic is the way he makes the street his home and this is his true legacy to psychogeography.
Coverley next explores the phenomena of what Rimbaud termed 'robinsoner' - a verb to describe 'to let the mind wander, or travel mentally'. However the concept of 'mental travel' predates Rimbaud, In the spring of 1790, Xavier de Maistre, confined under house arrest 'embarked on a journey around his bedroom every bit as arduous as Magellan or Cook but one that took place entirely within the boundaries of his own imagination. Joris-Karl Huysman's dandyish protagonist 'Duc Jean Floressas Des Essientes is the protagonist in the decadent novel Against Nature. This sickly, indolent aesthete, unable to muster the energy to wander the streets retreats into mental travel. Such figures 'exiled renegade poets leading marginal and disreputable existences act as template's for a number of fictional 're-appearances by 'Robinsons' over the next century - in Kafka's Amerika; in Celine's Journey to the End of the Night; in the Work of the poet Weldon Keys, who disappeared mysteriously himself in 1955, leaving as his legacy a series of poems about Robinson. Finally in the present day, Film-maker, Patrick Keiller's psychogeographic trilogy which he completed in 2010 with Robinson in Ruins draws on the tradition of the flaneur when it finds Robinson "wandering through the English countryside, wondering aloud whether the failures of late capitalism in the UK can be explained by the flora and detritus he passes. Keiller's materialist approach yields ravishing results, affirming his status as a serious thinker with a knack for finding the "moving wind in the trees". As with London and Robinson In Space, the titular protagonist's philosophical musings remain a constant, guiding the viewer's attention to the manifold histories hidden within each object he encounters." (Rotten Tomatoes 2012).
Developments in France took a different turn, absurdist and political rather than bohemian and mystical. Breton and Aragon's pre-surrealist novels written just after the Ist World War recast the flaneur in a more erotic role where the streets of Paris are places to procure, seek out or simply think about sex. The flaneur is driven by desire, the flaneuse cast in the role of prostitute. Aimless strolling saw the figure of Robinson and the flaneur coalesce, where the wanderer is able to revolutionise the mundane through the operation of chance encounters and break down the barrier between reality and the realm of dreams.
"We may imagine the mind's greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls"
Andre Breton, Nadja, p. 112.
In the years folowing the second world war a number of radical movements developed such as the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Lettrist. As Coverley points out their programmes were frequently puerile, but they shared an interest in re-defining urban spaces, wresting them from what Chtcheglov termed the worldwide mental disease of 'banalisation'. It was in one of the publicatiions of the short-lived Lettrist journal 'Potlatch' that the term 'psychgeography first appeared. The term was taken-up in the late 1950s by the developing 'Situationalist' movement, whose leader Guy Debord, attempted a definition:
"Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural f0rces, such as soil composition or climactic conditions on the economic structures of society [...]. Psychogeography, could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. (p. 89)
Debord, in developing and leading the Situationalist International (1957 - 1972) emerged as one of the leading Marxist thinkers of the 1960s whose work was influential in the Paris uprising of 1968. His notions of derive and detournement, though related to psychogeography are templates for activism rather than aesthetic response. 'Gone are the romantic notions of an artistic practice; here we have an experiment to be conducted under scientific conditions and whose results are to be rigorously analysed.' (p. 89)
The French Jesuit scholar, Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' was more influential than Debord's work, particularly in America. Using what is essentially semiotic analysis, Certeau links the practices of psychogeography to issues relating to consumerism. As Coverly explains at times Certeau's prose is almost impenetrable.
'Upholding the finest traditions of contemporary French theory, de Certeau's comments display an utter disregard for clarity, instead favouring an approach that ensures his work a place within the burgeoning ranks of the unread.' (p. 103-4)
This being the case, one of the wonders of the modern age is that there is always Wikipedia to come to the aid of those of without the time and inclination to wrestle with the more impenetrable aspects of 'contemporary French theory'!
The Practice of Everyday Life
To date, Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.
Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" acting in environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the influential chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
According to Andrew Blauvelt who relies on the work of Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life:[2]
"Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the "arts of doing" such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these strictures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations.
Wikipedia
In the past twenty years psychogeography has emerged in London as a significant literary and cultural movement. As you might expect, given the legacy of Defoe, Blake, and de Quincey, the form of psychogeography which emerged, though associated with anarchist activism, leaned towards 'new age' ideas rather than Marxism. The immediate precursor of this approach were Arthur Machen and Alfred Watkins; this latter writer's somewhat dubious claim to immortality is associated with his 'discovery' of 'ley lines' - a prehistoric 'network' mysteriously linking earthworks, standing stones and barrows. Coverly sums up this latter writer's contribution somewhat wryly:
Merlin Coverley has produced a concise, highly readable history of the development of Psychogeography. The aim of the book is simple:
Increasingly this term is used to describe a bewildering array is ideas from the occult and urban walking, to avant-garde experimentation and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what does it mean?
The roots of the movement are traced to Daniel Defoe, whose work are regarded as the earliest examples of the novel to be written in England. However these fictions contain fantastical journeys, most famously Robinson Crusoe, or the setting of Moll Flanders in the labyrinthine streets of the London low-life alleyways. However, Defoe's historical and factual works - his account of the Great Plague and account of his travels in Britain blend biography, local history with personal reminiscence which transform as much as describe the territory it inhabit. There are no maps, the writer narrates his space through trial and error.
The work of William Blake has been highly influential in the development of psychogeography. 'Blake was a walker, a wanderer whose poems describe the reality of eighteenth-century street life, but they are overlaid by his own intensely individualistic vision to create a new topography of the city. His legacy to psychgeographic thought here is clear: the transformation of the familiar landscape of his own time and place into the transcedent image of the eternal city. (p. 40).
However although Defoe and Blake can be regarded as antecedents of psychogegraphy it is De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater that is generally regarded as the first fully realised psychogeographical text. 'De Quincey is a prototype for the obsessive drifter, allowing his imagination to shape and direct the perception og his environment; his purposeless drifting at odds with commercial traffic and allying homself to the invisible underclass whose movements map the chaotic and labyrinthine aspects of the city.' (p.43)
These ideas were further developed later in the nineteenth century by writers in Paris and London. What Coverley terms 'urban gothic' was developed by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle who established a an image of London as a fog-bound maze, seductive, strange and menacing.These essentially fictive responses were rejected by Arthur Machin who fused writer and walker to become the archetypal urban wanderer. 'In books such as Near Things and Far and The London Adventure Machen narrates his own adventures within "those red, raw places all around the walls of London" , outlining his peculiar "London science" in which the aim is to" utterly shun the familiar" in favour of a deliberate attempt to lose oneself in the overlooked quarters of the city.' (p. 49)
In Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century a parallel development occurred which gave rise the notion of the 'flaneur' an urban wanderer who seeks the anonymity of the crowd. a figure tinged with nostalgia for a city under threat from modernisation. The roots of the figure, developed by Baudelaire and Rimbaud can be traced to characters created by the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, whose creations such as the detective, Dupin inhabit a fictionalised London. Walter Benjamin, in his unfinished 'Arcades Project' offers a series of insights into Parisian street-life before the vast glass arcades were swept away by Housmann's wide boulevards.
'Ultimately the flaneur is a composite figure - vagrant, dandy, explorer, detective and stroller - yet, within these many and often contradictory roles, his predominant characteristic is the way he makes the street his home and this is his true legacy to psychogeography.
Coverley next explores the phenomena of what Rimbaud termed 'robinsoner' - a verb to describe 'to let the mind wander, or travel mentally'. However the concept of 'mental travel' predates Rimbaud, In the spring of 1790, Xavier de Maistre, confined under house arrest 'embarked on a journey around his bedroom every bit as arduous as Magellan or Cook but one that took place entirely within the boundaries of his own imagination. Joris-Karl Huysman's dandyish protagonist 'Duc Jean Floressas Des Essientes is the protagonist in the decadent novel Against Nature. This sickly, indolent aesthete, unable to muster the energy to wander the streets retreats into mental travel. Such figures 'exiled renegade poets leading marginal and disreputable existences act as template's for a number of fictional 're-appearances by 'Robinsons' over the next century - in Kafka's Amerika; in Celine's Journey to the End of the Night; in the Work of the poet Weldon Keys, who disappeared mysteriously himself in 1955, leaving as his legacy a series of poems about Robinson. Finally in the present day, Film-maker, Patrick Keiller's psychogeographic trilogy which he completed in 2010 with Robinson in Ruins draws on the tradition of the flaneur when it finds Robinson "wandering through the English countryside, wondering aloud whether the failures of late capitalism in the UK can be explained by the flora and detritus he passes. Keiller's materialist approach yields ravishing results, affirming his status as a serious thinker with a knack for finding the "moving wind in the trees". As with London and Robinson In Space, the titular protagonist's philosophical musings remain a constant, guiding the viewer's attention to the manifold histories hidden within each object he encounters." (Rotten Tomatoes 2012).
Developments in France took a different turn, absurdist and political rather than bohemian and mystical. Breton and Aragon's pre-surrealist novels written just after the Ist World War recast the flaneur in a more erotic role where the streets of Paris are places to procure, seek out or simply think about sex. The flaneur is driven by desire, the flaneuse cast in the role of prostitute. Aimless strolling saw the figure of Robinson and the flaneur coalesce, where the wanderer is able to revolutionise the mundane through the operation of chance encounters and break down the barrier between reality and the realm of dreams.
"We may imagine the mind's greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls"
Andre Breton, Nadja, p. 112.
In the years folowing the second world war a number of radical movements developed such as the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Lettrist. As Coverley points out their programmes were frequently puerile, but they shared an interest in re-defining urban spaces, wresting them from what Chtcheglov termed the worldwide mental disease of 'banalisation'. It was in one of the publicatiions of the short-lived Lettrist journal 'Potlatch' that the term 'psychgeography first appeared. The term was taken-up in the late 1950s by the developing 'Situationalist' movement, whose leader Guy Debord, attempted a definition:
"Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural f0rces, such as soil composition or climactic conditions on the economic structures of society [...]. Psychogeography, could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. (p. 89)
Debord, in developing and leading the Situationalist International (1957 - 1972) emerged as one of the leading Marxist thinkers of the 1960s whose work was influential in the Paris uprising of 1968. His notions of derive and detournement, though related to psychogeography are templates for activism rather than aesthetic response. 'Gone are the romantic notions of an artistic practice; here we have an experiment to be conducted under scientific conditions and whose results are to be rigorously analysed.' (p. 89)
The French Jesuit scholar, Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' was more influential than Debord's work, particularly in America. Using what is essentially semiotic analysis, Certeau links the practices of psychogeography to issues relating to consumerism. As Coverly explains at times Certeau's prose is almost impenetrable.
'Upholding the finest traditions of contemporary French theory, de Certeau's comments display an utter disregard for clarity, instead favouring an approach that ensures his work a place within the burgeoning ranks of the unread.' (p. 103-4)
This being the case, one of the wonders of the modern age is that there is always Wikipedia to come to the aid of those of without the time and inclination to wrestle with the more impenetrable aspects of 'contemporary French theory'!
The Practice of Everyday Life
To date, Certeau's most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power. Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts.
Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power who are the "producers", while individuals are "consumers" acting in environments defined by strategies by using "tactics". In the influential chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau asserts that "the city" is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau's argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.
According to Andrew Blauvelt who relies on the work of Certeau in his essay on design and everyday life:[2]
"Certeau's investigations into the realm of routine practices, or the "arts of doing" such as walking, talking, reading, dwelling, and cooking, were guided by his belief that despite repressive aspects of modern society, there exists an element of creative resistance to these strictures enacted by ordinary people. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau outlines an important critical distinction between strategies and tactics in this battle of repression and expression. According to him, strategies are used by those within organizational power structures, whether small or large, such as the state or municipality, the corporation or the proprietor, a scientific enterprise or the scientist. Strategies are deployed against some external entity to institute a set of relations for official or proper ends, whether adversaries, competitors, clients, customers, or simply subjects. Tactics, on the other hand, are employed by those who are subjugated. By their very nature tactics are defensive and opportunistic, used in more limited ways and seized momentarily within spaces, both physical and psychological, produced and governed by more powerful strategic relations.
Wikipedia
In the past twenty years psychogeography has emerged in London as a significant literary and cultural movement. As you might expect, given the legacy of Defoe, Blake, and de Quincey, the form of psychogeography which emerged, though associated with anarchist activism, leaned towards 'new age' ideas rather than Marxism. The immediate precursor of this approach were Arthur Machen and Alfred Watkins; this latter writer's somewhat dubious claim to immortality is associated with his 'discovery' of 'ley lines' - a prehistoric 'network' mysteriously linking earthworks, standing stones and barrows. Coverly sums up this latter writer's contribution somewhat wryly:
'Alfred Watkins discovered his theory in a single relevatory insight whilst riding in the Hereford countryside on 30th June 1921. A somewhat unlikely prophet for new age ideas, Watkins spent much of his life as a sales rep for a local brewer, a biographical fact that was seen by his detractors as a revealing source of his inspiration.' (p. 51)
In its most recent manifestation as a primarily literary movement based in London, psychogeography is an eclectic phenomena in which radical situationalist politics mixes with new age ideas and post Ballardian dystopian visions of urban space. Coverley identifies the key protagonists as follows:
- J. G. Ballard: nicknamed the 'seer of Shepperton' Ballard has written at length about 'The Death of Affect', the loss of emotional engagement with our surroundings, and novels such as Crash and High Rise offer accounts of the unexpected and bizarre forms of behaviour our new technological landscapes can provoke.
- Iain Sinclair: Like Ballard before him, Sinclair has been keen to expose those obscure places that lie at the margins [...} and his series of walks across the city immediately place him within the earlier traditions of urban wandering. But it is in his Lud Heat, with its proposed alignment of Hawkesmoor's London churches, that has been the key text in the neo-psychogeographical canon. Sinclair pays no allegiance to situationalist theory, instead invoking the theory of ley lines proposed by Alfred Watkins and reviving the previous occult concerns of earlier London visionaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machin.
- Peter Ackroyd: ...described, not altogether helpfully, as a 'historico-mystical psychgeographer' and through his recognition of cyclical currents unfolding across history, Ackroyds vision of the city also owes less to the rigorous approach of the Situationalists than it does to a conservative sense of national identity and a belief in the enduring power of the city.
- Stewart Home: (his) work goes some way to re-affirming (psychogeography's) theoretical authenticity and spirit of political radicalism. As the key figure in the London Psychographical Association, reconvened between 1992-1997, Home produced a steady output of pamphlets and novels as well as performing a series of avante-garde activities, reintroducing the provocative spirit of situationalism and its predecessors. Home's peculiar brand of theoretically alert, sex and violence fuelled parodies combine the plagiaristic tendencies of the avante-garde with some home-grown political radicalism and Sinclair's sense of London's past.
- Patrick Keiller: Finally in a move from text to film, the circle is completed by Patrick Keiller who, in his films London and Robinson in Space, marks the return of Robinson and with him the figure of Defoe with whom this survey began. In these two films, Keiller provides a psychogeographical meditation on London and the country as a whole, combining a politican response to Thatcherism with an inquiry into the literary history of the city and a final word on the fate of the flaneur. (pp. 111 - 114)
Tuesday 6 May 2014
Cultural Geography - some recent trends
Handbook of Cultural Geography, ed. Kay Anderson and others, Sage, 2003.
Jonathan Bate, writing in Romantic Ecology notes that poets were as much geographers as historians. Thinking about this in relation to this project then its subject matter - taking a single road and following it through England in order to treat the mundane as exotic, - does seem primarily geographic in intention. The problem is, I know nothing about geography whatsoever. The multi-disciplinary nature of the MA presents challenges in this respect. It is difficult to break down subject barriers or indulge in the academic equivalent of fusion cooking if you are ignorant of what the theory is in the first place. It's here that books like the Handbook of Cultural Geography are invaluable. The opening chapter's 'Rough Guide' seeks to give an overview of where the main recent developments have been, couched in language that is not too jargon laden, and so enables someone new to the subject to grasp its main thrust. This is followed up by more detailed essays, written in more specialised language that give you an opportunity to get 'stuck-in' to the nitty gritty of contemporary discourse in cultural geography, if you so desire.
After asserting that the diversity of Cultural Geography makes delineating its boundaries difficult the editors do attempt to posit a broad definition:
Cultural Geography is a style of thought which involves an injunction to think spatially about the world.
The editors go on to say, "cultural geography is better though of as a series of intellectual - and, at the core, politicised engagements with the world. (p. 2)
Jonathan Bate, writing in Romantic Ecology notes that poets were as much geographers as historians. Thinking about this in relation to this project then its subject matter - taking a single road and following it through England in order to treat the mundane as exotic, - does seem primarily geographic in intention. The problem is, I know nothing about geography whatsoever. The multi-disciplinary nature of the MA presents challenges in this respect. It is difficult to break down subject barriers or indulge in the academic equivalent of fusion cooking if you are ignorant of what the theory is in the first place. It's here that books like the Handbook of Cultural Geography are invaluable. The opening chapter's 'Rough Guide' seeks to give an overview of where the main recent developments have been, couched in language that is not too jargon laden, and so enables someone new to the subject to grasp its main thrust. This is followed up by more detailed essays, written in more specialised language that give you an opportunity to get 'stuck-in' to the nitty gritty of contemporary discourse in cultural geography, if you so desire.
After asserting that the diversity of Cultural Geography makes delineating its boundaries difficult the editors do attempt to posit a broad definition:
Cultural Geography is a style of thought which involves an injunction to think spatially about the world.
The editors go on to say, "cultural geography is better though of as a series of intellectual - and, at the core, politicised engagements with the world. (p. 2)
The 'Rough Guide' is divided into five themes - it seems useful to make a few notes on each of them.
1. Culture as distribution of things.
All groups of people produce cultural artefacts, from every the everyday items around the house to larger artefacts such as buildings and roads. What can the pattern of material artefacts tell us about the social, economic and political dynamics of cultures? These concerns are central to cultural geography.
Taking housing as an example it can be analysed from a number of standpoints:
Cultural geographies of artefacts, then, are as much about the graffiti themselves as they are about the the locations of the graffiti-marked building; as much about home as they are about housing; and as much about the diversity within culture as they are about culture per se. These geographies ask why and how as much as where and when.
2. Culture as way of life (p. 4)
"The values, beliefs languages, meanings and practices that make up people's 'ways of life', however mobile and mutable, have been the stock-in-trade of cultural geography for close on a century." The scope of enquiry has diversified during this period. Originally focused on 'exotic livelihoods of 'other' non-western groups, increasingly the subject homed in on more familiar territories which developed in tandem with poststructuralist critiques of knowledge in human geography.
3. Culture as meaning (pp. 4-5)
Landscapes, city streets, monuments, all are imbued with cultural meaning which shifts, is debated, asserted or denied over time. In cultural geography how are these meanings constructed, by whom and for what purpose? What do we mean by meaning - individual emotions, experiences and memories; or group values, communal attachments or national ideals?
Finding appropriate analytical tools to investigate such matters has proved vexing - resulting in a range of approaches:
1. Culture as distribution of things.
All groups of people produce cultural artefacts, from every the everyday items around the house to larger artefacts such as buildings and roads. What can the pattern of material artefacts tell us about the social, economic and political dynamics of cultures? These concerns are central to cultural geography.
Taking housing as an example it can be analysed from a number of standpoints:
- The style and decor can reveal the economic class of the resident, their ethnicity, attitudes to nature, their sense of belonging to a particular community.
- The interior can suggest gendered relationships within the family, social and economic aspirations, and work patterns.
- Neighbourhoods may reveal societal structures rather than individual identity.
Cultural geographies of artefacts, then, are as much about the graffiti themselves as they are about the the locations of the graffiti-marked building; as much about home as they are about housing; and as much about the diversity within culture as they are about culture per se. These geographies ask why and how as much as where and when.
2. Culture as way of life (p. 4)
"The values, beliefs languages, meanings and practices that make up people's 'ways of life', however mobile and mutable, have been the stock-in-trade of cultural geography for close on a century." The scope of enquiry has diversified during this period. Originally focused on 'exotic livelihoods of 'other' non-western groups, increasingly the subject homed in on more familiar territories which developed in tandem with poststructuralist critiques of knowledge in human geography.
3. Culture as meaning (pp. 4-5)
Landscapes, city streets, monuments, all are imbued with cultural meaning which shifts, is debated, asserted or denied over time. In cultural geography how are these meanings constructed, by whom and for what purpose? What do we mean by meaning - individual emotions, experiences and memories; or group values, communal attachments or national ideals?
Finding appropriate analytical tools to investigate such matters has proved vexing - resulting in a range of approaches:
- Textual - adapting methods from literary criticism to read the landscape as text, and with it the potential for a deconstructive interpretation.
- Iconographic - adapted from art history in order to interpret landscape as a visual image.
These approaches have been criticised as being to discursive and ignoring the material conditions of landscape production and thereby erasing the meanings of its producers.
Other cultural geographers have called for studies which focus on the non-material aspects of language and focus on people's intimate experience and performance within it.
4. Culture as doing (p. 5)
This idea that culture is 'done' is derived from Marxism's notion that consciousness is practical. Drawing on Epicurean ideas of 'the swerve of the atom' Marx asserted matter as a kind of of vitalising property. However this position contains a central ambiguity which has never quite been resolved. In placing 'recaltricance and vitality. within the sphere of human consciousness, Marx played down the agency within nature. Later debates have developed the idea of the swerve of the atom as a metaphor for man's capacity to resist (and shape?) physical form. Critics of this view challenge this division between nature and culture and see agency as something distributed across all kinds of hybrid actors.
"Such cultural geography tends to be hyperactive, sought up especially in forms of life which refuse the directive cultural politics so beloved by academics for a quicksilver cultural politics that is not only more tenuous but also in its emphasis on mobility of circumstance, more alert to differences and so more able to follow some of those paths to freedom".
It involves analysing cultural activity through certain kinds of virtualism, through notions such as habitus, 'actor network' and immanent 'becoming' to produce new modes of thinking that harry space, then re-invent it.
5. Culture as power
In some senses the analysis of power is implicit in all four of the foregoing themes:
"Over time, understandings of power have shifted away from models based on the power of one group over another, towards those involving the power to do things. This has suggested that power relations consist not only of domination, but also of seduction, influence, persuasion, capacity, ability, manipulation, consent, compromise, subversion, control and so on". (p. 6)
Analysis of power relations based on class have been supplemented (or weakened?) by those centred on politics, gender, lifestyle, nature, race, sexuality, nationality and so on.
The problem remains how to understand the ways space, place and nature are implicated - and constitutive - of unjust, unequal and uneven poer relations, and how to suggest ways of addressing and redressing these relations.
Thinking Spatially About Culture, Thinking Culturally About Space.
1. Building Bloc Approach.
Attempts to identify large processes to provide large scale explanations - for example Harvey's work on 'time/space compression'. Here, a transmission mechanism by which 'economy' could be linked to 'culture', so allowing traffic to take place between the two blocs. Space then becomes both a central engine of change in the nature of capitalism and its expression. (p. 6)
The blunt dualism of such explanation is now looked at askance, as it forces 'pared down narrative structures' on the geography of history and provides the illusion of control in a perplexing world, which is exactly the opposite of what 'spatial conciousness' should achieve.
2.Spaces of Identity.
Here the idea of fixed identity unambiguously belonging to one group and fixed in a particular place has been replaced by more fluid identity that can be combined in different ways. This emphasis on hybridity was best expressed in the highly influential work of Gilroy (1993). It is no surprise that an emphasis on mobility and hybridity have become key tropes in recent works on identity.
3. 'Scapes'
Related to the above is recent work on spatial surfaces - in the beginning concerned with landscapes and the structured act of seeing the land incarnated into particular 'scapes' but later branching out to encompass sound and more latterly music and not just landscapes, but city and even 'earthscapes'. In part it can be part of a grander attempt to ground in new ways ans so give the earth voice. 'Our houses are tumili erected over the slaughtered body of the giant ground; only our nervous decorations, our attention to monumental detail. or preoccupation with property, gives us away.' Carter 1996, 2).
Carter, P. (1996) The lie of the Land, Faber and Faber
Cosgrove, D, Apollo's Eye, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
4. Dwelling (pp.. 7-8)
Originally an approach associated with phenomenology concerning the human experience of place which traded heavily on notions of 'authenticity' in nature and culture, more recently has been influenced by the sociology of science, actor network and non-representational theory to investigate how non-human agency can effect space - resulting in an 'inhuman' thinking about place. Latour (1999) postulated a politics of co-existence. Whatmore and Thorne (1998) map out how animals were drawn into various projects which circulated them around the world. They sought a new 'natural contract' in which 'habitus', the 'unconcious' and other such sedimentations can be dreamt in more active ways.
5. Experimental
This kind of thinking attempts to culture a delight in the intricacies of space as a way of finding new interconnections through which new kinds of humanity can be realised. The increasing appeal to performance as a guiding metaphor goes hand in hand with attempts to produce new visions of place or more accurately 'space-time' to defy conventional cognitive co-ordinates, to unlock something different, something that exceeds - that engages the power of virtuality with its attachment to life. This is what Bennett calls 'ethical energetics', which can produce new stances to the world, 'fundementally more capricious. generous and "unthreatened" becomings of the self' (2001) So against a weak ontology. a new kind of spacial ethics is being forged. There is all to play for.
Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life, Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
"Such cultural geography tends to be hyperactive, sought up especially in forms of life which refuse the directive cultural politics so beloved by academics for a quicksilver cultural politics that is not only more tenuous but also in its emphasis on mobility of circumstance, more alert to differences and so more able to follow some of those paths to freedom".
It involves analysing cultural activity through certain kinds of virtualism, through notions such as habitus, 'actor network' and immanent 'becoming' to produce new modes of thinking that harry space, then re-invent it.
5. Culture as power
In some senses the analysis of power is implicit in all four of the foregoing themes:
"Over time, understandings of power have shifted away from models based on the power of one group over another, towards those involving the power to do things. This has suggested that power relations consist not only of domination, but also of seduction, influence, persuasion, capacity, ability, manipulation, consent, compromise, subversion, control and so on". (p. 6)
Analysis of power relations based on class have been supplemented (or weakened?) by those centred on politics, gender, lifestyle, nature, race, sexuality, nationality and so on.
The problem remains how to understand the ways space, place and nature are implicated - and constitutive - of unjust, unequal and uneven poer relations, and how to suggest ways of addressing and redressing these relations.
Thinking Spatially About Culture, Thinking Culturally About Space.
1. Building Bloc Approach.
Attempts to identify large processes to provide large scale explanations - for example Harvey's work on 'time/space compression'. Here, a transmission mechanism by which 'economy' could be linked to 'culture', so allowing traffic to take place between the two blocs. Space then becomes both a central engine of change in the nature of capitalism and its expression. (p. 6)
The blunt dualism of such explanation is now looked at askance, as it forces 'pared down narrative structures' on the geography of history and provides the illusion of control in a perplexing world, which is exactly the opposite of what 'spatial conciousness' should achieve.
2.Spaces of Identity.
Here the idea of fixed identity unambiguously belonging to one group and fixed in a particular place has been replaced by more fluid identity that can be combined in different ways. This emphasis on hybridity was best expressed in the highly influential work of Gilroy (1993). It is no surprise that an emphasis on mobility and hybridity have become key tropes in recent works on identity.
3. 'Scapes'
Related to the above is recent work on spatial surfaces - in the beginning concerned with landscapes and the structured act of seeing the land incarnated into particular 'scapes' but later branching out to encompass sound and more latterly music and not just landscapes, but city and even 'earthscapes'. In part it can be part of a grander attempt to ground in new ways ans so give the earth voice. 'Our houses are tumili erected over the slaughtered body of the giant ground; only our nervous decorations, our attention to monumental detail. or preoccupation with property, gives us away.' Carter 1996, 2).
Carter, P. (1996) The lie of the Land, Faber and Faber
Cosgrove, D, Apollo's Eye, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
4. Dwelling (pp.. 7-8)
Originally an approach associated with phenomenology concerning the human experience of place which traded heavily on notions of 'authenticity' in nature and culture, more recently has been influenced by the sociology of science, actor network and non-representational theory to investigate how non-human agency can effect space - resulting in an 'inhuman' thinking about place. Latour (1999) postulated a politics of co-existence. Whatmore and Thorne (1998) map out how animals were drawn into various projects which circulated them around the world. They sought a new 'natural contract' in which 'habitus', the 'unconcious' and other such sedimentations can be dreamt in more active ways.
5. Experimental
This kind of thinking attempts to culture a delight in the intricacies of space as a way of finding new interconnections through which new kinds of humanity can be realised. The increasing appeal to performance as a guiding metaphor goes hand in hand with attempts to produce new visions of place or more accurately 'space-time' to defy conventional cognitive co-ordinates, to unlock something different, something that exceeds - that engages the power of virtuality with its attachment to life. This is what Bennett calls 'ethical energetics', which can produce new stances to the world, 'fundementally more capricious. generous and "unthreatened" becomings of the self' (2001) So against a weak ontology. a new kind of spacial ethics is being forged. There is all to play for.
Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life, Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)