Key Pages
ProjectsChanges [Aug 26, 2008]
Avonmouth Severn Be...non-blog-blog
6-7 June 2008
Home
Jem Noble and Angel...
At site and behind ...
Events
More Changes...
Key Pages
ProjectsChanges [Aug 26, 2008]
Avonmouth Severn Be...
LANDSCAPE AND THEORY SYMPOSIUM 26 JUNE 2008
Response to papers by Tim Ingold, Mike Pearson and Kate Chedzgoy
I greatly enjoyed this opportunity to read 3 very rich papers for this session and to explore the links that I might forge among them. Moreover, in thinking with these contributions I have been returned to recent work leading an AHRC Landscape and Environment Network that investigated performativity and emptiness through a series of fieldworking weekends, symposia, an on-line collaborative wiki and a conference.
And so I begin with a detour of sorts to those places practised as empty – from the literal emptyings of eviction and excavation to philosophical, spiritual or political emptiness. Emptiness as a utopia to which one aspires, emptiness as the haunting of trace, emptiness as sublime, emptiness as erasure, emptiness as nausea, emptiness as any-space-whatever, emptiness as impossible possibility. To paraphrase W J T Mitchell, emptiness ‘as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’.
The 3 sites that we chose are hyphenated, multiple landscapes. Bristol Temple Meads-British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Sennybridge Training Center-SENTA-Mynydd Epynt and Avonmouth-Severn Beach – and they touch at a number of different points. Primarily, they are connected by the Severn Estuary - a shifting to and fro world of swift and dangerous tides, of intensive trade routes that connected railways and drovers’ paths, of conflict from the Roman period to WW1 munitions factories and mustard gas filling operations at Avonmouth to the WW2 constructed wilderness at Mynydd Epynt. While bearing the clear scars of recent and not-so-recent acts of violence, there is no pure landscape underneath waiting to be revealed.
Ingold’s discussion of weather-worlds here and his earlier work on wind allow me to consider new airier connections among the 3 places. At Bristol Temple Meads we worked in those sudden, disturbing gusts of warm winds that are channeled by tunnels and the Victorian ironwork. At Mynydd Epynt, Mike Pearson, my co-investigator Jo and I did our recce with the site commandant on a glorious day in April. It was warm enough to eat sandwiches in the firing ranges, perched on grenade-testing sandpits, warm enough to trigger my cotton-wool sleepiness back in the range rover. The air had that soft, Spring quality that smooths the skin and we could see forever. Our fieldworking weekend itself was marked by contrast across the 2 days: sunny and warm on one and finger-numbing cold with horizontal rain on the other. Loitering, listening to skylarks on one, shouting above the wind and hunkering down inside our hoods on the other. At Avonmouth we escaped rain, but the January winds up the estuary burnt our cheeks and left us speechless. Weather of course constituted our relationships with this place.
Still, I wonder about jettisoning the –scape in favour of the –world. Tim’s reminder that landscape came from the OE scipe long before Gilpin’s scopic techniques on the Wye suggests not just the community of kinship or fellowship but the active sense of shaping: to create, ordain, appoint. The ship is the thing that has been shaped. The shaping is what makes the ship. Ingold refers to Heidegger’s world worlding, for our dwelling shapes the clearing, If ships are shaped, then landscape seems to suggest a completed task, the play after the lights come up. Yet, we also know that the ship requires constant maintenance with the application of sealants and protectors, the scraping off of old paints and barnacles, the replacement of corroding nails and torn sails. So everything’s in the shaping. The ship is forever sciping.
Tim is right when he writes of a world in constant motion, in a state of continuous shaping by the elements. Like Tim’s class sea-ing the land, at Avonmouth-Severn Beach the chocolatey-thick tides constantly move things around. 2 workshop participants found an empty box on the beach. They begin collecting litter – empty containers – to fill the empty box with emptiness. Except that the empty box and empty containers contain the air of this place. They enclose and slowly release air. They are production-line buouys, bladders, plastinated lungs, both inside and outside They are Ingold’s materials in motion. Like the pebbles and the mud, they wash in and out to sea, the result of active littering by residents, runoff from landfill sites, accidents at sea. Despite my own forensic fascination still with things on the surface, I know that my camera catches these things moving in the breeze – whether in the winter weather of avonmouth or in the air currents produced by hundreds of feet passing by one another in a railway station.
And as I wrote for a school poetry assignment when I was 8:
In the playground
Leaves fly round and round.
I run with glee,
The leaves and I are free.
Where Tim might see this as me swept up by the weather-world, might we also consider the fluidity of the body that enables that possession? As an adult I catch my breath in the wind. As a child I ran in the wind, needing to its intensity with increased lung capacity and increasingly rapid breathing. The traces of air’s passage were inscribed on those surfaces which are of the earth, of the body. Chapped lips, rosy cheeks, snowflakes on eyelashes that swiftly melt into your eyes so you can’t see, breath that freezes on the trim of your coat .
Luce Irigaray writes (On the Forgetting of Air in Heidegger, p96):
‘Space is given first by her.’
And by her, Irigaray is talking of air or breath, which is what Heidegger forgets in his groundless ground of space.
I think of Chedgzoy’s discussion of the painting of Henrietta Laura Pulteney and keep returning to that pink sash and the twist of her body, so suggestive of the spontaneous dash. Chedgzoy’s fascinating account of the need to ‘restore a measure of social subjectivity’ to Pulteney rather than read her ‘merely as a symptomatic site bodying forth the cultural politics of childhood’ resonates with much of what we’ve been hearing today. Similarly, we know that landscape has been understood as a text, a signifying system, a way of seeing. It is seen as governing and constraining forms of behaviour, as translation of policy. It is both ideology and meaning, stable and fluid, hegemonic and open. In other words, landscape as already structured system. Yet, following Mitch Rose (‘Gathering dreams of presence’, EPD, 2006), how do we know when it becomes structure? Is it right to think of landscape as representative of what’s underneath? This seems to be the same question that Chedgzoy puts to our apprehension of the Pulteney portrait.
And so I want to return to the pink sash for it seems to me that just as much as the basket of hothouse flowers, just as much as the knowledge of her ownership of this land, it is that lift of the wind that merits attention. Here, the represented meteorological conditions are certainly constitutive of the physical relationship between girl and land. We are not immediately struck by her visual relationship with the ordered landscape in the distance, or even the semi-wild of the woods in which she’s portrayed. I have no doubt that the narrative elements of the painting would have been appreciated in highly coded terms back in the eighteenth century. However, we might consider how Chedgzoy and Ingold’s papers operate alongside one another to begin to illuminate those spaces of air. I suggest that Pulteney’s sash works much like the smoke and dust motes caught in the light of the projector, to reveal the invisible substances in which we are immersed – rather than revealing structure.
I know that Kate’s focus is on how landscapes facilitate or hinder play and the need for us to produce idyllic memories in order to categorize contemporary childhood as fallen or dangerous. Rather than figures in a moral landscape or ideological ciphers, these children are swept up in the weather-world around them, a world that engenders play. I was struck by her reference to Mary Lennox’s Secret Garden as I am currently reading this to my son at bedtime. One of the many things that strikes me about this book reading it for the first time as an adult is the presence of weather in the narrative. While adults frequently have to sally forth in all sorts of inclement weather, it is very clear that rain keeps children indoors while wind keeps them awake at night. Only Dickon, the wild, animist Jesus, anchored to the ground by his hob-nailed boots, ignores the weather for he is at one with the land like one of Van Gough’s potato eaters. And it is Spring sunshine is what makes Dickon’s Magic happen – a magic contrasted with that of the fakirs who live in the seasonless Indian heat that dulls the senses and potential to appreciate beauty. For Pulteney, while the wind lifts her sash and fills her lungs we know that it is the weather that determines whether or not she’s allowed out.
It’s that focus on play that links Mike’s paper to Kate's. His focus on performance as a manner of engagement that entails structuring, composing and orchestrating elements might at first sight seem to be aligned to the structural-ideological approaches to landscape. However, Mike’s focus on the ablative case – of the place from which we make – allows us to think through both Ingold’s focus on weather-worlds and Chedgzoy’s interest in play. In particular, we might think of Mike’s articulated action that requires in Japanese noh theatre the polished wood of the hinoki floor and the giant pots or bowl-shaped concrete structures beneath the floor to enhance the resonant properties of the wood when the actors stomp heavily. These constraints order time and narrative in particular ways. There are prescribed and prohibited activities. Yet, it’s also necessary to consider that the traditional noh stage would have been a shrine open to the weather on 3 sides. The painted cypress tree at the back of the stage both erases and reproduces the structure. For the play to work, it has to happen both inside and outside, shaped by weather conditions that cannot be ordered. It corresponds with Mike’s formulation of we all go: both performers and audience are swept up in a weather-world on stage and beyond. We might think of the noh stage, or Brith Gof’s scaffolding and seatings among the trees for the 1995 performance of Tri Bywyd in Mike’s ablative case. This play happens simultaneously - simul together with. Performers, audience, stage, weather, landscape all work together in a process of shaping.
A shaping which is also a gathering. To return to the dictionary, gathering is a transitive verb from the Old English gaderian – as in the related together. In his 2006 'Gathering dreams of presence' article, Rose wonders whether alongside Heidegger’s ontology of relationality, we might see his desire to encircle and contain where the event of taking place is reined in as a movement of care. While Irigaray might question whether the clearing where everything gives itself in open truth must first be encircled, I wonder whether we might think of this gathering in Irigaray's terms rather than as a ring or corner of cleared space, into which the sun shines.
We gather seeds and flowers. We gather our feelings and our emotions. Stones gather moss and books gather dust. Infections gather pus. We gather that. We gather together. We gather speed. We gather strength. Teenagers gather in parks. We gather children to protect them from gathering teens. The Haxey Hood participants gather into tight scrums and disperse again. Clouds gather. All living creatures gather with intent. The wind might gather leaves into themselves to set them whirling. We gather fabric into folds and waistbands with elastic. Gathering requires a tension and to maintain tension we require air – Mike’s sense of the fluid oozing of people, earth and air. We gather in order that we all go with, not to.
And as Mike says, such gatherings leave their scars on the body just as the body scars the land. The Haxey hood participants may mark their passage with collapsed walls, filthy carpets and bruises and sprains. Yet, those apparently solid traces are produced through fluidities of movement, pressure, beer, oscillation, blood seeping out beneath the skin and over-stretched tendons.
We reach out to gather in, the gesture in Mike's Bubbling Tom. We inhale and exhale. The elastic linking these is the body held in tension by the weather that connects earth and sky. We are in and of air and water. And we transmit vibrations of the air into the earth and from earth into air like vertical em dashes - those long lines that stretch between several parties in a sentence and span the spaces of breath. They are held taut between in and out, the to-ing and fro-ing. They point to something never arrived at, that over there, that you see in the distance, the space from one breath or footfall and another. Rather than being the performative space of the bracket, the hyphen is the elastic band, reliant on air to achieve tension. Not an encircling of the proscenium arch but a move towards gathering. It’s that em dash that allows Mike’s katachresis of this-and-this-and-this. Performance as breath on the threshold -
Far too long since visiting this area of the site. But preparing next week's lecture on indigenous and descendant filmmaking practices for the Screening Nations unit I'm teaching (Canadian cinema) I came across Raymond Lucas' stuff. A PhD from Aberdeen (I was reading up on Nancy Wachowich's work with Igloolik Isuma Productions - Atanarjuat, 2001) he's now at Strathcyde and writes about drawing and notation as forms of knowledge production, drawing on Deleuze and Bergson.: 'drawing or notation can be a valid alternative means by which to explore theory. Theoretical discussions are often held to be the exclusive domain of text discourse, but is it possible to draw an argument?' http://www.miriad.mmu.ac.uk/craftdesign/migratorypractices/abstract.php?id=6
2 August 2007
7 points on presence. Considerations of Heidegger's Origin of the Work of Art, Barthes' Camera Lucida and Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics. They deal with the irruption of 'the real' as truth. In art, truth is both its subject and its object. But where Heidegger sees philosophy as art, Badiou writes that art produces truth where philosophy can only elaborate on it. So is presence here just about accessing the psychoanalytic real? Thinking about the arguments that position 'hollow aestheticisation' against 'documentary rawness'. Both, of course, are aesthetic appropriations, 'creative treatments of actuality' as John Grierson would have it. As Alfredo González-Ruibal puts it, it's not aesthetics per se that is at issue, but what's done with it. Images present an indexical relationship with event, but whether photo-journalistic or surreal, they bring us no closer to the eventness of event. How they affect us, on the other hand, is a matter of continual negotiation, the relationality of judgement. All of these glimpses illuminate what Heidegger phrases as the riddle of art, but we're no further along in understanding its operation. I can recognise presence, but still want to know how it happens, when and why.
Thanks to Paul Gough for sending me the information: 'Conflict landscapes: materiality and meaning in contested places, 1900-2007' @ Imperial War Museum, 26 May. Strangely, the details aren't on the IWM website. Paul's talk is 'Voids of war - the empty battlefield as a place "full of emptiness"'.
There's a military landscapes conference on at Imperial War Museum on 26 May, but I can't find any online information about this. Paul Gough (Network partner) is giving a paper on emptiness and landscape....
Gough, Paul J. “’Calculating the future’ – panoramic sketching, reconnaissance drawing and the material trace of war.” Contested objects: material memories of the Great War. Ed. N Saunders and P Cornish. London: UCL Press, 2007. In press
Gough, Paul J. “Conifers and Commemoration; The Politics and Protocol of Planting in Military Cemeteries.” Landscape Research 21.1 (1996): 73 – 87.
I've started a Google Earth project. I want to find a way to append not only textual comments but images. I tried linking my Flickr images into the placemarks but this doesn't appear to work. I have also made a Flickr map but you can't get close enough in to the satellite image and nor can I make shapes.
Will now start an Epynt project!
Attended the Material City symposium on Saturday at Arnolfini. Great to see such exciting, complementary work. Both our Network and Dan and Claire's project orbit around each other but we've never quite managed to turn that into a collaboration.
Billed as collisions between art and archaeology, the symposium presented results from a 24-hour fieldwork / site-based workshop practice. In the publicity it stated that an artist and an archaeologist were paired in each of 3 themes: past, present, future. Dan Hicks and Pablo Bronstein worked with 'the past'; Sefryn Penrose and Richard Wentworth with 'the present'; and Sarah May and Lottie Child with 'the future'. Respondents were Victor Buchli, John Schofield and Josh Pollard. Jim Dixon did a fantastic job of opening the day; Jane Rendell closed it, after the marvellous video collaboration between Greg Bailey (soon to be my PhD student) and Amy Feneck.
What emerged was that each archaeologist and each artist had his or her own team of volunteers to produce work and that the team leaders didn't really have much contact with each other's practices during the day. That kind of atelier model is really interesting and I would have like to have heard more about the politics and hierarchies embedded in the day.
Like our own Network (and like other kinds of interdisciplinary practice-led research, including some of the Stanford collaborations) the Material City project focused on a deep mapping, chorographic process. This process was characterised in the main by the 2D practices of map making, drawing and photography. Bailey and Feneck's short video piece was particularly interesting in this respect and foregrounded the common problematic of urban decay stills photography and the allure of forensic modes of looking and the framing of the ready made. This is an issue we have faced in our Network and is something I discussed at CongressCATH in summer 2006, and via questions of materiality at CHAT 2006 
chat_aap.doc.
Another interesting tension through the day was reference to 'capturing' images, character, and so on. I don't think any of those involved actually do believe in capturing the urban essence. But what struck me is how we are all engaged in a variety of sampling strategies. Rather than think in terms of collage, perhaps what we're actually seeing is the fruition of the 'database narrative'. Whether scientific random sampling, tape loops, digital sampling, nonlinear editing, sequence logging, close reading -- we're all engaged in a similar process of abstracting and remixing. This is what Pablo Bronstein referred to as 80s postmodernism. Once technologies emerge that allow us to cut-and-paste quickly within a digital binary system, can we be anything but postmodern?
Things I wanted to know more about: 1) Bins. Why do we love to photograph them? Victor Buchli and I took loads of bin photographs in Helsinki. There were lots today, too. Obviously, consumer waste, loss, dirt, hygiene and the fact they always look freakishly futuristic with their brushed steel and improbable curves. 2) Ethics. How were interviews negotiated. What about people working in Broadmead? What about the fact the so many of the team members don't live in Bristol and those that do characterised so many areas as 'dangerous'. Slight overtones of 'look at the funny poor people'. Again, definitely not intentional, but I think this site-based work needs to attend to work. In our Temple Meads weekend we tried to work closely with the station and museum management, although engaging with workers itself has its problematic politics. 3) Politics of hierarchy. It seemed that the collaborative working happened between a senior professional archaeologist or artist and his or her team of 'junior' volunteers. It was interesting how the different presenters acknowledged their teams and how that fed through into the work. I wasn't quite sure how and where the collisions were happening. But the same could be said (for different reasons) about our Network. While our aim similarly is not to get people to see through the eyes of other practices, our disciplinary scope carries with it huge potential for clash. That's necessary, but it can make it very difficult to identify the conceptual gains made. 4) Why didn't anyone refer to the big Tollgate House projections in Feb 06, one of the city's largest arts commissions as part of the Broadmead regeneration? Animations made by children who attend the local school; vj work by people who live in broadmead; looped films pertaining very specifically to the theme of exhaustion, regeneration and the economics of work. 5) And what about the flattening of time? This arose again and again for me during the day -- how easily we forget. The juxtaposition of the 1950s and now as being two specifically dramatic moments. But all through the 80s and 90s we witnessed this same constant, dramatic flux. Remember the Temple Meads flyover? In her terrific talk Sarah May discussed the less physically grandiose, but just as significant shifts in commerce with changing leaseholders.
The whole day was really stimulating for me. I loved Wentworth's photographs as they speak to my own practice of pavement photography (I know we're not alone!). Listened to some terrific presentations that really brought home the fact that these issues are not unique to archaeology and visual art - but are at the heart of all broadly defined investigative practices.
'The intensity of La Traversee du Luxembourg we can now understand is that of a man no longer certain of his existence -- it minutely records the thoughts and reactions of a man who has begun to feel he isn't quite there any more. In the manner of Joyce's Ulysses, then, it attempts to avert a descent into nothingness, that is, the abject meaninglessness of the everyday in its most mundane detail, even as it embraces it as its necessary condition, by elevating the notion of the day into an epic construct in its own right. The paradox here is that by focusing on this day, this day which in fact is just like any other becomes an elected day, the full implication of which is that any other day could similarly be redeemed. This, in effect, is the fantasy of diarists: the fullness of their diaries competes with the emptiness of their lives as they themselves perceive it. For that is the precise task of the diary: to imbue emptiness with meaning, to give it a body we might also say.'
Buchanan, I. (2005) 'Space in the age of non-place', in I Buchanan and G. Lambert (eds) Deleuze and Space, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 27.
Glimpsing my own recurrent practice of ground-level video through Victor Burgin's 'The city in pieces' meditation on Benjamin (L. Marcus and L Nead, eds, 1993. New Formations: The Actuality of Walter Benjamin 20: 33-46) gets me thinking about the way in which my work relies on strong perspectival lines, forever producing (performative of) empty horizons. Perspective as '"common ground" on which the identification of architectural space with corporeal space could "take place"' (p. 35). Although I tend to focus on the micro-objects in the centre ground, perhaps what's more interesting is the acceleration of the work into the vanishing point. Another way to think through emptiness?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/
Thinking about Baudrillard's death on the 7th. System of Objects - particularly his musings on the power of identification we have with our cars - put me in mind of Gell's agency.
In my usual way, ate lunch with Jo and ideas flowed over the soup. Was concerned about how I might bring my praxis into the second workshop in a way that wouldn't amount to me playing at videographer. So am currently considering the spatialised presence of screen-based technologies at Epynt. From the TV in the soldiers' recreational area to site CCTV I want to think about the ways in which this 'empty' site is crisscrossed with telecommunications signals; the spaces and places that are re-emplaced via screens (Wisteria Lane in Epynt); the relationship between these networks and the old drovers roads; how the seemingly immateriality of this is materialised in and through human and non-human bodies.
First symposium out of the way. Went as well as we expected, I think. I am keen to develop my thinking more around ways in which to negotiate the tensions between desires for 'rehearsal room' and 'taskscape' models. But am happy that the group tends more towards the taskscape in which people bring their activities into proximity as way of 'telling' (to borrow from Mike) the place. Certainly worked well in our Birdcage Walk pilot project. So the question remains whether tensions will be productive or not: is it dialectical progress, generative aporia or blockage?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8kZup7MY0
e-Science
Final report on my AHRC-funded 'Locating Grid Technologies' workshops went in this week.
Various forms of documentation of events at https://secure.irational.org/discourse/viewtopic.php?t=74 and http://orchestra.cubecinema.com/scores/art_grid_score.ppt.
Very nice Flickr photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/38204625@N00/sets/72157594488499552/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/38204625@N00/sets/72157594488500800/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/12578533@N00/sets/72157594174798402/ http://www.flickr.com/groups/71382401@N00/pool/
Won't hear until May whether we got the big research grant to develop Semantic Web project with Watershed Media Centre's d-shed.
TV archaeologies
Finally clearing the decks to start interviews with key figures in recent production history. This will follow on from the audience research I did with Council for British Archaeology, for English Heritage. URL to follow once CBA posts the final report.
Oral Histories of Live Art and Performance
Attended first steering group meeting of Claire MacDonald's AHRC-funded project. Working with the British Library Sound Archive and a number of performance research experts, my role is in the area of the documentary/archive.
