Key Pages
Projects
Bristol Local Development Plan: Avonmouth 
blp-prop-alterations-appendices-ch12[1].pdf
http://www.severnbeach.com/severnbeach/index.htm
http://www.pilningandsevernbeachparishplan.co.uk/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Beach
http://www.cotch.net/special:search.php?key=Avonmouth
http://www.msatrivia.co.uk/m4aust.htm
'Here the sea ends and the earth begins. It is raining over the colourless city. The waters of the river are polluted with mud, the riverbanks flooded’
José Saramago The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
One element in our work together might be identified as a concern with how ‘emptiness’ is performed through practices of attention. Previously we have been asking ourselves 'who' finds this space empty / not empty — suggesting that ‘emptiness’ be considered as much an absence of attention to something not already anticipated by our discursive understanding as it is a quality of any particular physical location. The issue of practices of attention relates to an activity central to the initiation of projects by site-oriented artists, one that blends reconnaissance and reverie.
This activity suggests that one way to be open to emptiness is deliberately to attempt the (impossible) bracketing of our various professionalisms and their discourses by adopting something that approximates to an attentive ‘amateurism’. There may be a useful analogy here with the role of the essayist in relation to an understanding of the essay proposed by the poet and translator Michael Hamburger. My interest in the notion of the essay — n: an attempt: a tentative effort: a first draft (arch.): a trial (arch.): an experiment (arch.): a written composition less elaborate than a treatise. v.t. essay¹ to try: to attempt: to make experiment of (arch.) ? - relates to its root in the Old French term: essai L. exagium, weighing and has been focused by Hamburger's ‘An Essay on the Essay’ in Art as Second Nature (
As a child I was given copies of a series of books called The Observer Book of... dealing with topics like dogs, clouds, uniforms, old buildings, etc. These were clearly written to encourage curiosity and an enthusiastic attending to or essaying of the everyday world. We might ask, in relation to Edward S. Casey’s claim: ‘If a position is a fixed posit of an established culture, (is) a place, despite its frequently settled appearance,’ an essay in experimental living within a changing culture? (Casey, E., 1993). Getting back into place: towards a renewed understanding of the place-world Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).Can a notion of essaying be linked in any way to our particular interest in how multiple practices of attention can bring into focus chance findings? Rather than closing down definitions of ‘emptiness’ and ‘methodology’, might such an orientation challenge us to open out these terms?
We would like to ask each of the four groups to pick up to three topics from the list below with a view to making a (notional) contribution to either:
1. The Observer Book of the Overlooked.
2. An alternative (local) version of the Shipping Forecast.
Topics:
The Littoral (earth/water); Non-human activity; Hiding places; (Effects of)
Weather; Litter; Waterways; Air; Paths.
Your chosen topics can then serve as a common focus for group activity and for group discussion at the beginning and end of each day of the workshop.
04.02.07
(extended, wth images added, 17/06/07)
Iain Biggs' first thoughts.
Iain Biggs has identified this space as being an ideal site for our UWE-led workshop. Although it has no predetermined or fixed boundaries, it is easily if loosely defined as being occupied by the broadly parallel routes shared - over a space of approximately four miles - between the estuary shore line, the A403, the branch line railway from Avonmouth Station to Severn Beach and various footpaths including, at the north eastern end, a section of the Severn Way.
On the basis of a preliminary exploration this four-mile 'littoral strip' can be identified as including types of 'emptiness' associated with:
At some point in the near future Jim Dixon and Iain Biggs will walk the whole length of this littoral zone to get a fuller picture. If anyone else wants to join please let them know.
Of initial interest is the way in which the 'emptiness' of this space registers differently when the through journey is 'performed' at different speeds. It is superficially the case that, as one might expect, it is 'emptiest' when traveled by car a series of forbidding industrial and service spaces caught at a glance and cut through by a straight road down which large vehicles travel at high speeds. (There was a serious road accident the day I was there and there are signs that this is a not infrequent occurrence). I have yet to travel it by the single track train line, but it is clear that this will offer a 'slower', 'fuller' and more 'picturesque' route - at least where the rail track runs close to the shore over the second half of the distance from Andrews Road to Severn Beach station - and is no doubt actually safer! The 'slowest' and notionally least 'empty' speed should be that of walking.
However, because of the constant and sometimes disorienting changes and contradictions of the surroundings, the emphasis on 'security' that often blocks access and generates an air of hostility, and the vague sense that this is an often ugly and sometimes dangerous place (the awareness of pollution, the notice giving the numbers of 'villains' arrested by the local security firm, noise, speed of traffic, etc), it is easy for the walker to miss the 'fullness' that walking often shows in an environment passed through at leisure. Driving, by contrast, gives the sense of being able to grasp this space as dominated by the 'singular' quality of docks-oriented and related industry (with the complexity of the 'rhines' and littoral rural spaces becoming largely invisible and the shore line a marginal feature, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, etc). When heading northeast this impression of cohesion is heightened by the eye-catching sight of the new Severn Crossing Bridge that takes the eye away from one's immediate surroundings.
There are many other interesting aspects to this site. Please comments on these preliminary observations and, of course, suggestions as to how we might work with its potentialities, along with any other thoughts you may have related to the workshop weekend.
It would be most productive to look at this area as a whole rather than extract particular sites/aspects for study.
13.11.07
Iain writes:
To a large degree I agree entirely about the questions thrown up by the Barthes quote. He certainly makes far too categorical a distinction (although the context modifies it slightly). There is, however, something behind his notion which continues to interest me - perhaps because of having worked with art therapists and having an interest of early modern psychiatric and "Outsider Art".
I suppose this translates into an interest in those discourses of/around "amateurism" that focus on the relationship between an activity as performed and an ill-defined self (or as Geraldine Finn would put it, a self that is "always both more and less than the categories that name and define us"). Often discourses of introspection that are activated by desires that don't sit comfortably with those authoritative discourses framed by assumptions of professionalism - I guess this comes from an interest in what Foucault might called 'practices of the self" as a form of resistance to the pressures created by the circulation of power (which is slightly different from both Barthes' notion of amateurism and, perhaps, from your notion of an activity undertaken "purely for our own pleasure"). I would guess this is linked to what you say about material practices of attention and finding a commonality of purpose through the lens of shared attention to a common site. I think that our disciplinary boundaries become more sharply focused precisely because of a sense of interwoven limitation and possibility and so, as you say, also more permeable. So I certainly agree entirely with what you say about the current tendency among academics who "want to be artists" (which I guess is the mirror image of artists who want to be social scientists, etc, etc). I like your idea of an exercise for each group as being tasked with finding species of materials - we could create alternative genealogies of human and non-human actors to explore connections, overlaps, etc.
all the best
Iain
Angela writes: >> But I am intrigued by how we might use this methodologically. How might
>> we go about working if our activities were purely for our own pleasures?
>> This goes back to your sense that, for eg, Peter Coates and Douglass
>> Bailey *actually* want to be artists. How do we create a space in which
>> that might be possible without going down the route of simply and
>> superficially trying on one another's shoes for size? Although, there
>> might be something in adopting Adam Chodzko's shoe installation as a
>> concrete version of that method. If the Observer Book of... functions as
>> the shoes did, then we go for a walk with the material talisman of our
>> amateurishness. I think that a useful exercise might be for each group
>> to be tasked with finding species of materials - we could create
>> alternative genealogies of human and non-human actors to explore
>> connections, overlaps, etc.
>> Angela
>> --On 07 November 2007 09:46 +0000 iain Biggs
>>> Hi Angela
>>> The text I've been groping after and not remembering in recent
>>> conversations is "Requichat and His Body" in Barthes' The Responsibility
>>> of Forms: Critical essays on Music, Art, and Representation" (UCP 1991).
>>> In particular the section "Amateur" (pp. 230), in which he writes;
>>> "The amateur is not necessarily defined by a lesser knowledge, an
>>> imperfect technique ... But rather by this: he is the one who does not
>>> exhibit, the one who does not make himself heard. ... The amateur seeks
>>> to produce only his own enjoyment".
>>> Obviously I'm not interested in this in the literal sense/context in
>>> which Barthes presents it, but rather, methodologically, as an evocative
>>> indicative image of the (impossible) double of our various academic and
>>> artistic professionalisms.
Posted at Mar 12/2007 02:31AM:
AngelaPiccini: The slowest speed might actually be loitering? This would then tie in with some of our discussions at Temple Meads. The potential to tie geological timescales with the geographies of modernity with commodified time?
Preliminary reconnaissance of the Avonmouth / Severn Beach Littoral Zone.
Following on from Angela's observation, we've now tried that in practice. Below are some photographs from a preliminary walk - which included a good deal of loitering (with and without intent) - undertaken by Jim and myself with a view to getting a closer sense of the area.
Looking from Severn Beach towards Avonmouth - the sea wall as it is at the eastern-most end of the littoral before it becomes part of Seven Beach's seafront.
Negotiating the conflicts of non-place, in this case the planner's 'idea' of a public foot path and its physical reality 'on the ground'.
The complexities of a space dominated by the utilities of transport and drainage become much clearer when explored on foot.
"Walking the Dog" - a true story from the margins.
These two women are kennel maids who regularly use this area to exercise their charges. Out of a proper concern to keep the place tidy, they carry a good supply of brightly-coloured bags at all times, into which they carefully collect up the copious amounts of excrament deposited by the dogs during these invigorating walks. However, rather than carry this (increasingly heavy) collection of assorted dog shit with them for the full duration of the walk, they deposit it, more or less as and when it is produced, in the special bags. These then become interesting markers left at regular intervals on the first half of their walk. (Any temptation to adopt this practice as a form of territorial performance art should probably be resisted). The kennel maids then collect each bag as they come to it on their return journey. On the day we met them it appears, however, that they had had an unexpected experience.
We had seen these markers at regular intervals in the landscape and had commented on the bags' uniformity and the regularity of their deposition, and even speculated as to what exactly they might be but having got lost and had to retrace our steps, had given them no further thought. We then noticed that the bags had gone.
It appears that, having carried out their normal ritual of careful collecting and bagging as usual on the way out, the women were then disturbed to discover on their return that their carefully tied and deposited bags had all been taken by some person or persons unknown. Their inability to collect up the bags as usual had clearly prayed on their minds. As we were to discover, they began to think that some environmentalist had assumed the bags to have been thoughtlessly abandoned, rather than carefully deposited for future recovery. Perhaps fearing that we were those environmentalists, or perhaps members of an undercover government agency sent out to check up on the proper disposal of industrial scale deposits of canine excrement, one of them approached us to ask if we'd taken the bags. (We both had rucksacks on at the time, so presumably they thought we had stashed the bags away in them for future use as evidence!). In the long and slightly surreal exchange that followed, we collectively identified the most likely person to have removed the bags as being a (clearly environmentally-conscious) jogger, somebody we'd seen earlier, since nobody else at all appeared to have been in the area. (Supernatural intervention was ruled out at a fairly early stage).
When Jim and I resumed our walk it took me some time to get the vision of the athletic middle-aged jogger, now to be imagined as festooned with brightly coloured bags full of dog shit, running purposfully in search of the nearest rubbish bin with a view to disposing of his finds - not least because, by my calculation, he'd have to run a very long way indeed before he found one. Perhaps in the end he ran home with them?
"What happened to the foot path", or: coming to one of the points where the rural and quasi-rural elements of the littoral zone run up against large, heavily fenced industrial spaces and the road is the only way forward.
