Completed Painting: [dc]circuit 05/Kafka

'[dc]circuit 05/Kafka', Acrylic, Paper Collage & Mixed Media on Panel,
400 mm x 400 mm, 2026

Finally, we reach the fifth and final panel in my suite of ‘[dc]circuit’ paintings - namely, ‘[dc]circuit 05/Kafka’. Given the alchemical sequence implied in this group (as discussed in my last post), it’s only fitting that this one should be gold(ish) in its overall palette, and a variety of metallics do catch the light when it’s viewed from certain angles. It also seems appropriate that this one should be dedicated to Franz Kafka - my own personal gold standard when it comes to influential/inspirational literature. Given all my other tastes, it’s perhaps too predictable that I should also be a Kafka fan-boy, but there it is - he’s as good as it gets for me, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

This is the smallest of the set of five - being 400 mm square. When I first began to envisage these panels I decided to break my usual habit of painting related works or series of works at the same scale and format, and to inject a little more irregularity into proceedings. Therefore, whilst the three rectangular elements share a 600 mm x 400 mm portrait format, this one and ’02’ are square, albeit radically different in scale (’02’ being 600 mm x 600 mm). It felt important that the gold panel should be the smallest, suggesting a degree of value/scarcity, or perhaps that the best things often come in small packages. As is well known, Kafka’s novelistic oeuvre is also pretty small, and regarding ‘finished’ ones - even smaller. Admittedly, he somewhat made up for that with his copious output of short stories, but it was the novels I had particularly in mind here - specifically, ‘The Castle’ [1.].

Although it is never directly referenced in the text, it seems clear to me that Franz’s castle is, to all intents and purposes, the Pražký Hrad of his own home town, Prague. Anyone familiar with that destination knows how that massive edifice presides over the rest of the city, whilst somehow managing to remain strangely aloof. Just like Kafka’s castle, it is physically difficult to access frontally, involving a trek across the wide river on a congested bridge, before climbing steep streets and a formidable flight of stone stairs. The nominally ‘easier’ far entrance still involves a tram journey to a stop that many out-of-town visitors will fail to recognise, thus requiring a significant back-tracking exercise on foot. 

Of course, Kafka’s own castle is as much of a state of mind as a physical entity, with his hapless and reluctant Land Agent, K, repeatedly failing to gain acceptance by its ruling bureaucracy, and by extension - the infuriatingly obstructive denizens of the lower settlement, just as he fails to locate the correct route to a building he can clearly see. That neither his duties or any estate under his purview are ever defined, and that all roads repeatedly deny him access, seem to speak both to the Deleuzian idea of de/territorialisation mentioned in my previous post, and to the constant processes of random cartographic atomisation that characterise my work. As the novel unfolds, it becomes evident that gaining grudging favour from above is also difficult for the characters K encounters, and very easily lost also - for reasons none can fully explain. Worse still, he appears to become increasingly complicit in the worsening condition of any with whom he might have formed a relationship. As an outsider lacking any previous knowledge of the Castle and the impenetrable social hierarchies it dictates, he really never stood a chance. Kafka abandons his novel mid-thought (just as death interrupts a life, perhaps - allegory fans), suggesting he has become just as exhausted as is his protagonist, by the impenetrable world he has depicted.

Anyone lucky enough to visit Prague’s Hrad for ‘real’ will know that it is to encounter an enclosed, self-rposessed world of interlocking courtyards, internalised worship, arcane libraries, barred towers, and even a ‘hidden’ lane set aside for its incorporated subordinates. It is built on such a scale as to constitute a separate city within a city, and one has little sense of the streets below, once one is absorbed within its walls. For all it’s status as a prime tourist spectacle, complete with occasional outbursts of picturesque pageantry, it mostly exudes an air of eerie implacability and hidden intelligences - a fitting seat perhaps for the truly incestuous Hapsburg elite for whom it became at least a partial H.Q. The aforementioned and quaintly claustrophobic ‘Golden Lane’, enclosed towards the rear of the castle complex, was originally built for the royal goldsmiths, and it transpires that one of Kafka’s sisters later rented one of the small dwellings there for a while. Franz would occasionally visit, to write in relative seclusion.

My own little panel scrambles maps of the surrounding Hradčany district, along with a (partial) ground plan of the edifice itself in eroded form. The addition of a ghostly ‘K’ should be fairly obvious - it being the single most significant Kafkaesque ‘character’, if one refers to the protagonists of his three novels. My translation of ‘The Castle’ to ‘Das Schloss’ reflects the fact that, as a member of the minority Jewish population of Prague, Franz was expected to speak and write in German rather than the dominant Czech tongue. In effect, he was himself culturally marginalised twice over.

Whilst engaged in the production of these ‘[dc]circuit’ panels, I also happened to read a popular history of Prague, ‘Prague in Black and Gold’, by Peter Demetz [2.]. Of particular interest was the chapter outlining the reign of Rudolf II (the Bohemian lands being just one component of his territorial possessions as Holy Roman Emperor). Rudolf stands as a singularly picturesque but somewhat reclusive member of the Hapsburgs - a dynasty not exactly short on eccentric  characters. He ruled as HRE between 1576 and 1612, and is often seen as having partially  facilitating the catastrophic Thirty Years War that would convulse Europe, through his ineffectual  or misguided statecraft. Of more relevance to my own project is his status as one of the most voraciously acquisitive Renaissance collectors of art, jewels, weaponry, specimens of natural history, proto-scientific equipment, and exotica of all kinds. Alongside his famed ‘cabinet of curiosities’, he compiled an extensive and fantastic library to reflect his many interests and enthusiasms - not least of which was Alchemy. During Rudolph's reign, the numerous artists, scholars, philosophers, astronomers, astrologers, antiquarian dealers and cultural envoys invited to his court, were accompanied by a small army of alchemists - many of whom were patronised in their researches by the Emperor. Notable amongst these were the infamous John Dee and his distinctly shadier associate, Edward Kelley.

Thus it was that, for a period, Prague became famed as an alchemical hot-spot throughout Europe. Numerous medieval cellars throughout the ‘Golden City’, some still buried beneath the grand Baroque architecture that tourists now flock to admire, would become choked with fumes and encrusted with residues from experiments of varying degrees of toxicity and/or fatality. One might even argue that, at certain subterranean locations, the very fabric of the Prague became chemically altered - just as it was perhaps psychically transformed by the alchemists’ quest. I’ve long been fascinated by the ideas behind what became known as Psychogeography, but can’t help wondering if Psycho-chemistry isn’t also a label we might usefully employ. After all, any city is a kind of reactive crucible, whose multiple narratives might be recounted through the resulting accretions of grime, patination and chemical residues found on every surface.

Anyhow, his concludes my posts relating to each of the individual ‘[dc]circuit’ panels. However, the actual intention was always to compose an assemblage of five components that might be viewed as a whole, and I’ve yet to decide exactly how successful (or otherwise) I may have been in this. Lacking any easily accessible wall large enough to hang the group, I really need now to mock them up in miniature to assess how well they work together, and in which configuration(s) they might best be viewed. Certainly, their deliberately varying shapes and sizes dictate that a little creative experimentation is required there. Therefore, I hope to devote one more post to the group as a whole - and perhaps also to detail the overall alchemical sequence as it is finally revealed. 

Sometimes it feels like documenting all this stuff is almost more work than making the blinkin’ things in the first place!

[1.]:  Franz Kafka, ‘The Castle’ [Trans. J. A. Underwood], London/NYC, Penguin, 1926/1997

[2.]:  Peter Demetz, ‘Prague in Black and Gold’, London/NYC, Penguin, 1997

[Komponiert ohne künstliche intelligenz]

'The Annihilation Of Time And Space'* 1. (Starting Somewhere)

 

All Images: River Witham Walk, Washingborough, Lincolnshire, April 2023

It's fair to say that all the art I've produced in recent years has shared a clear urban focus. My entire life has been spent dwelling in cities of various sizes, and that has clearly shaped my consciousness (and tastes) in numerous ways. As has become customary, the pieces I have shown here in recent months (and which are still very much ongoing) all found their genesis in a fairly tight sector of densely urban terrain close to my Leicester home. 

However, as I have also periodically acknowledged, the less concentrated territories at the fringes of any conurbation, or those somewhat eerie interstitial sectors which may coalesce between closely-adjacent cities, can be as fascinating in their own way as any urban centre. These are commonly referred to as 'The Edgelands', and artists, writers, musicians, photographers, film makers, and the rest, have increasingly come to appreciate them for their particular (and sometimes paradoxical) qualities. J.G. Ballard noted long ago that such zones may well be where true futurity dwells. As our post-industrial economies mutate - and our grasp on a physical (built) reality dissolves ever further into the digital hive-consciousness, I find little reason to argue with his prophetic observations. In the twenty-first century, residing in a state of  transition, seepage or becoming, often appears to have replaced any idea of lasting connection to a single, identifiable location. That seems to be the case, both physically and psychically. Perhaps the real dilemma is whether one is bourn along with urgency, or instead chooses to drift.

In the event, my own relationship with such peripheral places is often tied-up with social or family visits, and that's certainly true of the landscape referenced here. Family commitments regularly take me to the dormitory village of Washingborough, just beyond the southeast boundary of Lincoln, where I grew up. The connecting road is punctuated by a crematorium, a bowling centre and a sewerage treatment plant - which certainly feel like classic edgeland features to me. Certainly, at little or no point does the traveller feel themselves to be properly 'out in the country' here. The River Witham Walk foot/cycle route, which follows a disused railway parallel to both the road and the river, also binds the village to the city. That way in particular, has come to symbolise a potential doubling-back to a much earlier chapter in my autobiography - one that can be comfortably pedalled in under 30 minutes.

However, in recent times, another, significantly more emphatic, intervention has been made across this landscape. This is the (decades-in-the-planning) Lincoln Eastern Bypass. Cutting across footpaths, waterways, rail lines (both current and disused) and intersecting with various pre-existing roads - the bypass represents a major feat of civil engineering, punctuated by bridges, roundabouts, embankments, and all the other accoutrements of modern road construction. More notably, and perhaps because of the very raison d'etre of any bypass, it has created its very own zone of highly palpable Edgeland terrain, with all that may (or may not) imply. 

In accordance with its avoidant function, the new(ish) road aims to process traffic through the landscape with high efficiency. Admittedly, a fully dual carriageway might have fulfilled that purpose even more effectively. Nevertheless, it is still a byway even more on its way to somewhere else than most roads - and one designed to negate any need to enter the city or surrounding villages, unless as a deliberate visitor.  Setting aside the routine necessities of commerce and industry, 'visiting' has become a clearly defined and marketable leisure-time activity these days - and one served by its own highly regulated infrastructure. As such, it represents just another option on a menu of approved activities - rather than something that might occur organically or on a whim. Naturally enough, the bypass signposts the designated access points to some heritage-based brand of alternative reality (as well as more workaday targets) for those determined to travel inward. However, it was clearly never intended to become a destination in its own right. The area surrounding it has consequently become one of those non-places, as a result of its superimposition on the map. What more reason could I need to loiter amongst its footbridges, verges and signage - and perhaps to travel 'inward' in a very different sense? 

There are no lay-bys - and very few feasible places to park within easy reach of the Eastern Bypass. However a network of adjacent bridle and footpaths, both new and old, do accompany it across the heavily remodelled landscape. Consequently, my bike has become the logical way to explore. For the time being, the River Witham Walk is currently less of a conduit to personalised urban memory - and more the gateway to a fascinating, alienated land that is simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. Just as one thing always leads to another, repeated visits over the last few months have revealed an ever-expanding range of possible subject matter - along with the attendant rhizome of potential associations and connecting ideas. And so, (without wishing to depart from the work I already have in hand - which does seem to be flowing quite nicely right now), it appears that another little sub-project is born. Honestly, I really should know better by now! However, rather than ring-fencing it as a competing distraction - perhaps I can simply regard it as just another, slightly removed tract of the same extended rhizomatic system. Ultimately, there really is only one map, after all.

I've yet to determine how this little phase of new activity might ultimately resolve itself. What began as a few speculative photos - opportunistically grabbed on a summer's afternoon in 2022, has now expanded into a significant archive of still images and associated video footage. I have already returned several times - documenting a new section of the route between its various bridges and junctions on each occasion. I'm wondering about the possibility of an artist book/photo essay-type thing at present, but we'll see what begins to solidify as I move beyond this current exploratory phase.

For now, there's no harm in presenting a little introductory pictorial evidence. Appropriately enough, these images were recently captured en-route to the bypass and without actually revealing anything of the main event. What they do indicate however, is that found texts, as usual, play an important part in my relationship with any environment I might fetch up in. Equally serendipitously, the signed information shown here relates to the replacement of one form of historical transport infrastructure with another. Clearly, the way we move through the physical environment, and how that interfaces with our perception of time, were as much of an issue in the nineteenth century as they are today. The archaeology of what once felt like the future, now decays serenely within earshot of the speeding traffic, just a few hundred metres away.

Perhaps most importantly of all - I seem to have found my title...

* The Stamford Mercury. Author & Date Unknown.

Significant Yellow Item: #2022.Y016 [trans_late / trans_scribe]

 

All Images: Central Leicester, November 2022

[Reconfigured/Translated Audio Transcription]:

This Weather Spoon restaurant suffers from the OIK fallacy. Erase the belief that everything is equal if it is already known. Well, duh! - the point is that the restaurant should take occasion to help the person who does not know what is the restaurant’s custom. No one was there to greet me, the customer. I needed to go to the bartender to ask at what table I may sit. No one came to take an order for a drink or for a meal or to clear the tables. There was a QR code if I had had use of a real smart waiter or waitress. I got up and went to the bar, maybe in order to phone my table to get the table number, or to pay for my order. There was no way of memorising my table number. There was no menu at the bar. There is an irony in the fact that there was on the customer's table a very large paper magazine. The food/drink menu could have been printed in the news (a tiny card could have explained that). Refusing a menu to the customer is Covid prevention. The map could have led me to the area where I noticed several elderly ladies had trouble. Negotiating these steps, chicken was brought to my table by someone you have to fetch alone. It would seem that the steps should be transformed into a ramp.

The chicken was very tender and must have been processed very well to be ready to be served so quickly. The grill marks on the processed chicken looked like the ones on the regal chickens. One must go to seek salt at another table, and condiments at another table full of coffee and probably tea by itself. There's nothing in the missing menu to indicate it. I wanted another drink but I didn't know what would happen to my plate if I had to go to the bar and get another drink. Note in hand then, I left - asking the scorer not to take my plate (there was no one there to protect my plate from things other people might do to it). I noticed there were menus visible on the way out but not visible on entering. The Weather Spoon was very successful with this mysterious system but for me it's quite short. When I come back to England I will never again try to eat at a restaurant.

Bristol Brutal

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Here's another short photo-essay from my recent Bristol dérive.  In this case, it features a series of architectural studies, of often-overlooked corners of the city - each stumbled upon, rather than sought-out, during my perambulations.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Anyone familiar with Bristol will know it's all too easy to be seduced by the Georgian, Regency and Victorian architectural styles, which still characterise much of the city - dating from the period of its spectacular mercantile expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries.  There's no denying that there's much to enjoy there, in terms of sheer visual (or atmospheric) environment.  But it's also important to remember that much of what now appears charming and quaint was built with the proceeds from massively exploitative colonial expansion, the trades in alcohol and tobacco, and most disturbingly - slavery.  Indeed, Bristol's dirty history as a major nexus of the slave trade is still commemorated in specific place names - not least Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill, and the various locations named after famed slave trader and so-called 'philanthropist' Edward Colston. 

Either way, Bristol has reinvented itself more than once since those days. Notably, it has  currently thrown-up numerous pockets of much more contemporary redevelopment -  often styled with the kind of sleek, almost hyper-real, minimalism beloved of late-stage Capitalism.  Such buildings often seem to incorporate highly reflective surfaces that seem to camouflage their real intent by throwing our own image back at us - or else the kind of curtain-walled transparency that might privilege the idea of transparency over any real insight into the interior workings of a specific institution.  Increasingly, there is almost a sense of architecture as a series of monumental screens - an analogue of the pocket-sized portals to the digital realm  we all now routinely carry.

Millennium Square, Cannon's Marsh, Bristol, April 2019

In Bristol, one such notable example would be the Millennium Square complex.  Nominally an attempt to re-imagine the old quayside hinterland of Canon's Marsh, as an 'exciting' public space, there's a strangely alienating Science Fiction quality at work here, with its huge mirrored sphere, geometric reflecting ponds, and purpose-built facades (suggesting the clean machine ethic of racked server towers).  Even those original dockside buildings that remain have been spruced up to become the carriers of blandly inspirational texts, or to incorporate an actual large video screen.

It occurs to me that the two most overtly favoured forms of architectural expressions at work in contemporary Bristol thus appear to reflect the city's commercial drive across the centuries, over any more civic aspirations.  This is as true of the rapacious sea-faring mercantilism evoked in the picturesque legacy of heritage Bristol, as it is of the race to monetise services and, above all - information, that informs its most recent manifestations.   

Freemantle Square, Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Reflecting (quite literally, in certain cases) on all of this, is fascinating, but there's another, perhaps less expected Bristol too - as demonstrated by most of these images.  This is the often arbitrary intervention of certain jarring elements of twentieth-century Modernism, or else - a kind of supremely quotidian functionalism, into the mix.  Thus, I could wander through picturesque Cotham, arriving at the charming (and personally nostalgic) Freemantle Square, only to turn a corner, and be suddenly confronted by a series of startlingly antithetical blocks of tawdry Brutalist public housing.  Clinging to the edge of Kingsdown, as it descends to Stokes Croft below, these feel like ramparts, from which one might survey wide tracts of the city as if from a disconnected, parallel timescale.  They're like a point of chronological fracture, or alternative history - just as they represent a rupture in physical and architectural space.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

Elsewhere, I found found myself pausing, on the steep climb from historic Park Street - and up to Clifton (that pinnacle of old, moneyed Bristol), only to find myself peering through concrete slats into a basement car-park so baldly functional as to seem totally decontextualised - like a pocket of parallel reality, or a portal through which one might leave the world outside behind.  A little further, a battered steel box, aspirated noisily through the slatted grille occupying its front face.  It was unexplained by its surroundings, and ignored by all other passers-by, and I'm left wondering exactly what kind of hidden subterranean realm might by served by such a ventilation duct.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

High Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Another, similar, basement space was to be observed, screened behind security gates at High Kingsdown.  This is part of a self-contained realm of modernist estate housing, inserted into the older and more organic surrounding neighbourhood, in another incidence of arresting architectural juxtaposition.  Possibly planned to provide staff housing for the nearby hospital (I'm guessing), the stylistic contrast with its neighbouring areas is so marked as to suggest it might even be some kind of independent micro-state.  I passed through freely, in the event - but expected to be challenged for my papers at any moment.   

Sir James Barton, Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Overlooking the rim of 'The Bearpit' at St James Barton Roundabout (itself, a whole other story - almost resembling a kind of post-apocalyptic anarcho-shanty town, these days), I found a grid of shabby mirrored windows in whose bleak signage, the commercial property boom seems to have been reduced to a kind of panicky fire sale. Nearby, a disability access lift has been inserted into a narrow aperture - resembling nothing so much as some kind of transporter unit - from which one might be beamed onto to the surface of a different planet altogether.  However, the broken bottle shards, alongside, and clearly compromised 'safety' barrier, are hardly reassuring - a situation unalleviated  by a few runs of hazard tape, inexpertly applied to the lift itself.  Would one's scrambled atoms ever be successfully reassembled in their correct configuration by such a dubious-looking unit? - we might ask (Scotty).

Sir James Barton Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Perhaps the most dramatic juxtaposition of all comes in the form of The Bristol Hotel & Conference Centre.  It's a building I've always found thrilling in its breathtaking incongruity.  With historic Queen's Square to one side, and the repurposed industrial archeology of the old Floating Harbour, to the other - one can only stand before its stark, pre-cast grids, and the even more dramatic latticework of its carpark facade, and marvel at the misguided conviction of its architects - that theirs' was the real future to build.

Of course, such buildings are generally regarded as little more than a pernicious blight, these days.  It's amazing just how many have already been swept away around the country, and I can only assume this one survives because it's prime city centre location has caused the hotel it houses to thrive as a business.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Much has been written about how the Modernism of the post-war twentieth century, and the brief moment of social(ist) consensus it represents, now feels indicative of a kind of future that never was.  Such ideas have spawned much of the recent pop-cultural re-imagining of the idea of Hauntology, as well as the awakening of a kind of alt-heritage impulse amongst Leftists, the self-consciously design savvy, and those inclined to embrace irony, or contrarianism.  But I think it would be disingenuous not to allow that there's probably a significant element of good old fashioned nostalgia at play too.  For some of us, of a certain vintage, such buildings represent a world we were born into - one whose naive Utopianism might have suggested the beginning of a more idealistic age, but which now seems, instead, to mark an end to innocence altogether.

If the main impulse behind my little West-Country excursion was a degree of autobiographical reprocessing (as I think it was), the meditations above are really only part of a more personal emotional journey.  They definitely represent certain familiar ideas that I've connected with in different cities, over recent years.  But, perhaps because of the even more dramatic architectural juxtapositions at play in Bristol, they seemed to swim into even sharper focus at various points during my brief stay.  Also, whatever cod-philosophy I might dress it all up in, you already know how much I love to photograph those straight edges and formal geometries, as well as all that delicious bleakness  - don't you?