…And The Day After

Washingborough, Lincolnshire, December 2014

We had a little fall of snow on Boxing Day evening this year.  It was a few hours too late to allow for much sentimentalising over white Christmases, and didn’t hang around very long, - at least where I was.  Nonetheless, this being Britain, a few centimetres of the white stuff quickly became inflated in the media imagination into a major weather event.  There were numerous weather and travel warnings, shading into implications of infrastructure breakdown and societal collapse.  Apologies to anyone who may have experienced the odd closed road or cancelled bus service, or who may have lost control on a slippery road, but really I’m baffled by how easily we get ourselves into a national tizzy about so little in this country.  Like most Brits, I retain a race-fascination with the weather, but this affected mild helplessness is something else again.

Washingborough, Lincolnshire, December 2014

Anyway, it was pretty enough for a few hours on 27 December, and I'm always intrigued by how a fall of snow can affect the quality of illumination and general appearance of the most familiar surroundings.  Finding myself at my parental home, just outside Lincoln, I took a couple of shots of melting snow in the placid housing estate where my Mother and Stepfather live.  I won’t pretend this is normally the most stimulating environment, (visually or otherwise), but after its dusting of snow, I was immediately reminded of George Shaw’s lovely painting of a similar situation, ‘Scenes From The Passion: The First Day Of The Year’.

George Shaw, ‘Scenes From The Passion: The First Day Of The Year’, Humbrol Enamel
On Board, 2003.

I’ve outlined my enthusiasm for Shaw’s work before, and always respond to his ability to mine a rich vein of melancholy visual poetry within the mundane surroundings of his childhood home in Coventry’s Tile Hill.  I don’t have the same emotional memory-connection with my Mother’s current home, so this time it was really a case of reality taking on greater resonance through the imitation of Art.

Ermine Estate, Lincoln, (Photographer Unknown)

Coincidentally, I'd earlier taken a little car journey of reminiscence around Lincoln’s Ermine Estate, on the city’s northern fringes.  The Ermine is a post-war housing development with a certain nostalgic resonance for me, being a place I, and my friends would often wander around aimlessly during our Secondary School lunch breaks.  We were searching for some undefined excitement beyond the school gates I suppose, but never really found it.  Strangely though, for all its suburban blandness, the estate always had a sense of slightly alien potential in my mind, - a frisson of stimulating unease.  Perhaps, I should undertake my own visual exploration of that peripheral territory of the imagination some day.

Iain Sinclair: 'London Orbital'

I’ve just finished reading ‘London Orbital’ [1.] by Iain Sinclair, something that is rather overdue.  Sinclair is a leading contemporary light of literary Psychogeography and indeed, the first writer who encapsulated properly, a range of attitudes to the urban environment I had previously felt but never really identified formally.  I’ve read and enjoyed much of Sinclair’s work over the years so it really is quite shameful that it’s taken me this long to get round to reading this one.

Iain Sinclair

Sinclair is primarily, (although not exclusively), regarded as a chronicler of London.  First published in 2002, ‘London Orbital’ represents his attempt to investigate the capital, from the outside in as it were, by walking around its perimeter, as delineated by the course of the M25 orbital motorway.  It is therefore, not only a high point of recent Pychogeographical writing, but also an exemplar of the ‘Edgelands’ theme that emerged a few years ago [2.], and to which I have alluded here several times.

Sinclair shared his series of contiguous walks with a number of companions, including artist Renchi Bicknell, fellow writer Kevin Jackson, photographer Marc Atkins, multi-disciplinary conceptualist Bill Drummond and noted Psychogeographical filmmakers Chris Petit and Patrick Keiller.  The project also included a number of interviews, most notably with that other genre Godfather J.G. Ballard.  Interestingly, Sinclair’s orbit can be seen as joining the dots between Ballard’s beloved Heathrow hinterlands and motor-erotic road fixations [3.]; Petit’s road movie sensibilities [4.]; Keiller’s cinematic portraits of London, Suburbia and the hidden countryside beyond [5.]; and indeed, Karl Hyde/Kieran Evans’ more recent Essex-based music and film collaboration [6.].  All concerned bring their own particular outlook on the territory traversed and to the general themes that emerge through Sinclair’s account.

Amongst these themes are: the huxterish residential redevelopment of London’s old chain of peripheral mental asylums; the secrecy of various military-industrial and government institutions; the relationship of suburban and dormitory living with the enduring English myth of rural idyll; the role of the motorway in suburbanising East End crime; the blank consumerism of Thatcher-Blair’s Britain epitomised in the Bluewater and Lakeside shopping complexes; and the empty spectacle of London’s celebration of the Millennium.  The much derided Millennium Dome becomes a notional centre point for the circular march, which thus becomes, not only an examination of London’s fringe, but of the state of the capital/Capital, (and by extension, the nation), at the turn of the century.

M23 Arial View

Bluewater Shopping Centre, West Thurrock, Essex

As ever, what I value most in Sinclair’s work, (and the Psychogeog. approach generally), are the connections made between territory travelled and observed; the historical/artistic/cultural associations discovered in specific locations; the socio-political, (often satirical), reading of landscapes; more or less believable and consciously acknowledged conspiracy theories; and highly personal responses, resulting in the overall construction of a multi-facetted, often highly subjective, reaction to Geography.  This all divides between new revelations and the author’s existing pre-occupations, and the way they feed into the other.

Queen Elizabeth Bridge, M25 Crossing Of The River Thames, Dartford, Kent

Proctor & Gamble Soap & Detergent Factory, West Thurrock, Essex

The skill that Sinclair brings to bear on this process is beautifully encapsulated in the passages that conflate Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ [7.] with the contemporary oil tanks and storage facilities of Purfleet and West Thurrock; the intersection of motorway and river at Dartford; and the vampirical predations of developers and property brokers.

“Vampires, according to Stoker’s mythology, have problems crossing water… The Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, scarlet lights at dawn and dusk, is a ladder for vampires.  A ladder on which blood is turned into oil.  And back again.  A motorcycle outrider with BLOOD on his vest.” [8.]

“Storage is the major downriver industry: human, industrial, retail landfill.  Petrol stations all over the south-east are supplied from Purfleet, night-tankers roll in convoy from the gate.  Dracula laid down the paradigm; fifty heavy coffins of Transylvanian earth to be distributed across London.” [9.]

“The Count recognizes that property speculation, an adequate portfolio, begins in the badlands: Purfleet, Mile End New Town, Bermondsey.  Dracula anticipates the boys in braces, Thatcher’s blue-nosed sharks, Blair’s private/public arrangements.  Buy toxic.  Buy cheap: Madhouses, old chapels, decaying abbeys.  Then make your play: storage and distribution.” [10.]

Esso Oil Storage Facility, Purfleet,  Essex

I polished off ‘London Orbital’ in only a few, (admittedly, leisure-filled), days and would heartily recommend it, as both a portal to Sinclair’s other writing, and an enjoyable, highly readable example of all the Psychogeographic palaver in general.  Now I really need to watch the filmed companion piece Sinclair made with Chris Petit and J.G. Ballard, as soon as possible [11.].

[1.]:  Iain Sinclair, ‘London Orbital, A Walk Around The M25’, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 2003, (First Published: Granta, 2002).

[2.]:  Most clearly identified in: Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Edgelands, Journeys Into England’s True Wilderness’, London, Jonathan Cape, 2011.

[3.]:  J G Ballard, ‘Crash’, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973, and: ‘Concrete Island’, London, Jonathan Cape, 1974.

[4.]:  Most fully realised in: Christopher Petit (Dir.), ‘Radio On’, UK/Germany, Road Movies Filmproduktion/BFI, 1979.

[5.]:  Patrick Keiller (Dir.), ‘London’, UK, Konink/BFI/Channel 4, 1994; ‘Robinson In Space’, UK, Konink/BFI/BBC Films, 1997; ‘Robinson In Ruins’, UK, Arts & Humanities Research Council/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation/Royal College of Art/BFI, 2010.

[6.]:  Karl Hyde, ‘Edgeland’, and: Karl Hyde & Kieran Evans (Dir.), ‘The Outer Edges, (Edgeland Version)’, Universal Music Operations Ltd., 2013

[7.]:  Bram Stoker, ‘Dracula’, London, Archibald Constable & Co., 1897

[8.], [9.], [10.]:  Iain Sinclair, ‘London Orbital, A Walk Around The M25’, London, Penguin Books Ltd., 2003, (First Published: Granta, 2002).

[11.]:  Iain Sinclair & Chris Petit (Dirs.), ‘London Orbital’, UK, Illuminations, 2004

At The Edges

Shaun Morris' Exhibition 'Stolen Car' is about to open in Rugby and I was interested to read his fellow Birmingham artist Andrew Smith's essay on the work in a recent post on Shaun's own blog [1.]. Those motorway paintings are completely rooted in the kind of intermediate zones, delineated by major road systems, where a large city frays into the countryside.  Having grown up on the fringes of Birmingham, Shaun is still clearly drawn to the particular qualities of such places and the associations they provoke.

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car', Charcoal On Paper, 2012

Shaun Morris, 'Stolen Car' Painting, Oil On Canvas, 2012

Coincidentally, it was also Andy Smith who recommended Robert Smithson's writings to me and I'm taking the liberty here of quoting verbatim an extract from his 'Spectral Suburbs', - itself just part of a longer, wider-ranging essay entitled 'A Museum Of Language In The Vicinity Of Art, from 1968 [2.].  It's a great piece of writing that connects with the whole subject of suburbia and 'non sites' that have fascinated numerous creative artists in recent decades.  It also gives specific mention to Ed Ruscha, - an artist whose work interests me greatly.

Ed Ruscha, 'Every Building On The Sunset Strip', Artist's Photo Book, 1966

"Suburbia encompasses the large cities and dislocates the 'country'.  Suburbia literally means 'the city below'; it is a circular gulf between city and country - a place where buildings seem to sink away from one's vision - buildings fall back into sprawling babels or limbos.  Every site glides away towards absence.  An immense negative entity of formlessness displaces the centre which is the city and swamps the country.  From the worn down mountains of North New Jersey to postcard skylines of Manhattan, the prodigious variety of 'housing projects' radiate into a vaporised world of cubes.  The landscape is effaced into sidereal expanses and contractions.  Los Angeles is all suburb, a pointless phenomenon which seems uninhabitable, and a place swarming with dematerialised distances.  A pale copy of a bad movie.  Edward Ruscha records this pointlessness in his 'Every Building on the Sunset Strip'.  All the buildings expire along a horizon broken at intervals by vacant lots, luminous avenues, and modernist perspectives.  The outdoor immateriality of such photographs contrasts with the pale but lurid indoors of Andy Warhol's movies.  Dan Graham gains this 'non-presence' and serial sense of distance in his suburban photos of forbidding sites.  Exterior space gives way to the total vacuity of time.  Time as a concrete aspect of mind mixed with things is attenuated into ever greater distances, that leave one fixed in a certain spot.  Reality dissolves into leaden and incessant lattices of solid diminution.  An effacement of the country and city abolishes space, but establishes enormous mental distances.  What the artist seeks is coherence and order - not 'truth', correct statements or proofs.  He seeks the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate." [3.]

Ed Ruscha, 'Sunset Strip', Scratched Photograph, 1966/1995

Los Angeles, California, (Photographer Unknown)

Los Angeles, California, (Photographer Unknown)

Ruscha's L.A. is, of course, the archetype of the de-centred, freeway-dominated modern city and in 1968, America was the best place to experience the phenomenon in its most highly developed form.  I witnessed it myself, in 2000 whilst driving across the interminable outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, - a city that resembles nothing so much as the desert it emerges from.

Phoenix, Arizona, (Photographer Unknown)

Dan Graham, 'Homes For America', Offset Litho Print, 1966

Dan Graham, 'Homes For America', Photographic Print, 1966

Notable home grown poets of similar terrain would include writers J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair, Michael Simmons Roberts and Paul Farley; film maker Patrick Keiller and painter George Shaw, but the entire list of those who have engaged with it would be much longer,  (Ballard and Sinclair have both made a feature of motorways in their writing, it should also be remembered). Indeed, are not most people born since the war actually denizens and potential chroniclers of the suburbs?

We're all familiar with the extensive suburbs surrounding big cities but these days, most towns and even villages have their own spreading skirts of estate housing and light industry, or are simply conjoined or absorbed into larger conurbations. British suburbia may be less diffuse, and often more parochial in nature than the world that Smithson and fellow artist Dan Graham revealed but increasingly, a similar kind of romantic alienation can be felt here too, - in contemporary industrial estates, business parks, and green-field developments of all sorts.  

George Shaw, 'The New Houses', Enamel On Panel, 2011

Film Still From 'London', Dir. Patrick Keiller, 1994

J.G. Ballard Outside His Shepperton Home

Smithson's philosophical coda has had me meditating on the core function and motives of artists for several days.  The notable subjectivity of his response to suburbia as a phenomenon, underlines his comment that what an artist really seeks is...

''...the fiction that life will sooner or later imitate' [4.].

  

Shaun Morris' exhibition of paintings, 'Stolen Car' can be seen at Floor One Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum between Friday 9 February and Saturday 22 February, 2013.

[1.]:  Andrew Smith, 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town: The Paintings Of Shaun Morris', 2013

[2.], [3.], [4.]:  Robert Smithson, 'Spectral Suburbs', (Part of 'A Museum Of Language In The Vicinity Of Art', 1968), In Jack Flam (Ed.), 'Robert Smithson: Collected Writings', Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996

Robert Smithson: The Psychogeography Of New Jersey

I'm doing quite a lot of reading in the midst of my current phase of research and creative meditation.  Paintbrushes are being wielded on a small scale but in reality, most of my current activity is taking place between computer screens, camera lenses and the pages of sketchbooks and literature.

One book that's already making an impression, despite my being only part way in, is 'Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings' , edited by Jack Flam. [1.]  It was recommended to me by Andy Smith when we exhibited in Birmingham last November and my good friend Suzie was kind enough to buy me a copy for Christmas.  Thanks to them both; it's already providing plenty of food for thought.

Smithson With 'Spiral Jetty' Work In Progress.
Photograph: Gianfranco Gorgoni, 1970

Film Still From: Robert Smithson, 'Spiral Jetty', 1970

I knew Smithson as a leading light of the 1960s and 70s American Land Art movement and for his 'Spiral Jetty' constructed in Utah's Great Salt Lake but hadn't really considered the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of his practice.  As the writings demonstrate, a wide range of serious and original thought lay behind his Minimalist Sculpture and later interventions in the physical landscape.  So far, two pieces have really chimed with my own interests, reflecting, as they do, an identifiably American Psychogeographical attitude to specific locations.

Robert Smithson, 'Untitled', Mirrored Plastic & Steel, 1964

'The Crystal Land' [2.] is Smithson's account of a geological expedition to the quarries of his native New Jersey, made with the Minimalist artist Donald Judd and their wives in 1966.  It fascinates me how Smithson switches focus between microscopic, macroscopic and personal spaces and between factual descriptions of the area's mineralogy; reflections on the aesthetics and mood of the region; anecdotes about the day's events and a meditation on the inconsequential details of their car's interior.  In one paragraph he describes excavating quartz crystals; in the next he discusses the area's middle-income housing developments, listing pretentious names and cheesy colour schemes, then explains how,

"The highways crisscross through towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete.  In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence.  From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centres, a sense of the crystalline prevails." [3.]

A subsequent account of their ice cream break quickly becomes a discussion of the structure of ice crystals before Smithson embarks on the following description,

"My eyes glanced over the dashboard, it became a complex of chrome fixed into an embankment of steel.  A glass disc covered the clock.  The speedometer was broken.  Cigarettes were packed into the ashtray.  Faint reflections slid over the windshield.  Out of sight in the glove compartment was a silver flashlight and an Esso map of Vermont.  Under the radio dial (55-7-9-11-14-16) was a row of five plastic buttons in the shape of cantilevered cubes.  The rearview mirror dislocated the road behind us.  While listening to the radio some of us read the Sunday newspapers.  The pages made slight noises as they turned; each sheet folded over their laps forming temporary geographies of paper.  A valley of print or a ridge of photographs might come and go in an instant." [4.]

Robert Smithson, 'Untitled', Mirrored Plastic & Steel, 1965

Everything before that beautiful, pivotal paragraph relates to the theme of crystals, whilst everything after involves the dismal qualities of the wider landscape.  Slag heaps; quarry equipment; pylons; railways and fences predominate over "partially demolished" [5.] vegetation.  A neighbouring region of swamps, motels and garbage fires suggests a Martian film location.  Finally, the image of mineral structure returns as they re-enter New York City amongst the repeating square tiles of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Robert Smithson, 1962.  Photographer Unknown

The second document 'A Tour Of The Monuments Of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)' [6.] describes a later, solo expedition into the artist's home state and opens with him boarding a bus and perusing newspaper surveys of New York galleries and a S.F. novel by Brian Aldiss, (Entitled 'Earthworks') appropriately enough.

'The Bridge Monument Showing Wooden Sidewalks,'
Photograph: Robert Smithson, 1967

'Monument With Pontoons: The Pumping Derrick',
Photograph: Robert Smithson, 1967

'The Great Pipe Monument',  Photograph: Robert Smithson, 1967

The 'monuments' that that Smithson visits in Passaic are of the most mundane variety.  The first is a river swing bridge of seemingly utilitarian design that he photographs repeatedly with his cheap camera.  I'm instantly reminded of my own current habit of standing in the cold to photograph railway bridges and cement hoppers with a thoroughness verging on obsession.  Then follows an investigation of a pumping derrick, pipeline and a water outfall system in which Smithson suddenly shifts from factual description to sexual metaphor and wild free association.

'The Fountain Monument, Birdseye View',
Photograph: Robert Smithson, 1967

'The Fountain Monument, Side View', 
Photograph: Robert Smithson, 1967

I'm struck by how dazzling sunlight affects the photographer Smithson's relationship to his surroundings and,

"…cinema-ized the subject, turning the bridge and the river into an over exposed picture.  Photographing it…was like photographing a photograph.  The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of 'stills' through my Instamatic into my eye." [7.]

The ways in which our experience of reality's continuum is modified once we interpose a lens between it and our eye is something that always fascinates me during my own photographic forays.

And so the piece progresses, through workaday streets and the sublime vacancy of car lots; amongst suburbs and an urban centre that actually feels very uncentered.  At each step the most conventionally unpromising of material provides the stimulus for associative thought, ideas generation and philosophical discourse.  Viewing a partially constructed road triggers a meditation on how suburbs grow, constructing a supposedly utopian future without any historical foundation.  He starts to see the future as,

"…lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past;" [8.],

and observes that,

"…Time turns metaphors into things and stacks them up in cold rooms or places them in the celestial play-grounds of the suburbs." [9.]

Passaic appears full of holes to the artist, - spread thin in comparison with the density of urban New York.  These qualities of insubstantiality and anti-historical, vacant neutrality are, I think, a recognisable quality of those transitional zones often called 'Edgelands' today [10.].  Smithson's impressions of Passaic's lack of substance leads him to re-imagine it as a map of itself with himself standing on cardboard, not earth. 

Robert Smithson, 'Negative Map Showing Region Of The Monuments
Along The Passaic River', 1967

The piece ends with an almost metaphysical discussion of the nature of entropy, - itself triggered by his observation of the final monument, - a simple sand pit that he likens to a "model dessert" [11.].  It becomes the hypothetical arena for an experiment to prove his theory on the subject.

'The Sandbox Monument', Phtograph: Robert Smithson, 1967

I love these pieces, not least for the quality of Smithson's writing, but also because they seem to validate my own habitual view of the world and, (to others - possibly baffling), behaviour.  He exhibits an approach that is simultaneously intelligent, intuitive and imaginative and I applaud his ability to find visual delight and profound significance in the most overlooked of subject matter.  I'm inspired by his example to write more creatively in accompaniment of the photographs from my own expeditions.

[1.]:  Robert Smithson, Jack Flam (Ed.), ‘Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings’, Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996

[2.] - [5.]:  Robert Smithson, ‘The Crystal Land’, 1966, In: Robert Smithson, Jack Flam (Ed.), ‘Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings’, Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996

[6.] - [11.]:  Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour Of The Monuments Of Passaic, New Jersey’, 1967, In: Robert Smithson, Jack Flam (Ed.), ‘Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings’, Berkeley, University Of California Press, 1996