A personal view of psychogeography; text for a talk given in Tainan, Taiwan, 2019

A wander through the idea, with diversions.

A personal view

Although the term psychogeography was coined at a specific identifiable moment of time, and in the specific context of the Situationist movement, it has long escaped this original context.  The exploration, wandering of a city (or indeed a landscape) following no conventional map, but being alive to the interplay of history, politics, memory, myths, can be seen to stretch back in time, and to be a way of engaging with our place in the world that is certainly common in the large urban conurbations that now cover the Earth.  The maps we use to navigate our way around a city are mere abstractions, a way of getting from A to B (or Z) to enable us to be good citizens of the great capitalist enterprises, aided by excellent travel systems that ensure we arrive at the office in time to begin another day of sending emails.  Why it is necessary to send all these emails, to arrange meetings in order to send more emails, is not to be questioned.

Once the maps we carried were physical objects, and every inhabitant of London (for example) carried a pocket A – Z Guide to the city, dog-eared and rain-stained, but still useful.  Then Google took over, and we follow that moving dot on the screen as if it really is us – and so we stare at the abstraction of lines and pixelate symbols and ignore the world we wander through.  Maps are not perfection, and as with the A –Z Guide – where the leap from one page to the next was a perilous affair – Google has glitches, and moves the geography of the world to fit into its abstractions.  And so the Longitude zero line – a real physical line that demarked East from West, and the basis of all modern navigation – has been shifted to a litter bin in the park.

The excitement of thinking psychogeographically, and throwing away our conventional maps, is that it enables us to re-engage with the world, to be alive to the cities we have made and the strata of memory that composes their substance.  Not only cities, but the entire environment contains the traces and fragments of human habitation, the political and psychological map that overlays the landscape and sits at variance to the official meaning imposed by power.  It should always be remembered that those in power design the city to tell their version of events, so that your journey to work bypasses the monument to the man(!) whose example you should follow, or commemorates the victory that must never be forgotten.  Such monuments are nearly always forgotten, and become memorials to being invisible.  Such contradictions are to be found everywhere, and make a pyschogeographic wander a process of creative and critical rediscovery, as we become archaeologists of the forgotten.

Although the concept is articulated in France, there is a parallel collection of writers and artists working in the UK whose projects can fit within this loose category.  In the symbiotic relationships that have developed between literature, architectural theory and practice, sculpture, site-specific installation, video, painting have provided an open and rich field that encourages a process of critical wandering and engagement with the urban and rural environment (the latter perhaps because artists now find it too expensive to live in big cities).

There is a long tradition of novelists and poets seeing the city through the lens of a personal vision – William Blake walks through the park at Peckham Rye (which is within walking distance of my studio in London) and sees angels singing in a tree – the metaphysical interacting with the actual.  For Blake this is not a vision, it is just that he is able to see the world as it really is.

Thomas De Quincey has opium-induced visions of the city as he wanders the streets, poor and starving.  His later accounts of the dream city that shimmered over the real become central to his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater

This idea, of there being another London that somehow exists alongside the one that is encountered by the everyday inhabitant, returns in the contemporary fiction of Neil Gaiman.  His concept of London Below (in the novel Neverwhere) is of a subterranean parallel city that intersects with the real at various important (and usually old) sites, with areas that make use of the names and myths of the real place.  The name itself is an allusion to the poor underclass that has been made invisible during the great financial boom.

The slippages of both time and space that is in Neverwhere is also in the fiction of Peter Ackroyd, whose book Hawksmoor is based in Spitalfields, an area of London that is a swirling fog of myths and history.  The book takes as its central point the church in Spitalfields built by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (), and from this builds a narrative that involves the past intersecting with the present, and with a fictional interpretation of the possible magical significance of the church.

Spitalfields, and in particular the area around Brick Lane, is central to an entirely different narrative, one that shows the problem with allowing a view of history that focuses on the supposed mystical significance of events and people.  I am drawn to strange stories, yet these must be treated with caution lest they become the only interpretation of places.

Brick Lane and its surrounding area has always been the place in London where immigrants have first settled.  In the beginning it was French Catholics fleeing persecution, and many of the buildings and workshops in the area owe their origins to this first wave of refugees.  Later it was those of the Jewish faith fleeing the pogroms in Russia, and then in the 1960’s it was Muslim immigrants from Pakistan.  This has produced an area with layers of religions and cultures, as each group has settled in the area, made a living, and eventually moved on.  The one constant has been working with cloth and clothing, which means that my current location in Wanhua reminds me, oddly, of East London in the 1970’s.

There is one building in the area that is an encapsulation of the different waves of migration – built first as a Catholic Church, then converted to a Synagogue, and now it is a Mosque. 

Above a synagogue was the locked room of the caretaker.  He had disappeared sometime in the 1960’s, but the room was not opened for thirty years.

Upon the forcing of the door what was revealed within was an abandoned apartment, with all the possessions still intact of someone who had seemingly vanished.  An urban myth grew up around this person – that he had been engaged in strange and secret activities, that his sudden disappearance was the result of secret researches he was undertaking, and the traces of which could be seen in the books in different languages, the maps of London with carefully traced routes throughout the city…a man of mystery.

The truth is more prosaic.  Rodinsky (the name of the inhabitant of the room) was an average poor person, but with an interest in self-education and in learning languages (hence the notes in strange scripts…actually Chinese).  He walked to see his sister and few friends, the routes traced out on the maps were these journeys noted down for future reference (an not something involving a secret agenda).  He had simply set out to visit someone, fallen ill, and died.

The true narrative was uncovered by the artist Rachel Lichenstein, who together with the writer Iain Sinclair wrote Rodinsky’s Room.  Originally they had planned to make a site-specific work centring on the actual room, a project funded by Artangel (of whom more later).  They wanted to make a work that rescued the real Rodinsky from the myth, but this proved difficult as the desire for the myth proved too strong (a desire fuelled by the money that could be made from the story of the ‘disappeared occultist’, as this all coincides with the time when Spitalfields shifts from being a run-down inner city area to an up-and-coming area for trendy cafes). 

Iain Sinclair has written a number of books that explore the multiple narratives of (specifically East) London.  His books are a poetic evocation of the personal and the political history of areas of the city, allied with a critical view of contemporary developments as finance and the global rich turn areas of the city into gated apartments and empty other places of community.

In London Orbital he follows the route of the M25 motorway that encircles the city.  He does this in a series of walks accompanied by friends from a variety of different backgrounds (from workers to film-makers), and it is the conversational interplay between Sinclair and his companions, together with the reportage of the conversations with people they meet on the way allied with the historical background of this outer fringe of London that provides the subject of the book.  This area is a place of low-grade recycling industries, out-of-town offices and call-centres, places associated with the ‘secret-state’ (military and security), and derelict mental hospitals being converted to up-market apartments.

Sinclair’s works of urban psychogeography have a basis in actual explorations of the city, using specific places to critically examine the underlying political currents that affect decisions over the use and mis-use of space – a prime example being the manner in which the London Olympics of 2012 allowed the privatisation of what had once been public space (this can also be seen in the manner in which shopping malls turn public streets into private spaces).

Rings of Saturn, by WG Sebald, reads as if it is a factual account of a walking tour undertaken by the author in the East of England.  There are even faded photographs, and digressions into history (for example the history of silk production and the Taiping revolt  in China) that relate to, yet lead from, the main narrative of the walk.  Yet it is not possible to follow the route of the walk, for the distances and geography have been shifted in order to amplify Sebald’s melancholy observations on history.  Even the photographs are fictions, taken by the author and then subject to a process of fading by being photocopied multiple times, until the right level of obscurity is achieved.  It is as if Sebald had decided on the associations of history and memory he wished to explore, and then reconstructed the landscape to fir this narrative, producing a wander through his own version of the east of England.  In truth that is how we encounter the world, remaking it as a landscape that fits our own pre-occupations, and editing out the rest except as incidental.  The nature of the pre-occupations this reveals, is however, telling.

Both Sinclair and Sebald are important writers for visual artists, with their observations on history and memory in connection to the environment that bears the traces of humanity chiming with much current practice.  Artangel has already been mentioned with connection to Sinclair, and together with Locus+, it is an important curatorial organisation that works closely with artists to produce site-specific projects.

One early project commissioned by Artangel drew inspiration from a book called The Old Straight Track.  This was written by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins in the 1925, and promulgated Watkin’s theory of ley lines.  The UK countryside is dotted with various sites of antiquity, from medieval churches (usually built on the sites of much older religious buildings) to standing stones, to ancient burial mounds.  On a map it is possible to draw a straight line between such sites, connecting them with a network that can be seen reflected in the ancient pathways connecting the site.  Watkins’ idea was that this was an aid for navigation in the days before Google (or any maps), a series of significant landmarks of ritual significance.  In the 1960’s this was further developed to see the lines as actual lines of some sort of mystical energy that the initiate could tap directly.  A kind of psychic power grid or ancient wi-fi.  The idea has turned up in multiple novels, films, usually in connections with ancient aliens or elder gods.  Yet, despite the obvious unlikely nature of the idea, the concept of the landscape being more than the physical reality we see does not go away…

And this mystical view of the landscape of the UK has its parallel in contemporary cities, where significant sites that promote lines of visibility is implicit to he various official monuments that are the traces of the imposition of power.  Monuments and memorials are designed to be seen from a distance, to exert a powerful influence by the nature of their symbolism and visibility.   Monumental statues and symbolic architecture are now seen as the province of the dictator, yet perhaps the towers that dominate our cities are the new monuments to the triumph of global capital (and such buildings as The Shard often turn up in contemporary fictions as the site of mysterious powerful entities).

The Shard is only the latest in the ecology of towers that has overtaken London.  Among the first was Canary Wharf, which can be seen to symbolise the beginning of the social changes to the east of London that have destroyed communities and driven the poor to invisibility.  The changes that have overtaken the UK, and specifically England, have formed the subject matter for the films of Patrick Keiller.  Described as ‘an architect who makes films, and a film maker who makes installations’  Keiller’s three major films (Robinson in Ruins, Robinson in Space, London) are records of the journeys of the fictional Robinson as he attempts to understand the changes that are happening to the country – and here country means both the place as urban and rural environment, and the political construct that is the UK.

Where once the monuments of the UK were forgotten, the myth of Empire has arisen.  It will destroy my country.

I wander through cities, and the weather is cool and I wish to escape the studio and think – the best philosophy is always undertaken when walking.  In the distant past I would carry my Olympus OM10, and have to make definite choices over which encounters were deserving of one of the 36 shots on a standard role of film.  I am still affected by this mindset, despite the almost limitless capacity of phones to retain an image of almost everything (especially every meal).

I wander in various cities, hoping to encounter traces, fragments of histories and fossils of ideas, untold narratives awaiting uncovering, or melancholic reminders of failed dreams.