Fragments

 

There is in my possession a collection of photographs of cities, photographs taken in the middle of the last century on the kind of camera every family once owned and used to record important occasions.  The photographs, all black and white, are of the standard size of 3” by 4”, and each has been glued to a page in a photo album.  This album is itself defined by its quotidian nature. The photographs are of ruined cities, no more than heaps of rubble and fragments of architecture. Each is accompanied by a hand-written inscription – Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne.

Second-hand bookshops are time machines, cabinets of curiosities that allow the shifting between the present into the past of the once-owners of the books that cram the shelves.   The books themselves allow further slippage, into the past of the author, into the past of the ideas in the book.  Forgotten histories and out-of-date views, layers of interpretations now no longer relevant, the bookshops invite a kind of imaginative archaeology. The random nature of the arrangements often means that serendipity plays a part in what is discovered, it being easy to slide from a shelf of books on cookery via science fiction to the publications of the Age of Aquarius.   Here can be found books that begin with a simple fact, for example the sighting of lights in the night skies of Pembrokeshire, and then build this into a fantasy involving aliens and megaliths.  The second fact, that of there being military establishments in that area, and night firing by tanks, is absent.  And then there are those books that deal with real secrets, with the hidden side of the military industrial establishment, with the listening stations and the test facilities that hide behind razor wire fences.

Large nineteenth century paintings hang at the side of the staircases, and one in particular always drew my attention.  This depicts Samson and Delilah at the moment that Samson is bound by his enemies, while Delilah holds aloft the hair she has cut from his head to deprive him of his strength.  Delilah has the appearance of a starlet from the 1920’s, as if this painting is a publicity still from a film by Cecil B. DeMille. The painting is by Solomon J. Solomon, an artist little known these days aside from those who have a passion for the obscure end of Victorian painting. He has another claim to fame, and a surprising one for those who regard art and artists as useless in times of war.  During the training for use of the Mark I tank at Elveden Explosives Area Solomon J. Solomon was stationed in a barn where he worked on developing camouflage schemes for the machines, trying to find ways to make the slowly crawling tank blend in with the shattered landscape of the Western Front.  The abstracted pastoral scheme may have helped to disguise the vehicle at the first encounter, but the rhomboid design of the first tanks was too recognisable to be fully hidden.  The image of the member of the Royal Academy literally painting tanks is one that is comical because of the unexpected juxtaposition. The markings on tanks carry symbolical meanings beyond the strategic, beyond the numbers and signs used for identification of formations and battlegroups.  The first German tanks had the name Wotan painted on the side, and the British tanks had the symbol of an eye on the front.  The eye that sees all danger.  Mythology and symbols, a magical language to ward off evil.  And to increase power.

One item in the newspaper drew my attention, not so much for its description of the ongoing fighting in Europe, but for one fact about the loss of a battleship.  The battleship was carrying a fragment of the True Cross, and had been blessed by priests. When the battleship sank the shock came not just from the loss of the ship to a supposedly inferior enemy, but also from the fact that the vessel was, in theory, protected by magic, by an invisible barrier guaranteed to defeat any common weapon.  The rites had been observed, the invocations made, and entities made to submit to the greater power.  Now they must protect the vessel with means that were beyond technology.  To bind these forces to their task of protection a relic had been placed at the centre of the armoured ship, and the perfect fusion of weapons technology and occult belief produced. To name something is to be involved in a complex web of meanings; naming as giving a degree of control over forces that are unknown; naming as identifying something as autonomous, as individual, as alive.  Naming means that the entities are under your power.  And naming a machine gives it life.

The legend of the golem deals with information as an animating force, the figure of the golem brought to life by the insertion of the correct formula.  I am not certain about the animating force that is called into action, is it something that is inherent in the clay of the figure, so that the paper on which is written the magical text merely brings forth what is already there?  Or does the text bring something from outside into the golem?  In which case the text is like the runes that carry the curse. I knew of the golem from stills from the 1920’s film, and fragments of the legend discovered in books on myths.  There are other stories of humanoid figures animated by means that seem magical rather than scientific, and behind the robot in Metropolis are symbols that carry occult meanings, and she sits on a throne that makes her seem like a goddess rather than a machine.  And that image, the mechanical future Eve, kept reoccurring in my dreams. In this the magician was not a Jewish Rabbi, but an industrialist, one of those who supported the rising militarisation.  He places his animating text in the chest of an armoured figure.

As familiarity with a building becomes part of how it is regarded, the imagination works to produce new narratives to populate the quotidian blankness.  When factories were part of everyday life, when industry was a central part of life, there was no threat.  Once fallen into disuse they become the site of ghosts, of the possibility of strange events.  Perhaps they follow the same route as the church, once the centre of a community, now a place to be avoided during the dark, when the owls and foxes fulfil their task of being messengers between worlds.  This may be a function of the interior spaces, for in both old churches and factories the roof is high, in one allowing space for cranes and lighting that ensures no one sleeps at work, in the other the space is lit with the ethereal light from tall windows, and spirits may inhabit the rafters.  These old factories contain the traces of vanished industries, abandoned as if the demise of engineering had been a sudden event and the workers had fled as industrial capitalism was overtaken by the service industries.  The remains of the test facilities had that feeling of forced evacuation, of there being some reason for the immediate closure.

In the medieval period there were stories of automatons, of machines endowed with life either through cunning art – the sophisticated application of hydraulics and fakery – or magic.  This latter was used to discredit those with too much mathematical knowledge, perhaps because such understanding was not being used for the furtherance of the aims of the state, the monarch through whom all power must flow.  Philosophers became magicians, and their machines were animated by demons. Roger Bacon is said to have constructed a head of brass, an intelligent automaton that could speak and foretell the future.  When Bacon’s assistant interrogated the machine while the Friar slept, it spoke three phrases and then fragmented.  Whether this was mechanical failure or the anger of a trapped spirit is not recorded, It was growing dark when I left the site and returned to my car.  As I switched on the headlights a sign was illuminated.  A sign that simply said this was the site of an ancient monument.

According to what has been released from the official report into the closure of the site, all the machines were buried in the munitions disposal area of a military range in the South West.   The documents gave a list of those in charge of the final disposal, a list that included a senior cleric.  Some sort of ceremony had taken place before the machines were buried, something akin to a burial service – or an exorcism.

Labour of Love.

 

Although my mum told me grandfather worked for the Post Office, I found it difficult to imagine him in a postman’s uniform, sack of letters over his shoulder, trudging the streets of Liverpool 8 in the rain, avoiding the puddles with their reflections of terraced brick houses.  I could see him working at the sorting office, placing the letters in the correct box for each street in Toxteth, streets with names drawn from the novels of Dickens, or from small towns in Wales.  But delivering letters?  No, not really.

 

He was a quiet man was grandfather, and, in my memory, he is forever knocking out the ash from the pipe, cleaning the stem, filling the bowl, lighting the tobacco, then contentedly sitting wreathed in smoke.  That ritual of the lighting of the pipe was undertaken with the same quiet care he brought to everything, which may be why the idea of his working at the Post Office did not ring true. It is possible it was something I made up later, though why I would do that is another matter.  Which is not to say he was boring.  He had a ready line in nonsense songs that he would sing when he came to look after me, and his favourite saying was “I’ll knock your head off and throw it in your face!”.   It took me a few years to understand the joke, serious child as I was.

 

I think he must have retired from the Post Office just after I was born, and so used the freedom this now gave him to concentrate on his passion, the job that was his real calling.  This employment was in keeping with the ritual of the pipe, with the quiet contemplation of the slow passage of time while engaged in a task, for my grandfather rebuilt and fixed old clocks.

 

In the last century clocks were common, real clocks that is, ones that took their power from a tightly-wound (though not too tight I hear my grandfather say) spring, mechanisms that ranged from the bedside alarm clock, set to wake the worker to another day in the factory, to the late Victorian long-case clocks that could still be found for little money.  These grandfather clocks must have come from from the houses of the well-to-do, houses that were slowly being given over to bedsits as the local economy changed and the financially secure bought country houses in Cheshire.  Naturally I thought they were called grandfather clocks because my grandfather fixed them.

 

My grandparent’s small house was full of clocks, two large grandfather clocks on the upstairs landing, various mantle clocks on sideboards and cupboards, and an upstairs backroom full of clocks undergoing repair and rebuilding, a room full of tins of gears, small screwdrivers, and the smell of light machine oil. 

 

I have often wondered where he gained this understanding of the mechanisms of clocks, this knowledge that meant he was a local celebrity.  He was the man you went to with your late-running alarm, with the old clock your Gran had left you when she passed away, with the pocket watch you thought looked good, but which no longer worked.  Did he pick up this knowledge from magazines and books found in second-hand shops, becoming like many in Liverpool a self-taught expert in an obscure discipline? A Scouse autodidact with a love for knowledge?  I doubt there was anywhere he could go to learn the trade.

 

I can imagine him in these bookshops, standing in the dusty interior searching for manuals, part of a secret brotherhood who met to discuss the arcana of gearings and escapements, the twentieth century equivalent of the Medieval Guilds.  Craftsmen allied by the love of their craft.

 

On my trips back home I often visit these second-hand bookshops searching for the out-of-print volume that will help my own work.  Standing between the shelves, scanning the books of art and design, the philosophical tracts now forgotten, searching for half-remembered science-fiction classics, I listen as the bookshop owner and customers talk knowledgeably about obscure occult philosophers with all the assurance of Oxford Dons.  This desire to find a subject and make that your own comes, I think, from the history of the city.  Liverpool has had its problems, with high unemployment.  But, rather than allow that to define their lives, people become experts, using their time to explore a subject that fascinates them.

 

My grandfather had a son, Frank, who inherited his need for self-education, though not in a realm as practical as the mechanics of clocks.  Uncle Frank was quiet, reserved, shy.  He still lived in the family house, the result, so my dad said, of a love affair that broke his heart.  When my parents, my brother, and I, visited on Sundays, because that was what a good Catholic family did after Mass, I would ask to look at the newspaper Uncle Frank had bought.  This newspaper was the Sunday Times, at that time the only newspaper with a colour magazine, and with supplements dealing with the Arts.  Uncle Frank was an avid reader, with a small library of books kept in the locked cupboard in the front parlour, that room that was only used on special occasions.  When I was allowed into the front parlour I would wonder at these books, many with titles beginning with the phrase “Teach Yourself…”, with some on subjects totally unknown, even to my dad.   What, for heaven’s sake, was Theosophy? 

 

Uncle Frank was entirely unpractical, despite having been in the Royal Engineers at the end of the war, or maybe because of this, and his exploration of philosophy, science, and politics, was his only passion.  He had once worked in a shop selling carpets, and, when that closed, became a taxi-driver, though a taxi-driver who had very little interest in driving people around at night-time, or indeed during much of the day.

 

When my grandfather died, and shortly after my grandmother, Uncle Frank stayed on in the family house.  He sold all the clocks to someone who offered to ‘take them off his hands’ without really thinking.  Perhaps all those clocks marking out time in a now-empty house was too much for him.  When I moved away to study art I didn’t keep in touch, something I now regret, for I know he followed my progress from Masters to PhD. 

 

I look back at my grandfather, at my uncle, and think about their work.  Not about their jobs, not about the thing they did to get money, not about how they fitted into the system of employment that in theory defined them, but never did.  I think about what they did that meant something to them, that gave their days contentment, that felt like discovery without someone, or something, controlling their actions and thoughts.  And in that I see myself, another Scouse autodidact reading philosophy and making things.

The madness of the real

 

One of the ideas floating around in my mind when I began to make the model architecture was a connection of JG Ballard and Derrida, with a nod to Mark Fisher; the idea of structures that seemed like ghosts from the future, ruined semi-military bunkers that appeared to foretell the return of war, as if the future was casting shadows into the past as a warning of paths that should be trodden with caution.  Do not pass through this rusting barbed wire, for if you do you will enter a time stream where the dogs of war once more stalk the land, and ruined concrete and rusting wrecked machines of war litter the landscape.

Although the technologies of war are ever-present, the underpinning of once empires and those who wish to rebuild their empires, they were shadows.  Conflict had shifted to finance, to resources, and militias sought to control places far away from the shining towers of The City.  There were still the dealers, those who took stands in the Fairs of Death to sell the latest piece of expensive equipment, and the factories still made the machines, and the research establishments still ran simulations and tested things that looked more fiction than fact. 

 But we passed through the wire, and the landscape changed.  We hold onto the belief that we can find a path through, that the light will disperse the fog and smoke and the ruins and wrecks will return to history, that tanks in museums will be relics and not functional, that lights in the sky will bring hope and not death. 

Meanwhile…I continue to make scenes that chase the world, wishing ruins to be hopeful signs of what has been left behind rather than a present reality.  There is hope in agency, we can do things, even little things, and work to change the path we travel. 

Aliens have no class

 

There are those files on the desktop that are constantly reworked and revised.  These include the c.v., that list of things achieved that can skirt the borders of fiction, and the artist statement, the little bit of writing that is always in need of revising as it never quite says what you want it to say, or that is my experience anyway.

To my set of revisable texts has now been added a short biography.  This slips between the first and third person depending on the requirements, and first made an appearance when I was making a public artwork in National Taiwan University.  This is the elite University of Taiwan, and as such has a student cohort that stems almost exclusively from the upper echelons of the social economic strata of Taiwan.  As part of the project I wanted some students to discuss ideas of utopia with the non-academic staff of the University, especially the cleaners and ground staff.  This proved problematic, as for the students the idea of engaging with the workers was beyond understanding.  What ideas about utopia could such people possibly have?

At the same time I was teaching in one of the many private universities in Taiwan, and during a discussion with another member of staff, an artist who had studied in the UK before returning to Taiwan, I was astounded to hear the complaint that “the common people do not understand my work”.

These occurrences made me look at my written biography, at the omissions in the discussion of my origins and identity.

 

I was lucky.  I was born in the 1950’s, brought up in a working class Roman Catholic family in Liverpool.  I came into education at the time when the hierarchies of class in the UK were under attack, when a working class Scouser could get a grant and attend polytechnic.   That now obsolete term – polytechnic – brings me up short.  Was that the start of the return of class, when polys became unis?  There was always a distinction between the two, with the academic standing of the university being held in much higher regard than the industry connected polytechnic, nicely symbolised  by the polytechnic I attend being named after a make of car.

My time on the BA was not filled with success, and I did not have the confidence or qualifications to either continue to MA or get a job as a lecturer.   I did have a small skill in painting murals, and so became a community artist, part of a team placed in a deprived area of Coventry. 

Here my feelings around my class and origins were in flux.  The Community Arts Team were based in the centre of the deprived area, and my role was to work with a historian to produce a mural reflecting the history of the area.  My personal ideas about art were confused, as I felt the pull between the kind of work the local community liked, and the kind of things I wanted to do.  There was also the idea at this time that artists working in a community should not try to be experimental – was this a foreshadow of “the common people do not understand my work”?  The Arts Team were from a variety of backgrounds, but we all had a vaguely socialist outlook, which was why we were there.  And we assumed that this outlook was shared by everyone in the local community.  And then Thatcher became Prime Minister, and everyone wanted to buy their council house as they fell for the property-owning propaganda. 

And yet…decrying the desire of the local working-class community to buy their council housing is a bit rich coming from the University-educated middle-class who have bought and are doing up that nice Georgian town house.

Housing produces a metaphor (stolen, I will admit, from Michael Landy), that of the artist from a working-class background who is ‘semi-detached’ from that background by reason of education.  It was during my time as a community artist that the idea of this dislocation became something that is always there.   The Community Arts scheme finished after a year, and I went back to trying to work out what kind of artist I was.

It was not until I returned to Liverpool to look after a gallery that I began to feel as if I was starting on the road to being an artist.  The gallery was a strange affair, funded by a local businessman to keep his daughter happy.  I was not paid, but given a free bedsit and a studio, my first dedicated studio space.  At the gallery openings I met local artists and others from the cultural scene of Liverpool (most importantly the wonderful poet, painter, curator, critic Adrian Henri) and these red-wine-fuelled discussions helped me to see that my ideas and ways of working connected to others.

Liverpool was a good place to be at that time (the 1980’s), for the perception by the government of the populace as unemployable trouble-makers meant that being without a job was fine – we all took the dole and joined the black economy.  To keep body and soul together I taught leisure painting and produced the occasional mural, building on previous experience as a community artist.  The glut of empty buildings meant that studio groups and studio group exhibitions were common, and the local publicly funded spaces (hurrah for the Bluecoat) provided more opportunities to both exhibit and see the work of a wide variety of artists.

I returned to Fine Art Education at the grand old age of 40, studying MA Sculpture at Winchester School of Art, and then getting a PhD scholarship at Nottingham Trent University.  And yet….despite now being ensconced in academia I still suffered from a feeling that I should not be there.  While my fellow PhD was invited to work with the students, I was not.  I was a technician, working in the gallery, installing the work of others. 

Since being ‘doctored’ (as it were) I have applied, and failed to get, numerous academic posts.  So I have worked in galleries and museums as invigilator and technician while exhibiting, and felt that this is my allotted role.  This has given me an insight into the mechanics of exhibiting and the relationship of artworks to the public beyond that I could not have gained by being safely inside the walls of the academy.

Where am I now?  By a series of accidents and the following of opportunities I have found myself in Taiwan, working as an artist and as a lecturer.  Finally in academia, but in a place where the nuances of my background are difficult to read, a place where my accent does not count.  Here I am obviously an outsider, and valued for the insight that brings.  As an alien, I have no class.

 

As I stated at the beginning, I have been lucky.  I am still the only member of my family who has been to university, and the chances of my nephews and nieces attending further or higher education are non-existent.  Without the underlying confidence and financial support that other classes enjoy, anyone from my background wishing to pursue a career in the arts is now facing an impossible task.  If you want security, a house when you retire, a family…don’t do this.  I am exhibition rich and in financial poverty, and fear for my future.

 

It is not the personal account that is the main focus however.  It is what this shifting of the arts towards the expression of a subset of the population means that is deeply worrying.  Culture holds up a mirror to society, and this mirror increasingly reflects the concerns of a minority.  This is seen not only in the work, but in the manner in which the artist glides through the world as if set apart, encountering only the curators and critics who have a similar background.  The technicians, those who build the temporary walls and ensure the paintings are fixed firmly to the gallery walls, are invisible, there only to ensure the artist’s (or increasing the curator’s) vision is achieved.  If this shift can be discerned in the artists, then it is reinforced in the curators.  The public are an annoyance, only addressed by the education staff who are trained in the ways of speaking down to the great unwashed.

I am reminded here of the worries by the upper echelons when it was proposed that the British Museum should be open to the working class, and the similar concerns that accompanied the plans for the Great Exhibition.  In both cases the worries were unfounded, as people came to not only look at the exhibits but equally to be seen looking at what was on display. 

Is the art world like that depicted in The Class Sketch (The Frost Report, 1966) in which John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbet, were the three classes?  This social stratification still holds true for the arts I feel, curators at the top, artists in the middle, and technicians at the end.  

What I find most troubling about this is that this is replicated in Taiwan, indicating that the problem is more wide-spread that just being a by-product of the entrenched class system in the UK.  There are differences here, stemming in part from the hierarchical nature of the society and the fact that Taiwan is a recent democracy threatened by a dictatorship, but a student from a working-class background here will find it difficult to be accepted.

Works that look at the experiences, the history, of the working class now seems like anthropological reports, a view from an outsider of a totally alien form of life.  There is little sense that the work stems from personal knowledge.

The Oriel Davies is a publicly funded contemporary art gallery in Newtown Powys.  On the Saturday morning after the opening of each new exhibition a boy, about seven years old and poorly dressed, would come in and wander around, looking at the works.  At first it was assumed he might cause trouble, but each time he came in he was quiet and looked carefully at the works, sitting and watching videos, looking at paintings.  My friend asked him why he always came in when they had a new show, and he said, simply, because he wanted to look at the new works.  She asked if he wanted to bring his family, and he replied “no, my dad doesn’t want me to come to places like this.”

Art is for everyone, not just for the cultured elite.  This applies to the making of art as well as to its reception, it applies to the chance to push ideas as far as they will go.  No one should have their desire for education in the arts dictated by financial considerations.  The idea fostered by the present incumbent at No 10 (I will not put a name here, as recent experience has shown that the only long-term inhabitant of Downing Street is a cat) and by others that the arts are somehow of secondary importance shows a poverty of imagination and knowledge that only someone from a public-school background can hold. 

 

I am dis-located from my working-class origins, yet know that the scepticism and humour that comes from that background is crucial to what I do.  As indeed is the knowledge that manual labour is important, and that taking joy in the building of an exhibition enables me to connect to my background.  My dad and my brother can connect to what I do by the shared experience of building things, and I enjoy that moment when the curator realises that the builder is also the artist.

On Models

 

 

 

The model does not propose a recreation of an existing structure, each model is a memory, although often a memory of something that has yet to be encountered. As such the model does not focus on an exact recreation of details - the obsession with the correct number and placing of rivets in the scale model of a tank - textures and layers of paint, dust, produces surfaces that allow interpretation, the idea of time passing by the layers, as if each iteration of the structure had produced a surface that has subsequently been partially obscured.

The layers and textures are that of the slow process of decay, and, as with this entropic process, chance plays a part in what results. The chance flows of paint follow the pull of gravity, the sinking of the structure into the earth, the collapse of the sheltering roof that now provides only partial protection from the ever-present rain.

In scale-models there is the desire to illustrate a story, to produce the vehicle of a specific unit at an historical moment. Scale models therefore are fixed in the flow of time, related to photographs that can be placed in history at an exact moment. Each detail gives the clue to the date, and no great process of detection is required to pull the scale model out of its existence defined by size and into the memory of a once-existing past.

Scale models are seldom uncanny in the manner of a doll’s house, which for all its period detail retains elements that disrupt direct connection with a historical moment. No Lord’s mansion had a frontage that could swing open to reveal the class-structure within.

Time, Ladies and Gentlemen, please...

 There comes a point when I need a break from the seemingly endless French Flute Sonatas that haunt early morning (ie afternoon here) Radio 3, and I have had enough of shouting at yet another Tory who seems to have forgotten the UK has been suffering under the rule of the Eton 'elite' for a very long time.  In these times I turn to audiobooks, and scroll through endless stuff on Youtube in the hope of finding something interesting.

Yesterday I discovered a reading of J G Ballard's Kingdom Come.  This is set in the towns around Heathrow, and concerns the malign influence of a huge shopping mall and the rise of a fascist/consumer cult based on violence and racism, for when your life is defined by the wandering of a mall and the purchasing of consumer goods there is only violence to bring excitement.  Although deeply disturbing, there is an element of satire in the fact that the narrator is a failed advertising executive, and therefore partly responsible for the rise of the mall and the central position of shopping in everyone's lives.  I am still listening.

But yesterday there occured one of those odd moments, an strong sense of deja vu.  This was during a description of an apartment, the last home of the narrator's recently murdered father.  I knew the description, I knew every sentence before it had been uttered, and as the description continued there was a feeling of the world shrinking, of there only being the light on the table, the voice from the computer, and me listening to something I already knew.  I have not, as far as I can recall, read this novel, but at sometime I must have read that description, for the sense of familiarity was overwhelming.  But it felt as if I was split in time - there was me listening in the present, and, in a not too distant future I was listening as well, so that the present me was remembering what the future me was listening to.

At this point I should reach for various philosophical and scientific tomes on the nature of time - which is an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so (spot the quote).  But I think it is mostly due to present problems, to not venturing forth often enough as the weather has been less than friendly lately.  I do not like summer, and endless hot days fill me with despair, I am a child of winter and much prefer autumn. 

That sense of deja vu has caught me a number of times recently, is this because I am mining my own memories for ongoing artworks?  Maybe, maybe...

To quote Week Ending, "Makes you think...."

Angry Old Man 1

 

It has been some time since I last posted anything here, and I can't really understand why.  Except that, too often, I put stuff on Facebook or into turgid emails my poor friends have to wade through in order to discover the state of my mind, and if I need help, or cake, or coffee.  Mostly it is the last two.

However, I think it is time I began to write again, rather than discussing my views with the dog on our short walks taken before the heat rises from barely acceptable to utterly intolerable, which latter may in fact be how I feel about the artworld.

Having reached that stage where new opportunities have ceased hereabouts, and the only worthwhile things are in Europe (oh, and the UK, I forget we 'got Brexit done' and have utterly buggered the arts - and sciences - for years to come.  But hey, we got control of our borders, something we already had, but don't tell the Surrey rascists who still think Brexit a good idea) I have fallen to musing on (dot dot dot) curators.  I am sure that once upon a time there were more gallery directors, exhibition assistants, and curators lived mostly in museums.  Now there are more curators than artists it seems, and the curators vie for funds to produce publications and attend conferences and, and here is the point that affects my reason, get money for exhibition proposals and then search for artists to 'respond to the curatorial concept'. Meanwhile the artist just sits and waits, devoid of any ideas, a mere automaton requiring the magic formula of the curator's concept to kick start the corpse into life.  I am a mere lump of clay and need the slip of paper to animate my base material.  

I object to this, to having to bend my ideas to fit the views of a curator fresh from an MA in Curatorial studies.  Maybe curators should, post MA, do some on-the-job training - five years of being a technician in a gallery building walls and painting things white, a few years standing in a gallery looking after exhibitions, that kind of thing.  Actually, this would be good for everyone in the artworld.  Especially those cloistered in academia.

This is all deeply unfair, and many of the curators I know have indeed spent their time painting walls white and fiddling with lights while the opening deadline for the exhibition looms.  But I wish there were more open calls were curators would develop ideas with artists, rather than proscibing what the artist(s) can produce.  And then that artist can make the work and the curator can deal with all the other bits, like getting money, arranging transport, painting walls white...

 

 

Ghost Library: Catalogue text.

An anatomy of melancholy1.
Ghost libraries; fragments of texts and references.
Two visions haunt me. The first is of the interior of a vast circular library, with balconies that run the entire length of the walls, each with shelves of books reaching to the base of the next balcony. When you stand in the centre of this place you are surrounded by books, and by the knowledge the books contain.2
As the vision clarifies I realise that the lower balconies are only accessible by open spiral staircases, and that the higher floors cannot be reached. This fills me with a mix of terror and sorrow, for I cannot articulate the feeling of loss combined with a fear of the unknown, unreachable, knowledge that may destroy my prevailing view of the world.
The second vision is of an abandoned library, with empty bookcases that demonstrate the irredeemable absence of books. This is something more than loss, for that would mean there was some understanding of what had gone, this is a profound absence, as if knowledge had never existed. The end of all cognition.
It was at the close of the last century that I first encountered the metaphor of knowledge being likened to an endless series of rooms, so that no sooner had you begun the exploration of all that one room contained when you became aware of the open doors that led to further rooms to be explored.3 The implication was that it was impossible to know everything, for there would always be more, something perhaps unknown and unexpected. It is the architectural quality of this metaphor that draws me to it I am certain, that and the image of knowledge as something contained in fitfully lit rooms accessed only via seldom used corridors.
Museums and libraries fit this metaphor to perfection, with their rooms drawing you to follow a specific path, a teleology of epistemology. Ease of access to information for the visitor is paramount to the existence of these institutions.4 Yet when you are employed in such an institution you soon discover that this primary path through the cabinets of objects or the shelves of books is but one of many routes that could be taken, and that there are side rooms and dimly-lit corridors that lead you to places seldom visited. Even this is to discover only what is available to the general public, for there are also rooms that are barred except to researchers who wish to explore further their particular area of knowledge5. These closed rooms, with only a fading sign on the door or affixed to the wall to indicate what treasures may lie within, exert a fascination for a dreamer such as I, someone for whom the idea of the library as a site of possible wonders draws me to these institutions in the first place.

It did not take long to grasp the general layout of the public areas of the building, the manner in which the architecture was designed to lead a visitor to follow a specified route to promote the official narrative. However, as anyone who has attempted to produce a linear description of the cultural manifestations of a civilisation can attest, such singular routes are misleading. It was possible to discover rooms that seemed to lead away from the main corridors, these rooms containing objects now regarded as merely the traces of ideas that no longer added to the present understanding of the development of culture.6 These seldom-visited rooms were my especial joy, for on the dusty shelves could be discovered volumes of uncertain provenance, and these allowed me to weave my own stories rather than be constrained by an adherence to official histories.
Museums and libraries often contain much more than the things that are displayed or available for public purview. In the building in which I worked at the time of this narrative the offices, storage rooms, archives, and private collections that lay behind the public areas were a complex warren where it was possible to become completely lost. Those that worked in this area knew only of their immediate surroundings, finding it no doubt unnecessary to explore the archives and libraries of the curators of the lesser-known disciplines. Even those who ventured between departments kept to well-defined routes, and curators would limit their explorations to the archives and libraries containing the volumes dealing mostly with the modern period.
I am sure you think it unlikely that a modern building would contain such mysterious areas as those alluded to above, yet you should also recall that the new building you encounter today was constructed on the foundations of much older structures, and that the basement of the present building connects to the corridors and abandoned rooms of these previous institutions, and that some of these remnants of the previous architecture are still used for the archiving of seldom-needed books and artefacts.7
It was indeed while pursuing my own research into the history of the institutions that once stood on this site, and whose corridors are said to form part of the deeper sub-basements of the present building, that I first ventured into these moribund storage areas. I was searching for the diary of a Professor N., a professor of Archaeology at the University of T., who had submitted a number of papers to an obscure publication dealing with bibliomania at the beginning of the last century. Many of these articles dealt with the libraries of eighteenth century Dutch explorers, and they demonstrated an almost obsessive focus on the fate of one particular collection of books of natural philosophy, now thought lost. My interest in the Professor’s diary, and indeed in his interest in the whereabouts of the books collected by one Hieronymous Schlaken, had been kindled by the chance discovery of an ink

and wash drawing of the local natural harbour, signed H. Schlaken. This was secreted between the pages of one of the volumes on geological formations that had been donated to the Museum Library upon the disappearance of the Professor.8 The drawing by Schlaken led me to assume that he must have been employed as a draughtsman on one of the voyages of exploration undertaken by Europeans in the pursuit of the projection of power, something the British had taken to perfection before their Empire, like all Empires must, had collapsed. I assumed that Schlaken had been, like William Hodges before him, both draughtsman and spy, engaged in describing local flora and fauna whilst surveying the land for possible naval bases.9
Upon his return to Europe Schlaken, now enriched as the result of the sale of curiosities he had amassed during the voyage, a collection that included a rather fine specimen of Haploteuthis ferox, began to purchase books from dealers throughout Europe.10 There exists in the Library of L. the correspondence between Schlaken and a bookseller in that city, which shows that Schlaken was chiefly interested in alchemy and the associated realms of knowledge where science interweaves with speculative philosophy11. Such a collection was not unusual for that period, although the manner with which it was pursued was remarked upon. The letters show Schlaken to be a difficult man. He was a recluse who used his status as an artist, for the paintings based on the drawings he made during his voyages were popular, despite being fantastical, as the excuse for his strange behaviour. He was seldom seen except at night, and all who chanced to encounter his heavily-cloaked figure in the dark streets of the city remarked on the sense of dread they felt. This emanated not so much from Schlaken himself, but from the feeling that there was someone following him, a barely-glimpsed shadow of great darkness that haunted the edges of the vision. Schlaken had the appearance of one being pursued12.
Schlaken’s body was never discovered, despite extensive searches of his now abandoned house. The library had been emptied of books, though there were scraps of burnt paper and ashes on all the shelves. Those who entered reported a palpable sense of unpleasantness, and the unshakeable feeling of being watched. Some of the more sensitive were sure they could hear voices, one speaking fearfully in Dutch, and the other in some strange language that seemed much older.13
This narrative I discovered from the extensive notes in Professor N.’s diary. I had almost given up the search for this volume, for all entries concerning its location had been erased from the pages of the library catalogues, and done so with a violence that had resulted in the pages being torn and disfigured14. This was not normal practice even in this institution. However, I found a small, badly-burnt, box on the shelves of the room reserved for uncatalogued items, and some whim made me take this to my office to examine it in detail. I was attempting to clean the ashes from the base with a small knife when a secret drawer opened, and within I discovered the diary and two documents15.

The documents were puzzling, for they were both architectural plans of some sort. After careful examination I realised that one was a copy of the original designs for Schlaken’s library. The second was an old plan of the deeper levels of the present Museum, with a room marked as the location for the rebuilding of Schlaken’s Library. This second plan was also covered in small drawings that seemed similar to diagrams I had once seen in a copy of the Seal of Solomon16. These were produced by the application of thin lines of charcoal, but, as soon as I tried to look at them closely they were dissipated by a sudden motion of the air. There are no windows in my office, and I was at a loss to explain this occurrence.
I am not versed in the language of architectural plans, so it took some time to understand how a plan for a library related to the present structure, and to locate the whereabouts of the entrance, if indeed such a library had ever been constructed. Given the labyrinthine nature of the building, and the manner in which Professor N. had been, according to contemporary accounts of his time at the University of T., able to convince his colleagues of the necessity for numerous experiments of a highly questionable nature, it seemed likely that getting a small library constructed in the sub-basement of the Museum was entirely within his powers.
I determined to explore the corridors in the general direction indicated by the plans, and with this in mind I informed the keeper of the keys that I would be working late, and that he should leave me with the means to lock the outer doors when I left.
Although I was used to being in the Museum, the experience of the closed and silent institution was unsettling17. I took my flashlight, and began to walk in the direction mapped out by the plan. At first the corridors were familiar, lined with shelves and cupboards containing specimens and illustrated volumes of artefacts, but eventually the spaces became narrow, with alcoves containing objects that produces strange shadows when my light chanced to illuminate their contours. As I progressed I became aware of an odd sensation, the feeling that someone was following me, and I was sure I felt a breath of air on the back of neck, as if someone very close had exhaled behind me. But when I turned there was no one there.
Eventually the corridors began to slope downwards, and the construction of the walls changed from old concrete to blocks of stone, which, though old, had been carefully wrought to produce a seamless surface. The shelves that now lined the walls were dusty, bending under the weight of boxes that had not been opened for many years. Rounding a corner I came across a shelf that had collapsed, strewing boxes and contents across the stone floor. In the light cast by my torch I could discern scraps of cloth and small bones amongst the dust, but nothing recognisable18.

I was now nearing the area indicated as containing the Schlaken Library, and therefore I began to examine the walls for any sign of the entrance to such a place. I discovered few doorways, and those that I encountered led only to small and empty offices, though often these contained furniture and personal effects that implied that the inhabitant had vacated the room precipitately those many years ago.
After a few hours of meandering I began to grow weary, and was on the point of retracing my steps and returning to my office when I became aware of a slight glimmer of light at the end of the furthest corridor. As I neared this juncture I realised that the light was coming from the window of a small door in the middle of the wall of the left-hand passage that led from the present corridor. The light was greenish in tint, which I assumed as being the result of the years of dust on the window, but, upon opening the door, I discerned the illumination beyond as being of this colour, and indeed of coming from no easily distinguishable source. As soon as I entered the light seemed to dim markedly, leaving me to rely on the illumination from my torch
The room I entered was large, and twice the height of the main galleries of the museum. At first I could make out no details, for the air was filled with dust and had the odour of decay, but eventually I saw a long balcony running the length of the far end of the room. I approach this, and as I neared I discovered that this balcony was lined with bookcases, and my light caught the gold lettering on the spines of many fine volumes. I was drawn irresistibly towards the books, trying to make out the titles, but no matter how much I tried to focus my vision the books seemed to fade and grow transparent, as if hardy there but solely the mere apparition of the book.
As I stood gazing up I became aware of three doors that gave access to the balcony of books, and no sooner had I noticed these than the window of the central one became illuminated, and a shadow darkened the aperture.
I watched as the door slowly opened, and a dark form filled the doorway blotting out all light. I shone my torch at the figure, but there was only a void, an emptiness that seemed to pull the light into itself. And I felt myself being pulled into this nothingness.
I recall stumbling back up the corridors towards the museum fitfully, and only regained full consciousness of my surroundings upon the arrival of daylight. I was huddled close to the main door of the building, facing the direction of the rising sun, as if praying for light to drive away the darkness. My clothes were covered in mould and stank of the grave.


1 The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton is a library in one book, a cabinet of curiosities, a strange, book about sadness. It cannot be assigned to any category, being philosophy, psychology, literature, medicine (though I would be wary of the cures within).
2 The Picton Library in Liverpool is the instigator of this vision, for it has such balconies of books. I recall searching for The Order of Things, slowly circumnavigating the central space from the vantage point of the second balcony. I realized that I no longer cared if I found the book, for this wandering existence in this world of books was more than enough. I am reminded of The Library of Babel, by Borges.
3 This image is from a play, though what play I have never been able to discover. All I recall is glancing through a collected volume of plays (Howard Brenton?) in the library and coming across the quote, but never being able to find the quote again. Did I make it up? It only matters in academia, nowhere else. The joy of libraries is the chance encounter.
4 Books on museum design show this to perfection. If you wish, read The Birth of the Museum. Tony Bennet connects museums to the institutional structures of knowledge, tying together museums and prisons, which though true seems unfair. Buildings and Power is also an excellent volume, with the added advantage of diagrams that show how museums, prisons, libraries are all part of an institutional structure designed to produce a good citizen.
5 A design for the Natural History Museum in London (all part of the disagreements between Huxley and Owen on what such a museum should be) had glass cabinets that ran the length of the galleries, with access to the public on one side, and access for researchers on the other. The production of knowledge as part of the display, which seems very contemporary. See Nature’s Museums by Carla Yanni.
6 It could be argued that the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is exactly this, a place of wonders yet based on an outmoded way of thinking about the world. I suggest reading the chapter on collecting in Interpreting Objects and Collections, by Susan M. Pearce.
7 Rereading this I am reminded of Gormenghast, which I now recall has much to do with books and tradition. 
8 Schlaken was a minor painter of the time of Rembrandt (who was not a minor painter). He is the subject of a ghost story by J.S. LeFanu, which was subsequently made into an excellent short film, directed by Leslie Megahey.
9 The paintings of William Hodges are in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. They were worked up from drawings made on the second voyage of Captain Cook, and retain the sense of the utter strangeness of the scenes encounter.
10 Haploteuthis ferox is the Latin name given to the carnivorous octopi who invade the South Coast of England in H.G. Wells The Sea Invaders. See any of the various editions of H.G. Wells The Collected Short Stories.
11 The now clear-cut divisions between were not always so, and the example I think of in this regard is Dr. John Dee. The Queen’s Conjuror by Benjamin Woolley is a good biography, and there is a fascinating chapter in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances Yates on Dee in relations to Spencer’s The Faerie Queene.  
12 This idea of someone being haunted comes from M.R. James, see The Collected Ghost Stories, especially Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.
13 This is a reference to H.P. Lovecraft and his myriad of stories centring on the Cthulhu myths. I am still fascinated by these stories, despite their obvious formulaic narratives. The best of the longer stories is At the Mountains of Madness. See The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson for an overview of the work of Lovecraft in relation to the literature of supernatural.
 14 The library of Sir Francis Willoughby, of Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, UK, was said to contain many volumes where the words ‘the Pope’ had been erased with great violence. The architect of Wollaton Hall was Robert Smythson, see Robert Smythson by M. Girouard for details of this strange place, and the (possible) source of the story.
15 This refers to the discovery of fragments of the diary of Dr. Dee in the hidden drawer of a large (burnt by the Great Fire of London) box.
16 The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish is a good reference for the appearance of these occult diagrams.
17 Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum begins with a wonderful description of the uncanniness of the closed museum.
18 The idea of the sloping paths to the unknown, and of the fragments of cloth, are both references to the H.G. Wells story The Time Machine. In the far future reached by the narrator is a ruined edifice called The Palace of Green Porcelain, and here he encounters the fragments of a long-abandoned library. This leads to the realization that for the future generations all the knowledge contained in books will be of no meaning. It may be that we are embarking on that journey now, as ‘information’ overtakes knowledge.

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.