skywritings

history as cartoon

2009-05-22T15:05:00.004+01:00

In Berlin for a few days to assess a performance made by Dartington students in Kreuzberg. On a wet afternoon, the director of the theatre takes me out across the River Spree to Treptower Park for a walk with her dog. We make our way through the park to the Soviet Memorial (Sowjetische Ehrenmal) to Russian troops killed in the carnage of the Battle of Berlin in 1945; 5,000 of the approx. 80,000 soldiers who died in Berlin are buried here.

In the slanting rain, past a huge sculpture of a grieving woman, the Motherland, then through the gap between two vast triangles of red granite - like stylised flag 'curtains' - to the sunken park that contains the Red Army soldier's mass graves. A series of 16 stone cube sarcophagi bear sculpted frescoes on their flanks, and quotations from Stalin (with German translations) at their ends: one sarcophagus for each of the Soviet republics.

The entire configuration leads towards a towering statue on top of a crypt or grave-like structure built from marble scavenged from Hitler's Reich Chancellery; about 40 feet high, this epic piece of Soviet symbolism created by the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich portrays a heroically idealised Russian soldier protectively cradling a small girl, the blade of his enormous sword cutting deep into a trampled swastika at his feet.

The entire memorial area is deserted, and its desolate emptiness amplifies its gigantism.

This is an instance of ideology's performative scenography, and it is extraordinarily potent as an affective spatial configuration. It leads one's eyes on a carefully constructed narrative trajectory to its focal points, while at the same time diminishing and humbling the living human body with its monumental scale. An awe-some and manipulative architecture within which the ideological extremes of communism and fascism come full circle and coincide in their aesthetics.

As part of a series of serial images in this blog, below are some of the sculpted friezes with their weathered and reductive two-dimensional versions of history's messy complexities. Historiography as monochromatic propagandist cartoon, yet these images are none the less effective and beautifully crafted for their absurd simplifications of the horrors of lived war-time experiences.

radio on

2009-11-22T14:47:00.020Z

Another morning, another borderline-psychotic dash to work in my car. In the past ten days, since the train line stopped functioning after flooding damaged a bridge, this journey has taken anything between 23 minutes and 3 hours 15.

You never know.

I have a tiny silver cake decoration blu-tacked to my dashboard by the radio: GOOD LUCK it says, with a tiny shiny flourish.

The fragility of these transport systems. They kind of work but only through a high speed stop-start lurch along the very lip of breakdown. The infrastructure permanently strained to overload. It only takes one bit of grit in the mechanism - roadworks, an accident, a storm, an anomalous micro-second of behaviour - for the circuits and flows of mobility to grind down to inertia and gridlock. Even in its working, abundant stress fractures of different kinds are all too apparent.

Today, with the sky bright and clear, the usual array of fleeting encounters, little frictions, glimpses of events or the traces in their wake. All so utterly predictable in the unpredictable blur of it all. Small acts of kindness, or of lunacy, or violence. The radio on throughout: a mildly irritating companion, like a slightly tiresome relative who's just occasionally surprising or hilarious in amongst the whittering banter. Channel hopping in search of a song to sing, a small musical dream to slide into for a moment. A kind of ephemeral cinematic anaesthesia.

The sudden jaunty appearance of a little white car emblazoned with LETSBREASTFEED.COM ('You supply the milk, I supply the advice' on its back window). I make space to let the car switch lanes, and the driver flicks her side lights in thanks.

Past a couple of huge texts that have become landmarks. The graffiti on the railway bridge, big rough white painted letters, like a kid's writing, always makes me smile. The letters S O U R. Then the Chubb building, with its new sign several metres to the right of the old one, now faded but still only half erased: so it says CH CHUBB, like an uncertain, stuttering locksmith.

The spray of white paint on the road surface, as though a barrel of Dulux has fallen off a truck at high speed. Or Ralph Steadman has been run over, leaving a characteristic splash with a constellation of tiny spots at its outer edge.

A few minutes later, a dawning realisation that the other side of the motorway is deserted, nothing there, just bare tarmac - there's a road closure in the other direction, and all three lanes are blocked by emergency services and police vehicles. An arhythmic burst of flashing lights, then a crumpled yellow vehicle, its bonnet completely crushed like a fag packet; its front end comes to a halt at the bottom end of the windscreen, which is still intact. A team of people in high-visibility jackets in attendance around it as two of them try to free the front seat passenger. Oh god. A huge wave of traffic is building up in its wake, those at the front looking as though they are well positioned on the grid for the start of the race, but increasingly resigned to its indefinite postponement.

One minute chugging along on auto-pilot listening to the radio, dang-a-lang-a-ding-dong, the next all hell breaks loose, a sudden eruption, weirdly slo-moed by the adrenalin rush. The metal and glass rendings of accidentnoise, then silence.

Good luck.

A few miles further, a break-down truck carrying a car has somehow taken out some traffic signs - they have been mown down and snapped off, or are teetering at oddly comic angles as though they've been installed by a drunk. The driver sits in his cab on the hard shoulder looking forlorn, while the policewoman walks away from him back to her car, which is blocking the lane behind him. For reasons that remain a mystery, she's carrying a big yellow torch. More flashing lights twinkling in the rear-view mirror, then gone.

And the radio sings, "You're innocent / You think everything is possible / And nothing's gonna get you baby / Everything is touchable / Nothing's gonna beat you in this life / It's alright ..."

Three guys in a black BMW, like cartoon big city hoods. All shaved heads, black suits, no necks. The front-seat passenger is wearing shades and talking into a mobile. Serious dude with don't-fuck-with-me written all over him. He glances at me as they pass, and for a split second I see a little blue car like a dinky toy travel across his reflector lenses. Then he's gone.

The planes queuing for landing at Heathrow in the sky. The arced choreography of other planes banking over Surrey after take-off. A v-formation of geese fly above the road, then branch off towards the lakes. A blue-yellow-white train along the water's edge, heading back into London; it looks like another toy in the landscape. Then the gear shift of the M25 for a few miles: a lane-changing frenzy, stuff coming at you from all angles. I turn down the radio to concentrate. A loud click as a motorcyclist zips past and brushes my wing mirror, but it pops straight back into position.

A quick stop at the petrol station to get fuel, a paper, and a coffee. As I walk back to my car, glancing at a front-page picture of a miserable Steven Gerrard trudging off the pitch after yet another disappointing game, the pick-up truck lurches off the road and on to the forecourt towards me. I stand back and give him plenty of space. You never know.

In the end, 28 minutes door to door today.

Good going ...

And the radio sings, 'Do you want the truth, or something beautiful?'

Images by Ralph Steadman: British, and I shot the sheriff

competent drummer

2009-11-09T21:42:00.007Z

for joff

Band ad in the Glastonbury record shop window
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For Joff Winterhart's exquisite Days of the Bagnold Summer, runner-up in this year's Observer/Cape graphic short story prize, see here

For the Bucky website, featuring Joff on competent drums, and Simon on competent guitar, see here

For an earlier post about drummers, see here

sehr (berlin)

2009-11-08T12:34:00.001Z

'es ist nur eine frage der zeit' (it's only a question of time): Berlin graffiti, November 2009

keep doing shit (berlin)

2009-11-08T19:05:00.004Z

Photos from Berlin, 6-9 November 2009

For Guardian articles on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, see here

For an earlier blog post on Berlin, see 'Memory machine', 8.9.2008, here

duree limite (berlin)

2009-11-08T18:52:00.000Z

mod

2009-10-15T17:42:00.005+01:00

for educational

2009-10-16T17:23:00.001+01:00

dama dama ruminate

2009-09-28T20:10:00.018+01:00

'To look at [animals in dreams] from an underworld perspective means to regard them as carriers of soul, perhaps totem carriers of our own free soul or death soul, there to help us see in the dark. To find out who they are and what they are doing there in the dream, we must first of all watch the image and pay less attention to our own reactions to it' (James Hillman).

My first class in a new job in a new university on the edges of the city. Six hours in a studio exploring the topic of animals. We talk of animal encounters, fears, dreams. I tell the students about Joseph Beuys and the coyote, Marcus Coates' Dawn Chorus, Val Plumwood's crocodile attack in Australia, James Hillman's Dream Animals. They talk about cats and bugs and worms and arachnophobia, dog attacks, collisions with deers on the roads.

We look at some of Sam Easterson's short films about animal locomotion, in which he attaches tiny video cameras to the heads of wolves, bison, armadillos, sheep etc. We watch an episode of Creature Comforts about the circus, and our discussion hovers around the pros and cons of anthropomorphism.

Later, after a warm-up and some impromptu collective barking, I ask the students to work in small groups to make an animal appear in the studio.

During a short break I drink a coffee and smoke on a bench amongst trees at the back of the theatre building, about 40 metres from the thundering A road into central London. As I sit there immobile, thinking about the class, a young male deer approaches, limping badly. With its brown coat mottled with white spots, and its short antlers, it looks like an adolescent fallow buck - dama dama.

On its left rear haunch it has the grey scar tissue of a serious wound, a car accident or attack of some sort. It doesn't see me, and hobbles to within 5 or 6 metres, its left side towards me. It sniffs the air, and lowers its head to eat the grass. I can hear it chewing evenly, like a pony. Ruminant. It has extraordinarily beautiful eyes - much older than its body somehow - and a velvet top lip beneath its moist black nose.

Two terriers in a neighbouring garden have heard something and bark incessantly behind the fence; the deer ignores them completely, it's been here before and knows they can't get out.

With wide eyes and shallow breath I watch it closely, wanting its peacefulness in this rural/urban context to continue uninterrupted by fear. It munches the grass for a while, shakes its head, then turns its head to look me in the eye for a full 10 seconds without seeming to see me for anything like what I am, before walking off towards the trees, its head bobbing up and down as it limps. Then it's gone, and the traffic moves on relentlessly.

I go back into the studio wondering quite how we have conjured up this visitation, and what else the students will bring into appearance.

***

Some hours later, mid evening in a suburban London street. I sit in my car making a phone call, and a fox ambles up the road, thick tail horizontal, and stops beside my car. It sits in the road, scratches, watches, its ears focused on a point up ahead like antennae. It doesn't see me at all. When it stands up to move off up the road, I see that it has a limp in its right rear leg. It disappears silently, as discreet as a cat, a shadow blending into the shadows in someone's front garden.

The animals are out in force in London.
Some of them are limping.
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Postscript - two weeks later: Another week, another class. After watching a longish section of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, we pause for a break after Herzog has listened to the sounds of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend being killed by the bear.

Outside the door of the studio, some of the students find a dying pigeon. They come and tell me, and I go outside with them. A pigeon on the stones of the courtyard, a couple of yards from the door, with the back of its head severely and inexplicably damaged - shot away, or sliced somehow, or perhaps torn open by a bird of prey. It is silent and barely moving, thick red blood stiffening on its feathers. It's close to death, but we don't know what to do. T and I stand there shocked but unable to act: 'I can't do this', T says, 'I'm too much of a pussy'.

J quietly says he can 'dispatch' it, he knows how to do it. I pick it up in a ball of paper, and take it to a concrete kerb by a skip. J places it on the lip of the kerb, and calmly but decisively steps on its head. Crushes it. The body spasms. J says it's normal, the death throes, it's what they always do. He places the body in the skip, and wipes his shoe on the tarmac.

Photo at top: still from a Sam Easterson video - a bison's reflection of itself in water as it drinks

witness of time

2009-10-05T23:19:00.007+01:00

Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh
Live Art Development Agency / MIT Press, 2009

Let’s start by revisiting the bare bones of the performance projects by Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh, realised between 1978 and 1999. Six projects in all, beginning with a series of five year-long performances. First, one year of solitary confinement in a sealed cell with no communication. Second, a year of punching a time clock on the hour every hour and photographing this action: 24 frames a day for 365 days. Third, a year living rough outside on the streets of New York, drifting and seeking shelter, never going inside. Fourth, one year tied at the waist with a rope to the performance artist Linda Montano, with a prohibition on touch. Fifth, a year spent abstaining wholly from art, its making and its spheres of influence. Finally, a 13-year project in which Hsieh proposed to make art without ever showing it in public, a project during which he effectively disappeared. On New Year’s Eve 1999, at the cusp of the new millennium, in a brief event at the Judson Memorial Church to mark the project’s ending, Hsieh simply told those who had gathered that he had succeeded in keeping himself alive …

The publication of this superb monograph is timely indeed. To date very little of substance has been published about this most remarkable artist and his profoundly unsettling body of work, despite the fact that its contours and challenges are etched indelibly into the psyches of so many involved in contemporary art and performance. We know these deceptively simple shapes, the sculptural forms of the bare bones outlined above, and they are as honed as the shapes of some of Beckett’s most economical work. Or rather we think we know them, for they linger on in unresolved reverberant forms within us. In reality, individually and collectively these works confront and resist claims to knowledge: about art and its parameters; about the passage of time, meaning, identity, freedom; and ultimately about what really happened in the seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years of these extraordinary ‘lifeworks’.

In a brilliant opening essay, ‘Impress of Time’, Adrian Heathfield contextualises and unfolds the implications of Hsieh’s ‘life lived at limits’ (58) with consummate sensitivity and thoughtfulness. He treads lightly and respectfully throughout, refusing to explain this work away in any singular and inevitably reductive ‘reading’, instead approaching each work in turn not as a referential or symbolic narrative structure but in terms of what it does. In this way, he seeks to articulate something of the affective ‘force’ of this body of work as a ‘constellation of enduring ideas, echoing in the present’ (58).

As well as providing detailed descriptions of each of the projects in turn, Heathfield explores a wide range of such ideas, including: Hsieh’s conception of art and life as simultaneous processes; his embodied instanciations of radical paradox, including the ambiguity of relations between constraint, solitude, freedom and thought in his work, and his deconstructive ‘binding together of activity and negation, production and redundancy’, public immersion and isolation, movement and stasis (45); the differing temporalities of photography and film, and the unstable epistemological status of documentation; Hsieh’s embodied stagings of an ethics of alterity, relationality and civility; his recurrent engagement with aspects and structures of ‘the law’ (he cites Kafka as a core stimulus), set alongside his vulnerable status as an illegal immigrant in the US; his decelerative ‘wasting of time’ in non-productive and uneventful works of extreme duration, and the critical frictions his ‘use-less’ slowness seem to propose within the accelerated temporalities of late capitalism. En route, Heathfield also traces relations with Conceptualism, Performance Art, Body Art in the West, and connections with a range of other artists including Bas Jan Ader, Harry Houdini, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abramovic and Ulay, and, perhaps most startlingly as a deterritorialising line of flight, the tightrope walker Philippe Petit. These connective genealogies are invariably and finely attuned to differences, and Heathfield resists collapsing this relational cartography into any homogenising empire of the selfsame.

The bulk of the book (pp. 63-315) is given over to Hsieh’s exhaustive documentation of each of his ‘lifeworks’. Scores, flyers, maps, punch cards stamped and signed, legal documents attesting to Hsieh’s own ‘rules’ having been respected (cells and ropes sealed and unbroken, punch cards stamped etc.), and thousands of photographs. Hsieh also includes calendars registering minor breakings of his strictures, such as hours missed in the punching of the time clock: 133 absences in the total of 8,760, each one catalogued in relation to one of three possible ‘reasons’ - ‘sleeping’, ‘late’, or ‘early’.

Many of the beautifully reproduced images comprise lengthy series of stills cumulatively registering the passage of time, in dated punch cards, say, or gradual hair growth. It’s intriguing to revisit the hourly photographs of ‘Time Clock Piece’ in this print context, laid out on 31 consecutive pages, each page containing 12 vertical columns / film strips of 24 images (i.e. one day per strip, 12 days per page). The lay-out produces an uncanny juddering temporality, and at the same time foregrounds the sheer enormity of the (t)ask. Its astonishing difficulty is somewhat elided in the high-speed, suppressed-hysteria energetics of the 6-minute stop-motion animated film version, within which each day – each column within the book - is condensed into a second (see Hsieh 1999). On the page one can skim and flick, or endeavour to accept it as a kind of meditation exercise: an invitation to engage with the im/possibility of paying attention to each image, to the rare blank spaces when Hsieh failed to make it, and to the infinite blank spaces of the unimaginable 59 minutes or so between each image. The labour of attempting to ‘read’ it as a (ruptured) continuum takes time and real effort. Cumulatively it’s incapacitating, one soon struggles with a kind of ‘blindness’ and defaults to skimming; and in the end we come no closer to understanding what really happened. One recognises Hsieh’s absolute clarity of purpose and will-ful integrity in the work, but ‘he’ is always elsew/here.

Ultimately, Heathfield locates Hsieh as ‘a sentient witness of time’ (11), engaged in practices of ‘aesthetic duration’, with each work ‘a sense passage in which corporeal attention is drawn to (a) time reforming’ (22). Each of Hsieh’s ‘untimely’ projects constructs a space of severe, self-imposed privation and constraint within which time passes and thinking happens. Each performance elaborates a rigorously precise architecture for the event of thought as art; but none of those thoughts are communicated. The internal life of the being in human being - Hsieh’s lived experience of brutalising bare life in extremis - is forever withheld in an economy of denial that serves to create empty spaces for our own projections and dealings with incomprehension. As Tim Etchells puts it in his letter to Hsieh, the extensive documentary traces of the work that survive ‘show everything but tell nothing’ (357). Hsieh moves implacably towards the self-erasure of ever greater illegibility, invisibility and silence to leave us confronted with ‘a sculpture of nothingness’, and we are pulled back endlessly to ‘a face off with the void’ (360). Or, as Hsieh puts it with characteristic economy and lack of sentimentality: ‘Living is nothing but consuming time until you die’ (335).

The book draws to a reflexive end without closure in a long and engaging interview/exchange between Hsieh and Heathfield (‘I Just Go On In Life’), and a series of open letters to Hsieh by Peggy Phelan, Marina Abramovic, Tim Etchells, Santiago Sierra, and others from Hsieh’s personal archive. The latter include a hand-written note from an irate and anonymous Chinese person – ‘Artist? UGH!’ (354); and a delightfully formal letter of support from a (real) estate agent in Michigan – ‘I don’t totally understand exactly what you are doing but I do think it is very important. Keep on with your good work…’ (350). The letters allow different modalities of writing to open up other more intimate perspectives on and creative responses to the work, most effectively to my mind in the exquisitely performative contributions of Peggy Phelan and Tim Etchells. Finally, Carol Becker writes back into and out of the book in an elegant summative post-script, in which she applauds Heathfield’s approach to the curation of these materials. His framing, she suggests perceptively, creates ‘a safe holding environment where the work can rest … The intent of the pieces appears intact, allowed to exist in its emptiness and silence, still elusive even after so much has been said’ (369).
______________________________________________________________

Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh
Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh
Live Art Development agency / MIT Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-262-01255-3 383 pp. £29.95

Hsieh, Tehching (1999). One Year Performance Art Documents, 1978-1999, DVD-ROM. For further details, see here

Also available through the Live art Development Agency’s online Unbound: see here

This review of Out of Now was first published in Performance Research 14:2 ('On Training'), June 2009: issue edited by Richard Gough & Simon Shepherd

garden hands

2009-04-25T21:09:00.002+01:00

the little by little suddenly

2008-07-23T17:31:00.067+01:00

'One thousand needles: imagine threading them with a straight thread’ (Yoko Ono 1970: unpaginated)

‘Perception over time equals thought’ (Bill Viola 1995: 150)

'Slowness is a formidable power: it has the passion of immobility with which it will, some day, fuse' (Edmond Jabes 1972: 55-6).

As Anthony Hoete has suggested in his introduction to Roam: Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility: ‘Mobility, in the contemporary context, is a complex concept, ideologically elusive, difficult to pin down. Mobility is a transitory, transformational state, reconfigurable and self-refreshing, time after time. Mobility is an ‘event-space’, a sequence of appointments and rendezvous. Mobility is multi-dimensional […] polymorphous […] multi-scalar […] multi-linear. Whilst comprised of journeys from A to B, these lines constitute networks: from C to DE via KLM. As such mobility’s multi-dimensionality suggests a matrix, or an array of co-ordinates’ (Hoete 2002: 11-12).

Yet, paradoxically, in practice mobility has also come to infer immobility. We are increasingly obliged to ‘kill time’ suspended in the meanwhile non-places of waiting within the multi-dimensional matrix, crawling along or going nowhere in traffic jams and queues and railway stations and airports, inert in front of computer terminals as the server fails to serve our desires. In our haste to speed up our trajectories through the world we are obliged to slow down, and in this tension for many there is a loss of patience and a kind of impossible suffering. ‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?’ (Kundera 1996: 4).

Some art processes and practices school us in slowness, and the qualities of attention that allow what is happening to happen and to take (a) place; they teach us about festina lente – making haste slowly. As Buddhist philosophers have recognised, there is an epistemology of and in slowness, and its propositions are informative and provocative for artists: ‘A rediscovery of the now, relocation in the here; return to the primacy of experience, of the event; rediscovery that facts are relations, that all knowledge exists on the threshold and in the interaction between subject and object (which are themselves only hypostatisations); a rediscovery of ambiguity, of contradiction, of difference; a reassertion that things – and people – are what they do’ (George 1999: 34).

In a 10-day conversation with a small group of dance writers and makers on the shore of Lake Como at Bellaggio in Italy in the summer of 2002, a conversation in which I was delighted to participate, American choreographer Susan Rethorst articulated her sense of choreography as a long, curious wandering: ‘Choreography engages what might be called a more sober passion. It lies in small cumulative moments and decisions, glimpses and glimmers that add slowly through the dailiness, that sneak into a whole consuming reality, a parallel to the rest of one’s life’. André Lepecki, one of those centrally involved in this drifting exchange, had written earlier about ‘the time of dance’: ‘to sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107). Now we talk about the time of conversation, and its dance. The luxury of time, of taking time to make time - of slow wandering and drift and waste and interruption and change of direction and silence and connective emergence and the small ‘violence’ of dislocation - of a slowing down into the complexity and detail of what is happening ‘in the middle’.

I think of the generative deceleration described by Matthew Goulish: ‘Most of us live in fear of slowing down our thinking, because of the possibility that if we succeed we might find that in fact nothing is happening. I guarantee this is not the case. Something is always happening. In fact, some things happen which one can only perceive with slow thinking’ (Goulish 2000: 82).

I think of Bachelard’s suggestion that one of his aims is ‘to school us in slowness’ (Bachelard 1988: vii). I think of Deleuze’s challenge to ‘think other durations’ through memory, art, philosophy, to ‘think the time of becoming’ as intensive rather than extensive, of time as the force of movement whereby movement transforms time by producing new becomings. Movement, he suggests, does not move a body from one point to another (translation), but rather in each aggregation/moment of movement bodies transform and become (vibration/variation/ multiplicity): ‘Movement always relates to a change, migration to a seasonal variation. And this is equally true of bodies: the fall of a body presupposes another one which attracts it, and expresses a change in the whole which governs them both. If we think of pure atoms, their movements which testify to a reciprocal action of all the parts of the substance, necessarily express modifications, disturbances, changes of energy in the whole … beyond translation is vibration, radiation’ (Deleuze 1986: 8-9).

I think of Paul Auster, blocked as a writer, falling out of the momentum of New York into the attenuated rhythms and discontinuous intensities and flows of a dance studio, and the moving stillness of a choreography taking shape: ‘In the beginning I wanted to speak of arms and legs, of jumping up and down, of bodies tumbling and spinning, of enormous journeys through space, of cities, of deserts, of mountain ranges stretching farther than the eye can see. Little by little, however, as these words began to impose themselves on me, the things I wanted to do seemed finally to be of no importance. Reluctantly, I abandoned all my witty stories, all my adventures of far-away places, and began, slowly and painfully, to empty my mind. Now emptiness is all that remains: a space, no matter how small, in which whatever is happening can be allowed to happen’ (Auster 1998: 86).

I think of Bill Viola’s explorations of the intervals below the threshold of perception in works where, as Walter Benjamin wrote of slow-motion: ‘the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’ (Benjamin 1968: 236).

I think of the French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin illuminated by his encounters with Mongol communities and with the burnt stones of the Inner Mongolian desert in the early 1920s. Years later he wrote: ‘Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within’ (quoted in Dillard 1999: 13). I think of deep ecologist Arne Naess’s invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, and of Wallace Heim’s notion of ‘slow activism’ (Heim 2003). I think of Marina Abramowic’s statement that she is ‘more and more interested in less and less’.

I think of Andrey Tarkovsky, Clarice Lispector, Edmond Jabès, Terrence Malick, WG Sebald, Ann Hamilton, Tacita Dean. The slow ones.

The texts and images that follow comprise 24 fragments related to conceptions, perceptions and practices of slowness, where each ‘fragment’ should be understood in Maurice Blanchot’s terms as ‘the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly‘ (Blanchot 1995: 34). Or as a single frame within an imaginary film strip of one second: 24 frames per second. The explosion of an instant. A slo-mo rehearsal of a lightning strike, moving at the speed of memory. [* Please note that for this online version, I have removed one of the frames and its accompanying text, in memory of Lyall Watson who died a few weeks ago in June 2008. A prolific writer and a rather eccentric adventurer, he was the author of a book that was important to me, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984). In the missing section, please think of a wind you know and its particular qualities].

Above all, in dialogue with Hannah Chiswell’s 24 fragments in the original artist's book, these texts and images stage something of a slow and ongoing conversation between two friends, about snow and rocks and sky and lightning and memory and flying and falling and birds. The unfolding loop of cogitation between two attenuated and intensive seconds, a dynamic relational meanwhile between an inhalation and exhalation.
________________________________________________________________

1. ‘There was this, and then this, and then this: nothing … one could truly lean on’ (Chantal Akerman on her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), quoted in Margulies 1996: 149).

2. ‘There is a secret link between slowness and remembering, between quickness and forgetting. Think of something utterly commonplace – a man walking down the street. Suddenly, he wishes to remember something, but his memory fails him. At this moment he automatically slows his paces. Conversely, someone trying to forget a terrible experience he has just had will unconsciously quicken his pace, as though wanting to escape from what is still all too close to him in time. In existential mathematics this experience can be expressed in the form of two elementary equations: the degree of slowness exists in direct proportion to the intensity of remembering; the degree of quickness exists in direct proportion to the intensity of forgetting’ (Kundera 1996: 34-5)

3. On a bright spring morning in April 2003, British performers Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters, collectively Lone Twin, conducted an exercise on the beach at Scarborough in Yorkshire, with a dozen or so participants. The proposition was simple: count the number of steps from the Victorian Spa to the beach’s edge, then over a period of 30 minutes walk towards the sea using the same number of steps; at the water’s edge make an action imagined en route, then turn and retrace one’s journey back to the beginning of the beach, again reiterating the same number of steps over a 30 minute period. A simple meditative slowing down and immersion in present process, drawing attention to time’s passing, in counterpoint with the rhythms of beach-side traffic, dog walkers, ball games, donkey rides, a group of girls cart-wheeling dizzily, swaying metal detectors, the crash of the waves, the drift of the clouds. During the group’s attenuated return from the sea, two uniformed policemen moved swiftly towards the lead walker - coincidentally the editor of this volume - and confronted him nose to nose, blocking his passage. They had received a number of phone calls reporting ‘suspicious behaviour’, a group of people moving imperceptibly slowly across the beach. What were they doing? Was it a protest of some sort? In this way a slow private action in public, its internal dynamics, meanings and functions resistant to a normalising survey from the outside, constituted a threatening anomaly to the civic everyday. The most everyday of actions - standing, walking, thinking, at times apparently immobile and doing nothing at all – had produced an unreadable and dissident friction in the complex layered polyrhythms of the seaside. Perhaps unwittingly, they had provoked a small collision of practices of mobility and conceptions of ‘acceptable’ speeds.

4. ‘I like the feeling of the texture of cocoons. A cocoon produces numerous threads. The threads come out so fast that my body is often left behind. At such times my body is empty. I wonder where my stomach and other organs have gone. But the threads that go out may be my organs, or they may go out through all my pores. They spread out into space, no one can stop them. All that’s left of me is contours. In the meantime, my body remains in the cocoon and is suffocated. People often say that I’m not moving or that I look like an idiot. Is it because I move too fast?’ (Butoh performer Akedno Ashikawa in Moore 1991)

5. 400 polished stainless steel poles, each of them with a diameter of 2 inches and solid stainless steel tips, arrayed in a parallel rectangular grid 5,280 feet by 3,300 feet, or 1 mile by 1 kilometre. Each pole 220 feet apart. Each mile-long row containing 25 poles, each kilometre-long row containing 16. A walk of about 2 hours to cover the perimeter of the grid. A field of potentiality in waiting for the untimely, sudden, sublime event of lightning. The conditions for lightning and its ‘doing of the did’.

Completed in West Central New Mexico in 1977, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field was one of the iconic works of land art. It was intended for the work to be viewed alone ‘over at least a 24-hour period’ (de Maria 1980: 529). Using aerial and land surveys to determine the precise elevation of the terrain, in order for the plane of the poles’ tips to ‘evenly support an imaginary sheet of glass’ (ibid), the work took 5 months to install. Only about 60 days a year fell within the season of primary lightning activity during the summer months. It was possible to observe a number of distinct thunderstorms simultaneously from The Lightning Field. With occasional light snow in winter, and the anomalous optical phenomenon of the vast majority of the poles becoming almost invisible when the sun was high in the sky, light was deemed to be ‘as important as lightning’ (ibid: 530). On rare occasions, a powerful electrical current in the air generated the glow known as ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ which was emitted from the tips of the poles. The conjunction of art and nature, engineering and unpredictability, a tiny number of witnesses and a vast landscape/skyscape, the slowest of events and those moving at the speed of light.

6. During the 1990s, the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik made a series of related performances collectively entitled Zoophrenia, in which he pursued the game of playing dog in a purposeful way, mimicking a certain kind of canine behaviour to excess. Becoming-dog was a strategy to ‘renounce his identity as a reflective being in order to become a being with reflexes (a dog)’ (Kulik in Watkins & Kermode 2001: 76). At other times, he also ‘became’ a bull, an ape and a bird, but the dog tracked him like a shadow. In 1998, Kulik made a performance called White Man, Black Dog. In complete darkness in a Ljubljana gallery space, a naked Kulik tried to interact and establish an intimate exchange with a real black dog. Intermittent camera flashes produced by two photographers documenting the encounter supposedly burnt ephemeral images into the short-term retinal memories of spectators. For Kulik, such an encounter and its fugitive visual traces constituted ‘the only true, “absolutely real” art’ (Kulik 2003: 23).

7. ‘Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui …’ (Aurore Clément, on the telephone in the final shot of Chantal Akerman’s film Toute une nuit (‘All Night Long’), 1982, quoted in Margulies 1996: 173).

8. She moves. Her attention adjusts and focuses as she sniffs around a quality of stillness in the action, a quality of action in the stillness, her nostrils flared for the event of it. Slowly slowly. Stalking while never letting on, while always letting on, that stalking’s afoot. Something lives here, and moves here. Something warm. Something animal. Its presence resonates and is carried on the wind in this windless space. Its reverberation comes to her as smell. Just a whiff, the merest hint of a lair, of a pelt, of a world in a surreptitious moment of synaesthesia. Coloursoundsongsmell. Something there. The need for moist attention. The need for a wet nose. Follow your nose. Slowly slowly track it, but but let it be, let it take a place in the open. Patience, go quickly go slowly, stay close to it but not too close: she must move away if she gets too close. How to be near and far? Come and go, just as it comes and goes on the wind in this windy place. The role of the eyes in sniffing it out, the role of the ears. Body all eye-ear-nose. She follows her nose, it takes her closer, closer, then no too close and she can’t smell a thing and she smells too many things, the smell blurs and its shape fades and she moves away again and begins to drift again. Circling. Circling. As if now were here, and she were all alone. S l o w i n g d o w n t o n o w h e r e s h e Breathe. Ready. Again. And. No not now, be slower. Move away again and wait, lie in wait, be still in wait. Wait. Weight. Wet. She remembers an Inuit word she read and wrote down and learnt for the rightness of its rhythm, the shape of its sound in space and the time of its gesture - an onomatopoeic map: QUINUITUQ, the deep patience of waiting for long periods while prepared for a sudden event. QUINUI - like a polar bear waiting for a seal at a hole in the ice. A chameleon invisibly perched on a branch attentive to the flashing insect wings around it. A tick on a blade of grass ready for the passage of fur. Or a photographer standing in a storm at night, camera in hand, waiting for the lightning strike. Then TUQ - a flaring into appearance. An active vanishing that burns itself into the retina for a moment, then gradually dissolves.

9. ‘There are about two hundred shots in Mirror, very few when a film of that length usually has about five hundred; the small number is due to their length. Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm. The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. Editing cannot determine rhythm … indeed, time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it. The course of time, recorded in the frame, is what the director has to catch in the pieces laid out on the editing table.

Time, imprinted in the frame, dictates the particular editing principle; and the pieces that ‘won’t edit’ – that can’t be properly joined – are those which record a radically different kind of time. One cannot, for instance, put actual time together with conceptual time, any more than one can join water pipes of different diameter. The consistency of the time that runs through the shot, its intensity or ‘sloppiness’, could be called time-pressure; then editing can be seen as the assembly of the pieces on the basis of the time-pressure within them’ (Tarkovsky 1986: 117).

10. Of all of the artist-walkers who spring to mind - Hamish Fulton, Marina & Ulay, Lone Twin, Wrights & Sites, Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Iain Sinclair, Bruce Chatwin, and so on – Richard Long seems to me one of the slowest and most patient, one of the clearest about his choices. Long repeatedly uses walking structures as generative ‘games’ in the production of photographs and texts in which words assume a sculptural quality, as well as ‘non-site’ works for gallery spaces. His walks are playful in a purposeful way, and it’s invariably hard to separate the idea for a walk, the walk itself, and the trace of walk. The walks are conceived by Long as ‘sculpture’, taking sculpture way beyond the usual definition of the generation of objects. Instead, he proposes to make experiential events and impermanent relational connections with and in places. In his registering of their traces lies an implicit set of propositions about reality, nature, our place(s) in the world: a kind of ethics of lightness, movement, process, change, relationality in complexity. We only ever witness traces of the space-time aggregate of the absent/invisible event. The sculptural work itself rarely involves violent interventions; the work is always on a human scale, often discreet, ephemeral, small restrained displacements more often than not employing the elementary and archetypal formal configurations of lines (motion) and circles (stopping points) and their variants (spiral, cross, arc, zig-zag, ellipsis).

In an interview in 1990, Long reflected on the complex relations between duration and ephemerality in his work, a slow dance of endless repetition with difference, of unfolding multiplicity within identity: ‘I suppose my work runs the whole gamut from being completely invisible and disappearing in seconds, like a water drawing, to a permanent work in a museum that could last forever. The planet is full of unbelievably permanent things, like rock strata and tides, and yet full of impermanence like butterflies or the seaweed on the beach, which is in a new pattern every day for thousands of years. I would like to think my work reflects that beautiful complexity and reality’ (Long 1991: 104).

One of Richard Long’s most remarkable walking works is Crossing Stones (1987), in which he carried a single pebble from a beach on the East coast of England, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk, all the way across Britain to Aberystwyth in West Wales, covering more than 300 miles in 10 days. On the beach in Aberystwyth, he deposited the Suffolk stone, exchanged it for another, and then carried this second stone back another 300 miles to deposit it on the same beach in Suffolk. This act of displacement is both heroic and Sisyphean in its epic absurdity. A return journey on foot lasting 20 days, covering more than 600 miles, in order to exchange two pebbles (why those two?), and all that survives is one text work, a brief score-like description of the structure of the event as a whole. The symmetrical transplant effects a re-assimilation by two pebbles on a new beach in a fresh alliance with other pebbles, all of them moving incessantly with tides and weather: so nothing moves, everything stays the same, but everything has changed. (The layerings of time: the moment of choice of a pebble, the rhythms of foot steps, the moment of placement, the rhythms of the sea, the glacial speed of change in stone: slowness is always relative). The pebbles remain remote from each other in their new locations, as far apart as ever, but a new connective relation or tissue is established between the individual stones, the beaches, the coastlines, the edges of Britain. Each of them has crossed to a situation that is the same and quite different. The space between them is blooded and activated by Long’s long walk, a passage which has all but disappeared in its embodied complexity, Nothing is mentioned of the journey to and fro beyond the fact that it took place; three weeks collapse into a few words, and Long’s experiences en route are excised completely in this most radical act of editing and distilling to a pure economy of exchange. It is the experiences of the pebbles, it seems, that are to be privileged.

11. ‘There are, on a few Shinto shrines, some sacred curiosities. Stones that have fallen from the sky. Nobody makes much fuss about them. They are simply there for people to take pleasure in, and as objects deserving of the respect accorded to everything that shares the spirit of divinity. The traditional explanation for their existence is very simple and matter-of-fact. “There is a hole in the sky”, say the priests, “and sometimes things just fall through it”’ (Watson 1984: 319).

12. In the opening sequence of Le Jet de Sang (‘The Spurt of Blood’), a short play written by Antonin Artaud, a pair of young lovers express ardent passion for each other in a (parodic? nostalgic?) exchange that culminates in the young man declaring: ‘We are intense. Ah. What a well-made world’. Artaud then provides a genuinely startling stage direction: precise, hallucinatory, dissociated, anti-romantic, surreal, apocalyptic. It appears there is indeed a hole in the sky, and fragments of well-made civilisations and anatomies fall through it as the lovers’ intensive coup de foudre gives way to cosmic dismemberment: 'Silence: noise like a huge wheel spinning, blowing out wind. A hurricane comes between them. At that moment, two stars collide, and a succession of limbs of flesh fall. Then feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticoes, temples and alembics, falling slower and slower as if through space, then three scorpions one of the other and finally a frog, and a scarab which lands with heart-breaking, nauseating slowness’ (Artaud 1968: 63).

Although one might readily associate an Artaudian ‘theatre of cruelty’ with frenzied speed and ecstasy, it is my impression that in his writings Artaud rehearsed a particular ontology of slowness. He returned repeatedly to his sense of time and integrated, ‘orderly’ spaces (e.g. that of the human body) being out of joint, and articulated the pervasive dis-ease he experienced as ‘that abnormal facility that has entered into human relations which does not allow our thoughts the time to take root’ (Artaud 1988: 162).

13. On a footpath, in large letters traced with a finger in the fresh snow, someone’s written a message to the sky: MORE SNOW PLEASE. The gift of snow. Its aura.

14. ‘Relation of walking and thinking, the movement of the body setting thought in motion. Rimbaud composed many of his poems while walking. So does Edmond Jabès. Walking the space of a line, a phrase. As if finding it. A grammar of motion … Edmond Jabès walks. Hands crossed in back. Slowly … In the dining room, Edmond opens a drawer full of pebbles he has collected on beaches. In Brittany, In Italy. “Look at this, wouldn’t you say, a face? And this one here, magnificent”. Almost all his pebbles have markings one could see as a face. “Just look; it’s Verlaine”. Once he has said this I cannot see anything but Verlaine in the veins of the stone. But I think more of how it is sand and stone that hold his attention rather than the sea. Bits of desert … After Edmond’s death, Marcel gives us a most precious gift. Two out of a group of five white pebbles that Edmond has collected for him. These do not suggest faces. They are pure white. They are, strangely, almost perfect cubes. They sit on top of one another’ (Waldrop 2002: 15, 30, 32-3)

15. ‘In 1981, I made a videotape in Japan, Hatsu Yume ('First Dream'), in which there is one sequence where a fixed camera views a rock on a mountainside over a long period of time. When it comes on the screen, the images are moving 20 times normal speed, and gradually, in a series of stages, it slows down to real-time, and eventually to extreme slow-motion. People usually describe that scene by saying, “ … the part where the people are all slowed down while moving round the rock”. What I looked at in that scene is the rock, not so much the people. I thought it would be interesting to show a rock in slow motion. All that is really happening is that the rock’s time, its rate of change, exceeds the sampling rate (the recording time of the video), whereas the people are within that range. So the rock just sits there, high speed, slow speed … it doesn’t matter. I think about time in that way. There are windows or wavelengths of perception. They are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain frequency range. This is directly related to scale changes in space or sound, proportion in architecture and music. A fly lives for a week or two, and a rock exists for thousands or millions of years’ (Bill Viola 1995: 151).

16. In the late 1960s, in a proposal for a new work called Island of Broken Glass, a work that might be thought of nowadays in terms of a ‘deep ecology’, American land artist Robert Smithson suggested that a small island in Vancouver harbour (Miami Islet) should be covered with broken glass. Eventually, through the forces of nature over a long period of time, the glass would break down into ever smaller pieces until its final return to sand. Smithson’s proposal was vehemently opposed by ecologists, and the work was never realised. Elsewhere Smithson wrote: ‘In the museum one can find deposits of rust labelled "Philosophy", and in glass cases unknown lumps of something labelled "Aesthetics"' (Smithson in Holt 1979: 79).

Meanwhile about thirty years after its disappearance Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) has re-emerged into astonishing visibility (for the time being) from beneath the surface of the Great Salk Late in Utah; the rocks are now caked in sparkling salt crystals in the pink waters of the lake.

17. Imagine it. A wheat field, two blocks from the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and Wall Street in New York City, opposite the Statue of Liberty. First, the clearing of rocks and trash on a disused block of land, then a fresh covering with truckloads of landfill, before the spring planting of seed in 285 hand-dug furrows blanketed with an inch of top-soil. The establishment of an irrigation system, clearing, maintenance, weeding and spraying. Four months of careful tending, from brown to green to amber, then the final harvesting in August: almost 1,000 pounds of wheat. Finally, the return of the land to the rhythms and economies of intensive urban development, and the construction of a new luxury complex.

Reflecting on her land art sculpture-event Wheatfield (1982) afterwards, activist-artist Agnes Denes suggested: ‘It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement and world hunger. It was an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilisation. Then again, it was also Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures’ (Denes 1982: 544).

A wheat field in lower Manhattan. Imagine it.

18. On a February morning of both sun and snow, walking through the fields on the banks of the River Dart at Dartington in Devon, I come across an oak tree that has fallen during a winter storm. Uprooted, its massive trunk shattered, the tree’s canopy lies over the pathway made by dog-walkers and joggers: an impassable obstruction, an interruption in the rhythms of walking and running. It is as if it has dropped out of the sky, like the timber house in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. I am struck by the juxtaposition of a long, slow period of vertical growth and the sudden moment of falling to the horizontal:

‘There is a moment when the newborn first lets out a cry into the dry air, when the pressure of light first falls on the virgin surface of the new retina and is registered by some pattern of nerve impulses not yet fully “understood” … There is a moment, only truly known in anticipation before it happens, when the eyes close for the last time and the brain shuts down its circuits forever (the end of time)’ (Viola 1995: 142).

In the weeks since the oak’s collapse, a new ‘desire path’ has been worn into the grass around it, a perfect semi-circle tracing the outline of the canopy and connecting the path at either side. The old path, now enveloped by the dead branches, remains bare. From the perspective of the buzzard floating far above my head, one might see a large brown D inscribed into the grassy surface of the field by gravitied footfalls over time.

19. [...]

20. First, a score: Yoko Ono’s TAPE PIECE III/Snow Piece (1963): ‘Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with. Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet’ (Ono 1970: unpaginated).

Then a slow and illuminating close reading of a slow and illuminating work. In his remarkable study of sound in 20th century avant-garde art work, Noise Water Meat (1999), Douglas Kahn begins by describing the paradoxical acoustical effects of snow falling: ‘It is a sound of blanketing bereft of warmth, a massive field of intense activity that is oddly quiet, and because the accumulation of snow acts to absorb sounds and the minute crystalline structure of snow breaks up sound waves at their own scale, it becomes progressively quieter as the snow mutes itself. [...] The irony of snow falling is that it produces the conditions for listening closely but then absorbs the sounds that might be heard’ (Kahn 1999: 238-9).

Kahn then turns his attention to Ono’s poetical disposition towards technology, and its embracing of multiple inaudibilities. For the score involves: ‘much more than trying to listen, even though Ono has employed and displayed the technology of listening. She has actually employed a technology one imagines and a technology one ignores. Assume for a moment an impossible transparency of audiophonic technology [...] A tape recording is made of falling snow using such technology and then ignored. Ono’s score instructs the recordist not to listen to it because it is the best way to ensure its accuracy’ (ibid: 239).

Finally Kahn highlights the ethical overlay in Ono’s score between environmental and social relations, the tacit acknowledgement of multiple silences (and silencings) and the emotional warmth in the economy of the gift: ‘A refusal to listen complements both the silence of the imagined sound of snow falling and the silences involved in the very act of gift giving. Whatever else can be said about gift giving, something is always left unsaid. Although speech may revolve around the act, the delicacy of the gesture, especially in Ono’s score, acts to absorb the sound waves of speech. When the audiotape is used as ribbon, the environment of snow falling lies covertly inscribed along the length of the tape in patterns resembling the loops of a bow’ (ibid: 239-40).

21. Las Ramblas: a bustling, tree-lined boulevard bisecting the old city of Barcelona. Lorca once described it as ‘the only street in the world which I wish would never end’. Its name derives from an Arabic word (ramla) for torrents or rapids, for at one time it was a seasonal watercourse, the route of run-off from hills to the sea. The memory of water.

Today Las Ramblas runs from Plaça de Catalunya in the north to Plaça Portal de la Pau in the south, with its harbourside monument to Christopher Columbus. Caked white with birdshit, with a hefty stone map in one hand by his side, Columbus points confidently out to sea, but in the direction of North Africa rather than the New World. This way, folks, must be.

How to remake a river? Or more modestly, for I’m uneasy with Columbus’s unshakeable conviction as model, how to make a small action whose ephemeral traces might reconnect this place briefly and playfully with its naming, and with its past role in the micro-circuits and flows of the hydrological cycle? How to re-member a river? I discussed this with Gregg and Gary. Many triggers for me in what they do, and they have moist imaginations. We chatted in a cafe, quiet little rants and what ifs and didyaknows about weather systems, bodies, maps, becoming-river, Snowflake the albino gorilla. Then Gary said what about ice.

In the end we slid a block of ice from the CCCB, past the Plaça dels Angels and along the Carrer Bonsuccés to Las Ramblas. We placed it on its side on the paving stones in the middle of Rambla Canaletes, near an old iron fountain, then wrung the melted ice from our gloves to start the flow. People watching, talking in the sun. The water of memory (David Williams in Whelan & Winters 2001: unpaginated).

22. After hearing La Monte Young talk at the Barbican in December 1998, Jem Finer, the creator and composer of Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long musical score for looped Tibetan bell-chants spiralling ‘like planets around the sun’ (Finer in van Noord 2000: 3), wrote in his journal: ‘I was interested by his talking about the evening’s performance as part of an ongoing, ever-lasting performance. The time that had elapsed since the last one merely being a pause in the music’ (ibid: 29).

23. Speed of the sound of loneliness is the title of a John Prine song sung by Nanci Griffin, a title borrowed by Richard Long for a walking work he made on Dartmoor in the winter of 1998. Walking continuously from dawn to dusk, Long circled Crow Tor at a distance representing the Earth’s orbit around the Sun; the rock acted as still point or fulcrum in a circuit of 7 miles walked 3 1/2 times, at a speed Long estimated to be at 2.8 miles an hour. Long’s published score of the event goes on to record other speeds occurring simultaneously in a sliding scale of space-times around Crow Tor - an overlay of differential speeds and relational connections moving out from the rock to the galaxy in this simple meditative staging of the vertiginous dynamics of our tiny corner of the universe (Long 2002: 149):

THE ROTATION SPEED OF THE EARTH IN ENGLAND 700 MILES AN HOUR

THE ROTATION SPEED OF THE EARTH IN ITS ORBIT AROUND THE SUN 70,000 MILES AN HOUR

THE SPEED OF OUR MOTION AROUND THE GALAXY 500,000 MILES AN HOUR

24. A man in a snail suit stands waiting at a zebra crossing. Spiral shell on his back, comedy feelers protruding from his forehead. A car slows to let him cross. He acknowledges the driver politely, then lies on his belly and slides imperceptibly slowly across the tarmac, inch by inch. Music: Bakerman, by the band Laid Back. "Bakerman is baking bread. Bakerman … is baking bread. The night train is coming, got to keep on runnin’ …" (from Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV).

References
Artaud, Antonin (1968). Collected Works, Volume 1 (trans. Victor Corti), London: Calder & Boyars
Artaud, Antonin (1988). ‘Manifesto for a theatre that failed’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press
Auster, Paul (1998). ‘White Spaces’, Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber
Bachelard, Gaston (1988). Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (trans. E.R. Farrell), Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
Benjamin, Walter (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936], in Illuminations (trans Harry Zorn), New York: Schocken Books
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock), Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press
Calvino, Italo (1993). ‘Quickness’, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 31-54
Carruthers, Mary (1990). The Book of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Deleuze, Gilles (1986)). Cinema I: The Movement-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
de Maria, Walter (1980). ‘The Lightning Field’, in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz (eds) (1996), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 527-30
Denes, Agnes (1982) ‘Wheatfield: A Confrontation’, in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz (eds) (1996), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 543-5
Dillard, Annie (1999). For the Time Being, New York: Vintage Books
George, David (1999). Buddhism as/in Performance, New Delhi: DK Printworld
Goulish, Matthew (2000). 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, London & New York: Routledge
Heim, Wallace (2003). ‘Slow activism: homelands, love and the lightbulb’, in Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim & Claire Waterton (eds), Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell, 183-202
Hoete, Anthony (ed.) (2002). Roam: Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility, London: Black Dog Publishing
Holt, Nancy (ed.) (1979). The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York: New York University Press
Jabes, Edmond (1972). The Book of Questions, vol. 1 (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Hanover NH: University Press of New England
Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press
Kulik, Oleg (2003). ‘Armadillo for your show’, in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Live Culture, London: Tate Modern / Live Art Development Agency, 20-3
Kundera, Milan (1996). Slowness (trans. Linda Asher), London: Faber & Faber
Lepecki, André (1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7
Long, Richard (1991). Walking in Circles, London: Thames & Hudson
Long, Richard (2002). Walking the Line, London: Thames & Hudson
Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Durham & London: Duke University Press
Massumi, Brian (ed.) (2002). ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London & New York: Routledge, xiii-xxxix
Moore, Richard (dir.) (1991). Butoh: Piercing the Mask (film)
Ono, Yoko (1970). Grapefruit, New York: Simon & Schuster
Tarkovsky, Andrey (1986). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair), Austin: University of Texas Press
van Noord, Gerrie (ed.) (2000). Jem Finer: Longplayer, London: Artangel
Viola, Bill (1995). Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, London: Thames & Hudson / Anthony d’Offay Gallery
Waldrop, Rosmarie (2002). Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press
Watkins, Jonathan and Kermode, Deborah (eds) (2001). Oleg Kulik: Art Animal, Birmingham: Ikon Gallery
Watson, Lyall (1984). Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, London: Hodder & Stoughton
Whelan, Gregg & Winters, Gary (2001). Of pigs and lovers: a lone twin research companion, in Live Art Magazine no. 34, March-May

(‘The little by little suddenly’, in Ian Abbot (ed.), Slow, Devon: Elusive Camel Books, 2007. Limited edition artist’s book. Contributors include Matthew Goulish, Kirsten Lavers, Kevin Mount, Cupola Bobber. This version - with one frame 'missing', no. 19 - is reproduced here in memory of Lyall Watson, who died in late June 2008).

book of motion

2009-10-11T23:37:00.003+01:00

Today at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, my friends in the group propeller - Pete Harrison, Augusto Corrieri, Tim Vize-Martin, Emma Bush, Neil Callaghan - are launching the publication of their collaboratively written book, Five Rooms (Acts of Language).

Here is a pre-publication response I wrote for them. For the propellers have indeed made a beautiful book. I wish I could be there to celebrate it with them.

*****

These collaboratively authored texts constitute a book of motion: of fallings and flyings and journeys of many kinds. Materials here are in perpetual flux. Matter circulates at differing speeds and transforms, as do spaces, times, images, narratives, selves. Identities and their constituent elements migrate in a dynamic unfolding/infolding of translations of things, people, stories. The authors trace the mortality of forms, and the trajectories and contours of time’s metamorphoses and of matter’s becomings: its dynamic ‘fidelities’ and ‘infidelities’.

For everything here is on the move, in transit: information (genetic, viral, sonic, electronic, visual, semiotic, ideological), people young and old, past and present, and events. Here events are protean in their meanings, and promiscuous in their proliferative ripples and dispersed echoes. A meteorite falls, and elsew/here so does a leaf, a seal in snow, light, rain, ‘Andrew’. Moments of shock, tiny or momentous, recur - eruptive occurrences when the doors of perception are cleansed, or at least re-written, by a sudden transformative ‘appearance’, a visitation, as untimely and unforeseen as that of an angel.

A catalogue of epiphanies and revelations in the everyday, some of them read as portents, symptoms, coded messages. Others trigger memory or breed confusion in this exquisite cartography of a politics of wonder, belonging, displacement and connectivity. At such moments – carefully distilled invitations to attend, imagine and connect - an infinite web of perceptions and circuits are activated, and the shape of time, memory, history and geography morphs, stretches, tears, and pulses.

This is also a book of passages, mapping a weave of interconnecting territories and the mysterious wormholes that both link and separate them. Here the world is re-membered as ‘something slippery, elusive, open’. Trace elements of lives – extinguished, sputtering or aglow - are continuously unmade, re-routed and refashioned. Within these pages coexist gods and dogs, dream and fear, love and loss, the exhaustion and hope of flesh and stone. And as readers, we are invited to inhabit the spaces between fragility and persistence, chance and fate, regimes of order and the apparent formlessness of a deeper grammar of complexity.
_______________________________________________

Five Rooms costs £10.00, and can be purchased online through Acts of Language here

For other responses to Five Rooms, by Cathy Turner, Tracey Warr and Wallace Heim, see here

For the propeller website, see here

For information about Acts of Language and its other publications, see here

suite an clearance

2009-04-23T21:03:00.001+01:00

der wolf

2009-05-25T18:07:00.000+01:00

underhistory (1)

2009-06-27T21:04:00.005+01:00

In 2004, the Croatian performance artist DB Indos took me to a vast rubbish tip near Zagreb; he called it ‘the mountain’, ‘an apocalyptic place, as if something terrible has happened’. A chaotic archive of the broken, the unwanted, the redundant, the forgotten, the repressed: a monumental landscape of fragments of the city’s discarded pasts. He told me about methane build-ups within this mass of refuse, how some years ago a huge explosion had scattered rubbish far and wide across the southern suburbs of the city. Then he told me of his desire to make a performance here, and pointed to a spot high on a crest …

Introduction
The following texts emerge from a long-term interest in Italian politics and organized crime: its performative modus operandi, and its imbrication in the circuits and flows of globalization. In addition, and more recently, I have been looking at approaches to waste in environmentalism, cultural studies, archaeology, psychology and psychoanalysis, and certain contemporary art practices. As John Scanlan and others have shown, terms like 'garbage', 'trash', 'refuse', 'waste' and 'rubbish' are complex metaphorical terms employed to organize and legitimize the treatment of parts of life normally desired to be overlooked. So perhaps attention to waste can provide uncanny shadow histories and geographies of ‘things, people or activities that are separated, removed, and devalued’ (Scanlan 2005: 10).

What follows in this sequence of 3 consecutive blog posts are sections from a longer set of texts – very much unfinished, a work-in-progress. In large part, I am inspired here by the work of particular activists, artists and investigators, and I dedicate this research to them: Dan Gretton and his colleagues at Platform; the artist/activist Ursula Biemann; the investigative journalist Roberto Saviano; the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles; and the Sicilian magistrates Giovanni Falcone & Paolo Borsellino, murdered by the Mafia in the summer of 1992.

I’d like to begin with three prefatory quotations:

First, Iain Sinclair, from his recent book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: ‘We are the rubbish, outmoded and unrequired. Dumped on wet pavings and left there for weeks, in the expectation of becoming art objects, a baleful warning. Nobody pays me to do this. It is my own choice, to identify with detritus in a place that has declared war on unconvinced recyclers while erecting expensive memorials to the absence of memory’ (Sinclair 2009: 7).

Second, Isabel Fonseca in Bury Me Standing, her extraordinary 1996 book about Roma & Sinti people in Eastern Europe. In 1940s Britain, she writes, “Gypsies suffering from pulmonary disease attempted a symbolic transference by breathing three times into the mouth of a live fish, and then throwing it back into the stream from which it had been fetched. The hope was that, confused, death would go for the fish” (Fonseca 1995: 248).

And finally, Walter Benjamin, an incomplete fragment from his ‘First Sketches’ for the Arcades Project: ‘And nothing at all of what we are saying here actually existed. None of it has ever lived – as surely as a skeleton has never lived, but only a man. As surely, however … [broken off]’ (Benjamin 1999: 833).

*****

Leonia
In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Leonia is a city that ‘refashions itself every day’ – everything is discarded and replaced on a daily basis. It’s uncertain whether Leonia’s ‘true passion’ is ‘the enjoyment of new and different things’, or rather ‘the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity’. Every day the street cleaners, who are ‘welcomed like angels’, remove ‘the residue of yesterday’s existence’, but nobody in the city knows where they take it. Somewhere ‘outside’. However ‘the bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified’, until eventually a ‘fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains’.

‘This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday, and of all its days and years and decades …’

Meanwhile, the other cities are also ‘pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves’. ‘Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle’.

As the mountains of refuse grow in height, the danger of a cataclysmic landslide increases. ’A tin can, an old tire, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities, finally clean …’ The other cities are ready to move into the new territory, flatten it with their bulldozers, and erase all trace of Leonia, freeing a space for their own street cleaners to push ‘still farther out’ (Calvino 1974: 114-6).

*****

Campania Felix

The last twenty-five years or so has seen the rise of an organized crime phenomenon known as the ‘Ecomafia’, a term that refers to illegal development and construction, and to waste disposal. Since the late 1970s, the waste disposal industry has become a lucrative context in an extreme form of gangster capitalism, in which toxic materials are dispersed illegally and with devastating effects. Bernardo Provenzano, former boss of bosses in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, wrote in one his smuggled notes, with a Midas-related boast: “It’s easy - it goes out shit, and comes back gold”. In Italy, investigators suggest that millions of tons of industrial waste ‘disappear’ every year, of which about 300,000 tons are highly toxic. An estimated 500 tons a day go missing from the province of Milan alone, almost 40% of its daily total.

Campania: Campania Felix, as it used to be known – ‘a land as clear as daylight’ is the advertising strap-line of the Regione Campania tourist board. Their brochures quote Pliny the Elder, writing almost exactly 2,000 years ago: ‘This land is so happy, so delightful, so fortunate that it is obvious it is nature’s favorite. This revitalizing air, the perpetually clear skies, the so fertile land …’ However, in the early part of the 21st century, in a semi-circle to the north of Naples, in the so-called ‘Land of Fires’, Campania contains the greatest concentration of illegal toxic and non-toxic dumping and unregulated incineration in Western Europe, which has poisoned the land and many of its inhabitants; there is an estimated illegal dumping of about a million tons a year in this region alone.

The scale is bewildering, to say the least. According to Lagambiente the Italian environmental NGO (the original inventors of the word ‘Ecomafia’ in the 1990s), “if all the trash that has escaped legal inspection in Italy [since the early 1990s] were collected in one place, it would form a mountain […] rising 47,900 feet from a base of 3 hectares. Mont Blanc rises 15,780 feet, Everest 29,015. So this heap of unregulated and unreported waste would be the highest mountain on earth” (Saviano 2007: 283).

In Italy almost all of this waste travels North to South, contracted out at 40-80% below its legal disposal costs: mostly scattered across Campania, Calabria, Puglia, Sicily. As Roberto Saviano points out, these regions with the greatest number of recorded environmental crimes, also “head the list for the largest criminal associations, the highest unemployment rates, the greatest number of volunteers for the military and the police forces” (ibid: 283).

All sorts of materials have been found: derivatives from incinerators & thermoelectric plants; asbestos; polluted soil from reclamation projects; petrochemical companies’ waste; paint residues; chemical thinners; carcinogenic hydrocarbons; radioactive and other waste from hospitals; old road surfaces with a very elevated tar density; sludge from tanning factories and purification plants; heavy metals – lead, mercury, cadmium – as well as arsenic, chrome, nickel, cobalt; even exhumed body parts from cemeteries when they clear space by moving on the so-called ‘superdead’ (over 40 years old). And in the plumes of illegal incinerations, the release of huge quantities of dioxins that find their way into the water table, and agricultural produce, including most famously into buffalo mozzarella cheese.

Saviano describes a farmer ploughing a newly purchased field, his plough blade becoming jammed and uncovering bales of pulped lire bank notes (285). Also, during the public prosecutor’s 2006 covert operation Madre Terra ('Mother Earth'), the discovery of huge dumps of printer toner (286) leaching carcinogenic hexavalent chromium into the soil.

This dispersal has reconfigured the landscape to create ‘previously non-existent hills and suddenly restored lost mass to mountains devoured by quarries’ (Saviano 285). There is a terrible logic to the cycle. Buy land – create new quarries/tips – get the contract for its reclamation.clean-up – re-disperse these materials, and re-use the old quarry/tip sites again – use the capital to drive out small holders, buy more land, create more space … Anywhere is a potential empty space: underground petrol tanks of disused gas stations, abandoned houses. In the documentary Biutiful Cauntri: construction waste is dumped in a pyramidal pile in the middle of the road on an underpass on the motorway. Another common dispersal technique is through mixing waste with cement or asphalt for use in construction (a technique employed in England by London Waste for the illegal dispersal of fly ash), or cutting waste into fertilizer and compost, distributed nationally and spread widely on agricultural land.

Cumulatively, this activity has generated billions of euros for the Camorra clans. It’s known that organized crime makes a lot more money per annum than Fiat, for example. It has produced spiralling health problems in farm stock & humans in Campania. Including (according to research by the WHO and others) an alarming increase in particular cancers - liver, leukaemia, lymphoma etc. - in Caserta, Acerro and other areas around Naples (see Senior & Mazza 2004).

Evidently this is just one part of widespread illegal dumping elsewhere; one thinks of Trafigura’s astounding criminal recklessness in its dispersal of a highly toxic sludge in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast, or of Shell’s implicatedness in the environmental devastation of the Niger delta. For organized crime in Italy it operates via an international network related to drug trade routes and connections, and easy deals with the 3rd world. Also to Eastern Europe (particularly Romania, where there is documentary evidence of radioactive waste having been dumped in the Black Sea); to Albania, China, Costa Rica – and in particular to Africa (Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia etc.), on land and in the sea. There has been tipping directly off ships – barrels dumped over the side into the sea, as well as the sinking of ships with holds full of waste, then claim the insurance. It’s now known, for example, that ships containing barrels of radioactive waste have been sunk off Calabria in the Mediterranean, as well as much more widely off the east coast of Africa.

Then in December 2004, the tsunami threw up hundreds of decaying barrels of illegally dumped radioactive and heavy metal waste on to the beaches of Somalia. UN reports and other sources confirm the link with Italian organized crime. Recent statements by some of the Somalian ‘pirates’ taking ships hostage have justified their ransom demands in part as compensation to be used in cleaning up the coastline ‘laid waste’ by Ecomafias in this way over the past 20 years, and in helping to protect their fishing territories. There remains very limited discussion of this in the Western media, with the notable exception of Johann Hari in The Independent, and more recently George Monbiot in The Guardian.

Strange reversals: ‘Waste disposal’ as environmental terrorism - the performance of ‘piracy’ as radical environmentalist intervention.

*****

underhistory (3)

2009-06-27T23:22:00.001+01:00

Dietrologia
One core stimulus for me here, a conceptual & compositional model/challenge, is Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld (1998). Like so much of DeLillo’s work, Underworld questions the legitimacy of multinational capitalism, its manipulation of images through saturation media/advertising to construct identity through acts of consumption, and its managing of ideological ‘waste’. (At one point, he co-opts Dupont’s slogan as an ironic chapter title: ‘Better Things for Better Living, Through Chemistry’). DeLillo proposes a sort of strategic paranoia about America’s military-industrial complex: agent orange/orange juice – ‘everything is connected’ (one of many links with Pynchon). ‘Dietrologia’ (280), the science of what ‘lies behind’ (events): a word familiar to organized crime investigators in Italy.

Here as elsewhere in DeLillo, there is an undercurrent – an ‘atavistic dread’ – related to the apocalyptic ecological threat of capitalism, and the media’s normalizing and rendering invisible of this threat. In a novel he says he conceived of in terms of ‘disappearance, loss, betrayal’, DeLillo presents a kind of counter-history of Cold War America in the shadow of the threat of auto-annihilation: a subterranean ‘underhistory of the Cold War, a curious history of waste which forms an underground stream in this book, waste and weapons’.

DeLillo describes literal ‘wastelands’ – massive landfills (in particular Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York), reflecting the volume of waste generated in consumer culture, and capitalism’s postmodern solution to the problem of waste: ‘Don’t contain the growth of waste’ [which is an index of business being good]; ‘contain the appearance of waste’. In the novel, Nick Shay is involved in waste management; indeed he’s a ‘cosmologist of waste’ (88), who comes across scenes that are ‘medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable ever thrown together’ (104). Remove all visible traces, dis/appear it ‘underground’: and yet Shay recognises waste as part of culture’s ‘secret history’ (791). At one point, he thinks: ‘Waste is an interesting word that you can trace through Old English and old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish, and devastate’ (120).

One of DeLillo’s triggers for the title relates to his reading about proposals for plutonium and other nuclear waste to be buried in the desert in the South-West of the USA at Yucca Mountain and elsewhere. He uncovers the etymological link to Pluto, ‘god of the dead, ruler of the underworld’: they ‘took him out to the marshes and wasted him’ (106).

The novel explores affiliations with a criminal underworld - and an-other ‘underworld’, an underclass of homeless people in New York (capitalism’s others, human ‘waste’). Many of them in this novel are based in the subway (‘underground’): the ‘wastelings of the lost world, the lost country that exists right here in America’ (628). There are intertextual echoes here of the ‘valley of ashes’ in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, even of Dickens’ Thames-side ash-and-waste entrepreneurs in Our Mutual Friend.

DeLillo’s novel references apocalyptic representations in art of the underworld, notably Breughel’s Triumph of Death: a ‘landscape of visionary havoc and ruin’, against a ‘background of ash skies and burning ships’ (41). And scattered through the novel are instances of waste being used in radical ‘underground’ or outsider art practices – including, for example, guerrilla artists who try to steal J Edgar Hoover’s garbage and use it to make performance art: a narrative based on AJ Weberman’s notorious pursuit of Bob Dylan through his trash in the 1960s. Historically, Hoover himself had authorised ‘dumpster diving’ as a legitimate means for the FBI to gather evidence …

In addition, DeLillo invents a series of Lenny Bruce gigs, improvised jazz-like hipster riffs around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, his uncanny channeling of the voices of the powerful and the ‘wastelings’, with the reiterated catch-phrase: ‘We’re all gonna die!’ Bruce’s voice is described as ‘the id-like wail from the audience’s own souls, the desperate buried place where you demand recognition of primitive rights and needs’ (547).

DeLillo also invents a supposedly ‘lost’ Eisenstein silent film called Unterwelt, about the dispossessed ‘living in the shadows’. In the novel it’s viewed between two other films: Robert Frank’s documentary about the Rolling Stones on tour in America, Cocksucker Blues; and an art installation video loop of multiple copies of the Zapruder film, the assassination of JFK. Associatively, all three films are about waste.

So, DeLillo constructs a kind of archaeological counter-narrative about proliferation and its waste (in both the arms race and consumerism). He traces ‘underground’ logics of another kind of ‘history’, ‘the sand-grain manyness of things that can’t be counted’ (60), and its desire ‘to find an element of felt life’ (77). In other words, History’s ‘waste’ – what it ejects, forgets, overlooks, represses (things, people, values and so on). The novel proposes a kind of scavenging resistance, an exercise in waste management, recycling or retrieval from the dust, the trash heap of history (alluding to Marx, Benjamin etc.). En route, DeLillo employs a range of compound words, some of them neologisms: ‘underbreath’, ‘undervoice’, ‘underdream’, underbelly, ‘underreal’, ‘underhistory’. A recurrent term is ‘understand’ - dietrologia, the science of what lies behind; or Plato’s hyponoia, Hillman’s ’undersense’. Under-stand. Stand-under ...

*****

Sea dreams: ‘blink’
In another dream, the Sea has vanished suddenly - and completely - and its exposed bed is dotted with people out walking, inspecting what it has left behind. Out there, where the Sea once was, all sorts of people, bent over inspecting a patch of ground, or a piece of driftwood the size of a small tree. Or a bloated purple jelly-fish, scratching at the sand around it with their feet. I can see laughing kids with buckets and spades making castles and cities, and dads sculpting mermaids with shells in their hair, and writing messages in huge letters for the sky. Huddled figures have gathered beside a pool and they stare into it in silence, as though it is infinitely deep, or the plug-hole through which the Sea has departed. As far as the eye can see, thousands of shiny fish pulse on the sand, clasping and unclasping like fingerless silver hands.

Perched on some rocks is a wreck of a wooden schooner encrusted with barnacles, its cabin draped in fine weed, like Christmas decorations; its tattered sails slap and dance in the breeze. Closer to the shore a blue yacht lies on its side, its mast pointing to the sky at an angle of, say, ten o’clock; it looks like a weird oversized sun-dial. Elsewhere there is a beached whale and its cub, breathing heavily, with a man posing for a photo next to the mother’s soft eye: as the shutter closes, the whale blinks. The air is full of birds …

I stand transfixed on the shore watching all of this activity, too frightened to walk out on to the sea bed and join the other people. For I’m terrified of the possibility of the Sea’s sudden return … Perhaps that low smudgy strip of grey cloud on the horizon is in fact a thundering wall of water hundreds of feet high …

Nobody seems to notice except me, they just carry on regardless. I stand there, trembling like a hobbled racehorse.

*****

Fresh Kills
For more than 30 years, Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation, initially unsalaried, self-appointed. Many of her large-scale public projects focus on issues and processes related to waste management, and combine the social-civic-participatory, the environmental, and the political. In Touch Sanitation (1978-84), she documented her meetings and conversations with NY’s sanitation workers, over an 11-month period thanking and shaking hands with over 8,500 ‘garbage’ workers in all 59 municipal districts in the five boroughs of New York. In response to their social marginalization, she was endeavouring to re-value the role of sanitation workers in the accumulation of small respect-ful human encounters: empathetic recognition of ‘the domestic on an urban scale’, and the value of human relations.

Flow City (1983-90) revealed to visitors the scale and material reality of solid waste management in NY City. It included access to the vast marine transfer station in Manhattan on the Hudson River, where the city’s waste is loaded from trucks onto barges for transportation by river to the landfill site. The project involved collaboration with artists, architects, scientists, ecologists; it entailed the construction of viewing platforms, a glass bridge/walkway, and video monitors with live-feed relay of the flows of river, landfill, recycling. The work made these ‘invisible’ processes available and immediate, and invited reflection on our imbrication within these relational circuits and their fragile ecologies.

Since 1989, Ukeles has also been working directly around the Fresh Kills landfill site on the Western shore of the borough of Staten Island. This is the biggest landfill site in the world where, for about 50 years until its closure in March 2001, 25,000 tons of waste from NY City were delivered daily. It was eventually closed because of its size – it had become one of the highest objects on the Eastern seaboard of the US, and threatened to impede air traffic. 2,200 acres, about 3.4 square miles, the equivalent of 2.5 Central Parks.

(Currently, and in the coming years, this vast brown fill site is being transformed into ‘Fresh Kills Park’, a huge public park space: the garbage has been capped, covered in a layer of earth and an impermeable plastic membrane, then topped with clean soil - up to 4 feet deep, native plants, its methane tapped and processed).

On 13th September 2001, one part of Fresh Kills, the largest (Western section 1/9), was re-opened as an emergency site for the FBI and NYPD to sift, sort and dump World Trade Centre debris from the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Dormant marine transfer stations and barges were re-mobilised within days. In an article for Cabinet magazine in 2002, Ukeles asked: ‘What is the meaning of this place now?’ She refers to Fresh Kills as a collectively constructed urban earthwork, ‘a 50-year old social sculpture we have all produced, of four mountains made from 150 million cubic yards of the un-differentiated, un-named, no-value garbage, whose every iota of material identity has been banished’ (Ukeles 2002). However with this dispersal of the ‘flying dust’ from ‘thousands of unfound, incinerated human beings’, and the mingling of human remains and garbage, she suggests: a ‘memorial, or graveyard – or whatever it is – needs to be created out of an utterly opposite kind of social contract. The shattered taboo that enabled this unholy shotgun marriage needs to be restored; a chasm-change in attitude is required, one of very deliberate differentiating, of naming, of attentive reverence for each mote of dust from each lost individual. Thus remembered. This must become a place that returns identity to, not strips identity from, each perished person …” (ibid).

*****

Elsew/here: ‘looking for our lives’
Elsew/here, another kind of sea far inland. The travellers arrive in ones and twos, sometimes a small van arrives in a dust cloud and disgorges an unsteady gaggle of people, shrouded against the sun. They carry light bags for the journey, just the barest of essentials. They have long since said goodbye to their families. Those that stay behind never say their son or daughter or husband ‘left’ or ‘migrated’; they refer to them as ‘the burnt ones’, those that have burnt the law, the past.

At the meeting point in the dunes a man in sunglasses shows them the pre-fabricated kit from which they will build the boat. As he explains the process, he traces lines and swirls in the sand with a stick. Lengths of untreated pine are laid out on the ground; to one side on a white cloth, a variety of bolts, screws, two screwdrivers, a hammer, some bags of plastic ballast. The wood looks like the ruptured rib cage of some extinct beast, bleached by the sun, then buried by the tidal movements of the sand, and only now disinterred.

Many of them have never seen the sea; with diverse images of ‘boat’ in their minds, they start to assemble this mysterious thing in which they will entrust their hopes and their lives. Gradually separate pieces are linked together and the boat’s outline emerges. Their tap-tap-tapping is sometimes interrupted by the low throb of a military plane scouring the dunes; they hide under camouflaged tarpaulins, or lie flat on the sand to try to make themselves invisible, just more fragments of unremarkable desert flotsam.

When the boat is finished, they stand around it with a mixture of astonishment and trepidation. In silence they wait huddled against the cold night until dawn, unable to sleep, then at first light they drag the boat through the sand towards the sea. We go looking for our lives, they say.

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

Slow burial
‘It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy … because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently, the snap off easily, and go blowing about. Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folk who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.

We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take” … Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as “salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred micro-fragments from tropical forest fires”. These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk, the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil’ (Dillard 1999: 123-4).

*****

To be continued ...
________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Cambridge: Polity

Benjamin, Walter (1979). ‘Naples’, in One Way Street, and other writings, London: Verso, pp. 167-76

Benjamin, Walter (1992) [1940]. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations (trans.
Harry Zohn), London & New York: Fontana/HarperCollins, pp. 245-55

Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Biemann, Ursula & Homes, Brian (eds) (2006). The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa, Actar

Calvino, Italo (1974). ‘Continuous Cities 1: Leonia’, Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver), Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 114-6

Davis, Mike (2006). Planet of Slums, London: Verso

DeLillo, Don (1998). Underworld, London: Picador

DePietro, Thomas (ed.) (2005). Conversations with Don DeLillo, Jackson: U.P. Mississippi

Dillard, Annie (1999). For the Time Being, New York: Vintage

Fonseca, Isabel (1995). Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, London: Vintage

Hawkins, Gay & Muecke, Stephen (eds) (2003). Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield

Hillman, James (1979). The Dream and the Underworld, New York: Harper & Row

Lacy, Suzanne (ed.) (1995). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle, Washington: Bay Press

Lippard, Lucy R. (1995). ‘The Garbage Girls’, Z Magazine, New York, December 1991: reprinted in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art, New York: New Press, 1995

Lundstrom, Jan-Erik, Dimitrakaki, Angela (eds) (2008). Ursula Biemann - Mission Reports: Artistic Practice in the Field, Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery

Marx, Ursula, Gudrun Schwarz et al (eds) (2007). Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, London: Verso

Neville, Brian & Villeneuve, Johanne (eds) (2002). Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory, Albany NY: State University of New York Press

Rathje, William & Murphy, Cullen (1992). Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, New York: Harper Collins

Rogers, Heather (2005). Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, New York: New Press

Saviano, Roberto (2007). Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia (trans. Virginia Jewiss), Basingstoke: Macmillan

Scanlan, John (2005). On Garbage, London: Reaktion

Senior, Kathryn & Mazza, Alfredo (2004). ‘Italian “Triangle of Death” linked to waste crisis’, The Lancet (Oncology), vol. 5, September, pp. 525-7

Sinclair, Iain (2003). London Orbital, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Sinclair, Iain (2009). Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report, London: Hamish Hamilton

Steedman, Carolyn (2001). Dust, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Strasser, Susan (1999). Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: Henry Holt & Co

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman (2002). ‘It’s about time for Fresh Kills’, Cabinet no. 6 (‘Horticulture’), Spring, pp. 17-20. Published online at Cabinet website: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/6/freshkills.php

Websites
For Legambiente, Italy, see here
For Legambiente’s illegal waste archive reports, see here

A version of some of these 'Underhistory' texts, was first presented as ‘Underworld, underground, underhistory: ecomafia landscapes’, part of the 4-day AHRC-funded ‘Landscape and Environment’ conference at Aberystwyth University, Wales, in June 2009. (Coordinators: Mike Pearson and Heike Roms). For further details, see here

underhistory (2)

2009-06-27T22:00:00.003+01:00

Undersense
James Hillman: '[This concern with depth leads us in practice to] pay special attention to whatever is below. This has been so since the beginning of psychoanalysis, and its notions of suppression, subconscious, and shadow. These are terms for what we see in images: burials, the dead, ancestors; workers in refuse, sewers, plumbers; criminals and outcasts; the lower body, its garment and its functions; lower forms of life that we ‘look down upon’, from apes to bugs; the underside of the world, the floor of the sea, the downstairs and cellars, and in fact anything whatsoever that can be turned over in the sense of hyponoia to reveal a deeper significance. The emotions that go with these images of bottoming are reluctance, loathing, sadness, mourning, inhibition, enclosure, lethargy, or that sense of depth that presses on us as depression, oppression, suppression. Our downward imagination has entered the earth' (Hillman 1979:139-40).

Hyponoia - Plato’s notion in the Republic: ‘“undersense”, “deeper meaning”, which is an ancient way of putting Freud’s idea of “latent”. The search for undersense is what we express in common speech as the desire to understand … search for deeper grounding … All these movements of hyponoia, leading towards an understanding that gains ground and makes matter, are work’ (ibid: 137).

*****

Insides white
In her book about the Roma and Sinti peoples of Eastern Europe, Bury Me Standing (1995), Isabel Fonseca describes relations between a marginalized, devalued people ‘outside History’, and their geographies, the landscapes made available to this ‘underground nation’ (277). Part of Fonseca’s project was to register the lives lived in these ‘Black Towns’ across Eastern Europe: communities in locations typically on the town dump, often without a name, or ‘with names like ‘Take-It-Or-Leave-It’, ‘Like-It-Or-Not’, ‘No-Man’s-Land’, ‘Cambodia’, and ‘Bangladesh’’ (305).

She cites an example from before the 2nd World War, in 1936 Berlin. Partly in order to clear the streets of Berlin before the Olympic Games, the chief of police authorized the arrest of all Gypsies in Prussia; 600 Roma and Sinti ‘were corralled under police guard into a sewage dump next to a cemetery at Marzahn, a suburb of Berlin’. As Fonseca points out, the location is doubly punitive for people with ‘elaborate codes of hygiene’ and superstitions about graveyards (257). With only 3 water pumps and 2 toilets for what the Nazis called the ‘Gypsy uncreatures’ or ‘the plague’, ‘lives unworthy of life’ (261), there were inevitable outbreaks of disease with many mortalities. Subsequently these Gypsies and others were sent into forced labour and death in Dachau, then later Auschwitz, in the systematic annihilation Gypsies refer to as porraimos, ‘the devouring’ (253).

Compare this with the Gypsy slums of Slovakia in 1990s. One settlement at Rudnany was dispersed over an abandoned arsenic mine, in ‘post-industrial squalor’; people were living in derelict mining offices, these decaying and often roofless buildings surrounded by corroded containers leaking white powder. An environment surrounded by heavy metal waste: arsenic, antimony, bismuth, mercury. In 1993, Slovakian premier Vladmir Meciar made a speech in which he stated that it was ‘necessary to curtail the extended reproduction of the socially unadaptable and mentally backward population’ (293).

In her book, Fonseca includes an image of a pair of Rom children playing in the river at Copsa Mica, Romania, in the shadow of a vast smoke-belching industrial plant. She explains that in this heavily polluted Transylvanian town ‘all the sheep are black – along with everything and everyone else. The residents drink great quantities of milk in the belief, according to one long-term resident, that it will at least “keep their insides white”’ (93).

She also reiterates Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s description of how, in 1940s Britain, “Gypsies suffering from pulmonary disease attempted a symbolic transference by breathing three times into the mouth of a live fish, and then throwing it back into the stream from which it had been fetched. The hope was that, confused, death would go for the fish” (248).

In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi’s party ‘Il Popolo della Liberta’ (‘People of Freedom’) proposed to introduce legislation that required all Roma people to be fingerprinted, including children. Berlusconi’s public rationale proposed that this was imperative given the ‘fact’ that Gypsy people ‘have the criminal gene’.

*****

The Angel of History
‘A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistible propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (Benjamin [1940] 1992: 249).

*****

Elsew/here: ghost net
Elsew/here a ghost net drifts across the ocean’s surface, a floating island unconsciously gathering its catch. From a distance it looks like a small reef breaching the surface. Close up, it’s another story. Caught in the net’s mesh are seaweed, drift wood, plastic bottles, lengths of blue polymer twine, twisted drinks cans, a paint can half full of toxic sludge, empty crisp packets, an aerosol can, dead fish, various bird carcasses, a dolphin cub, and a fluttering tern, its feet caught in the fine nylon filaments: its wings are the only visible sign of life. This is how it happens. A length of pelagic drift netting, one of the instruments of choice for those barely-legal fishing fleets engaged in a kind of maritime strip-mining, breaks loose and floats free. As it drifts it entraps whatever it encounters, gradually ballooning until its mass of waste and putrefying flesh finally sinks beneath its own weight. Over time, this material then breaks down or falls free to allow the net to rise to the surface once more - and the cycle begins again.

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

26 May 2009
‘ A Nepalese Sherpa who holds the world record for climbing Mount Everest said yesterday that rising temperatures were melting snow and turning the slopes barren, making it even harder to scale the world’s tallest peak. Apa Sherpa, back from his 19th successful ascent of Everest last week, said a snow trail to the peak was now just a stretch of bare rocks, as climate change pushed up snowlines and shrank glaciers …

Environmental activists say rising temperatures are rapidly shrinking the Himalayan glaciers from which several Asian rivers originate, threatening the lives of millions of people who depend on them for water.

As well as the impact of climate change, Everest’s environment is also threatened by rubbish left behind by climbers, campaigners say. Apa Sherpa, who first climbed Everest in 1990, said his team had brought down more than 5 tonnes of litter from the mountain, including old tents, ropes, plastic and gas canisters, human waste, and parts of a helicopter that crashed in 1973’ (‘Everest getting harder to climb, says Sherpa’, The Guardian, 26 May 2009).

12 December 2008
‘The government of the Andaman and Nicobar islands is investigating the deaths, over the past three days, of eight members of the Onge tribe who succumbed after drinking a chemical from a brown glass bottle which washed ashore. The Onge already has fewer than 100 members, and Stephen Corry, Survival International's director, said: "This is a calamity for [them]. If any more die, it could put the survival of the entire tribe in serious danger”. The Onge was devastated after the British occupied the islands in the 19th century. Today activists accuse the government of chronic neglect’ (Sanjib Kumar Roy, ‘Bottled chemical on beach kills tribe members’, The Guardian, 12 December 2008).

*****

places voices faces

2009-10-11T20:53:00.004+01:00

I spent most of yesterday at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, watching a screening of Claude Lanzmann's astonishing film Shoah (1985). Dan Gretton had invited me to help him introduce the film, with Alan Boldon. It was being shown as part of Platform's 2-month long residency at the Arnolfini, C Words: carbon, climate, capital, culture, and in conjunction with Dan’s performance lecture next week (and forthcoming book), Desk Killer.

11 years in the making, and 9 1/2 hours long, Shoah is a profoundly unsettling and challenging document, a kind of limit text that seeks to confront and engage with the unrepresentable. I had seen it before over 3 days in Melbourne in the mid-1990s, as part of the preparation for training as an interviewer for the Shoah Foundation's international oral history project, a coordinated gathering of testimonies from survivors from around the world (now archived in Israel and the USA). This first viewing was interspersed with lengthy discussions with survivors, members of the Polish Jewish community in Melbourne; these remarkable, buoyantly alive women had been children in Auschwitz.

Yesterday's second viewing in Bristol took place over a single day, with 3 short breaks: starting at 2.00 p.m., finishing at about 12.45 the following morning. Inevitably, an immersive and gruelling experience, so much of its detail forgotten and now reawakened. Afterwards we lurched out into the night; on the quays on the other side of the water, clubs and bars pumping. And I remembered those women in Melbourne: the fire and compassion in their eyes, the palpable life-force they exuded, their astonishing clarity, generosity and gentleness.

Below are the notes I drew on to introduce Lanzmann's film in Bristol. I reproduce them here for Dan, with my huge respect for his work: -
__________________________________________________________________

First, a quotation from a 1985 interview with Claude Lanzmann, published in Cahiers du Cinéma:

‘I began precisely with the impossibility of telling this story. I placed this impossibility at the very beginning of my work. When I started the film, I had to deal with, on the one hand, the disappearance of the traces: there was nothing at all, sheer nothingness, and I had to make a film on the basis of this nothingness. And on the other hand, with the impossibility of telling this story even by the survivors themselves; the impossibility of speaking, the difficulty – which can be seen throughout the film – of giving birth to and the impossibility of naming it: its unnameable character’.

So, a film created under the sign of, and in the face of, a double impossibility – the absence and unnameability generated by what Maurice Blanchot called ‘the utter-burn of History’. As the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma suggest, ‘the film is made entirely of words & gestures around a kind of blind spot that is the absence of the images it speaks about’. Lanzmann insists it is a ‘work of art’: an ‘originary event’ constructed with ‘traces of traces’.

A note on the title: ‘Shoah’ is a recurrent term in the Hebrew Bible, used to refer to the ravages of natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, and so on ('acts of God'). By mid-1940s, it had become a central term in pre-state (and later Israeli) public discourse about these catastrophic events for the European Jewish diaspora. By extension, it means ‘catastrophe’, ‘destruction’, ‘annihilation’. Initially it was chosen by Lanzmann not knowing Hebrew, not understanding its full meanings: he described it as ‘a brief opaque utterance, an impenetrable word, as unsmashable as an atomic nucleus … another way of not naming it’ (the events and the film).

Compare the term 'Shoah' with the theological implications of the term ‘Holocaust’, in relation to which Lanzmann was dismissive: derived from the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, 'Holocaust' means ‘burnt offering’, and suggests sacrificial offerings, a ritual inevitability.

A second quotation from Lanzmann: ‘A film on the Holocaust has to set out from the principle of the rejection of memory, the refusal to commemorate. The worst moral and artistic crime that can be committed in producing a work dedicated to the Holocaust is to consider the Holocaust as past. Either the Holocaust is a legend or it is present; in no case is it a memory’.

Lanzmann proposes a particular model of memory in his film: through micro-histories rooted in precise facts – where? what? when? who? how? to whom? (not why?) - and places. For this is a profoundly topographical film, with its insistent return to the scenes of these crimes, which Lanzmann, with reference to Pierre Nora, calls ‘non-sites of memory’: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Lanzmann believed that the brutality and violence of these facts in these places might have been weakened by the simplistically causal/linear narratives constructed by many historians. As one writer on the film, Leon Wieseltier, puts it, Lanzmann seems to have wanted to spare his witnesses ‘from the perfections of narrative’. And in his film the disjunctive plurality and weave of the witnesses' voicings, speakings, are more important and productive than any simplistic, seductive, reductive narrative arc.

One of Lanzmann's core concerns was to restore a sense of the immediacy of the Shoah for contemporary viewers, to make the past present, to make it 'take (a) place' with its horrors, complexities, ironies uninsulated: in other words, to presence its un/imaginable absences vividly. For example, Jan Karski's account of the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto; or the Czech Filip Müller on the hellish predicament of those Jews coerced to work within the Sonderkommando units in the ‘undressing rooms’, gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz - Müller survived 5 liquidations of the Sonderkommando.

Those interviewed are often asked to re-experience situations rather than to narrate memories. Many of them play out their roles in the relevant or related sites; performed versions of what happened are re-staged to take place once again in the site of trauma, thereby reintroducing the past into the present. Simon Srebnik, for example, one of only 2 survivors from Chelmno, returns to the Polish village; or Abraham Bomba, former barber for women in the Treblinka gas chambers, cuts a man’s hair in a salon in Tel Aviv; or Henrik Gawkowski, the Polish train driver of transports to Treblinka, once again in an engine rolling up to the station sign for Treblinka.

This return/re-enactment is an ambiguous technique Werner Herzog has used repeatedly, in Little Dieter or Wings of Heaven, for example; it’s a kind of Brechtian technique of reconstructive theatricality, or perhaps a psychoanalytic revisiting of the site of trauma, an acting out as a way to reactivate and work through. At times in Herzog, as here in Lanzmann's film, the ethics of the director's coercive pursuit or insistence are troubling to say the least. In Lanzmann's film, the camera zooms unapologetically to extreme close-up when masks crack and unbridled painful emotion is exposed.

Notice also how the revisited spaces themselves are called to ‘testify’ through their absences. They are surveyed slowly to disclose what remains and what has disappeared, such attenuated images often accompanied by the voices of those who suffered there, voices that ‘excavate’ archaeologically (a metaphor Lanzmann uses). In these sequences there is a recurrent discrepancy or friction between deceptive ordinariness/tranquillity in the present and former horrors – often in a silence that registers a terrible silencing. This disjunction requires reconciling in the spectator/witness in the present. (Lanzmann’s initial title for the film was Site and Speech, which points to the radical economy of means employed in the film: just ‘places, voices, faces’ (Simone de Beauvoir) - although in the end Lanzmann abandoned this title as ‘too abstract’).

Lanzmann’s focus here is on the systematic transport and machinery (bureaucratic, administrative, logistical etc.) of the murder of millions of Jews from early 1942, in particular in the ‘Operation Reinhardt’ death-camps at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and then at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no attempt here to provide a ‘complete’ history, despite the thoroughly researched historical framework underlying the film (and Lanzmann's indebtedness to the historian Raul Hilberg, one of very few interviewees here not directly implicated).

Necessarily there are all sorts of omissions. For example, there's almost nothing here about Jewish resistance, nor how most of the interviewees escaped death, nor collaborations in deportations by Western European governments. Nothing at all about ‘Operation Barbarossa’ when nearly a million Jews were murdered by the German Einstazgruppen in Eastern Poland, the Ukraine and other western Soviet States.

Perhaps most conspicuously, the film contains no archival film clips or photographs of the camps, victims, survivors – a total absence of any direct historical images of the film's principal subject (surely very rare in documentary). Lanzmann, marked by Adorno’s misgivings about the recycling of such images, felt they were inadequate, misleading; he dismissed them as ‘images without imagination’, an unsavoury, even pornographic spectacle.

Lanzmann was very clear about what he viewed as the limits of representation. He believed this past could only be accessed and animated now through a requirement for a focused effort of listening, learning, engaging imaginatively from the particularities and partialities of the details of 1st hand accounts. He saw documentary mimesis/reproduction as a hindrance to this other kind of ‘re-membering’ (anamnesis) that he was after – and this is at the very centre of the film’s ethical dimension. Lanzmann proposes a highly structured meditation on or moral enquiry into this genocide, awakening in the imagination the lived physical/carnal experience of its very processes of destruction: the intricate machinery designed to render subjects into dehumanised objects, in what Franz Suchomel (the secretly filmed former SS Unterstürmfuhrer at Treblinka) calls the ‘industrial production-line of death’.

The structure of the film provides a dense network of first-hand experiences of and perspectives on these systems, and particular roles within them. No one talks about the ‘Holocaust’ as global abstraction. There is only the concrete lived (and partial) experiences of witnesses to one aspect. Cumulatively the film elaborates a mosaic of perspectives, presented non-chronologically. And ultimately cyclically – we end where we began: with the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising, as described by Simha Rottem, and the transports from the ghetto to Treblinka.

Through the film's complex architecture, Lanzmann was aiming at what he called ‘an incarnation, a resurrection’, with these fragments designed to make of ‘the whole process of the film … a philosophical one’. And ultimately a profoundly unsettling and demanding one for spectators, who are witnesses to those ‘bearing witness from inside the very burning of the witness’ (Shoshana Felman). The film’s structure and its length ask of us particular qualities of commitment, attention, listening, compassionate imagination and reflection, and the work of an integrative re-membering here now.

Sources

Liebman, Stuart (ed.) (2007). Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press (particularly essays by/interviews with Claude Lanzmann, and by Simone de Beauvoir, David Denby, Leon Wieseltier, Anne-Lise Stern, Georges Didi-Huberman, Timothy Garton Ash)

Jacobson, Philip (1986). 'Life after death', The Sunday Times, 2 March

patient pulse

2009-09-06T16:37:00.017+01:00

A walk along the coastline towards the former fishing community of Hallsands, part of a series of walks to bid farewell to Devon and the sea as we prepare to move to the city. Torcross to Beesands to Hallsands, the Start Point lighthouse in the distance as our guide line.

The village is perched on the rocks at the sea's edge, long since deserted and all but erased by a storm in January 1917. A few houses still standing, two of them intact and inhabited; one of them is called, erm, 'Seaview'. Most of the structures are now no more than shattered shells. A pathway disappears abruptly into an abyss above the water.

The sea's like oil today, barely moving. Hard to imagine its ferocity.

Below is a fragment of a long text I wrote for and with Cupola Bobber, as part of series of 'waves' that are reproduced in Stephen Fiehn and Tyler Myers's poster-sized 'reading companion' to their current performance Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me.

The trigger for this fragment was Hallsands, a place that has lingered in my imagination since childhood when I first visited this coastline with my parents.
Elsew/here a fleet of steam dredgers remove tons of granite and flint shingle from the seabed beneath the cliffs to provide material for a new sea wall further down the coast. God-fearing fishermen with furrowed brows look on from their village at the foot of the cliffs, wondering what repercussions this might have, this ‘tampering with nature’, this modern arrogance to dream of ‘playing god’. No good will come of it, they say. Look at them: they couldn’t navigate a turd around a pisspot, they say.

Some years later ferocious winter storms whip the sea into a frenzy, and the slate sky is thick with spindthrift, like a snow storm. As dusk falls, towering black waves blast away at the unprotected village. Never seen anything like it, they say, like the end of the world. Overnight most of the community’s buildings are devastated, gouged and pulped to dust by the walls of driving water. The whitewashed slate-roofed fishermen’s cottages, all of them decapitated and ground down. The small grey stone inn, its fireplace doused forever. The workshop for making lobster pots and mending nets. The stables and piggery. The chapel. The tiny Post Office shop. The village hall, for community meetings and wedding receptions and evenings of songs and shanties.

Remember? ‘I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking’.

All dust now, carried away tirelessly by the sea. Even the beach is gone.

Every now and then deep in the churning bay, minute sandy particles and splinters fleetingly reconfigure to form the skeletal outlines of what they were once part of – a shed, a kitchen, the furniture of a bedroom – before a fresh undersea gust tears through these ghostly outlines, shattering them anew, and the grains disperse and disappear into the ocean’s depths.

On this journey, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

Cupola Bobber's Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me premiered in Chicago earlier in the summer, and will be performed at PS122 in New York in late September. It is due to tour in Britain next year. For further details of Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me: A Reading Companion, and to order a copy, see here

'heart land'

2009-08-11T21:57:00.010+01:00

visitations

2009-07-27T23:47:00.011+01:00

Spending a night in my old friend Don's house in South London, the first time I've seen him for many years. Lots of memories jogged and pleasurably unleashed in the course of the evening. Nefarious revisitings of previous 'lives'. Revenants awakened.

In the night, the door to my room swings open oh so slowly and in comes my mother, looking elegant and much younger than she was when she died about 20 years ago. She is pretending to be a ghost. She creeps towards me playing the game of spooking her kid. She jumps on top of me on the bed, making ridiculous theatrical ghoul noises, oohs and aahs, and we wrestle. For a moment, I'm genuinely frightened and try to bite her, my heart pumping. After a moment, we pause. My head comes up from under the covers, our eyes meet, and I realise it's a game.

'Hello love', she says, sitting up, smiling. 'I'm a ghost'.

When I wake up in the morning, the door is still open.

*****

A few nights later in Devon, Sue and I are creeping alongside a wall at night, hand in hand, in silence. We don't want to be caught, and are walking quietly but freely on the grass. The wall goes on and on. We keep going where we are going. Then a small warm animal noise in the darkness in front of us: horse breath. We stop.

To one side - the direction we are heading - a group of horsemen are gathering quietly: they look like hussars in uniform, their swords are drawn, the horses' flanks catch the low light. The brief flare of a brass cuirasse, the glint of an eye. The horses paw the ground.

Then to the other side - the direction from which we've come - other horsemen walk slowly into the half-light, like actors quietly taking their place on the stage, their swords also at the ready. Gradually the numbers grow until all are present.

A silent stand-off, as the horses fidget; tiny sounds of metal, bits and blade. The calm before some sort of storm in this field of intersecting gazes.

We are caught in the middle, looking one way then the other. The confrontation is nothing to do with us, but we have no choice but to be there as it unfolds around us. Witnesses.

We wait. No one makes a move.

not ours anymore

2008-07-29T18:15:00.049+01:00

For the first time in the ten years that I have lived in Devon, this summer there have been swifts roosting under the roof of my house. Three pairs, I think. Imagine those small white eggs - up there. After a while, tiny cries from under the slates in the evenings. Soft scuffling in the ceiling above my desk. Then one evening we see an adult bird peel off from the shrieking hunting party to deliver food - the high-speed flight directly at the wall, the last-minute throwing back of its wings and head, and forward of its body, an air-brake to stall its momentum in the last few feet before the wall; and then the sudden plunging disappearance into the tiniest of gaps in the building. All of this in a flash. What a choreography. It looks like an outrageous parking manoeuvre in a black feathery sports car into an imperceptibly minute garage at 70 mph. We set up chairs on the grass below to watch these flashing disappearances and re-appearances: far better than TV (although an episode of The World's Ugliest Pets or Can Fat Teens Hunt? is weirdly tempting).

When the fledglings first leave the nest, they may not touch the earth again for several years ...

Imagine that initial drop-dive into the air, never having experienced the world 'out there' before. Take nothing with you. Just fall into the air, and within a micro-second somehow know how to fly. Imagine.

The common swift (apus apus). Every May I look forward to the arrival of the swifts from Africa, and when they finally appear I feel honoured, wide-eyed, lifted up - and at the same time clumsy, a gravity-bound blob. Hours spent in the evenings watching their intoxicating fly-pasts, neck straining in the dusk. Reckless energy, precision flying, joyous screams. Speed, intensity and exactitude. A swift is a genius at being a swift. It drinks and eats and mates and sometimes sleeps on the wing. It builds nests from feathers and fragments of dry grasses in the air, glueing them together in layers with its spit. It harvests insects like aerial plankton. It drifts and spirals effortlessly at unimaginable heights (up to 10,000 feet), then roars through the upper reaches of 'our world' like a tiny jet. Their experience of the topography of rooftops, telegraph poles, aerials and trees is so utterly different from any human sense of this village. How do they slow down perception to take in the mass of information coming at them? What is the function of their cries - territorial expression? in-flight communication and orientation? echolocation in relation to the complexity of the architectures they pass through? sonic blasts to stun or somehow confuse their prey? And what do they make of us humans on the ground, staring dumb-struck and bewildered at the sky, our eyes always too slow to see much more than the blur of their passage? Every year I'm deflated and humbled when they leave on their extraordinary journey.

Swifts remain deeply mysterious to us; there’s such a huge amount we don’t know about them. We do know the broad shape of their epic migratory odysseys to and from Southern Africa, above holiday destinations and chronic war zones and banks of gunmen and through dusty thermals, but we know almost nothing of the particulars of this magnetic trail. We know that they move clockwise around low-pressure systems in huge arcs of up to 1,200 miles. In England, they fly towards the unstable air at the rear of a depression, into the insect-rich, warm rising air as the front departs. Young birds roost on the wing, circling at high altitude through the night until dawn. It is thought that they don't touch ground to roost until their 4th year, remaining in flight throughout their early lives. We know that they can fly enormous distances, an estimated average of 500 miles a day; so a 20-year old swift will have flown more than 3.5 million miles ...

They are only here in England for about 16 weeks a year; and they have become an emblem of summer. ‘They’ve made it again, which means the globe’s still working’ (Ted Hughes).

Our most common encounter is as witnesses to their wild, high-speed displays and their screaming passes (part of what ornithologists call 'social screaming-parties'). That black sickle, sky-trawling flight silhouette that looks, in Edward Thomas’s words in his poem 'Haymaking', ‘as if the bow had flown off with the arrow’ …

"And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror ...
They swat past, hard-fletched,
Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again …
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades sparkle out into blue – not ours any more” (Ted Hughes, ‘Swifts’)

And now it seems the young birds have left the loft of the house. They must have set off four or five days ago and we never saw them go. Too slow. I look for them in the sky, and listen. Lots of jackdaws and housemartins, but not a sign of the swifts. It's too early, surely, they're too young, too small, too fragile to leave - and it's not even the end of July. Did they somehow pick up a whiff of the change in the weather, days before the storm clouds rolled in? How did they conceive of what lies ahead? How could they conceive of it? How did they know when, and where, to go?

They must have been ready, but I'm not ...

© David Williams

rummage

2009-03-12T14:43:00.000Z

burning the house down

2009-08-14T21:56:00.004+01:00

I have been reading Dylan on Dylan, a fine collection of interviews with Bob Dylan from the early 1960s until 2001. Dylan is intriguing throughout: always astute and thoughtful, mercurial, contradictory, sometimes grouchily deflective - and often genuinely hilarious. Sometimes he deals with inept interviewers' questions with playfully unravelling jazzy riffs that bust things right open. This is the only way to keep himself sane, it seems, in a culture that just won't let him be who he is becoming. Repeatedly it constructs the versions of 'Dylan' it needs, then expresses outrage at his having changed.

During a 1966 interview for Playboy with Nat Hentoff, for example, when asked 'What made you decide to go the rock'n'roll route?', Dylan replies:

- 'Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until the delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?'

- 'And that's how you became a rock'n'roll singer?'

- 'No, that's how I got tuberculosis'.

*****

In the same interview, Hentoff asks Dylan whether 'jazz has lost much of its appeal to the younger generation', and off he goes on his own surreal, free-associatin', free-tootin', jive improvisation:

'I don't think jazz has ever appealed to the younger generation. Anyway, I don't really know who this younger generation is. I don't think they could get into a jazz club anyway. But jazz is hard to follow; I mean you actually have to like jazz to follow it; and my motto is, never follow anything. I don't know what the motto of the younger generation is, but I would think they would have to follow their parents. I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and a pocketful of feathers? He'd say, "Who are you following?" And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and soot pouring out of his belly button and say, "Jazz. Father, I've been following jazz". And his father would probably say, "Get a broom and clean up all that soot before you go to sleep". Then the kid's mother would tell her friends, "Our little Donald, he's part of the younger generation, you know"'.

*****

Later Hentoff tells Dylan that one 'adult commentator' has referred to him as "self-consciously oddball and defiantly sloppy", then asks his thoughts about 'far-out hair styles'. After bad-mouthing the 'adult commentator', and then explaining that essentially long hair's about warmth ('People with short hair freeze easily'), Dylan's off again, his critical-poetic mind runaway:

'I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of one's hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head. Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head, the better. People who want free minds sometimes overlook the fact that you have to have an uncluttered brain. Obviously, if you get your hair on the outside of your head, your brain will be a little more free. But all this talk about long hair is just a trick. It's been thought up by men and women who look like cigars - the anti-happiness committee. They're all freeloaders and cops. You can tell who they are: they're always carrying calendars, guns or scissors. They're all trying to get into your quicksand ...'

Jonathan Cott (ed.) (2006). Dylan on Dylan, London: Hodder