bronze box

bronze box, originally uploaded by aesop.

Flying carpets, dissolving woodlands and French curses

I was able to get to the RWA (the Royal West of England Academy) in Bristol on the 22nd to see a show I'd seen some notices for some time ago, and thought I'd try to get to see before it ended up as another Fruitmarket scenario. An exhibition of the work of members of a group called "Lan2D" was on, which is a group working on art's relationship to the landscape, and the various cultural and philosophical offshoots of that. It's coordinated by Iain Biggs, who's one of my PhD advisors, and it features the work of several people I've been taught by or worked alongside, so there was a feeling of familiarity about the show which was only dented a little bit by having to pay to get in to see it.

It's been a while since I've been into the building, which was refurbished last year (parts of the interior are still looking a bit imperfect, but I think the way it is is sort of characterful, like the desk fans screwed to the wall to provide ventilation on the admittedly rare hot days).  There was quite a lot to see here. I'm not going to write about all of it, because I could go on for ages.

Mick McGraw's work first. I met him a couple of years ago when my friend Andrew Atkinson had a residency at Glasgow School of Art, where Mick McGraw runs Printmaking. I had a chance to review one of this books for the artists' books yearbook a couple of years ago, but despite my writing admiring things about his book, the copy got lost somewhere between my writing it and the printing. Mea culpa, most likely, but it's a shame. The book I reviewed, Three Fifths Fluid, seems to fit in well with the work I'm seeing here. There's a relationship with the Scottish landscape that's partly personal, partly historical. partly scientific (geological), and partly mythical, I think, too. The creation of myth around landscape is always a conflation of these different human approaches to the world, layering the experiences and thoughts of others onto the world we experience. This is a theme that comes up again and again throughout the exhibition, not just mythical, but all sorts of cultural overlays. In fact "Overlay" might have made a good essay title for the show. Returning to McGraw's work though, there were a series of large stretchers with letterbox-format photos and prints on them. These have a theme running through them- different images of the ancient remnant forests of Scotland. If memory serves, these are patches of forest that survive from a time before Scotland's forests were largely coniferous, so there are lots of different species of a less Scandinavian character. They're like little islands. I can't remember clearly enough to say what their relationship to glaciation is, but there is one, so that the forests themselves share the timescale of the land they're growing in: the events that shape the rocks around them have also shaped them. In a sense, there is a "culture" a relationship, anyway, here, that isn't human- it's an older relationship where the trees overlay (that word again) the land with their ecological culture. This changes, different events and forces drive away the old culture and replace it with the new (coniferous, human) cultures.

There are senses in which trees, forests, capture human culture, too. The growth rings of trees capture data about air quality, holding it under the trees' skin like a tattoo, and the macroscopic scale of the forest carries traces of habitation and industry. ( I can remember being in such an ancient remnant forest, years ago, where charcoal works had served a foundry. The forest held this archaeological data, too) The remnants hold out, are islands in a sea of change that can't be absorbed (like the early charcoal workings), waiting for the axe to fall- or more likely to be swept aside by the bulldozer. Well, maybe not. At least some of these sites are protected. They remind me of a passage in The Child That Books Built, by Francis Spufford. Spufford is talking about the character of the forest in story. They stand for wild places, inhuman, or maybe just soaked in primeval humanity. Spufford talks about the notion of an untouched piece of forest down a ravine somewhere in Britain where noone has ever set foot. I don't imagine that this could be true of our Ancient remnants, but they hold that sense of time just the same.

McGraw's photos and prints look at these patches of forest and individual trees, surveying land and tree together and showing the tenacity but fragility of the forests' hold upon the land. It's patchy, windswept, hemmed in by roads and civilisation. It's a rich resource though, a hidden archive, a holdout that has been overlaid so long but used so natively, that one might never know it was there.

I walked on, by now glad of the desk fans screwed to the wall. It gets rather warm in this gallery.

Paul Gough's work here consists of a series of studies for "Southern Region". Gough's work has been rooted in war imagery for a long time. Memorials and landscape and story come together in maps, grounds, structures and masses, weaponlike, fortresslike forms that rise up almost heraldically out of the ground. One of these pastels is a sort of x-ray of a tunnel, a sapper's hole with an entrance at one end and a crater at the other. The land bearing the traces of the event. And the traces marked and encoded here as a memorial of the event, but made unspecific. There's a symbolic and spatial shorthand here, the cutaway view, the x-ray, that simplifies and dramatises the event so that we can approach it, and the events it relates to, as a story.

I really started to get the sense of 'Overlay' as a theme, when I looked at Jane Millar's work. Several pictures, painted and pastelled- in, literally overlaid with lines of beadwork. Three sets of pictures: some based on pictures from a Mars Rover, one at least of a mountain scene, and several of a tornado. The concerns of these groups mesh with one another. In the "Mars" pictures, the desolate Martian surface hosts the proxy human gaze of the camera, taking the photo the picture is based on. There have been several points over the last couple of decades where evidence seems to have been found for the presence, at some point in history, of microbial life on Mars. We still don't know. But the Rover's job is to find out, and to send us back images of our new lands. They're already mythologized. The map of mars is covered with names, (Who gets to pick them?). The surface of Mars, depicted in this picture, at least, sports carpets. These carpets (products, traditionally, of desert cultures on Earth), lie in the dust of the Martian desert here. As the rover's lens pulls them into focus, they're literally embroidered onto the surface of the image. The strings of beads, themselves resembling mats of microbes, are overlaid onto the desert ground. The surface of the planet is covered in a culture like the surface of a Petri dish. The carpet implies both the presence of life, and the codifying presence of the human gaze, filling the land with stories.

The "Mountain" sequence, though recognisably Earthlike, shows a snowy mountain scene, with the summit of a mountain and a small Alpine settlement below, separated by a forest and the towering bulk of the mountain. The small house and the peak are embroidered. I'm starting to read the embroidered parts at this stage as a cipher for human presence. The picture’s called (I think) "So where are you now?". The options seem to be- either cosily ensconced in the lodge at the foot, or shivering at the top. There seems to be an implication of a 'phone conversation, so there may be a pair of mobile-equipped people, with one in each location, but which one's doing the talking, I don't know. Again there's a sense of human culture moving across the landscape here- at the summit and the foot of the mountain. No in-between here, only destinations, with the invisible words communicating across the distance. Beamed across the landscape's intervening darkness and confusion of the natural world, just as the Martian carpets fly across the vacuum between the planets. Both are digital, both quantizing the world into short, separated statements. The pixilation of the beads recapitulates the "pixilation" culture imposes on the world.

Finally, there's the "Tornado" pictures. These look like weather, with the pastelled cone of a tornado whipping across a horizon just out of frame, or a square the colour of overcast, stormy sky. Here the beadworks seem less human, I think. There's a sense in which they resemble a very definitely human overlay- systems of pressure and ionisation, metaphors for understanding the forces at play in this natural phenomenon. There's also a sense in which they portray (and so I suppose, to that extent, they still are a cultural portrayal) actual patterns of pressure and charge. There may be channels for lightning here, there may be hanging sheets of charges locked into the atmosphere. There is dust swept up into the vortex, or perhaps, here amidst the destruction, the threads of human culture are swept up and separated- perhaps the embroidery we see here is that of a pattern being torn apart and redistributed by nature. There's an irony at work here- the closer we get to a depiction of a peaceful, habitable landscape ( From Mars, down to the arable plains that Tornadoes frequent), the more violent the image becomes. Mars is peaceful: our gaze weaves complexity here, and we can hold out on the rugged slopes of a mountain, but at home on the farm everything's gone wrong. The best we can see here is the gaze of scientists trying to hold the smallest ideas in place amidst the maelstrom. I'm not sure if this is intentional on Millar's part (nor, of course, am I sure of any of it- I am merely working my own embroidery across the surfaces her work provides), but there seems a strong comment about where our intelligence turns its gaze, its effort, its humanity. To Mars, or to shanties and trailer parks?

Sian Bonnell's "Serving Suggestions" are photos of food made up as landscapes. Again we've got the humanisation of landscape going on. Here, perhaps literalized in agricultural terms: a field could raise so much beef or so many potatoes. A chalk cliff is a face of mashed potato fringed with the green of peas. The cultural significance of food (bully beef for Britain, boiled beef and carrots to see us through) is played on, with the humour of the images patching into the nostalgia their depictions suggest. The raw material of the land is transformed through enculturation into the "cooked" material of the landscape, here quite literally.

Iain Biggs' work is represented here too. Quite a lot of his work recently has centred around material collected and inspired by Borders history and culture. It's a bit too close to my own projects in Whistling Copse for me to see it very clearly. Biggs has approached the material from a number of different angles, mythical and historical and even musically examining the subject, which shines out cryptically.  There are series of related images forming a semantic field that tells us something over time and examination, like the interpretation of x-ray crystallography that allowed researchers to interpolate the structures of molecules. The images themselves are like unknown hieroglyphs, hovering on the edge of meaning, but with a definite syntactical relationship with each other. My own approach to similar material ( at the moment everything's a bit quiet on this front) has been more literal, possibly more textual. There may be something to be said for this less literal imaging, something which I'll be thinking about over the next few days.

Dan Shipsides' work comprised a number of photos of large, old looking boulders somewhere in France, and a video piece. The video showed people climbing on these rocks. Not easy climbs by the look of them, but one which can be taught, codified, tried against and eventually overcome. A climber tries and fails, tries and fails, tries and finally makes it. Climbers falling the few feet to the ground utter FRENCH CURSES as their grip gives way. Diagrams appear on the screen, showing the diagram of the climb: climber's notes and the special marks indicating holds and positions appear on the roughly depicted anatomy of the boulders. It made me think of one of the first stories I read, of the discovery of the caves at Lascaux by children. These boulders, so old and French, seem to have been 'peopled' long long ago, so worn and smooth are they, presumably by some geological or water effect, but seemingly by being immersed in the intensity and relentlessness of human habitation and human regard for so long. Not to mention being scrambled over by wiry French guys with moustaches. There's a sense in which the access we normally make with our gaze/intellect to the landscape, is here dramatised physically. Rather than tracing a contour or balancing along the line of a shadow by eye, our protagonists here are physically engaging with the big rocks, enduring the agony and the ecstasy of getting to the top the hard way. This is paralleled in the text which come up on screen, a long text of Cézanne addressing Basquet ( I'm sorry to say I don't know who Basquet is). The gist of the text is about the difficulty of capturing images of the real world, the difficulty of addressing one's gaze, one's concentration, to the subject just right: "if I pass too high or too low- bang", paraphrases a passage. As if Cézanne is shuffling along the ledge himself, gripping tightly but trying to stay nimble. Even the end of the ascent is difficult. The final few feet over the curving lip of the edge are deceptive- finishing the climb and finishing the picture are difficult.

Another part of the gallery was showing the work of Michael Garton, a member of the RWA who died recently, and whose later work was concerned with landscape. The standout pieces for me were a pair of diptychs with a high horizon, showing a piece of forest in summer and winter. I met Peter Reddick, the printmaker, as I was looking, and found out from him that Garton would go to a place and leave his equipment there for a long time, as he visited and revisited, looking and looking and looking, climbing slowly towards the picture. They're monumentally observed. The depth and form of the trees, stacking themselves off towards the horizon with twigs flaring and boskiness rampant, is realised far better than any photo could in this subject. There's a depth of formal realisation here that takes on the formidably abstract drawing problem presented by a bunch of trees and works with it on terrifically brave terms. These images interrogate the landscape closely, and above all, personally. Although the style and handling couldn't be different, I'm reminded of Ivon Hitchens, toiling away in his wood, trying to capture something of the place. What I think Garton found, and which is here in his work, is a kaleidoscope of change and fixity, painting that is firmly realistic, but goes so deeply into the seeing that it becomes abstract. Working in these spaces, returning and returning, and getting closer and closer to the land itself. Imagine returning and having to clear away the ivy twining about the easel.

Like all the other work I saw that day, there was a human gaze working on a landscape, finding there not only the plants and animals and earth, but the dreams of everyone else as well.

A Discovery

I work at the Art Library here in Bristol, where we've made a discovery in the stacks.

Buried in a secure stack were about 250 paste-up cards with photos layed out for rephotographing for publication. They've got bits of retouching and printer's notes, and many of them are signed H. Robert Lewis or monogrammed H R L. I haven't been able to examine them all yet, but they are all from the 1920's, seeming to be mostly between 1923-28. There must be well over 1000 photos in all, all of them of West Country scenes and buildings. Anthony, the librarian, discovered them a few days ago. This library has seen several generations come and go, and it still has some secrets to yield. It looks as though this deposit was never catalogued. We've already seen it yield some results. Anthony had a visitor from Tyntesfield House (a National Trust property nearby), which was recently restored. Photographs discovered at random in this pile of cards were of Tyntesfield and yielded hitherto unknown details of the interior and the presence of a tennis court on one of the lawns. We've been trying this afternoon to research their provenance: they must have appeared in some local publication in the 1920's. We've found some trace of the photographer: he worked in Bristol as a photographer in the 1930's being last listed in local directories in 1940 (we idly speculate that he may have been killed in the Blitz). We'll certainly catalogue this collection, and hopefully go on to digitize it. It's been exciting and enchanting looking at these- I still haven't had a chance to peruse them at length- it's like something out of Shooting the Past. I'm sure (I think)no one will mind if I get a snap of a couple of the pictures next week and post them here.

On Carrión

Ulises Carrión's The New Art of Making Books first appeared in 1980. It's a sort of manifesto for artists' books, made up of a series of statements contrasting the "Old Art" with the "New Art". It's split into a number of sections; What a Book Is, Prose and Poetry, The Space, The Language, Structures, and The Reading. It has a slightly polemical style, comparing the virtues and values of the new art to what are portrayed as the staid, static, didactic values of the old art. In this, Carrión is poising his arguments on the new art's ability to be inclusive, to be intersubjective- not to be dominated by its' author, not to be didactic. There is a thread running through this piece about intention, a notion which is one of those I'm using to examine artists' books myself. I have some of my own ideas about how it can give us a way to understand artists' books, and I have some other reading to bring to my relationship to it. However, though I've known about Carrión's text for several years, I only read it through for the first time a few days ago. I'm going to set out some remarks on it now to try to establish my relationship to some of the points in it.

Having read it, I think I can agree broadly with Carrión about the much greater role of interpretation in creating meaning in artists' books, (the New Art) and with the importance of structure in creating a space within which this interpretation can take place. However, Carrión implies a shift in the expressive qualities of media embodied in artists' books that I don't think I could agree with. I certainly see a sea-change in the role of the reader here, but stories, narratives, have always had an implicit structure that is made explicit in artists' books. Artists' books make concrete the metaphorical space of reading, they make concrete the containment of an artwork's notions, they make concrete the elaborate array of intention the artist is working with. I'm inclined to view the artists' book as having the properties of concretizing the metaphors that artists' use all the time to deal with the notions they manipulate to produce their work. Artist's work is informed by strategies: techniques of thinking about and doing their work: these are metaphors and the heuristic yield they produce. Which is to say, ways of seeing and doing. I think they have always been part of creativity and that books simply make some of it more obvious, more self-aware, more self-referential. Carrión would, I think on the basis of his essay, disagree with me, in my saying that there are- and always have been- multiple ways to read the old art, and that this is something that is multiplied and enhanced in artists' books, rather than being a different experience on the order of a paradigmatic shift, as seems to be implied here.

"A book is a sequence of spaces"

Comparisons with metaphors of memory come to mind: memory as a sequence of quasi spaces, with the artists' book making this metaphor concrete, and signifying consciousness' traverse of memory in the form of narrative recollection. The metaphor of the book form recapitulates the convolutions of recollection. St Augustine's remarks on memories as being

"retained in the great storehouse of the memory, which in some indescribable way secretes them in its folds".

Introspection, recollection, both take place in these quasi spaces: the reader has always had to construct them to understand the plot of a story or the abstract encounters of argument, played out on inner stages. Carrión's assertion that the book is "a series of spaces" fits well into this traditional metaphor, with the book transmitting the metaphor in concrete rather than strictly narrative form. The book is a series of constructions, too, each unfolding and blossoming from the last, like a series of logical connections, or the tangled connections of brain cells that must ultimately be the keepers of such spaces, in all their richness. Augustine himself wondered at this, holding in his mind the awesome scales of mountains and rivers and stars, all contained within the circumference of his own skull.

"Each of these pages is perceived at a different moment- a book is also a sequence of moments"

Again, much as memory unfolds as an episodic rebus, so books unfold their constructions in a sequence of representations. Books, as I have said, could be considered as similar to the model of memory as a storage space. To simulate the unfolding of memory, or of introspection of other sorts, we would want books to enfold a series of relations, a series of moments, happening in time as well as in space. As Carrión says, a book is "a volume in the space", it is also a span of time.

"Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within the space; the reading of which occurs in the time.

"A book is a space-time sequence."

But just as our memories and our store of impressions and thoughts remain available for us for purposes of introspection, just so are books: holding patterns, temporary constructions of idea. Where memory brings with it attachments, trails, traces of other recollections associated with what we have sought, the book will do the same, its allusions reaching beyond itself. In our minds our memories are in constant flux, each recollection, fading, changing, attached to new chains of recollection, altering and shifting. It is the same with all representations. We can look on memory as a representation, too: it takes consciousness to turn the biology of memory into meaning. And as for books, Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge says this,

"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. "

Just like memory, our book is part of life, subject to the same stresses and strains, the same changes in meaning. Our questions about what the book means are directed in two directions: what was the author's intention? And, what does it mean to me? We might ask our memories how sure we were of their accuracy, and try to be aware of the quality of our introspection in a similar manner. Books need be no more didactic than memory: we may trust it or not, we may interpret it one way or another, just as we wish. And this interpretation is, argue philosophers like Ricoeur or Kearney, a continuous process, one which constantly refigures identity and relationships to memory and outside materials. Identity itself is subject to emplotment, to entanglement in the stories (and, I think, to the structures of representation at large) which embody human culture. Artists' books make some of these processes concrete, they set out metaphors of interpretation and creation in their construction: in this they do something ordinary artifacts do not. They ask us for interpretation, and they model our processes of introspection in a structure.

"To make a book is to actualize its ideal space time sequence by means of a parallel sequence of signs, be it verbal or other."

The sequence is a sequence of relationships in syntagmic and paradigmatic array. This is the "plot" envisaged by Peter Brooks in his work Reading for the Plot: it is at once a series and a space. It is a series of events in syntagmic order, and a series of allusions and echoes in time in the paradigmatic order. And it is also a space: the arena within which the events take place. Read, take part in this story, and your life is part of this plot, the space and time of it are those of your life. Our relationships with plot are sympathetic because we feel that they are part of us, part of our memory and our future. This is because we recapitulate the space of the plot in our minds, in the space of introspection, to work with, to percieve and understand the ideas of the plot. Books actualize the space of the plot, making concrete the whole of the work, reinforcing the structured entity that is the work, holding, keeping, containing, enveloping.

"In the new art (of which concrete poetry is only an example), communication is... intersubjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real physical space- the page...

"A book is a volume in the space

"It is the true ground of the communication that takes place through words- it is here and now."

Books are both physical and refer to a mental space. The "ground" they offer is a concrete metaphor, made of paper and binding, of the semantic field that "grounds" all representations. As Foucault notes, and I have repeated above, such a ground is slippery at best: the ever-shifting labyrinth of allusion and connotation makes any construction into a shadow-play, lit by ever-changing lights. Nonetheless, we are talking here of temporary structures ( a notion I have brought into my writing before, and one which seems to gel with similar notions of social constructions (John Searle) and presuppositional frameworks. These are spaces to enact, to represent intention. The similarity to the "inner stage" of introspection, the "storehouse" of memory, remains striking. They are places where we can explicitly examine relationships between notions. When we stop to think of the implications of a scene in a novel, we jury-rig one in our mind's eye. Artists' books do something similar with the ideas they contain. They are spaces where our incredulity about the author's intention is set aside, where we pursue the meaning of the construction against the odds that we may never discover what it means. But simply trying to do so, simply understanding this freedom is, Carrión says, to understand the work,

"In the new art the reading itself proves that the reader understands."

Understands, that is, that one has been drawn into a perfomative space.

"In a book of the old art words transmit the author's intention.That's why he chooses them carefully.

"In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a totality, that transmits the author's intention."

I would disagree with what Carrión seems to be saying about the "Old Art" here. He seems to be saying that there is no other order to the old art: that the transmission of intention occurred solely through the words, and that reading them creates no intersubjective occurrence. I would try to argue that one's involvement in reading is always intersubjective, and I would carry on with the ideas of emplotment of several paragraphs earlier. I would also allude to the performative space that exists literally in artists' books, and point to their function as a concretization of the metaphors of introspection. This introspection is going on in the old art, too. Reading demands it. Nonetheless, the new art makes it more explicit, and the new art turns in on this process consciously: it may not be about intersubjectivity and all that, but the subjects presented in an artists' book do presuppose a particular awareness in their readers, "the reading itself proves that the reader understands". I wouldn't draw a line between the old art and the new, here, though.

The book is a holistic entity, not a textual communication. How does it stack up against a notion like "story" which is performative, and intersubjective wherever it occurs. Kearney's book On Stories, is all about how they permeate our societies and our minds, indeed, they form the core of how we describe ourselves to ourselves- we have a life-story, after all. Story, too, is in the here and now, continually shuffling between teller and listener, author and reader, history and the present, and just as continually shuffling the meaning and the identity of all of these. What books can do is like the form of the story: they can contain it. Books can suggest a certain structure, a certain way of assembling the story, a certain metaphor for examining the notions contained, and an associated heuristic yield from that way of thinking. Bruno Bettelheim writes of "The Uses of Enchantment": how stories provide templates and ideas for dealing with life, for thinking about identity, for working-through one's emplotment in the real stories that comprise our human world. Artists' books place artists' work within similar boundaries, which may, as Foucault points out, be ever-shifting, but which allow the artist to work-through the story of their work as a maker of ideas.

The Scottish Poetry Library

The Scottish Poetry Library, originally uploaded by aesop.

There's an artist's book event there in early October. I don't know if I will be able to make it, since I'm going to be in Wexford in September and in Amsterdam in October- and I haven't booked any of it yet. Hope I can go.

red man

from the bus..., originally uploaded by aesop.

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, originally uploaded by aesop.