Observation – Page 13 – Murdo Eason

(Always) Between Something and Nothing

The white centre … is both an emptiness and an energy generator. Your eye is continually drawn back to its white silence, its void-ness. Then your attention is propelled out again along the twisting road-ways. The eye cycles back and forth between “something” and “nothing”.

First Rauschenberg laid down a base coat of white paint on a 48-by-32 inch piece of masonite. Then on the top four-fifths of this white ground, he pasted pieces of maps of American cities: Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, St Louis, New Orleans Boston, Denver…

The twisting spidery roadways – dark lines radiating across off-white backgrounds crackle with shivery linear energy. This frenetic activity is silenced at the pictures centre by a great white circular void that hovers like a pulsating energy field. This void isn’t empty. Literally it’s a layer of brushed white paint that laps over the cut edges of the maps. Visually, the painted surface dematerialises into a humming whiteness.

Kay Larson on Robert Rauschenberg’s Mother of God

I recently finished Kay Larson’s wonderful book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists. I don’t particularly want to offer a review here but if you have any interest in John Cage then I guess that you will be well rewarded by reading it.

Like any great book, it’s the ideas that linger around afterwards that are of greatest value. They push, prod and poke. Unconscious spectres haunting the edges of conscious thought before demanding some form of engagement, application or reflection. This perhaps explains why, for a few minutes last weekend I stood, in the dark, on a motorway bridge at Charing Cross, Glasgow. A walk back to the station interrupted by thoughts about “something” and “nothing”. The traffic of the M8 motorway cascading underneath my feet and I’m recording it on my phone…

Well clearly my silent piece…expresses the acceptance of whatever happens in that emptiness. And the same thing was expressed by that empty painting, that white painting of Bob Rauschenberg.

John Cage

One of the most fascinating parts of Larson’s book deals with Cage’s conceptual evolution leading up to his (in)famous ‘silent’ piece 4’33”. Larson makes the case that prior to 4’33”, Cage’s thinking was expressed in Either / Or dualities. His two lectures: Lecture on Something and Lecture on Nothing bookend this approach. Increasingly inspired by the Zen lectures of D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University and the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Cage moved towards the idea of the radical act that was required to detonate these dualisms. His famous visit to the anechoic (sound-proof) chamber at Harvard had shown Cage that ‘silence’ could never be an absolute absence of sound. Even in the scientifically quietest place on Earth he could still hear sounds. The high whine of his own nervous system and dull roar of his blood circulation. He heard the sound of his life in process and Cage concluded that there is no such thing as silence.

Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.

4’33” embodies the idea of life and art as a process. As Larson says: “before anything else, it’s an experience.” It is a proposition that says, in notational shorthand: stop for a moment and look around you and listen; stop and look; stop and listen. “Something” and “Nothing” can never be divided.

Well I use it (4’33”) constantly in my life experience. No day goes by without my making use of that piece in my life and in my work…I turn my attention towards it. I realize that it’s going on continuously…

This may all sound pretty abstract but two events from a recent afternoon wander through Glasgow bring it all home. Heading back from the West End, the energetic bustle of Byers Road noticeably slips off the shoulders as you enter Kelvingrove Park. Welcomed into the crisp and brittle air by the bare winter trees, very few people are around and circumstances are conspiring to shift towards something approaching an urban ‘silence’. (The ubiquitous, low hum of traffic is always there, much like the sound of Cage’s blood circulation). Slipping into a kind of unconscious walking reverie, measured out in the rhythm of movement, I was brought completely into the moment by the spooling song of possibly a mistle thrush or song thrush high in a tree. What an enchanting experience to simply stop and listen to the cadences and Fi-ga-ro Fi-ga-ro refrains weaving a thread of song through the urban silence. An oscillation between something and nothing. Lives in process. I managed to capture around 40 seconds on a pretty rough phone recording, by which time several people had gathered around wondering what I was looking at:

[sometimelater]

I wanted to be quiet in a nonquiet situation.

Later in the early evening, it is already dark and I’m walking back into the town centre . I stop on the motorway flyover bridge at Charing Cross. For a short time I just watch the traffic swoosh past underneath. Pools of light flooding the motorway and dispersing within seconds. The experience is strangely mesmerising and calming. The rhythms of sound vary depending on the sequence and number of cars across the three lanes. Like a childhood game, I start to guess which lane a car will appear in next. A chance operation in process. I then notice that occasionally there can be an almost complete drop out towards a momentary void of sound. For a few seconds no cars are in view in any of the lanes. Once again this is a rough recording but within this short clip it happens a couple of times:

After a few minutes of this hypnotic experience, I realise that I’ve been in the white centre of Rauschenberg’s painting. The void. Quiet in a nonquiet situation. As I lift my head to look around, the roads and paths of the city spiral off in every direction. Energies of neon, arteries of possibility, encounters, histories and stories yet to come.

I walk towards Sauchiehall Street, always poised between something and nothing.

Now playing: Kevin Drumm – Tannenbaum

References:

Richard Konstelanetz (ed), Conversing with Cage (London: Omnibus Press, 1989).

Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists, (New York: The Penguin Press. 2012).

Robert Rauschenberg, Mother of God, 1950. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Special thanks to Fraser Macdonald and Louise Arber for offering suggestions as to the identity of the singing bird. The wonder of Twitter.

The Woods and the Words

The stories are still told

of a time before the water.

When the earth lay heaped,

black and smouldering.

It is said that they tunnelled

g r o u n d

for black diamonds

to burn for warmth.

A structure survived

the darkest of

the dark days –

although, now, no one

is quite sure

what it was used for

Now.

now to simply be

amongst our co-dwellers

in this healing place.

If you remain still

for long enough

they become curious

and congregate,

silently swaying

with the wind.

A few season-cycles ago

the visitors started to return.

We listen for their arrival

always the calling first.

despite

bluebell

all that happened

stitchwort

the woods and the words

wild hyacinth

at least

oak

some of the words

hazel

and some of the woods

dog mercury

survive

And the thin

bleached light

of a pale sun

continues to shine

on the white tree

of Harran Hill Wood.

♦

♦ ♦

♦

This little field trip, possibly sent from another point in time (?), was inspired by frequent visits to a favorite place in Central Fife: Lochore Meadows or The Meedies as it is known locally.

The Meedies opened as a Country Park in 1976 following one of the largest and most ambitious industrial landscape renovation projects in Europe. This included the reclamation of 600ha of heavily contaminated land comprising six redundant coal mine sites, colliery buildings, mineral railways, refuse tipping, areas of subsidence and the towering pit bings (most of them burning) which rose to 60m over the surrounding countryside and settlements.

The Meedies is now a major centre for outdoor and environmental education with Loch Ore the largest area of standing water in Fife. It is an important habitat for wildfowl with significant numbers both over-wintering and breeding. Otters, bats, water voles and even ospreys have been recorded within the park boundary. The acid grasslands of Clune Craig are botanically rich and also bear traces of hut-circles and enclosures from a Bronze age settlement.

The ‘structure’ in the photographs above is the reinforced concrete headframe of the ‘Big Mary’ No. 2 pit shaft, sunk in 1923. It is one of only two such surviving structures in Fife and a monument to the Kingdom’s mining heritage. (The other is The Frances in Dysart). You can gain some impression of how the area looked when mining was in operation from this photograph:

The pit head is in the distance and the smouldering pit bings in the foreground. This photograph is from the fabulous web resource on the Fife Pits by Michael Martin which can be accessed here.

The original Loch Ore was drained in the 1790s when the landowner, Captain Parks, attempted to reclaim the land for cattle grazing. The project was a commercial failure and the land formerly occupied by the loch remained boggy. Parks was declared bankrupt in 1798. The loch gradually returned in the mid 20th century, when coal mining flourished and the mineral railway serving the pithead became an embankment surrounded by water. The return of the loch was mainly due to subsidence caused by mining, and the ‘new’ loch now occupies a different footprint to the original. The loch is now stabilised but its depth still fluctuates. The islands in the loch are the remains of the former railway embankment.

To the north west lies Harran Hill Wood which sits on a rocky ledge between Loch Ore and Benarty Hill. Botanical studies indicate a strong possibility that this site may have been wooded since shortly after the last Ice Age c. 10,000 years ago.

Whilst writing this, I’m listening to a composed piece called After The Rain by Barry Guy, perhaps better known as a free improviser. I don’t think I had ever read the sleeve notes before but was intrigued to learn that it was partly inspired by the Max Ernst painting Europe After the Rain. As Guy says in the sleeve notes:

“The canvas portrays four large masses of tortuous baroque-like remains as if left after some unfathomable catastrophe…these images invite the viewer to speculate on the nature of the events. Here in Europe After the Rain could be the apotheosis of anxiety and destruction or the emergence of new life from the ruins. I am drawn to the latter…”

Now Playing: Barry Guy and City of London Sinfonia – After the Rain

Reference:

Fife Council Lochore Meadows Country Park Development Plan, November 2008.

Michael Martin, Fife Pits and Memorial Book, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/mmartin/fifepits/

Miles K Oglethorpe, (2006), Scottish Collieries: An Inventory of the Scottish Coal Industry in the Nationalised Era (Edinburgh, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland).

4’33” on a train – John Cage Centennial, 5th September 2012

Our modest contribution to the John Cage centennial celebrations. On 5th September 2012, we decided to undertake a performance of 4’33″on the train from Falkirk High to Glasgow Queen Street. Raising and lowering the seat tray served to mark the three movements. During our ‘silent’ performance this is what we heard:

Low bass throb

– of train thrum.

occasional>>>>>stabs

– of pitched track squeal.

a sigh

a cough

a sneeze.

earphones fizzzzz and

crisps crunch.

fingers tap on digital screens

as turning pages – fan

distant carriage whispers.

The shuddering recoil – from

– the slap of a passing train

all sound and silence cocooned

– underneath a bridge.

Out in the landscape

– an imagined Williams Mix:

Doppler-shifted siren,

birdsong and turbine whirr.

a ratttttttttttttling window

“tickets please”

tacet

the seat tray creaks.

Happy 100th birthday John Cage. In another place you are walking around Walden Pond with Henry Thoreau looking for mushrooms.

Now Playing: John Cage and David Tudor – Rainforest II / Mureau – A Simultaneous Performance (Part I)

T h r e s h o l d

trying

to catch

a thread

of time

when

theincomingtide

becomes

the o u t g o i n g t i d e

listening

ebb

listening for

flow

an inflexion

ebb

of breath

flow

inhalation

ebb

becoming

flow

exhalation

flow

exhalation

ebb

becoming

flow

inhalation

ebb

at the river

still standing

grounded

still standing grounded

at the river, still standing grounded – but different

Now playing: The Necks – Silverwater

Postscript: The (Other) Firebugs of Kreuzberg

A short postscript to a previous post The Firebugs of Kreuzberg:

A friend from Berlin commented that the piece was quite different from what they had anticipated from the title:

“You do know about the other Firebugs of Kreuzberg right?”

“Eh, no…remember it was only a fleeting visit whilst on holiday!”

I was helpfully sent a clutch of links to some newspaper articles which outline how ‘firebug’ arson attacks on high-end cars have been increasing in Berlin in recent years. It would appear that BMW, Mercedes and Porsche are the favoured brands to toast. There is a long history of traditional May Day protests in Kreuzberg culminating in car burnings, however, these articles suggest that the number of politically motivated firebug attacks is increasing. The attacks appear to be an expression of both anti-gentrification protest and also of a more general grievance against ‘the rich’ as Germany attempts to navigate the global, economic malaise. The record annual number of car burnings in Berlin was previously 401 in 2009. In April 2012, it was reported that this had risen to over 700 in 2011. Whilst car burning incidents have taken place across Berlin, the majority cluster around the central districts of Kreuzberg, Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Not surprisingly, these are places where the usual gentrification tensions arise between relatively wealthy incomers and poor long-term residents and play out against rising rents and property prices and the polarization of employment opportunities.

Trying to attribute arson attacks as politically motivated or copycat vandalism is not something that the politicians or police appear to wish to address although an unemployed man was jailed in April 2012 for seven years. He was prosecuted on 86 charges of arson involving 102 cars. As a motive he said that he: “hated the affluent”. Meanwhile, given the sheer number of car burnings, it looks as if many other disaffected ‘firebugs’ continue to evade detection, regardless of motive.

As a final aside, I was also interested to receive a comment from Emina Redzic who recognised the insects in the original piece. In Serbia they are called “palikuce” or as directly translated into English “arsonists”.

Perhaps these little insects may be even more mysterious than we originally thought.

Selected References:

1 . Berlin Police Chief: Don’t Park Fancy Cars in Kreuzberg

2. Berlin’s burning cars a hot topic in forthcoming elections

3. Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe

4. Berlin as Battleground: “Don’t Park your Porsche in Kreuzberg”

5. Arsonist Gets 7 Years for Burning Luxury Vehicles.

Now Playing: Swans – We Rose From Your Bed With The Sun In Our Head

s i l e n t l y .. b e i n g .. s i l e n t

silently

being

silent

being

silent

silently

Now playing: Eliane Radigue – Transamorem – Transmortem

The Firebugs of Kreuzberg

Retain your memories
but détourn them
so that they correspond with your era.

Asger Jorn

We are in Berlin travelling on the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. It is a gloriously warm April morning with fists of sunlight starting to punch through the clouds. From the elevated train tracks we can survey the sweeping spread of the city below. In the foreground, a graffiti inscribed, cubist assemblage written on to the earth. “How do they manage to get up there to paint it? asks R, pointing to a 3-D effect trompe l’oeil covering the entire gable end of a tall building. A and I marvel at the scale and ambition. An exploding riot of colour and illusion. We both shrug our shoulders…

I had been in Kreuzberg the previous evening at a gig in the HAU 2 theatre complex. (As an aside, I was delighted to discover later that this building was the original site of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab formed by Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Boris Schaak in 1968. More on this below if interested. (1)). I didn’t have much time to stroll around the streets beforehand but picked up a little of the night ambiance. Clearly the zest to inscribe almost any available surface with graffiti and street art was alive and well. I realised that my previous visit to Berlin had been when the Wall was still standing and Kreuzberg was the beating heart of a chaotic, edgy, alternative radicalism. An enclave of squatters, artists and musicians, living cheek by jowl with the, largely Turkish, immigrant population. At the time it felt like some bunkered interzone within the island of Berlin. A city trapped and adrift in topography, history and cold war paranoia. Inter-railing around Europe, I remember having to scrape up the Deutschmarks to buy a ticket and visa to allow travel through the DDR from Hamburg. Walking out of Zoo Station with a head full of Berlin tropes: Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed and Christiane F. I could imagine witnessing scenes of Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave holding court in the bars of SO36 underneath the watch towers. On reflection, a romanticised, pop-culture depiction of the city shaped more by the NME than by any history or guide-book.

Around twenty-five years later I’m walking out of Kottbusser Tor station with the family still carrying these ghosts of memory. It feels a bit surreal to experience the bright sunshine and languid air of the street as we set off in search of the Turkish market down on the banks of the Landwehrkanal. We pass the grocery stores and a few cafes where groups of men (and it is all men) are sitting outside sipping Turkish coffee and gossiping. It’s only a short walk to the canal and it evidently becomes apparent that we have either got the day or our directions wrong. There is no sign of any Turkish market. Perhaps Bowie, Iggy and Blixa can help guide us? Feed us a few signs? However, R is already off. A nine-year old is not going to hang around whilst our putative tour guides attempt to get their shit together.

♦

Unburdened by worldly cares, unfettered by learning, free of ingrained habit, negligent of time, the child is open to the world.

Yi-Fu Tuan

Children are natural and consummate psychogeographers. They can happily drift through any environment, urban or rural, seeking out and following the signs of place that speak to them. With the city as potential playground R, starts to saunter on ahead of us, leading the drift, although, of course, not aware or caring that this is what is happening. We wander along the tree-lined canal path for a good stretch and apart from the dog shit, and occasional jogger, the city takes on an almost rural feel. Bowie, Iggy and Blixa are struggling to keep up. I think they may have stopped for a fag. The sunlight is clearly not agreeing with them.

I could feel the interest of our spectral trio dissolve even further as we sat down on a bench to marvel at two magnificent white swans and a group of mallards bobbing on the canal. “How do the swans keep so white in the city?” A pleasure boat chugs past and the gentle wake lip-lips against the canal sides. Our quiet reverie is broken when the larger swan rises out of the water, and extends its full wingspan. For a moment it looks as if the wingtips will almost touch either side of the canal. A few strong beats and the swan takes to the air. We wonder where it can be heading and whether the birds flew freely between East and West when the Wall was up.

Against a riot of cubist, Kreuzberg colour
– “Fuck Yuppies – Reclaim the Streets”
a white swan rises from the water
outstretched wings unfurling,
almost pushing
the canal walls apart.

We can feel ourselves being pulled into another city world as a ladybird lands on A’s arm. I love how ladybirds always look hand painted. After watching it run over her skin, it pauses to open its tiny wings as if basking in the sun. R lets it run on to her fingers and kneels down to reunite the hand daubed, smudge of colour with the greenery beneath the lime trees. She discovers the bustling activities of an ant colony and we observe the industry of the leaf carrying comrades, marching in their regimented lines – lugging, organising, creating. Sucked in closer to the unfolding drama of this animistic, micro world, we start to notice other flecks of red and black moving amongst the earthy shades of leaf mould. They are not ladybirds. We are looking at hordes of small insects that are completely unknown to us. Some scurry around alone, whilst others pile on top of each other to accumulate into little shuffling balls of red and black. Too absorbed in the moment, we ‘forget’ to take a picture of them. It is only once we are home that we eventually manage to find an image and identify these mysterious little creatures as firebugs. From now on they will be known as The Firebugs of Kreuzberg.

Time has dissolved as we eventually head away from the canal and start to re-enter Kreuzberg street life. We start to notice the hum of cars again. A Mad Max biker type walks past with a tiny dog on a pink lead. The dog is sporting a bandanna. Our drift takes us up the entire length of Oranienstrasse, the main street of the district. It is still pretty quiet in daylight and we pass the door of SO36, the club where Bowie and Iggy used to hang out and, by now, have probably once again, taken refuge. R has commandeered the camera and is now taking photographs, still drifting through a city more akin to Hayao Miyazaki’s animistic universe than my one populated with spectral ghosts. The signs are speaking:

The Détourned Red Bulls of Oranienstrasse

The Goddess and Protector of Oranienstrasse

The Visitor (detail from the side of a parked van)

We eventually return full circle and ascend the steps back up to Kottbusser Tor station. Our quest to find Turkish markets, and gain enlightenment from Bowie, Iggy and Blixa has failed. They have all remained spectral and elusive. Our drift has pulled us into another dimension of Kreuzberg. One of canal paths, white swans, mallards, ants, and détourned red bulls. Above all, we have discovered and witnessed something mysterious and new. The red and black insects that we now know as The Firebugs of Kreuzberg.

That’s all from the Berlin holiday. It’ll be back to Fife next. Possibly Cowdenbeath!

Now playing: Kluster – Klopfzeichen

♦ ♦

(1) HAU 2 and The Zodiak Free Arts Lab

I was excited to learn that, after a hiatus of twelve years, Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg (Pita) and Pimmon were reconvening their curiously named Afternoon Tea project for one night only in Kreuzberg. It was delightful happenstance to discover that this was happening on one of the nights of our holiday. I headed down to the HAU 2 venue and certainly wasn’t disappointed. One long piece saw this stellar ensemble layer up a set of dark, fractured shards of glitch improv, punctuated with blankets of shimmering serenity. A deep, meditative, all embracing sound. An unfolding. Ambarchi sat almost motionless unleashing his trademark sonic ‘depth charges’. The aural equivalent of watching and feeling a lava lamp. The bass resonance of the note entering through the feet and traveling up and out of the body. It was also good to see Keith Rowe having to play in a much louder and busier sound environment than the last couple of times I’ve encountered him. Fennesz couldn’t help but attempt to excavate and instil some melodic fragments into the proceedings whilst Rehberg and Pimmon intervened with pincer movements of laptop noise assault. All in all a fabulous event to witness and experience in the dark, minimal space of HAU 2.

The happenstance of this event was further enhanced when I later discovered that HAU 2 was actually the original site of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab or Zodiac Club, formed by Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Boris Schaak in 1968. Whilst only open for a few months, the Zodiak was a melting pot where “freaks and avant-gardists of all stripes could enjoy live psychedelia, free jazz, free performance and freakout”. (A1). It was a space also directly responsible for the emergence of Kluster (Schnitzler/Roedelius/Moebius) and Tangerine Dream, at that time with Schnitzler and Klaus Schulz in the ranks. This early incarnation of the Tangs is light years away from the vapid new-age pap that they later embraced in the 1980s.

The first few Kluster albums were engineered by a young Conny Plank who brought his experience of working with Edgar Varese to give some shape and coherence to the brutalist improvised chaos of this embryonic kosmische music. With the subsequent exit of Schnitzler and a later name change to Cluster, the sound took on a softer edge and the recording of classic kosmische albums such as Cluster II, Zuckerzeit, Sowiesoso and Cluster & Eno. The Zodiak also hosted performances by, amongst others, Agitation Free, Ash Ra Tempel, Human Being, Peter Brotzmann and Alexander Von Schlippenbach.

I love it when buildings can reveal their embedded memories like this. From a few months activity, the ripples from the epicentre are still being felt.

(A1) Nikolaos Kotsopoulos (Ed), (2009), Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and It’s Legacy, (London: black dog publishing).

On the edge and further out: to slip through time

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville

Out on the fringe of gold

– lip of coastal edge.

Eyeing that breath of line

– flux of sea and sky.

Grounded punctuation

– conical crag of hill.

Arrested flow of time

– phonolitic trachyte.

I’m over the cerulean Forth

– tang of brine and caws of gulls.

Walking the high line Out

– to North Berwick Law.

Treading clouds and updraughts

– the whale, reeling me in

Out there, slipping through

– into that void of white.

♦

With a huge thanks to Brian David Stevens for the use of his photographs shot from Kinghorn Beach in Fife. These images are part of Brian’s ongoing Brighter Later project which is a journey around the British Isles looking outward from the coastline to show a different view of the UK. The journey will visit every coastal county in the British Isles. The project is currently being serialised on the Caught By the River website with Fife the most recent entry.

The volcanic plug of solidified lava – North Berwick Law (hill) – is clearly visible in the photographs and I had forgotten about the whale jawbones on the summit which Brian mentions in his text. Staring at the images got me thinking about Kinghorn, volcanic plugs, whales, Herman Melville, Laurie Anderson…

Some people know exactly where
they’re going
The Pilgrims to Mecca
The climbers to the mountaintop
But me I’m looking
For just a single moment
So I can slip through time.

Laurie Anderson, Life on a String. (Including songs from her stage production Songs and Stories From Moby-Dick).

Also check out Brian’s other wonderful photographic work here

Bouncing on Sacrilege: Deller, Debord and Jumping for Joy

It is futile to search in our theories of architecture or dérive for any other motive than the passion for play.

Guy Debord (1)

As we enter Glasgow Green, my daughter takes aim, like an archer pulling a bowstring and points to the horizon. “There it is!” We both follow the trajectory of the imaginary arrow and gaze over the vast expanse of green common land. From all directions, ant-like threads of people are drifting towards the iconic structure of Stonehenge sitting in the landscape. The lines of people are converging and congregating around the monument and we can hear the distant sounds of carnival. Feeling the totemic pull of the stones, we set off to join them. This is why we have come.

Except this Stonehenge is Jeremy Deller’s ultimate bouncy castle version. An interactive art installation named Sacrilege and part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Such is the popularity of Sacrilege, that, on arrival, we are assigned to one of the two holding ‘pens’ which allow up to one hundred people, at a time, to assemble and wait for a fifteen minute ‘interactive experience’ with the exhibit. As we sit in the sunshine, and soak up the celebration taking place amongst the stones, it really is a joy to watch the utter delight on faces as they attempt to run, jump, roll, lie or simply walk. Toddlers are happy to bounce up and down on the spot whilst the older kids are going off like pressure cookers, doing cartwheels, forward rolls, playing tig and body slamming into the iconic henge. Adults are given licence to do pretty much the same if they can keep up. A tribe of teenage goths stick to the perimeter, appearing to be disoriented by the brilliant sunshine and riot of lurid green plastic. Some pilgrims simply take refuge at the base of a stone and observe.

What also contributes to the Sacrilege experience is how the area is completely cleared between pen changeovers. For a short period of time the empty installation is replete with possibility, creating a sense of playful anticipation in the crowd as shoes are kicked off, jerseys discarded and bags are heaped in piles. The good-humoured security crew attempt to enforce their mock authority as they patrol the ‘control zone’ between crowd and structure, yakking into their walkie talkies. An anarchic youngster unable to contain herself, sneaks under the rope and makes a dash for the centre before being retrieved, kicking and screaming, by a slightly embarrassed parent. The heid bummer security guard with the megaphone barks out instructions (“no shoes, heavy bags, human sacrifice”) and the rope is finally dropped with all the ceremony of an Olympic starting gun. It’s a mad, mad rammy to clamber on to the structure and within seconds all ontological baggage is released by the sheer thrill of being and bouncing in the moment. When our turn comes around we (I!) soon find that fifteen minutes of plastic stone hi-jinks is pretty exhausting but exhilarating. We are part of a communal assemblage, literally jumping for joy. Sacrilege indeed.

I’m not overly familiar with Deller’s work, but afterwards it struck me that there is a lot more going on with this bouncy castle than at first may appear. I’m reminded of Ralph Rumney and Guy Debord’s attraction to the ludic ideas of Huizinga who proposed that spontaneity, play and festival should be a vital part of daily life and a potentially transformative agent to break free from the ‘stultifying nature of boring, non-ludic life’. Hussey suggests that Huizinga’s arguments had a revolutionary significance for Debord who was intrigued by the suggestion that games or spontaneous play could be experimental forms of new social behaviour. Rumney claims to have introduced Huizinga’s Homo Ludens to Debord which was instrumental in providing him with a vocabulary for thinking about and anticipating ‘the construction of situations’. If nothing else, Deller has certainly constructed a situation. I’m also reminded of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque whereby the participation in carnival can remove individuals from the social hierarchies of everyday non-carnival life and allow the exercise of normally repressed energies to flower. Perhaps Sacrilege can be viewed as a practice of Situationist détournement. By hi-jacking the iconic image of Stonehenge, and all of its associated cultural baggage, Deller has created a new artwork that celebrates free assembly, mass appeal and the carnivalesque. Perhaps more importantly it is playful, fun, cheeky and joyous. Not terms that would leap to mind should you visit the original Wiltshire version these days. I understand that Sacrilege is now heading to ‘the Olympics’ and it will be interesting to observe whether the Glasgow experience will be ‘allowed’ to translate to a very different cultural space. Will anyone be able to pitch up at will, freely assemble and take part? We shall observe with interest.

And as we join the dehydrated but elated crowd drifting over the green common land to the winter gardens of the People’s Palace, we also take the chance to view the people’s history of Glasgow. A history of grim social conditions and top-down imposed planning failures, leavened with histories of resistance. My daughter is particularly taken with two iconic artefacts from popular culture: Billy Connolly’s banana boots and Alex Harvey’s leather jacket. Two performers, who also know/knew something about invoking the carnivalesque.

So here we are, with freedom
within our sweaty, greedy, grasps.
So remember this, boys and girls,
when freedom comes along…
DON’T pish in the water supply…

Alex Harvey

Now playing: The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Live

References:

(1) Guy Debord, ‘Architecture and Play’ Potlach no. 20 (May 30, 1955).

(2) Andrew Hussey, (2001), The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (London, Jonathan Cape).

Of Walking in Ice – Werner Herzog, Kenneth White and Liminal Pilgrimage

If I actually make it, no one will know what this journey means.

I’m following a direct imaginary line.

Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice is arguably one of the great texts of existential walking and pilgrimage. A short diary, never intended for publication, all is reduced to the (a)lone figure of Herzog moving through a landscape, trying to cope with a litany of physical discomforts and atrocious weather conditions which write themselves on his body. If psychogeography is an increasingly used, abused, and slippery signifier, it is clearly absent from Herzog’s practice. There are no dérives here. This is walking as an act of resistance against the ultimate inevitability of death and as a process to absorb and internalise the landscape rather than make any attempt to open up and engage with it. This is an immersion into the mind and soul of the “I” pitted against malevolent nature that cares little for humankind.

I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides I wanted to be alone with myself.

In November 1974, Herzog received a telephone call from a friend advising him that the German film critic Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would ‘probably die’. She was 78 years old. Herzog responds: “I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death”. As an act of secular faith, he decides to walk from Munich to Paris and strides out on what turns out to be a three-week odyssey. Armed only with a jacket, compass, duffel bag, new boots (!) and some survival money, Herzog sets out from Munich on 23rd November and eventually arrives in Paris on 14th December. Along the way, he endures increasingly intense levels of physical discomfort, shelters from the hostile weather in chapels and farm buildings, breaks into unoccupied houses to sleep and gradually withdraws and tries to avoid any prospect of human contact:

Then snow, snow, rainy snow, snowy rain; I curse Creation. What for? I’m so utterly soaked that I avoid people by crossing sodden meadows, in order to save myself from facing them.

Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, only rain, I can’t recall anything more. It’s become a steady, even drizzle and the roads become endless.

The soles burn from the red-hot core in the earths interior.

In spite of all the physical ailments that Herzog endures, I find the book strangely uplifting as it is clear that the process of walking is an almost shamanic ritual that allows access to what he has described, in other interviews, as ‘ecstatic truth’. It is as if the repeated act of placing one foot after another gradually opens up the mind to a transcendent dream state where fact and fiction merge and new ideas are born:

Traveling on foot has nothing to do with exercise. I spoke earlier about daydreaming and that I do not dream at nights. Yet when I am walking I fall deep into dreams. I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories. I literally walk through whole novels and films, and football matches. I do not even look at where I am stepping, but I never lose my direction.

It is not difficult to imagine how Herzog’s obsessive, driven characters may have been dreamt into being during this process of walking pilgrimage.

In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit makes the point that by going on a pilgrimage, one has left behind the complications of one’s place in the world – family, hierarchy, and duty and the pilgrim enters a truly liminal state. A state of being-in-the-world on the cusp of past and future personal identity – a state of possibility. Solnit also reminds us that liminality is derived from the Latin limin, a threshold. As the pilgrim steps over the line, symbolically and physically, s/he is stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure, maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and levelled to a homogenous state of being with fellow pilgrims through discipline and ordeal. However, if the sacred pilgrim is bound by a sense of comradeship and communion with fellow travellers, there is no such comfort for Herzog and nor is any sought.

Herzog’s existential, shamanic, pilgrimage also reminds me of the great Franco-Scottish poet, essayist and geopoetician Kenneth White whose work is also centred on walking as a means of ‘opening a world’ and, in particular, establishing a fundamental relationship with planet Earth. White was involved with Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma in the 1960s and took part in the Paris évenements of 1968. This lost him his university teaching post which led to him going ‘on a long walk in the Basque Country’. White is inspired by what he calls ‘intellectual nomads’ such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Henry Thoreau and Patrick Geddes (all keen walkers) who he views as having wandered from the ‘motorway of Western civilisation’ in order to find new ways of thinking and living. (As an aside Giles Deleuze was one of the panel who judged White’s doctoral thesis on intellectual nomadism). White has undertaken numerous long walks and geopoetic pilgrimages such as his travels in Asia which are collected in the volume Pilgrim of the Void. (the title says it all!) This includes an account of White walking in the footsteps of Basho from Tokyo to Hokkaido:

All alone
with an old crow
in unfamiliar country

which reminds me of one of the rare occasions in Herzog’s book where he achieves some form of solace and communion with the natural world:

A nuthatch was tapping on a tree and I stood there a while, listening to him, as it soothed me.

Off course, as Herzog arrives in Paris, the question has to be asked. What happened to Lotte Eisner? She is tired and weak, but still alive and given that she manages to push a chair over to Herzog, is possibly in better shape than he is:

Someone must have told her on the phone that I had come on foot – I didn’t want to mention it. I was embarrassed and placed my smarting legs up on a second armchair which she pushed over to me. In the embarrassment a thought passed through my head and, since the situation was strange anyway, I told it to her. Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish. Then she looked at me and smiled very delicately, and since she knew that I was someone on foot and therefore unprotected, she understood me. For one splendid, fleeting moment, something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said to her, “Open the window. From these last days onward, I can fly.”

Lotte Eisner lived for another nine years and died in 1983.

Now Playing: Thomas Köner – Permafrost

References:

Paul Cronin, ed, (2003), Herzog on Herzog, (London, Faber & Faber).

Werner Herzog, (1978), Of Walking in Ice, (Delf, Free Association, English translation 2008).

Michael Gardiner, (2006), From Trocchi to Trainspotting, Scottish Critical Theory since 1960 (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press).

Rebecca Solnit, (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London, Verso).

Kenneth White, (1992), Pilgrim of the Void (Edinburgh, Mainstream).