I haven’t had the opportunity to write for a while as March has been a bit of a chaotic month for me with a couple of trips to London (where I saw the fantastic ‘Mythologies’ exhibition at Haunch of Venison – strongly recommended) then Cambridge, Cardiff, Swansea, Machynlleth, Aberystwyth and I’ve got Oxford and Staffordshire then Cardiff again next week so I don’t have much time to sit down and catch up with writing. I’m also reading some interesting books at the moment which are taking up slightly more of my time than they should ‘The Poetics of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard and ‘Psychogeography’ by Merlin Coverley being the relevant ones but I’m also slowing myself up by dabbling in Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’ and Lyall Watson’s ‘Supernature’. But this isn’t a book club. So anyway, the Catalyst exhibition at the Tannery at MOMA Cymru came to an end and so I decided to go about obtaining and where they could not be obtained, writing reviews for it and for the Blaengar book that was launched at the event. The reviews have been published on the AN Interface website and can be found here and here . The exhibition review also includes some nice photos of a selection of the works (including mine).
I’ve been busy at artists’ events or as it seems fashionable to entitle them, ‘symposia’ this month as well. Last week I was in Cardiff for Nutopia , a symposium organised by the artist Jennie Savage (who’s work I very much admire) and was concerned with constructing visions of new utopias for the 21st century amongst contemporary planning and architecture. There was a huge and fascinating range of speakers over the two days that I’ll briefly outline here.
We started off with Mark Chapple, a representative of Save the Children, who sent us out on an urban wandering exercise ‘Without Shops we are Nothing’ considering waymarkers that posed questions about social collapse through the illustration of Zimbabwe. Then there was Steve Garrett of Riverside Market, Cardiff discussing Cuban models of urban agriculture and Chris Carlsson of San Francisco, author of Nowtopia proposing grassroots, DIY lifestyle as a form of activism and resistance. Also in the first session was Mark Hallett an unconventional and slightly left-of-centre property developer of Igloo Regeneration and Peter Draper of Rounded Developments Enterprises. The first session seemed to me to present a dichotomy between idealism and practicality with little common ground between the view points as to whether it is more productive or responsible to tinker from within the existing system: making subtle changes from a position of responsibility with possible big, if non confrontational effects. Or else whether it is viable to ‘drop-out’ and make changes in your own life with the hope of gaining the critical mass possible to affect change. I have to say though the second option seems to offer the most integrity in its idealised vision I couldn’t help but thing that its brand of non-threatening rebellion may possibly do more to confirm and enforce the structures it purports to challenge. By giving a disorganised and individualised idealistic outlet to political impulse outside of existing structures, unless the fabled ‘critical mass’ can be achieved it merely acts like the release valve on a pressure cooker. I fear this anti-consumerism, giving the impression of rejecting global capitalism whilst tacitly confirming it in not presenting any coherent alternative, may offer a false choice in the way Berger presents consumerism in the classic Ways of Seeing. It is a fear rather than a certainty and I certainly find its existential elements appealing, my problem lies in the way in which it claims it can change global power structures. I accept that we can change our own lives (‘Everyone will live in his own cathedral’ – more on that later) to an extent, but I am not so sure about possibilities for changing the world unless you have a lot of gold or guns unfortunately.
After an amazing lunch that seemed almost decadent to my simple (and possibly uncultured) pallet we undertook a range of breakout sessions. Lunch slightly amused me in that it comprised huge platters of exotic fruits slightly at odds with the preceding two hours of debating the importance of locally grown, carbon-minimal produce but the irony seemed to be confined to me as I shuffled around nervously attempting to strike up conversations with various delegates. I fear my networking skills still need some work.
The breakout sessions were interesting and were led by Poppy Nicol, Rob Bermingham, Esther Pilkington, Daniel Ladnar and RoToR with subjects that ranged from re-greening the city to cycle training to a narrative walk. After this we returned for the second session chaired by Wiard Sterk, director of Safle where the tension between dominant economic frameworks, mass consumption and resistance and human exchange were examined. Speakers included Prof. Malcolm Miles, professor of Cultural Theory at University of Plymouth, Dr. Jill Fenton from the Geography department of Queen Mary University London, Dr. Tom Hall from the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff and Dr. Bas Spierings of Utrecht University. Discussed were the tensions between real and symbolic economies and the Surrealist games that created psychological utopias/dystopias from prominent architecture. I found the concepts regarding constructing almost psychological economies (though there were not called this) through recourse to ‘iconic’ architectural interventions in the psycho-social fabric of the city (as manifested in its unplanned myriad spaces of social interaction). There were definitely complex issues of class, interventionism, regeneration and the redesign of public space as consumer space. What I found particularly interesting was the idea of symbolic economies and how visual/spatial interventions could alter the psychological (and even economic) fabric of a given locality.
Afterwards Jennie launched her new Museum of the Moment project that involved an audio walk around Cardiff’s 19th century arcades whilst listening to a soundscape comprising hundreds of interviews with the inhabitants/users of the arcades. The result was strangely affecting and effective. I sat in the sun round the back of the arcades listening to the gentle voices and the abstracted silence that surrounded them and felt a strange feeling of simultaneously being cut off from my surroundings whilst being drawn into them and perceiving them afresh. I can’t really explain what it felt like, it was like being cut adrift from a fast-forward crowd sweeping around you whilst you sat there, almost in another reality. It made me feel at the same time relaxed and uneasy and even though I went into it expecting an entirely intellectual exercise, or at least if I was affected for it to be on this level, instead I found that it got at me on a deeper and less explicable emotional level than I had imagined. I suppose it’s something very much dependent on the external conditions but also the emotional state of the participant as much as it is the work itself (in this sense the participant becomes part of the work itself) but as I am keen to experiment more with sound works it is something that I noted with interest.
After the audio walk I skipped on the conference dinner and instead went off and climbed the tower at Cardiff University (one of the highest buildings in this relatively low-rise city). It was sunset and the university observatory was having an open day so I went and looked at the craters on the moon.
The next day began with artists Simon Whitehead and Ben Stammers conducting a walk-based work ‘Vulpine’ but this was at 5 am and a challenge too far for me. The first session of the day was on the relationship of language to regeneration and was possibly the most interesting for me. It was chaired by Pratap Rughami, independent filmmaker and course director of MA Documentary Film at London College of Communication. Speakers included Zoe Skoulding of Bangor University, a poet and editor of Poetry Wales; Nell Quest, studying for a PHD in Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Jersey; Karem Said of the American University, Cario and Aparna Sharma, a film-maker who unfortunately couldn’t be there in person as she was filming in Delhi. I found Zoe’s analysis of psychogeography through poetry fascinating as it is very much an area that I am into at the moment. The idea of site-specific poetry and the effects that it might produce in the perception of space were intriguing. One line that she quoted from Ivan Chtcheglov ‘Everyone will live in his own personal cathedral’ and to continue the quote myself ‘there will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love’ from his Situationist ‘Formula for a New City’ I found particularly evocative. Concepts involving the analysis and manipulation of psychological responses to space mirror my own concerns and the work that I have been producing lately in the visual/aural arts. It was described as ‘a reaction to alienation by reclaiming emotional geography’.
The next session involved an archaeological analysis of the Arcades by Dr. Andrew Cochrane and a presentation of Sophie Hope’s ‘Arcade’s Treaty’ – a kind of manifesto for a new utopia whose most amusing suggestion was that the royal family should be made into cat food!
After lunch the final session presented varying visions of the future of the build environment and was chaired by Dr. Emma Posey, director of BLOC. Speakers included Rachel Armstrong of the Barlett school of Architecture, University College London, University of East London and Smartlab digital Media Institute; Prof. Goncalo Furtado of Oporto University, Portugal; Mac Dunlop and Artist and Writer from Cornwall and Anne Marie Culhane of the Open University. The sessions proved a fascinating and slightly divisive one on which to end the conference with Rachel Armstrong presenting an amazingly energetic vision of a scientific, biologically/chemically engineered future in which buildings can literally come alive around us in order to help us and the wider environment. In opposition to this Anne Marie Culhane, backed up by many ‘green’ minded delegates from the floor presented a kind of back to nature approach of community groups trading urban-gathered fruit at barter markets. I have to say whilst I admire the initiative, her approach was blown out of the water somewhat by the revolutionary and forward looking concepts put forward by Rachel Armstrong. I went away feeling that we couldn’t turn back the clock and that these initiatives had no answers for the urgent issues facing our global society, just rose-tinted tinkering. And so despite my vaguely contrary and luddite outlook on many matters I think I’ll be investing my hopes, despite my instinctive position, with the scientists.
All in all I found the whole symposium incredibly interesting, slightly outside my comfort zone often but I enjoyed the challenge and even feel inspired by the academic discussion that I participated in to consider the possibility of further study and a potential return to academia.
Anyway that was list week, this week I was in Swansea for the WARP program seminar on Critical Discourse entitled ‘The Centre is Here’. The panellists giving presentations were Neil Mulholland (director of the Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art), Elisabeth Mahoney (writer and art critic for many newspapers including The Guardian), S Mark Gubb (artist) and Marie-Anne McQuay (curator of Spike Island in Bristol). The event was extremely interesting and the discussion lively. It was generally accepted that for whatever reason, largely the absence of a credible media, that critical discourse in Wales is very much absent. Discussion centred on whether it was viable to attempt to entice UK media coverage, lobby and develop a Wales based media alternative, to bypass critical discourse through media via use of interpersonal networks or whether to simply use this lack of conventional discourse as a stimulus to the production of a DIY critical network through use of new, free, individualised media and the internet. Again, as is often the case at these events, it came back to that rather platitudinous abdication of responsibility on behalf of the discussions (although no doubt true) of Do It Yourself. It is fair enough to state that you can’t wait for someone else to do these things for you but at the same time always placing all of the emphasis on the individual without the accompanying structures could be seen as a lazy, if practicable, analysis of the complex issues involved.
After the seminar was the Framework Social at a local working men’s club at which an assorted range of performers and artists presented work and cookies were sold and bingo was called and beer was drunk and I’m sure everyone had a very good time.
Lastly (and at last), back down to earth from the theoretical abstractions of the preceding weeks and back to making some money hopefully, I am selling photography at the craft fair at the Red Dragon Centre in Cardiff Bay on the 18th and 19th April. Please come along if you are in the area, I’ll have the full range on sale!
