I’ve just read an article by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian (09/12/15) about Assemble winning the Turner Prize. Their winning is (I hope obviously?) a very real cause for celebration. But it is also a reflection of just how slow the official ‘art world’ has been to recognise the sea change taking place on its wilder shores.

As Higgins points out, to some people giving the prize to a collective of young architects is going to look like “a monumental category error, like giving the Man Booker to, say, an oral poet”. And it’s that ‘category error’ by the Art Establishment, surely, that is the most fundamental cause for celebration. Art as we have reinvented it, ‘art with a capital A’, will be with us for just as long as there are elites who can use it as a sign of their ‘wealth’ – whether in terms of economic or cultural capital – and social exclusivity (or ‘taste’ if you prefer the polite term). What has been happening for many years now, however, is a slow withering away at the edges of the categorical exclusivity, in relation to the arts as to all other disciplines, that separates our skills and knowledges into separate and exclusive silos. In academia this is glossed as the ‘inter-disciplinarity turn’ (an unfortunate term that tacitly continues to perpetuate the myth of the superiority of disciplinary knowledge).

In actuality, however, what is taking place, albeit often below the radar on which cultural pundits depend, is the acknowledgement that we live in a polyverse in which it makes no sense to ghettoise any set of skills or form of knowledge on the basis of traditional professional hierarchies. (This is, I think, the most important insight behind Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘ecosophy’, despite his tendency to lionise aesthetics and the ‘artist’ over against science).

When Maria Lisogorskaya and Louis Schulz, two of the ‘eighteen or so’ members of Assemble, tell Higgins that they are indifferent to whether they are categorised as artists or not, that their focus is on “doing good projects”, which in turn is sometimes “about doing really good plumbing”, they give us a very clear indication of where the resurgence of an aesthetics of the everyday may be taking us.

Some years back my old friend Simon Read – who teaches art students at Middlesex University, makes extraordinary and beautiful predictive coastal maps, other kinds of large drawings, sculptural environmental interventions in the salt marshes on and around the River Deben, and is also practically engaged in the debates around environmental governance of the region in which he lives – told me a story. He was at the opening of a major exhibition in London when a friend introduced him as an artist to a well-known art critic. The critic asked Simon what he did. When Simon told him the critic’s response was: “how worthy”, with which comment he turned and walked away.

I hope that Assemble’s success will mean that, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons, the cultural influence represented by that critic will now be a little less dismissive of those for whom the skills of an artist are wholly compatible with getting productively engaged with the messy and complex  everyday realities of our crumbling psycho-social environment.

On Friday last week I found myself at the Invisible Landscapes: Exploring Embedded Approaches to Place-Based Contemporary Art Practice seminar. This was organised by Simon Lee Dicker for OSR/Projects , who are based in West Coker in Somerset.

I had originally intended to skip this interesting looking event, simply because there is so much to do at home but, as it turned out, it provided the only opportunity for a meeting with three friends with overlapping interests – the artist and geographer Jethro Brice; Owain Jones, Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University; and John Fanshawe, an ornithologist and artist who is currently working with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) . An added bonus was the chance to catch up with Jethro’s news during the drive down. Jethro is currently doing AHRC-funded doctoral research in the Geography Department at Bristol University into ‘crane cultures’ – the birds, not the machines – by drawing multi-species wetland narratives from the field and archives. (The purpose of the four of us meeting was to talk about whether we can initiate some productive interactions with CCI, and it seems we may have the basis for doing so. However, it’s far too early to write about that here).

After a brief introduction by Simon, we listened to two very different talks. Sally Watkins – co-artistic director and curator for b-side – talked very informatively about b-side’s work, particularly on Portland, which included drawing out the various different ways in which that organization understands notions of ‘site-responsiveness’ and ‘embeddedness’ in practice.  The second talk of the morning was by Owain.

I have trouble knowing how best to write about this talk. (I’d heard a version of it before at a conference in Newcastle and raised some of the issues that concerned me with Owain then). Put briefly, this is because I think his take on our current situation is warped by a number of factors. The most significant is his stressing – referencing Felix Guattari – the aesthetic in opposition to science. While that position obviously went down well with an audience almost entirely made up of people from the arts, it seems to me to be a wrong-headed unless its heavily qualified, and may in any case – following Bruno Latour – be an outdated, binary position of the kind we badly need to avoid. I won’t go further into the reasoning behind this view here but I’ve discussed the question of scientism and aestheticism in contemporary culture at length in a chapter called ‘Beyond Aestheticism and Scientism: Notes towards An “Ecosophical” Praxis’ in Art, Science and Cultural Understanding, edited by Brett Wilson, Barbara Hawkins, and Stuart Sim and published in 2014. While Owain’s take on the chronically destructive nature of our current eco-social position is, at one level, as passionately argued as it is intellectually well-informed, it is in my view also saturated with – and in my view seriously distorted by – his own emotional discomfort with his inability, as an academic, to ‘know what to do’. (One antidote to which might be a careful reading of David Abram’s Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, published in 2010).

And this highlights a major ecosophical issue with regard to all articulations of our situation by those who earn their living providing “authoritative” accounts of that situation. Put simply, the personal ecology of the academic makes him or her singularly ill-suited to providing a helpful approach to our situation, simply because any such approach requires us to by-pass or overcome the fundamental presuppositions on which academic knowledge, and the whole material mesh and realpolitik in which it is embedded, rests. I found it sad and deeply ironic that, while Owain was rightly sceptical of all contemporary politics, he failed to acknowledge that the underlying psycho-social assumptions that underpin those politics also underpin the authority of academia. And no amount of aesthetic or imaginative work will change that situation until we acknowledge it for what it is.

Anyway, after an excellent lunch of bread and soup in a local pub we hear an informative talk from Sally Laburn, an artist and the co-director of The Drawing Shed, which is based in east London. This was followed by three parallel workshops run by Alexander Stevenson, Jethro and Tim Martin. I went to Jethro’s, in which we used mud to think about our relationship to non-human thinking, which involved me and my two peers in our group in an interesting and wide-ranging series of thoughts and reflections.

I enjoyed the day on a number of levels, and recognise just how important these types of gathering are to the regional arts community. However, one of the questions it left me with is around the issue of how we exchange with each other – starting with our terms of reference and vocabulary. If they also leave me somewhat saddened it is because I fear they may reinforce the very thing they appear to seek to overcome – the huddling together of individuals on the basis of a monolithic, disciplinary-based, world view – almost every speaker introduced him or her self by saying “I am an artist” – in a constellated world in which only the understanding that we now live in a polyverse will allow us to mitigate the extraordinary difficulties we increasingly face.

It’s been one of those weeks. As if fate wanted to throw a different light on all the usual, necessary stuff that has to goes on regardless, I heard that my uncle – my mother’s half-brother – died in his sleep after a brief period in hospital. So the family will be gathering for his funeral next week (some of whom I will not have seen since the last family funeral).

During the week I also discovered that I have won something called “the Derek Balmer PPRWA Painting Prize” at this year’s RWA Annual Open Exhibition for my piece Washington & Vicinity (Arlington betrayed), a work in part inspired by talking with my friend Mona Smith about the history and mis-treatment of the Dakota people. (See the earlier post Two works for the Annual Exhibition at the RWA). Apparently the prize is awarded “for excellence in painting”, something I was under the impression I no longer really ‘did’, at least in the traditional sense!

Then today – although in fact, since I’m writing this in the early hours of the morning, actually yesterday – I helped my elder son, who has been semi-camping here in our new house, and his partner move into their own new home. It’s great for them and that move is a serious milestone in any parent’s life. And then my younger son, who has been very ill for a while, has come to get some rest and a bit of help with his work. Meanwhile my wife and daughter are still up north, and sadly must stay there, until this house is in a state where they can come back to a functioning home with proper heating, etc. However the building work proceeds a pace and hopefully, despite the endless and inevitable minor problems that that process throws up, I hope it will continue to do so. And finally, I thought (wrongly) that I had recovered from a nasty cold and discovered today that I haven’t. Just another week in the polyverse.

Meanwhile, of course, everyone else continues to pursue their own priorities and, where those involve me, to hope that I will put their’s at the top of my Urgent List. And no doubt I’ll try to do what I can.

This year I’m sticking out my neck (in RWA terms) and submitting unframed work, basically reconfigured maps of Washington. It will be interesting to see what the response is, particularly given that I am due to work with the RWA and Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in conjunction with an exhibition that has the archive and mapping as one of its starting points.

On Monday this week I caught up with Alyson Hallett who, although we don’t know each other well, I’ve now come to think of as a real friend. Alyson recently finished her term as the second Charles Causley poet-in-residence, and was also the first to actually live out her residency in Causley’s house – Cypress Well – on Ridgegrove Hill in Launceston. Appropriately, the hill then gave its name to the collection of poems she created during her residency. She was over in Bristol to visit Bristol university, where as Dr Hallett she works as a Royal Literary Fund  Advisory Fellow, a post which places her in the university to help students develop their writing. We first met through her presenting her Stone Library work at a PLaCE event and had been in touch about her most recent book, On Ridgegrove Hill, which is now published by Atlantic Press. The book is the fruit of Alyson’s Charles Causley residency and has been beautifully designed and illustrated by Phyllida Bluemel, a current student on the MA Illustration course at Falmouth University.

I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of the Cornish poet Charles Causley, let alone read any of his work, until I read Alyson’s own poems. On the strength of her obvious empathy for Causley and his world (and perhaps because I spent three years working on a project in north Cornwall), I then bought a second-hand copy of his collected poems. I then read it more or less straight though, as I might a really good novel. I can highly recommend both poets’ work to anyone who is interested in place and its being interwoven with our attention to language, notably in Causley’s case with the particularities of vernacular speech.

My pleasure in talking with Alyson is in part in her own delight in, and genuine relishing of lively, freewheeling conversation, which she described in an email as “a banquet of ideas and thoughts and pathways”. It is also because of her wide-ranging knowledge and understanding. This is exemplified by what she says on the video Encountering Iceland – reading from 6 Days in Iceland by Alyson Hallett and Chris Caseldine. This gives an indicative sense of her work on, and of the poems resulting from, a field trip to Iceland with the physical geographer Chris Caseldine and his students, part of her residency in the Geography Department at Exeter University. They read from the book that came out of their trip with the students  – 6 Days in Iceland – which combines poetry, geographical text and photographic images. It is typical that Alyson should have encountered Iceland as a poet but alongside a professional earth scientist and his students, and that she should have been fascinated by the ways in which these two rather different fields of study – at least when seen from a disciplinary perspective – can in actuality inform, enliven and enrich one another.

My conversation with Alyson reminds me what a privilege it is to have worked in a university – notwithstanding all the deepening problems of that archaic institution – because of the friendships and contacts that work creates. I have been having very interesting exchanges on line with two individuals  with an interest in deep mapping. One is Siri Linn Brandsoy, who is working on a Masters project around deep mapping a small island in the north of Norway. She is a students on the M.A program in Visual Anthropology in Manchester and will be showing work in an exhibition with her fellow students on October 15-17. If anyone reading this gets the chance, you should go and see what, form my contact with Siri and others, I think will be an interesting exhibition of work combining ethnography with art practices and filmmaking.

The second person I’ve been enjoying an exchange with is Erin Kavanagh, who is working with Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology and Historical Anthropology and much more besides at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. I think of Erin as a new (or maybe very old) kind of en-placed teller of multi-dimensional stories. She is currently working on a paper on deep mapping to be presented at the University of Vienna, along side much else, and writes: “Four papers in under four months, that’s do-able on top of a full time work load and organizing publications, right…?”, reminding me of aspects of academic life I am happy to do without.

We moved into our new home just a week ago and, after what seems rather longer grappling with a sea of brown cardboard boxes, problems with drains, and all the other dubious joys of domesticity associated with moving house, I returned briefly to another of my lives today.

I have been in Exeter giving a joint presentation at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference with Antony Lyons as part of the session Geo-aesthetics in an Anthropogenic World. The convenors, Deborah Dixon (Glasgow) and Dominic Walker (Exeter), had kindly given us a double ‘slot’, which allowed us to show Antony’s most recent edit of Transgression (Rising Waters) immediately followed by a textual ‘duet’ in which we each read in turn a short response to fifteen of the words listed on the digital drawings I made for that project. (See one example above). Given that we had not had any time to rehearse this it went surprisingly well, largely because Antony had carefully structured the presentation so that the drawings gave us a clear ‘time slot’.

Our abstract – which does more or less reflect what we delivered (!) reads as follows:

We take as our starting point the definition of ‘Transgression’, as a geological term describing an advance of the sea over land-areas: ‘a relative rise in sea level resulting in deposition of marine strata over terrestrial strata. The sequence of sedimentary strata formed by transgressions and regressions provides information about the changes in sea level during a particular geologic time’’

This moving-image work is based on a combination of fieldwork, archival research, creative conversations and inter-media collage. Drawing on our shared interest in place, environmental change, and water landscapes, we explore questions rooted in physical, social and cultural relationships between land and sea. In an era that many now term the ‘Anthropocene’, it can be argued that we face the prospect of human-influenced marine transgressions. Using strategies of poetic juxtaposition and conjecture, we focus special attention on coastal change/resilience/adaptation along the Severn Estuary coast, as well as wider afield. Our hybrid composition incorporates photographic and other visual content, accompanied by voice, song and soundscape. It weaves together original and archival material to create an imaginative bridging and transgressing of both disciplinary thinking and the culture of possessive individualism that underpins it. The method is influenced by Lyons’ work as a geoscientist and landscape-based artist; and by Biggs’ academic and artistic work embracing ‘deep-mapping’ as a creative paradigm. Our many antecedents include films such as Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and the socio-ecological thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, coupled with Pearson and Shanks’ re-visioning of ‘deep mapping’ as a regionalist performative creative strategy. Transgression (Rising Waters) is closely linked to a Lyons’ longer-term Arts Council funded project ‘Inundation – Drowned Lands’ and to his artist residency project on the Severn Estuary, called ‘Sabrina Dreaming’.

Of particular interest to me about the session as a whole was that the collaborative presentation – by Rebecca Ellis (a social anthropologist with interests in science, technology and cultural geography) and the artist Sarah Casey – that preceded ours. Titled Porous topologies of (Im)perceptibility’s as creative process, the abstract for this reads as follows:

Two reflections from theoretical cosmology provide the inspiration for this paper. The first is an acknowledgement that light is but a one-dimensional signal of (non)human knowability of the properties of the universe. The second is the claim that properties as-of-yet unknowable are mathematically thinkable, albeit in the absence of observational verification. Current cosmological debates concerning the (non)existence of manifold topologies of the multiverse (e.g. Smolin 2015) provide a rich context in which to both stay with and trouble claims for (un)knowability as a resource for tentatively grasping the radically insensible (Yusoff 2013). Indeed the deep recesses of the (non)existent multiverse promise to usefully probe further the very meanings of (non)human perceptibility. This paper will practice a recent interdisciplinary experiment between an artist, anthropologist and cosmologist as they exchange theoretical and material resources with which they individually and collectively trouble the limits of (im)perceptibility posed by the example given. Theoretical reflection on the status of mathematics as (non)human signal, will tentatively steer between accounts of mathematical ontology (Badiou, Meillassoux) and feminist materialist consideration of mathematics as human-nonhuman semiotic exchange (e.g. Kirby). We reflect upon the problem of seeking ‘illumination’ of dark objects through the example of Art practice, where ‘knowing’ is deliberately postponed and a state of being ‘in the dark’ is essential to enriched understanding (Jones 2013).The paper will be framed by a wider-arching question concerning the possibilities of the utter (ir)relevance of such radically ‘dark spaces’ for anthropocenic thinking.  

There was something in all this that reminded me of the Hebrew mystical concept of Ein Sof, which in the study of the Kabbalah is understood as God prior to his self-manifestation in the production of any spiritual realm. In this line of thought, it is only by withdrawing into absence that the Divine can allow anything (else) to come into being. There was a sense of a queer interdependence/distance, of an ‘oscillation’, hinted at in the paper that was fascinating. Anyway, and probably rather to everyone’s surprise, there turned out to be a number of tantalising overlaps between this presentation and our own. These appeared in various ways, not least in Rebecca Ellis’ question to me about my use of the term ‘polyverse’ (against the more usual ‘multiverse’). Strangely, it seems Antony and I have been edging towards a possible convergence with thinking in mathematical speculation about multiverses, along with the debates for and against Object Oriented Ontology. Two particularly interesting lines of enquiry (for me) came out of this heady stuff. Firstly, a recommendation that I read Mary Jane Rubenstein’s The Many Worlds of the Multiverse. But secondly (for me) the positive provocation of Sarah Casey’s resonant and technically deeply thoughtful approach to her drawings.

So much food for thought before my re-imersion in the sea of brown cardboard boxes!