Britain, the USA, and perhaps Europe as a whole, seem increasingly to be falling under the sway of cynical demagogues who practice a polarising and self-serving politics based on fear and loathing, ably assisted by the majority in the media. (Typically, in the UK the Daily Mail has just branded three high court judges ‘enemies of the people’ for upholding the rule of law). In this context, we owe a profound debt of gratitude to Gina Miller. The long-established world view predicated on the elite narratives of high capitalism and the culture of possessive individualism is turning increasingly toxic in both its psycho-social and environmental dimensions. As a result, those happy to cynically exploit fear come to the fore, intimidating or denigrating anyone who disagrees with them. (This has long been a popular managerial tactic in big institutions, as it is in totalitarian states). It takes very real courage to stand against this in a country where demagogues and their media allies appear hell-bent on re-creating the kind of atmosphere that allowed fascism to come into power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s.

Unlike those whose Brexit politics are based on mixing gross lies and vague half-truths, she has had the courage to do what they claimed to be doing. She has insisted on publically arguing for the sovereignty of the British Parliament as the cornerstone of our particular brand of democracy. That private individuals have had to do what Parliament should itself have done speaks volumes about the shameful situation in which we now find ourselves.

I took part in a meeting yesterday that ended in a discussion in which a number of us openly challenged some of the presuppositions that underwrite the work of the academic status quo. I was particularly interested in one line of argument that appeared during that discussion. Namely, that the difficulties we were bringing to light were simply – or primarily – the result of clashes of personality. This seemed to me to parallel the argument that any questioning of, or opposition to, the desires of the Brexit camp is just people being ‘bad losers’, ‘whingers’ – is, in short, the product of personal defects at an individual level. What this allows those who argue in this way to side-step is the fact that, while of course our differences are always expressed at a personal level, they can never be reduced, monolithically, to manifestations of individual personality. We are social beings. To argue that how we manifest ourselves is simply an individual mater, and so by implication is not interwoven with and influenced by the cultural, structural and institutional norms that are written into our collective lives, is simply a way of avoiding the uncomfortable realities of our current situation.

It is time that, like Gina Miller, we find the courage to publically name and address those uncomfortable realities; to acknowledge them for what they are and look collectively for ways to address them.      

This post largely consists of a longer (originally written for a twenty minute presentation, of the text read at a “Beyond Interdisciplinarity: situating practice in the art/geography nexus” session at the Royal Geographical Society conference in London on September 1st, 2016.

It was prompted by my growing sense of the gap between the openness of the creative projects undertaken by the arts practice-led doctoral students I have been involved with as a supervisor over the last 15 or so years, and the various academically-led “interdisciplinary” research projects I have been attached to over approximately the same period of time.

While the former have by and large become more adventurous and reflexive and less inclined to locate themselves using conventional terms such as ‘interdisciplinarity’, the later have become increasingly mired by constraints imposed by a thinking that, while adopting the rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinary’, remains tacitly in thrall to the presuppositions of the disciplinary mentality. This is sometimes the result of senior academic staff passively adopting assumptions that fail to address questions of the nexus of power, intellectual authority, and terminology within the academy. For example, by tacitly accepting that philosophy, as ‘queen of the sciences’ sits at the top of a hierarchy of value and so provides the trump card in terms of authority vis a vis epistemological differences. However, the constraints are sometimes nothing to do with the projects themselves as intellectual constructs. Rather that are caused by the deadening consequence of academics being required to internalise a risk-averse governance culture that uses audit (including the REF) to reinforce an exclusive disciplinary regime predicated on a logocratic realpolitik. 

This presentation is intended as a provocation and, as such, involves an element of caricature

My topic is the realpolitik that determines institutionally funded encounters between art and geography. However, keeping in mind Isabelle Stengers’ stress on the need for epistemological bridge-building, I’ll try to keep my distance from what Gemma Corradi Fiumara calls the logocratic culture of ‘competing monologues’. Rather than assume a monolithic professional persona, I’m going to speak as a constellated self with multiple and tensioned concerns – in education, place oriented research, social activism, and the imaginal arts.

Barbara Bender’s observation that: “Landscapes refuse to be disciplined. They make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time [History] and space [Geography], or between nature [Science] and culture [Social Anthropology]” – indicates why I have a problem with conceptualizing “contemporary art as a mode of spatial enquiry”. This conceptualization would also appear to have missed the richly and densely interwoven existing conversations between geography, the arts, landscape architecture, visual anthropology, and uncategorizable compound practices. These conversations are important because, while academic geographers are subject to a disciplinary realpolitik as a condition of their employment – and so look to interdisciplinarity for change – that polyvocal conversation takes place in an extra-academic elsewhere. So any proposal to dissolve boundaries that’s articulated in academic terms signals a certain degree of belatedness. I suspect this is the consequence of a dilemma within “non-“, “anti-“ or “more than” representational geography, but I’ll come to that later.

Because of this misunderstanding I’m going to employ a quite different differentiation, one that cuts across the categories “art” and “geography”. This is the psychosocial spectrum used by sociologists Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead to distinguish between different citizens of Kendall, one that arcs between “life-as” and “being-as-becoming”. I’ve modified their approach using terms suggested by Pauline O’Connell – between individuals focused on achieving “best of breed” status and those who accept, given our worsening socio-environmental situation, the uncertain status of “compound cur”. The first position internalizes possessive individualism’s insistence on the primacy of the autonomous self to the point where the desire to be “best of breed” in a given professional field – say “art” or “geography” – takes precedence over all other concerns and connectivities. The resulting life-world is framed hierarchically by, ultimately, the same historical presuppositions that link the terms “university” and “universe”. By contrast, the inclusive and compound imaginal/material activity of “compound curs” is constituted through negotiating the epistemological differences and cognitive dissonances that flow from living in a polyverse. There constellated selves are constituted through internalising commonality as a multiplicity of attachments, connections, and relationships. In reality of course each one of us lives in a state of uneasy oscillation somewhere between these two poles.

The imaginal/material practices of a “compound cur” interweave multiple forms of creative work and share techniques and intensions across a host of different skill sets and fields of concern. The academic term “interdisciplinary” is a pale discursive shadow of performative, constellated, practices that are so intertwined in participation, sociality, conversation, and ‘the civic’’ as to elude categorization. Of course like everyone else “compound curs” still have to live with the consequences of the given professional categories that govern employment and the realpolitik that underwrites professional authority.

The current relationship between geography and constellated imaginal/material practices is indebted to the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Programme between 2006 and 2012, which catalysed certain on-going transformations. I know from personal experience that it transformed three informal networks that continue to facilitate constellated imaginal/material practices across and between the arts, activism, the humanities and the social sciences – and despite an increasingly hostile institutional environment. The effects of that Programme also inform current research projects like the AHRC-funded Towards Hydro-citizenship, in which I’m involved and that informs this presentation.

I was a co-ordinator for a network funded by the Landscape and Environment programme – Living in a Material World: A cross-disciplinary location-based enquiry into the performativity of emptiness. This developed a vibrant conversational exchange between individuals engaged in a wide range of practices. Significantly, four of the five coordinators had constellated practices – working in and between performing or visual arts, a commitment to the radical pedagogy that’s implicit in good arts education, and various forms of place-oriented research. Other participants included archaeologists, historians, artists, and the geographers Stephan Daniels, Hayden Lorimer, J.D. Dewsbury, Owain Jones and John Wylie. This conversational project informed the 2009 Living Landscapes conference in Aberystwyth, a watershed event organized by Mike Pearson and Stephen Daniels.

The Material World network was animated by conversation as an imaginal/material field-based method for working-across a wide range of disparate skills, practices, engagements, and lines of thought. A concurrent project involving Patrick Keiller and Doreen Massey adopted the same approach to produce the film Robinson in Ruins and the installation The Robinson Institute at Tate Britain in 2012. That creative exposition included film, curated artefacts, and carefully researched polyvocal texts, interweaving diverse historical and contemporary material in telling juxtapositions. The project as a whole is an exemplary indication of what collaboration that privileges an extra-academic context can achieve.

SPUD is an on-going imaginal/material conversation initiated by Deirdre O’Mahony. It works with cultural and agricultural concerns and involves both a South American research institute and the Loy Association in Ireland. Initially a way of presenting a more nuanced understand of the potato’s role in Irish culture – particularly in relation to food security and globalized food production – it has developed into an understandable and accessible entry point for a public discourse on sustainability, food security, and tacit cultivation knowledge. Its lazy-beds were recently displayed as “useful art” outside the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

A project like SPUD requires its coordinator to identify and acknowledge the limitations of different epistemological assumptions. This enables a collective mind-set comparable to that of a “compound cur” to develop. Without this grounding in “epistemological agnosticism”, collaborative academic projects continue by default to be framed by the realpolitik of the logocratic order because that is what frames their funders’ criteria. Criteria in turn based on a consensus that categorizes the arts as “other” and subaltern. This framing is independent of the views of individual academics. Academic research governance systematically enforces its consensus on the basis of the “epistemological error” identified by Gregory Bateson. In a paper called Stepping from the wreckage, Owain Jones summarizes this error as: “the enlightenment/modern aspirations of progress towards truth through the elimination of doubt and the application of reason, language and power” – the tripartite basis of the logocratic order – so as to divide, sort, represent and fix the world. Academic realpolitik enforces this logocratic order. Even if all the individuals in a collaborative team would claim to reject the error Bateson identifies, that realpolitik subordinates the outcomes of consensus-based research to that order, or else marginalizes or negates them. In short, consensually based Research Council funded projects always ultimately conform to the requirements of a logos that divides, sorts, represents, analyses and fixes the world.

At this point it may be useful if I indicate what I see as the dilemma of “non-“, “anti-“ or “more than” representational geography. Intellectually it repudiates the epistemological error Jones’ identifies. But while a geographer like John Wylie may wish he and his peers could “engage freely with the techniques and presentational forms of the creative arts”, their academic authority still largely rests on a typical logocratic strategy. This is the use of philosophy to re-conceptualize – that is re-divide, re-sort, and re-represent – previous discursive conceptualizations of the world. It does so in philosophically saturated texts that, somewhat ironically, privilege the concept of ’embodied’ experience’ – texts on which its academic authority depends. However, some geographers are also aware that, to paraphrase Gemma Corradi Fiumara, the logocratic order is based on knowing how to speak rather than how to listen – hence perhaps J. D. Dewsbury’s emphasis on “witnessing” – a form of listening in Fiumara’s sense. All of which indicates why this geographical tendency talks of wanting to distance itself from the logocratic order through hybridization with arts practices. However, to do so in practice would be to put its status within the academic hierarchy at risk. In the terms of academic realpolitik a non-rep geographer gains status by citing Gilles Deleuze, not by emulating Joseph Beuys or Susan Stenger.

This dilemma is best addressed using attentive listening as the basis for adversarial collaboration basedon disciplinary agnosticism. This obliges us to acknowledge and openly converse across openly acknowledged epistemological differences – a process that replicates that of the imaginal/material practices of “compound curs”. It requires cultivating the agnosticism mentioned earlier to enable us to explicitly acknowledge, and then work with and across, both our own epistemological presuppositions and those of others. This process is sharply distinguished from collaboration based on the assumption of a consensus that ignores, represses or marginalizes difference. Put very simply, adversarial collaboration works with epistemological difference to create vibrant, generative contrasts.

I’ve been assuming a particular understanding of conversation that I need to make explicit. Conversation is an art grounded in active listening. As Monica Shev-chick argues, to choose to have a conversation with a person is to admit them into the field where worlds are constructed. However, this choice ultimately runs the risk of redefining not only the ‘other’ but myself as well. The art of conversation has the capacity to stay open to and wait for what is unforeseen. As such it enables ideas to converse with time, unrestricted by given or predetermined ends. In this way it challenges the instrumentality of Funding Councils and the REF emphasis on outcomes and impact.

The risk of redefinition through conversation is, however, equally present in adversarial collaboration. There is immense pressure on geographers and artists to live a “life-as best of breed”. This means that to engage in adversarial collaboration – which necessitates acquiring some real understanding of, and respect for, lived epistemologies other than one’s own – is to risk transformations that may be professionally damaging.

The dilemma of “non-“, “anti” or “more than” representational geography as I see it appears in the nexus of method and authority. The Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub argues that poetry – and by implication the arts – is predicated on the inadequacy of its means, enabling it to evoke our lived experience as always exceeding and falling short of conceptual definition. This inadequacy is deeply problematic from the perspective of a logocratic order underpinned by reason, language and power. That order’s authority lies in it claims as to the adequacy, or at least temporary adequacy, of its methodologies and categories – particularly those of philosophy as the peak of the logocratic hierarchy. Yet it appears that some geographers want to step away from the wreckage of the logocratic order that, paradoxically, still underwrites their existing authority. This is a paradox familiar to any “compound cur” working in tertiary education.

Constellated selves working with compound imaginal/material practices in Arts or Landscape Architecture Departments follow the example of dissidents in the Soviet Union prior to Glasnost. They pay lip service to exclusive disciplinary categories and the academic governance system. They struggle to work within institutional frameworks while enacting quite other values. And, like supporters of perestroika, they work below the parapet in pursuit of larger priorities. I hope this also happens in Geography Departments. In terms of any genuine nexus then, perhaps our first priority should be conversations about the type of “productive deception” I’ve identified in relation to doctoral supervision. This is a variant of what Paulo Freire refers to as a ‘limit act’ – one that, through shared witnessing, reflecting, acting and reimagining, can detach us from logocratic framings.

Maria Kerin writes of the collaborative artists’ collective Outriders that it operates on the principle of hospitality, generosity and reciprocal support, using its own resources and a minimum of public funding. This enables it to remain largely independent of systems it views as no longer fit for purpose – the same systems that underwrite academically-led arts/geography projects. The example of Outriders makes me wary of Sarah Whatmore’s call for “hybrid geographies” that are (I quote):

“not defined as/by academic disputes like the so-called ‘science wars’, important though these are, but in which the stakes are thoroughly and promiscuously distributed through the messy attachments, skills and intensities of differently embodied lives whose everyday conduct exceeds and perverts the designs of parliament, corporations and labour” (p.162).

I’m wary, not because I lack sympathy with her sentiments, but because of my own experience of the unholy alliance between academic realpolitik and the possessive individualism of best-of-breed actants. Wary too because I suspect that hybridity, like resilience, all-too easily becomes the means by which a system maintains the status quo while mimicking transformation. Finally, wary because of the context that frames the invention of Landström and Whatmore’s ‘competency group’. As with Rancière’s silence on the active tradition of critical pedagogy in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I have to assume that they are unaware of parallels between their “invention” and strategies long used by both socially engaged artists and liberation psychologists.

Given the economic situation, there are no shortage of artists willing to sign up to interdisciplinary projects with geographers – despite the unresolved issues of power, epistemology, and financial reward involved. However I want to close on another note.

Les Roberts has identified the core of this problem of authority when he claims that my call for an ‘open deep mapping’ only makes sense insofar as its openness is sufficiently diffuse to invalidate deep mapping as a category. But this claim precisely presupposes a disciplinary perspective, one predicated on the authority of fixed categories. Like any “compound cur” however, I understand my practice to be predicated on inadequacy and, in consequence, subject to a perpetual erosion of any categorical identity it may temporarily acquire.

One alternative to the proposed academic nexus would be for interested individuals to adopt the position of the Irish collaborative collective Outriders. This operates on the principle of hospitality, generosity and reciprocal support, drawing on its members’ own extra-institutional resources and a minimum of public funding. Adopting such a strategy would minimize interaction with the realpolitik that will otherwise frame any proposed nexus as ‘interdisciplinary’. But taking such a step requires academics to lead double lives with regard to

I want to end on a different note. Writing about deep mapping in north Cornwall, Jane Bailey and I describe our working process as: ‘observing, listening, walking, conversing, writing and exchanging … of selecting, reflecting, naming and generating … and of digitalizing, interweaving, offering and inviting’. Taking up Lee Roberts’ observations on our claim, I suggest we were no more involved in “a mode of spatial enquiry” than we were in any literal form of mapping. As Roberts notes, we immersed ourselves: ‘in the warp and weft of a lived and fundamentally intersubjective…creative coalescence of structures, forms, affects, energies, narratives, connections, memories, imaginaries, mythologies, voices, identities, temporalities, images and textualities’. So whatever name we give to what we were doing, it’s not helpful to frame it as “spatial enquiry” or some form of interdisciplinary nexus.

Economic necessity and intellectual curiosity will ensure that artists look to work with geographers, at least while geographers continue to engage with the techniques and presentational forms of the arts.  I hope both camps will start to adopt reflexive forms of collaboration, or else strategies like those of the Outriders collective. However, that will require them to enter conversations predicated on disciplinary agnosticism. That in turn will put both parties at risk of emerging with wholly other forms of praxis, those of compound curs.

I look forward to that happening.

I keep wondering whether it is wrong to think that Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and their ‘Brexit’ friends are directly responsible for whatever seems to have happened in the mind of the man who murdered Jo Cox?

What is clear is that her murder is indicative of what follows on from the kind of near-Fascist anti-immigration sentiments expressed by Farage, aided and abetted by the low, popularist Nationalism of the Brexit camp. Their toxic mix of political opportunism masked as patriotism, Little England xenophobia and their tapping into a repressed post-colonial resentment – the trigger for the endless cant we have been hearing about ‘British sovereignty’ – is now set to drag a country already deeply divided by the unfettered consequences of our culture of possessive individualism into what is starting to look uncomfortably like a replaying of the Fascistic abyss of the 1930s.

I don’t usually use this blog to advertise events but this conference, set up by the Centre for Landscape Studies at NUI, Galway, looks to be really interesting in a number of respects. What particularly caught my interest was the following:

“Arranging the contributions around four themes: Place Values; Places in Action; Place Thinking; and Place Governance; the conference aims to reflect and critique the journey of values from their genesis and expression in place, through how they are recorded and documented, to the position they command or are accorded in governance and contemporary social praxis”.

“All of the human sciences recognise the important role that the collective values engendered in place-making have in building and reinforcing community cohesion. However, a 2015 survey by the Heritage Council reveals that, in Ireland, the public rank built and natural heritage equally. In fact, though the gap is statistically insignificant, nature is ranked ahead of monuments and buildings as heritage. This suggests that the values associated with nature are not only scientific, that ecosystems service more than just the biological needs of society, and that topophilia and biophilia are deeply intertwined. In short, place has ecological dimensions which, in terms of management, can be honoured by initiatives such as Natura 2000, Green Infrastructure and High Nature Value Farming”.

“Typically, however, many of the cultural values attaching to landscape are expressed only in the languages of poetry and the creative arts. Though uniquely sensitive to the synaptic and protean nature of the relationship between people and place, such expressions are commonly deprived of their force and agency during the decision-making process. When it comes to regional, national and international business and governance, historical and cultural values are usually required to cede to biophysical and economic ones, leading to an inversion of value-hierarchies customarily associated with community projects“.

I know (or have met) a number of the people involved in setting up this conference and, as a result, I’m further encouraged to enthuse about it in advance.

But anyone interested in submitting will need to get their skates  on as abstracts (not exceeding 800 characters) and nomination of one conference theme has to be in by 17:00 (GMT) 27th November 2015 using the online abstract form located on the Landscape Values: Place and Praxis web site hosted by www.conference.ie.

Last night I worked for the first time in about three months. With my friend Luci Gorell Barnes I run a workshop that responded to the artists John Wood and Paul Harrison’s Erdkunde – itself a new video work responding to Bristol City Museum’s collections. (These were not, it has to be said, much in direct evidence in the film, but so be it). After meeting at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery to watch the Erdkunde film we walked up to the RWA (where Luci and I had already spent a frustrating half hour struggling to get PowerPoint up and working) and assembled in the small upstairs studio. I started us off by linking some of the key features of a deep map to what we’d just seen. What I said is pretty much as follows.

The word “Erdkunde” can be literally translated as ‘physical geography’ – but in German ‘Erde’ can mean ‘world’, ‘ground’ or ‘earth’, so it’s a very inclusive term. That makes it a perfect title for John Wood and Paul Harrison’s work. Their interest in collecting, cataloguing, and displaying various kinds of information – through notes, sketches, photographs, thoughts, ideas – questions how we look at things, identify them, talk about them. To do all that we use given systems of classification, even though our actual experience is always somehow both more and less than the systems and categories we use to tidy up the world. Deep mapping asks questions about the official categories we apply to space when we start to think about our experience of place.

So ‘deep mapping’, like the Erdkunde exhibition, is a way of questioning the relationship between official classifications of what is or is not important and our own immediate experience. Of course all places are shared to some extent, so our sense of place is always a combination of lived experience, given information, and various kinds of memory. Any deep mapping exercise begins by asking: “what needs to go onto a map of this particular place” and, because a place is always changing, being re-shaped, deep mapping is in turn always as much about time as it is about space.

I can identify each of these four snapshots taken in Bristol in terms of a particular place, but they are also evocations of different times – the slow change and decay of architecture periods over against the span of a human life or the growth of a sunflower.

We make sense of places through sharing stories, which are like crossroads where what’s important to us personally meets shared histories and social values. Here’s a story about a place in Bristol that’s no longer there. This was a medieval church dedicated to Saint Leonard – patron saint of prisoners – down on the Westgate, one of the original entrances to the medieval city, which became known as St Leonard’s Gate. This medieval church was in the way of ‘improvements’ to this area of the city that, in the C18th, needed to rework itself as a port in order to accommodate its expanding trade. So the civic authorities destroyed an ancient religious building dedicated to a saint who, according to legend, had the right to liberate prisoners and, having done so, to gave them land to live off. Ironically, they did this in order to facilitate the slave trade. I’m telling you this because one of the things deep mapping does is try to make visible the tensions between what’s remembered and what’s forgotten in constructing a sense of place. In doing so it inevitably asks questions about our values.

So deep mapping is a way of visualising the mesh of social tensions – both productive and unproductive – inherent in the processes of remembering and forgetting. Since these processes happen at the point where the personal and the public meet, deep mapping is always in some way collaborative. This slide shows a project by Rebecca Krinke called Seen / Unseen – the mapping of joy and pain  where she and her students took a plywood relief map of Minneapolis / St Paul into the park and asked people to map where they had experienced joy and pain in their city. It’s purpose, however, was really as much to make an intimate public space for people to share their experiences and the stories that make Minneapolis / St Paul not just a city on a map but a lifeworld held in common as it was to make a specific art work.

Luci then talked about her Atlas of Human Kindness and opened up the parameter of the evening’s thinking  by referring to ‘narrative mapping’ rather than ‘deep mapping’.

We then asked the participants to plot particular locations that mattered to them onto a big map of Bristol, using PostIts colour-coded according to three general types of experience, so as to create a high-speed pro-deep map of Bristol. Here are three photographs Luci took:

It seems to have been a good evening for the participants and it was certainly good for me to be ‘back in the saddle’ in terms of doing something educational, having been wholly emersed in family matters and the new house for so long.  

So what has any of this to do with ‘autumn in suburbia’? Perhaps nothing, literally speaking, but I find it increasingly hard to take things entirely literally these days or, indeed, to keep the separate elements and levels of my life from seeping into each other across the usual boundaries we erect. At sixty-five and recovering from six weeks illness in a house that’s been half building site, I am tending to feel a bit autumnal myself, so very much in tune with the current season of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ and decay. And to find myself living in suburbia is, for me, to be living in a space that is neither truly urban – I got something of a buzz from being out on Queen’s Road at seven at night yesterday, the familiar feeling of the street on Friday night just starting to get busy – nor (despite the plentiful evidence of foxes, owls, etc.) rural in any meaningful way.

The world in which I now live is characterised by reticence – there’s little sense of neighbourly communication – on one hand and excess on the other. (Oddly, John Wood and Paul Harrison’s reticence in their film seemed to me to resonate oddly with the suburban world, their piece a kind of absurdist ‘Janet and John’ exercise directly at the culturally sophisticated). Excess out here, on the other hand, has seemed to me to be personified by the plethora of vast 4x4s – often two to a house – that I see driven by small, determined women in a hurry with little sense of how to manage the mechanical beast they’re in charge of. (Yesterday I watched as one such women took three goes at backing into her own drive, reversing clearly being something of a problem). Their husbands, large, corporate types, tend to have a better grasp of the beast, but seem to regard speed limits as some kind of personal affront.

I could go on but there’s no point in airing my prejudices – unnecessary consumption and similar forms of selfishness and excess are hardly the prerogative of the Bristol suburbanite!

As so often when things are difficult, I find myself turning to music as a way of steading myself, making space for something else to well up into whatever troubled place I currently happen to be in. (This will hardly be news to anyone who reads this blog regularly).

As I write this, in hopefully the dog days of a long bout of ‘flu that went to my chest, I’m listening to a new CD – by Alela Diane and the guitarist Ryan Francesconi – called Cold Moon. This sounds like the necessary and inevitable followup to her beautiful About Farewell and somehow perfectly matches where I find myself just now. If you’re into this kind of music – which is almost impossible to categorise (although she sometimes reminds me of the spirit of Sandy Denny, the intensely personal narrative refigured through the lens of a sense of the collective that belongs to any folk tradition) – start with the tracks Cold Moon and Shapeless and, if those press your buttons, listen to the whole CD.

And, while I adjust to the changes emerging in my life and try to pick up my health again, all manner of bigger and more serious storms rage elsewhere – not least in the political world and in the lives of some of my friends. The first are too large to think about in my current state and the second too personal to be included here. I am, however, turning once again to trying to realise a recurrent desire – the idea of organising a ‘hedge school’ for those whose I know whose creative potential in all its ecosophical dimensions has somehow been failed by their encounter with the university system. That desire, and an unexpected enquiry from a Dutch friend, remind me that there is still a great deal of interesting work to do out in that currently distant quarter of my life, no matter the current difficulties and sense of restriction.

Just a question, as always, of ‘keeping on keeping on’.

Recently the poet Anna Saunders recommended I listen to Madam Life, a CD by a band called Little Machine who specialise in setting poetry to music. She also mentioned that she didn’t know what music to listen to any more so I promised that, in return for letting me know about Little Machine, I’d send her some recommendations. Afterwards I rather wished I hadn’t.

It wasn’t that I begrudged Anna doing this, it’s more that I didn’t know what to recommend to a poet whose work I much admire but whose musical tastes are, I suspect from past conversations, very different to mine. (She is, not least, a whole generation younger than me).

Given her enthusiasm for Madam Life, which I too very much enjoyed, I initially thought I’d focus on what I assumed to be ‘poetic’ songs – songs by poets or, in some cases, poetry set to music (not quite the same thing). We had also talked about my fascination with old ballads – Tam Lin in particular – which she did not know and about listening to different versions of old ballads, so a number got onto my list. The songs I recommended were:

Yeats’ Sweet Dancer by The Waterboys from ‘An Appointment With Mr Yeats’, The Jeweller by Pearls Before Swine, Fairport Convention’s version of Tam Lin from ‘Liege & Lief’, The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey by Joni Mitchell, Yeats’ Long-Legged Fly from Christine Tobin’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Neko Case’s Magpie to the Morning from ‘Middle Cyclone’, the delicious You’ll do from Rachel Harrington’s ‘Celilo Falls’, Twenty Seven Strangers by Villagers from ‘Becoming A Jackal’, a second, very different version of Tam Lin from Pyewackett’s ‘The Man in the Moon Drinks Claret’, Nancy Elizabeth’s Coriander from her ‘Battle and Victory’, a version of Willie O’Winsbury by Meg Baird, Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds The Ship Song from ‘Boatman’s Call’, a third version of Tam Lin by Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer, White Dog from The Handsome Family’s ‘Twilight’, a fourth version of Tam Lin by Steeleye Span,  Venus by Anais Mitchell from ‘Young Man in America’,  Michael Marra And The Hazey Janes’s Mrs Gorrie, Emmy The Great’s Edward Is Dedward , Magpie from The Unthanks’ ‘Mount the Air’, Black-eyed Susan from Laura Veirs’ ‘Orphan Mae’, Furr by Blitzen Trapper, Salters Road from Karine Polwart’s ‘Traces’, The Rolling of the Stones by The Owl Service, Sally Go Round the Roses by Great Society, Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh, an interpretation of Hunter and Garcia’s  Row, Jimmy by Susan Kane, Cold Atlantic Ocean – which has my lyrics set to music by Gary Peters and is from our ‘Fish in the Flood’ project, the beautiful Child Amongst the Weeds by Lal Waterson & Oliver Knight, You Want That Picture from  Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s ‘Lie Down In The Light’, River Girls by Tanya Donelly from ‘This Hungry Life’, Alasdair Roberts’ wonderful version of The Cruel Mother from ‘No Earthly Man’, America from Laura Veirs’ ‘Warp & Weft’, Ticket Taker by The Low Anthem, Quit These Hills by the Pinetop Seven, Aberystwyth by Paper Aeroplanes, Laura Veirs’ Dorothy of the Island, a version ofLeonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan by Joe Cocker, Yr mother called them farm houses by Robin Holcomb, Washing By Hand from Jackie Leven’s ‘Creatures Of Light And Darkness’, The War On Love Song by A.L. Kennedy & Sons and Daughters, Bird Song by the Grateful Dead from a concert in New York in 1990 that features Branford Marsalis guesting on saxophone, Robin Holcomb’s Deliver me, Midnight singer from Laura Veirs’ ‘Troubled By The Fire’ Patti Smith’s version of Neil Young’s Helpless, Mairi Morrison  and Alasdair Roberts’ version of his The Whole House Is Singing from ‘Urstan’, and It’s Good to Know by A Weather from ‘Cove’.

Looking back at this list now I really wonder what on earth I was thinking? In terms of my attempt to find songs with poetic lyrics, how come there’s nothing by Bob Dylan? (Not so much maybe in his guise of bad-tempered ‘translator/updater’ of grumpy Old Testament sentiments, but as the lyrical writer of Visions Of Johanna, Tangled Up In Blue and Blind Willie McTell). I think the problem is that, despite my own brief attempts to write lyrics for the musician Garry Peters,  I’d somehow conflated the output of three overlapping but ultimately distinctly weighted entities – the poet, the musician and, ideally the perfect combination of the two, the lyricist. In recommending songs to a poet, that’s maybe bound to cause some concern.

In the first case – the poet – the lyric is clearly privileged. Yeats’ Sweet Dancer, Sailing to Byzantium and Long-Legged Fly, no matter how good their different musical settings, seem to remain poems first and foremost, although they may be enhanced to some degree by the quality of their setting. As the product of a poet, Leonard Cohen’s songs would seem to fall into this category. To some extent this is equally true of the vernacular poetry of ballads like Tam Lin, The Rolling of the Stones, Willie O’Winsbury and The Cruel Mother. (Although if we’re interested in old ballads we’re likely to hear each of these with undercurrents of different versions as an additional resonance. (In much the same that orchestral interpretations of a piece of classical music are, I understand, heard in the context of other interpretations). Borderline cases here would be songs like Lal Waterson’s Child Amongst the Weed and Magpie from The Unthanks, both the product of sensibilities so saturated with traditions of vernacular song that they seem to be the product of that tradition of slow distillation and variation, rather than of an individual. The same can be said of the best (in my view) of Alasdair Roberts’ songs.

Then there are honest-to-goodness, through-and-through musicians, for whom the music is what it’s really all about and the lyrics just an afterthought. (I am still enamoured of the music produced by the Grateful Dead, but it’s no surprise to me that when Gerry Garcia wanted to produce songs, he worked with the poet Robert Hunter as a lyricist. A interesting recent example of this is the collaboration between the novelist A.L. Kennedy and the band Sons and Daughters, which produced The War On Love Song). My own sense is that very few of the songs I’ve chosen are by people who are primarily musicians in this sense. Examples of people in this category whose work I very much enjoy would include Bill Frisell, Rachael Grimes, and the Bristol-based band Spiro, whose CDs ‘Lightbox’, ‘Kaleidophonica’  and ‘Welcome Joy and Welcome’ use violin, viola, mandolin, accordion, acoustic guitar, and cello to produce a form of music that owes something to minimalist classical music and folk music, but remains largely unclassifiable none the less.

An interesting borderline case between the categories of poet and musician is, for me, Robin Holcomb. This American singer, songwriter, conductor, composer and pianist makes edgy ‘hybrid’ songs out of elements of jazz, minimalist chamber music, and both country and folk Americana elements. But her lyrics are also highly particular and, to my ear, deeply poetic in a way that echoes Emily Dickinson as much as the vernacular lyrics of the old hymns and Civil-War songs she admires. They are very much paired down, and she says of them that: “when I write poetry, I go for the fewest number of words that evoke a lot or let the readers connect the dots, or relate it to their own experience, and the same with music”. So, a poet/musician in the strong sense of both terms, maybe?

As my list suggests, I like and recommended songs with intelligent, witty, thoughtful, or otherwise engaging lyrics. I’ve nothing particular against songs like Cream’s I’m So Glad, The Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash, or Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls, but these are not songs that have me savouring the words or that prompt me to listen carefully, let alone inspire me to recommend them to a poet! This has nothing to do with content as such – listen to Rachel Harrington’s You’ll do for example  – but with the quality of the writing and a certain sense of the particular observed or evoked that draws me back to a song.

The bulk of the songs in my list are by people I would regard as good lyricists – that’s to say they have a way with both words and music. Some of these songs are clearly in the poetic narrative tradition of the vernacular ballads – Villagers’ haunting Twenty Seven Strangers, The Handsome Family’s White Dog, Blitzen Trapper’s Furr, The Low Anthem’s Ticket Taker and Karine Polwart’s Salters Road, to name just five very different approaches to drawing on that storytelling poetic. Others seem to owe much more to lyrical or love poetry –  Laura Veirs’ Midnight Singer, Aberystwyth by Paper Aeroplanes, The Jeweller by Pearls Before Swine, Jackie Leven’s Washing By Hand, Neko Case’s Magpie to the Morning, or Tanya Donelly’s River Girls, which got onto my list simply for the lines:

“… Some river girls make their way
To the sea
Some settle into the bed…”

Some of these songs, of course, simply belong to what might be called the modern vernacular tradition of urban popular music (‘Pop music’ for short?). Michael Marra and The Hazey Janes’s Mrs Gorrie, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds The Ship Song,  and Emmy The Great’s Edward Is Dedward being three obvious, if very different, gems in this category.

I have no idea what Anna Saunders made of my list. She hasn’t told me. What I do know is that she enjoyed the versions of Tam Lin sufficiently to be provoked into writing a poem based loosely on its narrative.

Maybe some day an enterprising musician will set it to music?

Postscript

The day after I posted this I heard Emily Portman’s ‘Coracle’. Her lyrics are extraordinary, very clearly in the tradition of folk stories and vernacular songs, but somehow simultaneously utterly her own – a marvellous balance of a sense of the deeply personal and poetic and the down-to-earth eroticism, hardness and darkness I associate with the old quasi-pagan mentality that haunts the best old British vernacular songs. This seems to me another kind of poetic, almost mediumistic in quality. If Robin Holcomb’s aesthetic is finally inseparable from a certain stripped-down, Puritan element in vernacular North American culture (which is, of course, also the ultimate point of reference for Agnes Martin (her interest in Oriental philosophy notwithstanding), this resonates with something far older and stranger.

Shortly after I’d posted this I opened today’s Guardian and found Neal Ascherson’s article Independence day has already dawned. Since it relates to much of what I’d written, it seems sensible to amend what I’d written earlier so as to take account of some of Ascherson’s comments. 

I find it a bit odd when someone gives themselves a monolithic identity – as in ‘I’m English’.  This may be because I was born in London, had a Scottish grandmother, spent my childhood in Kent, Dorset, and Inverness-shire, took my degrees in Leeds and London, now live in Bristol (while spending part of each summer in County Durham), have working links to Europe (the Netherlands and the Irish Republic recently), carry a British passport, and am close to good friends in the USA and Australia. Or it may be because I understand myself as inhabiting a polyverse, one in which it makes no more sense to think reductively about identity than to try to configure my lifeworld as a monolithic ‘life-as’.

Whatever the the case, I wonder if I’m the only person to sense something weirdly indicative about Sarah Lucas representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, given the political situation in Britain following the election?

It seems to me that Lucas, along with Tracy Emin, has always been a poster girl for a particular cultural position – the knowing metropolitan ‘bohemianism’ of the YBAs if you like –  that is highly specific to London and the South East, while presenting itself as something much more ‘representative’. (If that seems too big a generalisation, think about what might have been if their cultural sensibilities reflected the urban worlds of, say, Cardiff, Glasgow, or even Newcastle. If they’d been working in those cities – famous for their Hen Nights and heavy drinking, in-your-face party girls – their work would almost certainly had other elements in the mix, other specific cultural and historical traces entirely absence from the bland literalism that signifies so much of the YBA’s work).

But why place Lucas in the political context thrown up by the British election, given that the critic Laura Cumming writes that at the Biennale her work “stands out purely by having no political content whatsoever”? Because, as Ascherson points out, the question of ‘Great Britain’, of “how to save the union” is now quite simply meaningless because “the 1707 union between England and Scotland is already dead. As a piece of architecture, it was abandoned in 1999, when the devolved Scottish parliament met” … “Today, what exists instead is a constantly changing set of relationships between London and Edinburgh, confused by feeble constitutional wheezes that arrive too late”. So what exactly is this notion of a cultural ‘British-ness’ that Sarah Lucas is supposed to be in some sense representing? In my view it’s a political slight-of-hand we’d do well to dispense with.

What is increasingly clear about the rise of the SNP is that, while in one sense it can be said to represent a ‘Nationalist’ politics (although not, I would suggest, in the narrow sense that Plaid Cymru does because of the issue of the Welsh language). Rather it is intended to deliberately evoke an alternative set of social values. In short, the SNP is in large part about contesting the assumptions of the two traditional mainstream parties, for whom both the Westminster status quo and the economics of austerity are simply taken as given. My feeling then is that Sarah Lucas represents ‘Britain’ in very much the same way that the recently elected Tory Government does. That Government, as Ascherson notes, is now working from the presupposition that: “Westminster is well on the way to becoming an English parliament anyway. As Michael Kenny writes in his book The Politics of English Nationhood, ‘As an unintended consequence of devolution … an increasingly Anglicised polity has quietly emerged as an incubus at the heart of the UK state … the Westminster parliament is gradually evolving into an English-focused one'”. And an England that, increasingly, is identified by those in power with the City of London and the South East.

I’m suggesting then that both Lucas’ art and the Tory party ideology are, in their different ways, inseparable from a tacit understanding of an anachronistic and exclusive ‘English-ness’ dominated by a particular (and particularly arrogant), set of parochial cultural and economic presuppositions that regard London and the South East as ‘the heart of Britain’. (As Lucy Lippard observed in The Lure of the Local (1997): “The urban ego is in fact parochial; New Yorkers (like Parisians or Bostonians) are among the most provincial people in the world” I would argue that this is equally true of the London art world). I see just that kind of provincialism reflected in much work by the YBAs (now not so young, of course), and by the fact that Lucas was one of 200 public figures who signed a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to the referendum. That stance, after all, was really little more than a reactionary denial of the different values that let those living in Scotland to reject Tory ideology.

Whether my view is justifiable depends, in no small part, on whether you think the SNP is primarily motivated by the nationalism that socialism still tends to reject out of hand. (Notwithstanding that it is capitalism, and not socialism, that dominates the global stage). Personally, and as Nicola Sturgeon has made very plain post-referendum, I see the SNP as first and foremost an anti-austerity party that, in the name of those living in Scotland, rejects a political and cultural status quo that sees the term ‘Britain’ as largely referring to an ‘England’ that presupposes the superiority of the South east – of London and the Home Counties. (Ascherson appears to share this view, writing that Sturgeon’s “nationalism is instrumental rather than existential: independence as the means to social justice and prosperity, not the end”).

Acknowledging other lifeworlds

I first came across Lois Williams when she was studying to be a teacher at Goldsmiths College in 1975-6. (My wife studied there the same year). However, I only really registered her work when it was included in the New North exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 1990. Later I read the exchange between Williams and Iwan Bala in his Certain Welsh Artists: Custodial Aesthetics in Contemporary Welsh Art (1999). My interest in her work is part and parcel of a wider interest in the cultural mechanisms that ignore and suppress lifeworlds that do not conform to the presuppositions of the status quo; that reduce them to monolithic identities or a ‘life-as’. Cultural work that opposes those mechanisms is what animates my interest in the Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony and the farmer and and performer artist Ffion Jones, both of who I mentioned in my last post, and in projects like Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s The Event Of The Thread. 

It is sometimes said that ‘comparisons are odious’ but, thinking about social tensions as articulated in contemporary politics and culture in the UK recently, I can’t help ponder the differences between Williams’ A Living Position (1997), Lucas’ Au Naturel (1994), and Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998) – all of which use found objects located within a bed-like space.

Williams’ contribution to the chapter co-authored with Iwan Bala seems to me to set her apart from the values of the ‘British’ (in actuality ‘South Eastern English’) art world of which I’m suggesting Sarah Lucas’ work is indicative. In that chapter Williams writes: “I have always been interested in the parallels between art and farming” (Bala p. 142), something I cannot imagine a contemporary ‘English’ artist saying. Equally ‘un-English’ (in the reductive sense I’ve indicated) is Williams’ willingness to teach for many years in a secondary school in Sheffield while practicing as an artist, part of her clear sense of the importance of maintaining her links with Cefn, St Asaph.

Nothing could be further from the cultural presuppositions that inform Tracy Emin’s My Bed that, with its overwhelming emphasis on the artist as isolated individual – the stained bed sheets and litter of condoms, period stained pair of knickers and personal everyday objects. That work seems to me to stand as an embodiment of the preoccupations of those YBAs who evoked the reductive hedonism and consequent anxieties of the culture of possessive individualism. A culture predicated on the consumption of a  ‘quasi-bohemianism’ as fundamental to the ad-man’s focus on consumption, sex, and identity conceived in terms of money as a route to a rampant individualistic exceptionalism (to celebrity, to put it at its simplest). Both Tory politics and the art world that sends Lucas to ‘represent Britain’ in Venice can only maintain power and status by ignoring or marginalising alternative, less reductive, values.

What in my view links the work of Lois Williams and Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s The Event Of The Thread is precisely what is absent in the work of Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin. Both Williams and Leighton-Boyce are, it seems to me, centrally concerned with the specificity of community and place as these are constellated in and through a particular taskscape. In short, they understand that working relationships, rather than leisure and consumption, as the formative element in social identity. In Williams’ case the relationship  of the Welsh farmer to the land farmed and those whom it feeds, and in Leighton-Boyce’s the traditional relationship between cloth manufacture, place, weather, the act of stretching woollen cloth on tenter frames, and their resilient trace in language despite massive social change in areas such as the Rossendale Valley (also known as the Forest of Rossendale) in Lancashire. To work out of that understanding is already to act politically – not as a metropolitan provincial but as someone conscious of being placed in the multiplicity of relationships that Felix Guattari characterises as constituting ecosophy. Which is why just how we approach creative work has everything to do with issues of multiple lifeworlds, identity, culture, and politics.

In Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s book documenting and celebrating The Event Of The Thread, there are two photographs of her spinning wool (one publicly, outside the Robin Hood pub in Helmshore, the other on the great wheel at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum). For me these are extraordinarily resonant in a variety of ways with elements in both Ffion Jones’ performance Dear Mike Jagger – in which she span wool in order to enwrap a ram’s skull – and with Lois Williams use of wadding in works like Journey (1989) and A Living Position (1997). These acts and traces of acts, taken together, evoke the constitution of a weave of resonances that speaks of the interdependence of social, individual, and animal tasks capes; of a mycelial mesh of place, activity and identity, that in turn evoke a sense of cultural – and ultimately political – value utterly at odds with both a reductive Tory ideology predicated on the global economic bottom line and the maintenance of existing wealth and power, and with the values of the London-based cultural mandarinate that sent Sarah Lucas to represent ‘Britain’ at Venice.

I’ve been busy with the Bristol City Water project recently. One activity on Sunday was Perrie and Proxi’s celebration in the form of the The Bristol Syzygy Oath, administered at high tide in Bristol on 22 03 2015, shortly after 8.29 am.