Blogs for Nottingham Contemporary
Spot Talk Flyers
For the material connected with my time as a Zebra, please see 'Zed'
May 2016
Blog 2 / Nottingham Contemporary / Simon Starling exhibition
A sideways look / an observation / Slippage
I asked myself, ‘Why am I undertaking my spot talks o'er the scaffold in Gallery Four whilst referencing work in Gallery One’. I stood in the far corner arms at right angles akin to a boxer on the ropes…facing out at my audience. All will become clear I informed them…first I shall deliberate Simon Starling’s work, ‘Island for Weeds’ in context of invasive species, Joseph Banks, Francis Galton and heavyweights Charles Darwin and Peter Kropotkin. Those present may have been aware that I had produced a poster promoting the talk. The image borrowed heavily from promotional boxing posters and I presented Darwin and Kropotkin as champion and challenger. Round one commenced with a reading of a final letter by Leo Tolstoy to his son and daughter offering a last word of advice…it matters not herewith as to what advice he gave to them. Round Two ensued with the hammering of one thousand wedges into the narrative, we all went for it…visitor and gallery assistant alike…’Nature, red in tooth and claw’ as Alfred Lord Tennyson circumscribed to Man’s bloody battle with an undomesticated world. I believe Tennyson preferred Mablethorpe to Somersby I interject…DH Lawrence liked Sutton on Sea.
During this memoir of experiences and shared rapport I seized the moment to usher in ‘Slippage’, Round Four. Starling’s work could be viewed as a series of detours, looping and linking different points, transforming, interrupting flow, evolving material and concepts. One customary view of slippage is the gap between the viewer and the art. Referencing ‘Project for a Crossing’ and the magnesium boat in Gallery one, I’m reminded of two pieces of rudimentary schooling. Firstly, what transpires to a ribbon of magnesium when dunked into water and the second considers the filling in the void between a finger and a thumb. The two observations resonate, I remember watching Connections, a television series with an accompanying book written and presented by James Burke. Numbers do not really exist, they are a concept created by the human mind, in this world 1+1= 3 is a possibility. In essence this delicate space is something we might think of as white space, negative space or even as a void. It considers two elements that are closely aligned, a part yet apart. This synergy is when the sum is equal to more than two parts and we accept adaptability with further possibilities of transformation and change.
Slippage harnesses fluidity of interrelated ideas where one thing leads on to another and so on and so forth, a cascade of variation and deviation between two factions…the space between your fingers…as one squeezes the light out of the space so the mosquito is crushed. The idea of crushing the life out of nothing and something at the same time is my analogous proposition to explain different properties…and somehow through this metaphor these forces are allied. The analogy focuses upon similarity rather than disparity and there is a real possibility that my metaphorical usage is of dubious veracity and authority…it may even be simply bad or heretical…a vacuous truth!
Slippage evokes something apocryphal, not necessarily hidden, secret, obscure or an ingredient of esoteric knowledge, but something spacious and sunyata…something unknowable…sensed. Slippage is a complicated array of phenomena and material; each made up with unique properties and characteristics whilst possessing the possibility of polythetic commonalities…what connects the Coelacanth with a beach hut at Sutton on Sea? This abstract family resemblance may remain seemingly obscure, however Ludwig Wittgenstein contends that entities, which could be imagined, can be connected by one essential common feature and furthermore be further connected by a series of overlapping similarities whilst no singular feature is common or apparent.
I do not think there is a prerequisite to define, illustrate and explain ‘slippage’ through the language of art. The American aesthetician Morris Weitz describes Art as something that cannot be defined; he refers to this as an ‘Open Concept’, however and not unreasonably I feel a certain amount of ‘work’ is required to define the indefinable. Weitz and William Stanley Jevons would suggest that reasoning though the development of a critical faculty is required, to interpret, evaluate and theorise, however Jevons meditates, intelligence should not confine itself to a singular order of thought.
Notes
Sunyata (Sanskrit) = void and openness
Polythetic = sharing a number of characteristics which occur commonly in members of a group or class, but none of which is essential for membership of that group or class.
William Stanley Jevons = Economist and Logician
Blog 2 / Nottingham Contemporary / Simon Starling exhibition
A sideways look / an observation / Slippage
I asked myself, ‘Why am I undertaking my spot talks o'er the scaffold in Gallery Four whilst referencing work in Gallery One’. I stood in the far corner arms at right angles akin to a boxer on the ropes…facing out at my audience. All will become clear I informed them…first I shall deliberate Simon Starling’s work, ‘Island for Weeds’ in context of invasive species, Joseph Banks, Francis Galton and heavyweights Charles Darwin and Peter Kropotkin. Those present may have been aware that I had produced a poster promoting the talk. The image borrowed heavily from promotional boxing posters and I presented Darwin and Kropotkin as champion and challenger. Round one commenced with a reading of a final letter by Leo Tolstoy to his son and daughter offering a last word of advice…it matters not herewith as to what advice he gave to them. Round Two ensued with the hammering of one thousand wedges into the narrative, we all went for it…visitor and gallery assistant alike…’Nature, red in tooth and claw’ as Alfred Lord Tennyson circumscribed to Man’s bloody battle with an undomesticated world. I believe Tennyson preferred Mablethorpe to Somersby I interject…DH Lawrence liked Sutton on Sea.
During this memoir of experiences and shared rapport I seized the moment to usher in ‘Slippage’, Round Four. Starling’s work could be viewed as a series of detours, looping and linking different points, transforming, interrupting flow, evolving material and concepts. One customary view of slippage is the gap between the viewer and the art. Referencing ‘Project for a Crossing’ and the magnesium boat in Gallery one, I’m reminded of two pieces of rudimentary schooling. Firstly, what transpires to a ribbon of magnesium when dunked into water and the second considers the filling in the void between a finger and a thumb. The two observations resonate, I remember watching Connections, a television series with an accompanying book written and presented by James Burke. Numbers do not really exist, they are a concept created by the human mind, in this world 1+1= 3 is a possibility. In essence this delicate space is something we might think of as white space, negative space or even as a void. It considers two elements that are closely aligned, a part yet apart. This synergy is when the sum is equal to more than two parts and we accept adaptability with further possibilities of transformation and change.
Slippage harnesses fluidity of interrelated ideas where one thing leads on to another and so on and so forth, a cascade of variation and deviation between two factions…the space between your fingers…as one squeezes the light out of the space so the mosquito is crushed. The idea of crushing the life out of nothing and something at the same time is my analogous proposition to explain different properties…and somehow through this metaphor these forces are allied. The analogy focuses upon similarity rather than disparity and there is a real possibility that my metaphorical usage is of dubious veracity and authority…it may even be simply bad or heretical…a vacuous truth!
Slippage evokes something apocryphal, not necessarily hidden, secret, obscure or an ingredient of esoteric knowledge, but something spacious and sunyata…something unknowable…sensed. Slippage is a complicated array of phenomena and material; each made up with unique properties and characteristics whilst possessing the possibility of polythetic commonalities…what connects the Coelacanth with a beach hut at Sutton on Sea? This abstract family resemblance may remain seemingly obscure, however Ludwig Wittgenstein contends that entities, which could be imagined, can be connected by one essential common feature and furthermore be further connected by a series of overlapping similarities whilst no singular feature is common or apparent.
I do not think there is a prerequisite to define, illustrate and explain ‘slippage’ through the language of art. The American aesthetician Morris Weitz describes Art as something that cannot be defined; he refers to this as an ‘Open Concept’, however and not unreasonably I feel a certain amount of ‘work’ is required to define the indefinable. Weitz and William Stanley Jevons would suggest that reasoning though the development of a critical faculty is required, to interpret, evaluate and theorise, however Jevons meditates, intelligence should not confine itself to a singular order of thought.
Notes
Sunyata (Sanskrit) = void and openness
Polythetic = sharing a number of characteristics which occur commonly in members of a group or class, but none of which is essential for membership of that group or class.
William Stanley Jevons = Economist and Logician
This Blog entry had been written for Nottingham contemporary in response to the exhibition by Simon Starling. I had been working on a parallel text (Blog2) that addresses ideas of 'Slippage'...blog 2's content informs blog 1.
April 2016
What goes around comes around
The status of everything eventually returns to its original value after completing some sort of cycle…my actions, whether good or bad have consequences. Returning to where I started I have gained measure of my experiences and my explorations.
Stemming from early childhood and into adolescence the supernatural is something that has sustained my interest. In my informative years my father purchased a Waddington’s ‘Ouija’ game to provide us with our Christmas entertainment. The family sat at our dining room table and each of us placed a finger upon the plastic heart-shaped planchette…did this move involuntary under guidance from a spirit from some vestigial dimension?
In early adolescence my school friends and I frequently amused ourselves within the cavity of an old railway line embankment. The deep Permian sandstone cutting once formed part of the five-mile Bennerley & Bulwell Midland Railway line. Long since abandoned, the embankment was overgrown; nature had reclaimed the old line; softening the cut.
New Farm Lane was our arterial route and the bridge was our entry point into the cutting. To the left of the bridge was the West side; this ran towards the Blanchard’s Bakery. For the adventurer and beyond the bakery were the dark and dangerous 268 yards long Watnall Tunnel and the derelict No 12 Group RAF Fighter Command Centre and bunker. To the east of the bridge the overgrown wooded embankment deceptively mollified the drop into the cutting. At this point the only way to climb down into the cutting was by the telegraph wires hanging from disused telegraph poles. The climb down could be precarious, limbs and heads beat-up. There were a safer ways down into the cut and this was by walking a minor footpath that ran parallel to the edge of the embankment and some fencing into pastures. Intersecting the old line was the M1 motorway bridge just beyond Junction 26, once the site of the Palladian Nuthall Temple…for a number of years this environment became the scenery of our youth.
During one summer (in the mid 1970’s) the embankment began to be filled in with refuse. This act would change the landscape forevermore...where pools formed and water streamed, newts and wildlife flourished, over time the water became polluted and the land diseased.
We descended into the gap to riffle among the garbage. We restless youth gathered apt material together…firstly to light a fire and secondly to collect together plastic tubs, metal tins and other potentially percussive material so that we could create pounding rhythms long into the summer night. My one find on the tip was a bound copy of the first six issues of the legendary ‘ Man Myth & Magic’. This book filled my mind with rich imagery; imagery that I would continue to encounter to this day. This volume introduced me to the magic of the moderns, Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp and the atavistic work of Austin Osman Spare. Contained in the encyclopaedia to the supernatural were sections dedicated to alchemy and Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus’, aptly illustrated one section with an image. The discoveries of this book lead me on a personal 35-year expedition. The journey concludes with the Alchemist painting hanging in the current Simon Starling exhibition…my final act will be to return the former railway cutting and lay to rest the book.
Notes
For a one balmy day in the mid 1970’s pupils from the local Comprehensive School…myself included, made our way down through the Watnall Tunnel to the foot of the embankment below the chain link fence of the bakery. A sight to be seen…a torrent of fresh cream ‘Wonder Cakes’ had been tipped into the embankment.
No.12 Group RAF fighter command center and bunker…this subsequently became part of the ROTOR air defense radar system in the 1950’s to counter possible attack by soviet bombers…by 2010 local police discovered a large cannabis factory inside the bunker.
Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural edited by Richard Cavendish. The art director was Brian Innes, former percussionist of The Temperance Seven. Man, Myth & Magic was originally published as a British weekly magazine. The publication commenced in 1970, and continued for 112 issues spanning 1,000 articles with some 5,000 illustrations.
April 2016
What goes around comes around
The status of everything eventually returns to its original value after completing some sort of cycle…my actions, whether good or bad have consequences. Returning to where I started I have gained measure of my experiences and my explorations.
Stemming from early childhood and into adolescence the supernatural is something that has sustained my interest. In my informative years my father purchased a Waddington’s ‘Ouija’ game to provide us with our Christmas entertainment. The family sat at our dining room table and each of us placed a finger upon the plastic heart-shaped planchette…did this move involuntary under guidance from a spirit from some vestigial dimension?
In early adolescence my school friends and I frequently amused ourselves within the cavity of an old railway line embankment. The deep Permian sandstone cutting once formed part of the five-mile Bennerley & Bulwell Midland Railway line. Long since abandoned, the embankment was overgrown; nature had reclaimed the old line; softening the cut.
New Farm Lane was our arterial route and the bridge was our entry point into the cutting. To the left of the bridge was the West side; this ran towards the Blanchard’s Bakery. For the adventurer and beyond the bakery were the dark and dangerous 268 yards long Watnall Tunnel and the derelict No 12 Group RAF Fighter Command Centre and bunker. To the east of the bridge the overgrown wooded embankment deceptively mollified the drop into the cutting. At this point the only way to climb down into the cutting was by the telegraph wires hanging from disused telegraph poles. The climb down could be precarious, limbs and heads beat-up. There were a safer ways down into the cut and this was by walking a minor footpath that ran parallel to the edge of the embankment and some fencing into pastures. Intersecting the old line was the M1 motorway bridge just beyond Junction 26, once the site of the Palladian Nuthall Temple…for a number of years this environment became the scenery of our youth.
During one summer (in the mid 1970’s) the embankment began to be filled in with refuse. This act would change the landscape forevermore...where pools formed and water streamed, newts and wildlife flourished, over time the water became polluted and the land diseased.
We descended into the gap to riffle among the garbage. We restless youth gathered apt material together…firstly to light a fire and secondly to collect together plastic tubs, metal tins and other potentially percussive material so that we could create pounding rhythms long into the summer night. My one find on the tip was a bound copy of the first six issues of the legendary ‘ Man Myth & Magic’. This book filled my mind with rich imagery; imagery that I would continue to encounter to this day. This volume introduced me to the magic of the moderns, Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp and the atavistic work of Austin Osman Spare. Contained in the encyclopaedia to the supernatural were sections dedicated to alchemy and Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus’, aptly illustrated one section with an image. The discoveries of this book lead me on a personal 35-year expedition. The journey concludes with the Alchemist painting hanging in the current Simon Starling exhibition…my final act will be to return the former railway cutting and lay to rest the book.
Notes
For a one balmy day in the mid 1970’s pupils from the local Comprehensive School…myself included, made our way down through the Watnall Tunnel to the foot of the embankment below the chain link fence of the bakery. A sight to be seen…a torrent of fresh cream ‘Wonder Cakes’ had been tipped into the embankment.
No.12 Group RAF fighter command center and bunker…this subsequently became part of the ROTOR air defense radar system in the 1950’s to counter possible attack by soviet bombers…by 2010 local police discovered a large cannabis factory inside the bunker.
Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural edited by Richard Cavendish. The art director was Brian Innes, former percussionist of The Temperance Seven. Man, Myth & Magic was originally published as a British weekly magazine. The publication commenced in 1970, and continued for 112 issues spanning 1,000 articles with some 5,000 illustrations.
Reflecting back on the Pablo Bronstein exhibition 'Treasures of Chatsworth' / Text as published January 2016
The new year may already be old news, but here at Nottingham Contemporary an air of “in between” persists, as we prepare for the launch of our new season. Thus, I’ve been considering my favourite show of the year gone by, and the exhibition I elect is Pablo Bronstein and the Treasures of Chatsworth.
This show aligned my interest in contemporary art and ancient history, specifically the period between the rise of Julius Caesar and the end of the western half of the Roman Empire in AD476, when the Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, the first King of Italy. During the exhibition I undertook a number of Spot Talks in Gallery 1, a room dedicated to Roman architecture and Baroque artefacts. These talks seldom touched on the elevation of Caesar; principally they explored possible reasons for the demise of Rome. It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that I would mention the trajectories of a number of the mad, bad and debauched emperors.
It was Edward Gibbon (1), I believe, who conceived the notion of the “fall” with reference to Rome. I take it to signify the defeat of an idea: the idea of an all-encompassing order fashioned by reason and diplomacy. And, for several centuries, Rome may well have embodied this ideal. It has been suggested that the Empire was at its zenith in the early third century AD, and it is possible to believe that the world up until that point may never have known such prolonged peace and prosperity. But in AD218 the young Elagabalus (the sun god) donned the imperial purple, and proceeded to surpass some of his forebears in the arts of inhumanity.(2)
Historians have posited numerous explanations for Rome’s demise, but artists, poets and storytellers have mythologised it. One of the most striking myths is that by the sixth century BC the population of the city itself was zero.3 This was the period in which Pablo Bronstein chose to present the Via Appia in his sequence of fantastical drawings in Gallery 1.
If you ever have the opportunity to spend a day walking (4) the Via Appia Antica in modern-day Rome you will discover a thoroughfare once lined with proud family tombs and burial places.(5) This ancient road, with its ruined Roman masonry, is imbued with history.
I have visited the Italian capital many times. On one tour of the Appia my wife and I encountered no more than three people (6) throughout the entire day. This absence of inhabitants, this desolation, can be romanticised upon. Likewise the idea of Rome and her fall.(7) This lost great city and empire – was she destined to be mourned over?
The forthcoming show at Nottingham Contemporary will inevitably provoke similar questions. On Saturday 16 January we present Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, an exhibition of over 100 artworks and objects from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, dating from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s.
This exhibition will no doubt give me cause to reflect upon another of my travels – to Yugoslavia in 1986. This was only a few years before the Balkan trauma of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I was fortunate to visit the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik before it was besieged for seven months and suffered significant damage from shelling. In Mostar I walked over the magnificent old bridge built by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. In 1993 how many of us watched the footage of this treasure being destroyed?
My thoughts return to that day on the Via Appia and the feeling of melancholia. The end of history continues.
Notes
1 The citations and notes in Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are famously lengthy and discursive. They provide the reader with fascinating glimpses into the author’s thought processes, and are, from time to time, humorous, idiosyncratic and opinionated.
2 Think Colonel Gaddafi to the power of ten! And read Caligula: Divine Carnage – Atrocities of the Roman Emperors by Stephen Barber and Jeremy Reed, a book that confirmed my thinking that this sun god wished to be a hermaphrodite.
3 Although not accurate the number is perhaps telling. Estimates for Rome’s population by the third century AD vary, between one and four million. (Note, Roman censuses did not take into account women, slaves and those who wished to remain anonymous.) By the latter half of the sixth century, with many of the aqueducts and drainage systems in disrepair, the city’s populace succumbed to malaria (look to the Pontine Marshes!) and fell below 50,000.
4 Make it a Sunday (as it is closed to traffic then), take a packed lunch and plenty of water.
5 Exit the modern city via the Porta San Sebastiano, visit the Church of Domine Quo Vadis, and venture underground into one of the catacombs of San Callisto or San Sebastiano. Take in as well the Tomb of Caecilia Metella or the Tomb of Priscilla. Several of the structures that appeared in Pablo Bronstein’s drawings called to mind these drum-shaped monuments. To view something of a similar nature take a look at the Circus of Maxentius, erected by the eponymous emperor (regarding whom, see the civil wars of the Tetrarchy).
6 All native, two of whom were riding an old, rasping Vespa, bumbling along, trying to remain upright on the worn, interlocking stone. The Appia had suffered greatly in more recent times, not least from serious pillaging of both its marble and the tufa. Some – but by no means all – of this sacking can be blamed on urban regeneration projects. Which reminds me of a local tale of woe. How sad it is to know that the Palladian Nuthall Temple was finally levelled to make way for a slip road at Junction 26 of the M1 motorway.
7 To my mind, the “fall” does not convince. Rome as a political centre had been abandoned long before Alaric sacked the city in AD 410. The Western Empire did not so much fall as disintegrate. One may consider the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378 to be the beginning of the decline and Romulus’s deposition as the last emperor, in AD 475, to mark the conclusion. So less a fall – certainly not a revolution – and more a state of evolution.
The new year may already be old news, but here at Nottingham Contemporary an air of “in between” persists, as we prepare for the launch of our new season. Thus, I’ve been considering my favourite show of the year gone by, and the exhibition I elect is Pablo Bronstein and the Treasures of Chatsworth.
This show aligned my interest in contemporary art and ancient history, specifically the period between the rise of Julius Caesar and the end of the western half of the Roman Empire in AD476, when the Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, the first King of Italy. During the exhibition I undertook a number of Spot Talks in Gallery 1, a room dedicated to Roman architecture and Baroque artefacts. These talks seldom touched on the elevation of Caesar; principally they explored possible reasons for the demise of Rome. It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that I would mention the trajectories of a number of the mad, bad and debauched emperors.
It was Edward Gibbon (1), I believe, who conceived the notion of the “fall” with reference to Rome. I take it to signify the defeat of an idea: the idea of an all-encompassing order fashioned by reason and diplomacy. And, for several centuries, Rome may well have embodied this ideal. It has been suggested that the Empire was at its zenith in the early third century AD, and it is possible to believe that the world up until that point may never have known such prolonged peace and prosperity. But in AD218 the young Elagabalus (the sun god) donned the imperial purple, and proceeded to surpass some of his forebears in the arts of inhumanity.(2)
Historians have posited numerous explanations for Rome’s demise, but artists, poets and storytellers have mythologised it. One of the most striking myths is that by the sixth century BC the population of the city itself was zero.3 This was the period in which Pablo Bronstein chose to present the Via Appia in his sequence of fantastical drawings in Gallery 1.
If you ever have the opportunity to spend a day walking (4) the Via Appia Antica in modern-day Rome you will discover a thoroughfare once lined with proud family tombs and burial places.(5) This ancient road, with its ruined Roman masonry, is imbued with history.
I have visited the Italian capital many times. On one tour of the Appia my wife and I encountered no more than three people (6) throughout the entire day. This absence of inhabitants, this desolation, can be romanticised upon. Likewise the idea of Rome and her fall.(7) This lost great city and empire – was she destined to be mourned over?
The forthcoming show at Nottingham Contemporary will inevitably provoke similar questions. On Saturday 16 January we present Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, an exhibition of over 100 artworks and objects from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, dating from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s.
This exhibition will no doubt give me cause to reflect upon another of my travels – to Yugoslavia in 1986. This was only a few years before the Balkan trauma of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I was fortunate to visit the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik before it was besieged for seven months and suffered significant damage from shelling. In Mostar I walked over the magnificent old bridge built by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. In 1993 how many of us watched the footage of this treasure being destroyed?
My thoughts return to that day on the Via Appia and the feeling of melancholia. The end of history continues.
Notes
1 The citations and notes in Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are famously lengthy and discursive. They provide the reader with fascinating glimpses into the author’s thought processes, and are, from time to time, humorous, idiosyncratic and opinionated.
2 Think Colonel Gaddafi to the power of ten! And read Caligula: Divine Carnage – Atrocities of the Roman Emperors by Stephen Barber and Jeremy Reed, a book that confirmed my thinking that this sun god wished to be a hermaphrodite.
3 Although not accurate the number is perhaps telling. Estimates for Rome’s population by the third century AD vary, between one and four million. (Note, Roman censuses did not take into account women, slaves and those who wished to remain anonymous.) By the latter half of the sixth century, with many of the aqueducts and drainage systems in disrepair, the city’s populace succumbed to malaria (look to the Pontine Marshes!) and fell below 50,000.
4 Make it a Sunday (as it is closed to traffic then), take a packed lunch and plenty of water.
5 Exit the modern city via the Porta San Sebastiano, visit the Church of Domine Quo Vadis, and venture underground into one of the catacombs of San Callisto or San Sebastiano. Take in as well the Tomb of Caecilia Metella or the Tomb of Priscilla. Several of the structures that appeared in Pablo Bronstein’s drawings called to mind these drum-shaped monuments. To view something of a similar nature take a look at the Circus of Maxentius, erected by the eponymous emperor (regarding whom, see the civil wars of the Tetrarchy).
6 All native, two of whom were riding an old, rasping Vespa, bumbling along, trying to remain upright on the worn, interlocking stone. The Appia had suffered greatly in more recent times, not least from serious pillaging of both its marble and the tufa. Some – but by no means all – of this sacking can be blamed on urban regeneration projects. Which reminds me of a local tale of woe. How sad it is to know that the Palladian Nuthall Temple was finally levelled to make way for a slip road at Junction 26 of the M1 motorway.
7 To my mind, the “fall” does not convince. Rome as a political centre had been abandoned long before Alaric sacked the city in AD 410. The Western Empire did not so much fall as disintegrate. One may consider the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378 to be the beginning of the decline and Romulus’s deposition as the last emperor, in AD 475, to mark the conclusion. So less a fall – certainly not a revolution – and more a state of evolution.
Alien Encounters/NC Blog/December 2015 / Text as it appears
For the current exhibition, Alien Encounters, I have undertaken talks in the weird yellow room devoted to the sights and sounds of Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist Renaissance entity from Saturn. These talks gazed into the world of British Space Rock. In this strange and amazing galaxy bands produced music composed of lengthy instrumentals, experimental guitar and keyboard sounds dominated by electronic organs and synthesizers. There was also much theatricality. The Ladbroke Grove circle that included Hawkwind and Gong fashioned acts in which outer-space lyrical themes intermingled with ambient resonances, poetry and liquid light shows. In the case of Hawkwind, integral to the performance was interpretive dance by Stacia, who performed topless or stark-naked, her body decorated with iridescent or luminescent paint.
Space Rock emerged out of the 1960s psychedelic scene in Britain and was closely allied with the progressive rock movement of the same era. Groups such as Pink Floyd have frequently been fused to the space rock sphere, although Syd Barrett, perhaps the original acid casualty, claimed that he had no particular affiliation to science fiction, and it is possible that compositions such as Astronomy Domine, Interstellar Overdrive and Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun were more concerned with inner than outer space. Similarly, Roger Waters commented in 1987 that “The space thing is a joke, none of those pieces were about outer space.”
The use of the recreational drugs LSD and Mandrax (a tranquilliser affectionately named “mandies” or “mandrakes” in the UK) facilitated journeys through the doors of perception to Never Never Land. In America, the Ken Kesey “Acid Tests” had a significant impact upon the LSD-based counterculture of the San Francisco area and consequently on the hippy movement. This was the creative context of the Grateful Dead, Silver Apples, Fifty Foot Hose and the United States of America, bands that also drew inspiration from the American electronic scene, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Edgard Varèse, as well as from cinematic depictions of the future like Destination Moon (1950), Forbidden Planet (1956), Barbarella (1968), Planet of the Apes (1968) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (also 1968).
My journey and the title of my talk, I Hear a New World, emanated from a concept album devised, composed and recorded by Joe Meek in 1959. Meek was a pioneer of experimental pop, but he is possibly best remembered for two incidents that made the papers. The first (and happier) was his 1962 Number 1 hit Telstar, performed by in-house group The Tornados. Telstar was the name given to various communications satellites, and that year one of these relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls and fax images to Earth from orbit, gifting Meek a topical title for a truly infectious single. (Telstars 1 and 2 continue to circle the Earth to this day.) Meek’s second claim to fame (or rather notoriety) is the tragedy that occurred in 1967, when he shot and killed his landlady before then shooting himself.
The space programme fascinated Meek, and Joe was among the crowds who gathered in central London to welcome Yuri Gagarin to the capital in 1961. He believed that life existed elsewhere in the solar system and the aforementioned album was an attempt to create a picture in music of what might exist in outer space.
Back down to Earth and to the land of Albion. The year is 1970. The month is July; the place is Worthing in Sussex; the happening: Phun City. This three-day festival of “Kosmic” rock ’n’ roll is widely considered to have been the first large-scale free festival in the UK. Organised by one of the luminaries of the London freak scene – the UK Underground anarchist Mick Farren – Phun City also has the distinction of being one of the most shambolic and financially disastrous occasions in the history of festivals.
Funding for the event was withdrawn at the last moment, but it went ahead regardless, with free performances given by The Pretty Things, Mighty Baby, Kevin Ayers, Edgar Broughton, Mungo Jerry and the proto-punk outfits MC5 and Pink Fairies (who liked to strip off while performing too). The Beat poet William S. Burroughs also put in an appearance. Ironically, the one group that refused to play for nothing, and so didn’t perform, were Free. The English counterpart of the American Hells Angels provided security.
The Pink Fairies were perceived as a revolutionary group and directed most of their activity against the music business. They supported the underground press, the gay liberation movement and other radical causes by way of fundraising happenings. As at Phun City, the Fairies often appeared at festivals for free, or established a “next door” event in opposition to a commercial one. But by the start of the 1970s their world was a changin’. Twink – the drummer, singer and songwriter – has stated that, as far as he was concerned, flower power disappeared almost as abruptly as it began. He felt that as early as 1967 the air of excitement had been replaced by an overwhelming feeling of defeat; the money men had moved onto the scene and commercialised it.
Yet it was still rather too strong for some. The chief public health inspector, Mr E.T. Oates, said of Phun City, “The whole thing was offensive and obscene in many ways and you would have been surprised at some of the people there. There had been university people from America, Oxford and Cambridge and ordinary decent people. They just wanted to do what they wanted to do and they did it. I just cannot understand it”.
Phun City was certainly chaotic. The audience was effectively left to police itself, and it is fortunate that a shooting of a girl did not result in her death.
This ought, perhaps, to have been anticipated. The previous December, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in California had seen considerable violence among the crowd, culminating in the death by stabbing of Meredith Hunter. These events, captured on film for awful posterity, took place to the sound of The Rolling Stones and are often held up as marking the beginning of the end of the hippy dream.
Yet as Todd Rundgren sang, “A Dream Goes On Forever”. So the spirit of hippy Space Rock continues, through the jams of Pinkwind and the music of Gong, Here and Now, UFO, Magma, The Orb, Simply Saucer, Zolar X, Von LMO, Chrome, Ra Can Row, ST 37, Ozric Tentacles, Spacemen 3, Loop and Factory Records’ Ad Infinitum, who only ever recorded one single – a cover of Joe Meek’s Telstar.
Appendix
While discussing my research into Space Rock with a colleague I began to consider the genre’s wondrous album artwork. Inspired by the journalist Steven Johnson, and his eulogy to the emergence of the internet’s “curatorial culture” I headed off into cyberspace to seek out my top ten LP covers.
I quickly encountered the curator’s eternal conundrum, however. How to choose? I decided to freak and simply go with my first instinctive reaction. Unfortunately I had to leave out Weekend Party, with a picture of Jane Fonda in a spacesuit on the cover, as well as The Ames Brothers LP Destination Moon, Khan’s Space Shanty, Blast Off! by Ferrante & Teicher, The Very Best of Nimoy and Shatner, The Spotnicks in Jazzland, Party Interplanetire and Robots-Music: Volume 3.
There’s a vast universe of Space Rock art out there, just waiting for intrepid explorers. Here I present my own discoveries under the title Simon’s Nomenclature of Spaced-Out Albums.
For the current exhibition, Alien Encounters, I have undertaken talks in the weird yellow room devoted to the sights and sounds of Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist Renaissance entity from Saturn. These talks gazed into the world of British Space Rock. In this strange and amazing galaxy bands produced music composed of lengthy instrumentals, experimental guitar and keyboard sounds dominated by electronic organs and synthesizers. There was also much theatricality. The Ladbroke Grove circle that included Hawkwind and Gong fashioned acts in which outer-space lyrical themes intermingled with ambient resonances, poetry and liquid light shows. In the case of Hawkwind, integral to the performance was interpretive dance by Stacia, who performed topless or stark-naked, her body decorated with iridescent or luminescent paint.
Space Rock emerged out of the 1960s psychedelic scene in Britain and was closely allied with the progressive rock movement of the same era. Groups such as Pink Floyd have frequently been fused to the space rock sphere, although Syd Barrett, perhaps the original acid casualty, claimed that he had no particular affiliation to science fiction, and it is possible that compositions such as Astronomy Domine, Interstellar Overdrive and Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun were more concerned with inner than outer space. Similarly, Roger Waters commented in 1987 that “The space thing is a joke, none of those pieces were about outer space.”
The use of the recreational drugs LSD and Mandrax (a tranquilliser affectionately named “mandies” or “mandrakes” in the UK) facilitated journeys through the doors of perception to Never Never Land. In America, the Ken Kesey “Acid Tests” had a significant impact upon the LSD-based counterculture of the San Francisco area and consequently on the hippy movement. This was the creative context of the Grateful Dead, Silver Apples, Fifty Foot Hose and the United States of America, bands that also drew inspiration from the American electronic scene, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Edgard Varèse, as well as from cinematic depictions of the future like Destination Moon (1950), Forbidden Planet (1956), Barbarella (1968), Planet of the Apes (1968) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (also 1968).
My journey and the title of my talk, I Hear a New World, emanated from a concept album devised, composed and recorded by Joe Meek in 1959. Meek was a pioneer of experimental pop, but he is possibly best remembered for two incidents that made the papers. The first (and happier) was his 1962 Number 1 hit Telstar, performed by in-house group The Tornados. Telstar was the name given to various communications satellites, and that year one of these relayed the first television pictures, telephone calls and fax images to Earth from orbit, gifting Meek a topical title for a truly infectious single. (Telstars 1 and 2 continue to circle the Earth to this day.) Meek’s second claim to fame (or rather notoriety) is the tragedy that occurred in 1967, when he shot and killed his landlady before then shooting himself.
The space programme fascinated Meek, and Joe was among the crowds who gathered in central London to welcome Yuri Gagarin to the capital in 1961. He believed that life existed elsewhere in the solar system and the aforementioned album was an attempt to create a picture in music of what might exist in outer space.
Back down to Earth and to the land of Albion. The year is 1970. The month is July; the place is Worthing in Sussex; the happening: Phun City. This three-day festival of “Kosmic” rock ’n’ roll is widely considered to have been the first large-scale free festival in the UK. Organised by one of the luminaries of the London freak scene – the UK Underground anarchist Mick Farren – Phun City also has the distinction of being one of the most shambolic and financially disastrous occasions in the history of festivals.
Funding for the event was withdrawn at the last moment, but it went ahead regardless, with free performances given by The Pretty Things, Mighty Baby, Kevin Ayers, Edgar Broughton, Mungo Jerry and the proto-punk outfits MC5 and Pink Fairies (who liked to strip off while performing too). The Beat poet William S. Burroughs also put in an appearance. Ironically, the one group that refused to play for nothing, and so didn’t perform, were Free. The English counterpart of the American Hells Angels provided security.
The Pink Fairies were perceived as a revolutionary group and directed most of their activity against the music business. They supported the underground press, the gay liberation movement and other radical causes by way of fundraising happenings. As at Phun City, the Fairies often appeared at festivals for free, or established a “next door” event in opposition to a commercial one. But by the start of the 1970s their world was a changin’. Twink – the drummer, singer and songwriter – has stated that, as far as he was concerned, flower power disappeared almost as abruptly as it began. He felt that as early as 1967 the air of excitement had been replaced by an overwhelming feeling of defeat; the money men had moved onto the scene and commercialised it.
Yet it was still rather too strong for some. The chief public health inspector, Mr E.T. Oates, said of Phun City, “The whole thing was offensive and obscene in many ways and you would have been surprised at some of the people there. There had been university people from America, Oxford and Cambridge and ordinary decent people. They just wanted to do what they wanted to do and they did it. I just cannot understand it”.
Phun City was certainly chaotic. The audience was effectively left to police itself, and it is fortunate that a shooting of a girl did not result in her death.
This ought, perhaps, to have been anticipated. The previous December, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in California had seen considerable violence among the crowd, culminating in the death by stabbing of Meredith Hunter. These events, captured on film for awful posterity, took place to the sound of The Rolling Stones and are often held up as marking the beginning of the end of the hippy dream.
Yet as Todd Rundgren sang, “A Dream Goes On Forever”. So the spirit of hippy Space Rock continues, through the jams of Pinkwind and the music of Gong, Here and Now, UFO, Magma, The Orb, Simply Saucer, Zolar X, Von LMO, Chrome, Ra Can Row, ST 37, Ozric Tentacles, Spacemen 3, Loop and Factory Records’ Ad Infinitum, who only ever recorded one single – a cover of Joe Meek’s Telstar.
Appendix
While discussing my research into Space Rock with a colleague I began to consider the genre’s wondrous album artwork. Inspired by the journalist Steven Johnson, and his eulogy to the emergence of the internet’s “curatorial culture” I headed off into cyberspace to seek out my top ten LP covers.
I quickly encountered the curator’s eternal conundrum, however. How to choose? I decided to freak and simply go with my first instinctive reaction. Unfortunately I had to leave out Weekend Party, with a picture of Jane Fonda in a spacesuit on the cover, as well as The Ames Brothers LP Destination Moon, Khan’s Space Shanty, Blast Off! by Ferrante & Teicher, The Very Best of Nimoy and Shatner, The Spotnicks in Jazzland, Party Interplanetire and Robots-Music: Volume 3.
There’s a vast universe of Space Rock art out there, just waiting for intrepid explorers. Here I present my own discoveries under the title Simon’s Nomenclature of Spaced-Out Albums.
NC / BLOG / Pollock /Simon Withers / May 2015
The image is 'Yellow Islands' Jackson Pollock
I have erased the top most layers using photoshop in order to gain a different onsite into the painting.
‘Painting’
Pollock began to write the number five in the lower quadrant of the canvas. For whatever reason he abandoned this particular number and added what looks like a couple of inverted commas. He writes the number again, he tips in the year, 52 then signs the canvas…the signature appears to be written with a thick marker pen, the signature seems awkward…constricted.
At what point was this particular painting monogramed…and with the autographing of the painting was Pollock signing off a ‘finished’ canvas or simply authenticating his efforts?
By 1952 Pollock had consciously tried to move away from his accustomed style, yet within this painting he appeared to be returning to more familiar territories, the poring of paint over the surface using tools such as glass basting syringes. Over the top of this black canvas he applies a tangled mesh of pored curves and lines…each score seemed to be marking or slashing at the black template beneath…Pollock returned further into his past…he picks up a brush, loads it with paint and commences to add a number of large slabs of colour on to the black painting…the miasma of his former painting vocabulary comes to bear upon this labored canvas.
Only a few years previous the poring’s had lyricism and the painter ‘bopped’ above the surface, he worked with calmness, sobriety and sensitivity. Now conceivably lacking confidence and self-assurance Pollock may have realised that his energies were spent…could he Pollock ever convince himself that he could draw…that he could paint…that he could ‘do black’ like Kline?
Pollock continues to set upon the canvas…’I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image…because the painting has a life of it’s own’. The tension increases as he wrestles between the figure and the ground, between abstraction and representation, between content and technique. The canvas is on the floor; dense black paint is clumsily pored over the bulk of the yellow, white and red slabs. The poured line seems to interlink these blocks of colour…are they being pulled out of the image by a hook-like form that protrudes out of the bottommost edge of the canvas; or are these skeins being pulled into a whirlpool…a centrifuge in towards the midpoint of the canvas? The qualities of these lines in contrast to the first painting, the template are somewhat crude by comparison…it is possible this painting was reworked over a period of time.
Pollock up righted the canvas and taking hold of a thick brush he plunges it into a can of clotting black paint...it is possible that the paint he uses is old stock, may be even the dregs from the bottom of the can...in his endgame he cuts to a swathe of paint in the upper-middle of the painting. Loading up the brush once more Pollock daubs the center of canvas with a dark slick, the gesture is determined it signifies the effort of the man and his current density...is it by the hand of the same man?
The slick is beginning to drip; in his final gesture a delicate vermilion wound is positioned close to the centre…all is tallied...it is finished.
Notes
In 1961 the painting now known as ‘Yellow Islands’ was then titled simply ‘Painting’. The provenance of the work is that Painting went directly from Pollock’s estate to the Tate, via Marlborough Fine Art, London. Marlborough had a show* of Pollock’s work (including “Yellow Islands”) in 1961, which is the year the Friends of the Tate purchased it.
*Jackson Pollock: Paintings, Drawings & Watercolors from the collection of Lee Krasner. June 1961
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