Grasscut: voices past

Grasscut. 1inch / 1/2 mile. 2010

Andrew Phillips and Marcus O'Dair of Grasscut do a lot of sampling of archival recordings and picking up sound on cell phones. The name of their most recent cd, 1 inch / 1/2 mile, is a map scale. They walked across southern England at one point. On this disc 'The Tin Man' mixes a metal-on-metal creaking of a sculpture at the Pompidou Centre and a 1927 recording of John McCormack recorded off a wind-up gramophone.  The results are haunting, as if one was listening to the past through light years of space and time, which of course, we are.

This piece is 'In Her Pride' – Hilaire Belloc in 1932 sings his poem 'The Winged Horse' where he flies over England, and Ezra Pound reads from 'EP: An Ode' of 1926 on the acceleration of interwar life.  Their voices are very robust.  This is the only video I could find: I wish the image was as lapidary as the music.

Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas

Cristovao Canhavato (Kester). Throne of Weapons, 2001Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) is a project initiated by Bishop Dinis Sengulane in Mozambique in 1992 to exchange the weapons accumulated during the 1976-1992 civil war for tools such as sewing machines, bicycles, hoes and shovels.  One village exchanged all their arms for a tractor.  The weapons are decommissioned, cut up into scrap metal which is then used by artists. 

The resulting sculptures are powerful anti-war statements, diagrammatic in their political import:  the first image on the TAE website is of a saxophone made from an AK-47 and a bazooka. The caption reads: 'It is the antithesis of the weapons used to construct it. It regroups people rather than separating them. It's an instrument of peace rather than an instrument of death.'

In 2005, in conjunction with Christian Aid which supports TAE, Bishop Sengulane gave an enormous Tree of Life to the British Museum.  It is as one would expect, a large metal baobab tree trunk made of gun barrels. 

A more subtle piece is Throne of Weapons, 2001, by Cristovao Canhavato (Kester) who studied at the Núcleo de Arte in Maputo in 1998, becoming involved in the TAE project.  This is a generation of artists, many of whom were child soldiers, who grew up knowing only civil war and the tools of civil war.  Art here is instrumental in turning those tools – chunks of metal, plastic and wood – into things that war cannot appropriate. 

The Throne of Weapons which featured recently on BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects turns the weapons of war back into politics: thrones, chairs, seats – these are the euphemisms for power, especially during war when it is those who sit in chairs that conduct the war, not the children with the AK-47s.  

Zaha Hadid's Evelyn Grace Academy

Zaha Hadid. Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton. 2010 photograph: Luke Hayes/PRLost in society.  When I lived one tube stop away from Brixton it had race riots and people lived in crumbling Victorian terraces if not in tower blocks – Dickens in the late twentieth century.  Some things haven't changed much although Brixton has its gentrified pockets; Rowan Moore says it has the highest crime rate in Europe.  This is the site of Zaha Hadid's Evelyn Grace Academy, a leaning z-shaped building with the running track shooting through it. 

Rowan Moore's review is worth reading for how this project actually happened, who commissioned it, the educational and school-building context under Labour and why children who suffer much privation should have a serious piece of architecture in which to be schooled.  He points out the architecture of Edward Robson whose schools were built across London under the Elementary Education Act of 1870 – buildings of grace and light, still in use today, although not always as schools.

The Evelyn Grace Academy is what we would call a charter school I suppose: strict discipline, uniforms, traditional teaching.  The sense of it being a social service community centre is not in its brief.  The architecture is, as Moore states, adult, rather than child-centred and cute.  It supports the academy's expectation that students be adult and responsible. 

Not sure what the students would think about it but  I can compare it to the dreary box I went to school in, the imaginatively named NDSS, whose architecture supports (still) the expectation that students be careless with buildings and indifferent to architecture, and as I recall, careless with learning, and indifferent to almost everything.

problem-solving genres

Wallander. Yellow Bird, Left Bank Pictures and TKBC for BBC ScotlandJust finished reading Henning Mankell's The Man Who Smiled.  There is always so much more in the books than in the television versions, good that they are.  It is interesting, the huge number of detective books and dramas on offer right now, from the ongoing popularity of Agatha Christie to the relatively newly discovered Stig Larsson.  What they all share is that the narrative, no matter how complex, is sorted out by the end of the book.  In fact solving a conundrum is the end of the narrative.  In Mankell most of the police wander about in a Swedish fog, pursuing dead ends, being sad, working to overcome personal difficulties, not being able to work because of personal difficulties, generally going nowhere other than collecting a lot of disconnected material and then at the 11th hour the focus sharpens and it all falls together.  In real life things rarely fall together.  Narratives drift, like dreams, into new stories, none of which ever really end.  Perhaps this is why detective fiction is so popular: the genre guarantees that the story will end.  How attractive.  There is retribution, there is payback,  I like it.  It doesn't often happen

Early detectives - Holmes, Poirot, Whimsy - shot straight through all the clues. The story was complex, but logical.  New detectives are plagued by personal demons, nothing is as it seems.  This too is attractive.  Life is very confusing.  They bring order to it.

Thinking about architecture and how by its very nature it solves problems, whether those problems are program, density, image, brand, materiality or energy consumption.  There is an end point, the building is done and its post-occupation narrative is not allowed to wander too far off expectations.  Compared to other arts where difficulty and inconclusiveness have long been the norm, architecture is like a tightly plotted detective novel with no surprises.  Should this be a measure of its success -- that it responds to our desire for the tidy ending in a sloppy uncontrollable world?  Or, should architecture lean towards the fluid accommodation of extremely fluid and migratory life in the world today?

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean. The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, 1997. Chalk on blackboard support, each: 2438 x 2438 mm. installation. Tate T07613

Unbearably frightening: lost down a mine, lost in space, lost at sea. 

Tacita Dean is known for her films, but I once saw a series of large chalk drawings she did, The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days, at the Tate.  They are large diagrams, full of film instructions, structural analysis, notes.  The Roaring Forties are fierce winds in the Southern Ocean; the ship she was drawing was under sail.  The drawing above is of a row of sailors tieing down the mainsail – I think that's what they are doing, my sailing experience only extends to sabots.   This mast with sailors also looks eerily vertebral.

Each drawing is on a large 8' square blackboard.  They really are notes: just enough information to tell us something about a longer narrative broken into seven chapters, but not enough to get the story.  It all remains fugitive, incomplete, partially erased, inconclusive.  The drawings appear to be factual – the direction of the wind is noted, for example, yet the scene is never one we could possibly imagine.  Lashing the mainsail is something known to only a handful of people in this world, and is mostly known from literary description - small black and white words on paper.  Clues are given in these drawings that only enable the imagination, nothing further.

It is interesting that as a filmmaker with the capacity to tell stories in full colour and detail, Dean's films are shadowy narratives much like the ones, always intangible, that haunt us.

Chile

What more is to be said about the Chilean mine rescue, given the acres of print about the seamy side of whatever story there is.  Why do we, in the developed nations, do this?  Why are we so intent on turning everything into a sleazy soap opera?  Is there a real problem with how right-wing is the president and whether or not the mining minister, having gone to Stanford and by definition is a member of the comprador bourgeoisie and whether or not miner 18 was separated and was living with someone else – does it matter? 

It was the most amazing saga I can remember since the invasion of Iraq, which I also watched in 24 hrs a day coverage on BBC World.  I remember thinking when the US had reached Baghdad airport, 'holy crow, that is the same distance away from where I live as if a hostile army had reached Calgary airport, a 20-minute dash up the Deerfoot'.

With the miners, yes the Mapuche hunger strike was concurrent, yes, the other miners thrown out of work by the same company that was mining the San José mine are protesting, but the world is now watching.  The attention on Chile is acute.  Canny politicians moving their underdeveloped country into first world status are not able to sweep anything under any sort of rug now. 

The oldest miner, Omar Reygadas, says of course he will go back to the mines.  He is a miner.  It is a reminder of when being a miner was a source of immense pride in the developed nations.  The miner's strike, broken by Margaret Thatcher, put paid to mining in the UK.  The Cape Breton miners, the men of the deeps, went to the wall along with the cod fishery.  However, Canada is still a mining country; we are a primary resource nation.   Would Christian Paradis have spent 50 of the last 70 days at, say, the tar sands, or a potash mine if there was a crisis involving the workers?   Somehow I doubt it.

Oikos

More on Oikos, the theatre made out of scraps, pallettes and determination.

Hesco bastion

German forces filling Hesco bastions in IraqJimi Heselden died last week in a Segway scooter accident. He was, according to his obituary notices, the epitome of the entrepreneurial inventor from the gritty side of Leeds.  He developed the gabion into an international manufacturing company that provided flat-packing wire and canvas frames that, when filled with sand or gravel or building debris or whatever is at hand, forms a heavy wall against erosion, mortars, bullets, landslides.  The R-House is a fortified building: a square of bastions with a heavy canvas top strapped over for a roof: 'living space for six to eight people against the potentially devastating after-effects of any disaster'. 

Hesco is divided into humanitarian, civil and military applications with many variations of the basic frame filled with rubble.  RAID is a 400m concertina wall packed into a 20' container.  It pulls out of the containter, a meter wide and 2.2m high, providing instant cover.  On the website it shows a truck shooting down a track the RAID wall flooding out behind it. Once standing it can be filled, or used for storage, but its main use is as an instant forward operating base.  It's a terrific concept – fast, effective; thundering music in the little video demo brings home that war needs ideas, and it needs someone to put those ideas in place.  Lives depend on them.

The Hesco website is full of information and photographs of the most amazing products.  Heavily copyrighted, thus no images here.   However, when looking up the history of the gabion, I find it is an ancient war defence, once used by Leonardo da Vinci for foundation fortification.  

Heselden gave away millions  to charity, he bought Segway just last year as the future of personal transportation able to be developed in many different ways.  He was on one when it tumbled over a cliff near his home.  A freak accident cutting short a canny, clever, generous, visionary life. 

Rachel Whiteread

Rachel Whiteread. Parts 1-4 of House Study (Grove Road) 1992. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian, London © Rachel Whiteread. Correction fluid, pencil and water-colour on colour photocopy, 29.5x42cmThere is an absolutely wonderful interview/discussion between Rachel Whiteread and Bice Curiger, the co-founder and editor of Parkeet.  Rachel Whiteread has an exhibition of drawings at Tate Britain until mid January 2011.  The discussion looks at the things in her studio that she has collected, including a plaster cast of Peter Sellers' nose, it talks about what her drawings do, it revisits the Grove Road project.  It is delightful. 

Driss Ouadahi, Densité

Driss Ouadahi. Fences 4, 2010, oil on linen, 70 x 79 inchesFifteen large oil paintings of Driss Ouadahi are on exhibit at Hosfelt Gallery in New York.  The press release states:
Ouadahi's exploration begins with images of the enormous public housing developments in Algiers that had been modeled on France's habitation à loyer modéré (housing at moderated rents). In North Africa, these monoliths accommodate displaced rural populations; in Europe, they house immigrants from former colonies. 
 
Ouadahi studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sigmar Polke, Andreas Gursky and Katharina Fritsch.  Well, the press release says they were at the Kunstakademie when Quadahi was there, then it veers off into unforgivable editorialising:
 Ouadahi's oil paintings of the ubiquitous high-rise, the legacy of Modern Architecture's failed promise to improve the human condition, are renderings of impenetrable boundaries of steel, glass and concrete. They are symbols of the politics of class, religion and ethnicity. Reminders of "otherness."

Maybe.  Poor old modern architecture, what a scapegoat.  This is Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles that is being talked about here.  Granted not all habitations were as well considered, but did they ever intend to be symbols of class, religion and ethnicity?  No, quite the opposite and perhaps in their very even-handedness there was nothing definitive or positivist enough to withstand the blaming of modern architecture for social ills. 
Every European city has dreadful zones of low-income, immigrant housing towers.  The banlieus of Paris are the sites of much North African immigrant unrest, although those on the streets are French-born, and seemingly without prospects in contemporary French society.  Modernism's great delusion was that it could solve social problems.  It can't.  It can only house social problems that must be solved elsewhere.  

Ireland Park

Kearns Mancini Architects, Ireland Park Foundation, 2007Paul Whelan has written about Ireland Park in the new issue of On Site.  It commemorates the huge wave of emigrants from the 1847 Irish famine.  Incredibly, over a six-month period, 37,000 immigrants washed through Toronto, population 20,000, on their way to both inland and to the United States. 

Walls with names seems to be a necessary memorial component now: these names of people who died on the voyage or shortly after, about 20% of the total, are inscribed in the interstices of a rough difficult craggy cliff. 
And, also necessary it seems, are the figurative statues, in Toronto's Ireland Park part of a set, the other half being in a park in Dublin: the wraiths who left, and if they didn't die, arrived in North America. 

Migration stories: is there a point at which oral history – the journeys, the reason for emigration in the first place, the subsequent struggle to re-establish a life –is lost?  And is that when we start to build memorials?  

onsite 24: migration

Marianna de Cola. Travelling the south shore of Newfoundland, 2010

This is one of the beautiful images sent to us by Marianna de Cola, from her study on migration and relocation in outport Newfoundland.  We used it for the cover of issue 24 because there is something so complete and yet so slow about leaving home by boat.  Where you came from recedes, is lost in fog, or over the horizon; your line of travel always marked by the wake scrolling out behind you.

PLANT: fallen firefighters

Proposed Memorial to Canadian Fallen Firefighters. PLANT + Douglas Coupland, 2010

from PLANT's website:  PLANT and Douglas Coupland have been awarded the commission for the Canadian Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Ottawa. The competition jury selected from among five collaborative teams. The project will begin design development this fall, with a projected completion date of Autumn 2012. 

One of the sticking points with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington is the obligatory presence of over-sized bronze soldiers nearby, something insisted on by Vietnam veterans themselves, not sufficiently versed in the power of the abstract statement.  Such statues, of soldiers, or flyers, or seamen, or firefighters, or nurses are either shown engaged in battle, or are standing exhausted after it.  Leaders are shown in dress uniform standing tall and stern, untouched, as in real life, by the grit of fighting.

PLANT+Coupland's proposal clearly refers to Maya Lin's Vietnam project: also a wall, also engraved with names, also shaped in some meaningful way, although from this one press release image it isn't quite clear what the shape refers to.  It also refers to the controversy over memorials and the degree of representation needed to show effectively the collective individual tragedies that constitute natural and man-made disaster.

In this firefighters memorial, the naturalistic bronze statue points at the abstract list of names.  We are admonished. We are not out for a pleasant day on LeBreton Flats looking at the increasing array of national monuments and memorials, we are being told to go and look at this particular sacrifice.  We are being instructed.  It is quite exhausting. 

John Pawson

Monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur, Czech Republic, 2004. phot by Stefan Dold.From the exhibition 'Plain Space' at The Design Museum from 22 September 2010 until 30 January 2011

Emma Lake: Pamela Burrill

Pamela Burrill. 'Distant Prospect', 1988. 86 x 119 cm acrylic on canvas.

More on Emma Lake: Pamela Burrill was a geologist, retired by time she painted this in 1988.  Really, everyone should paint their environments.  According to how one sees a landscape, whether as a geologist, an architect, a gardener, a cook, a plumber, we might start to understand the complexity of land, rather than its instrumentality.  I mean, does this look like Saskatchewan of the wheat fields?  No, and this perhaps tells us something about how we perceive this country, generally as a set of clichés endlessly reproduced on whatever the equivalent is today of hardware store calendars.   As with all our cultural products, there is a handful of well-known artists known across the country, and hundreds of others known only in their own regions, and often only by their own generation. 

I find much of the Emma Lake work really startling, incredibly beautiful, very cognisant of contemporary art movements in whatever era the work is from, and almost completely unknown. 

Emma Lake: Wynona Mulcaster

Wynona Mulcaster. Prairie Riot, 1988. 91.5 x 120 cm. acrylic on boardEmma Lake was a northern Saskatchewan artists workshop started in 1934 by an  immigrant English landscape painter, Gus Kenderdine and the art school at the University of Saskatchewan.  When one thinks of how dire prairie circumstances were in the 1930s it was a truly civilised act.  Originally meant to train Saskatchewan teachers to teach art, it was a camp: tents and a dining hall at the next door Anglican Church summer camp.

After WWII, the romanticism of Kenderdine was superseded by a more vigorous Saskatchewan school consisting of what became the Regina Five: Kenneth Lochhead, Arthur McKay, Ronald Bloore, Ted Godwin, Morton, several US artists and Roy Kiyooka.  In 1955 Lochhead re-initiated the Emma Lake Artists' Workshop, bringing in an interesting list of modern abstractionists, often from New York, and famously, Clement Greenberg, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland and Anthony Caro.

The effect of these powerful proponents of colour field painting, abstract expressionism and general postwar surface exploration and mark-making on the romantic landscape tradition of Saskatchewan has produced a long generation of artists that see landscape in the most interesting ways. 

Wynona Mulcaster uses acrylic like water colour in  'Prairie Riot' of 1988.   Mulcaster, born in 1915, had been one of the early Emma Lake participants, a teacher with a wartime BA from the University of Saskatchewan and discussed in Clement Greenberg's 'View of art of the prairies', 1963.

Prairie fields as, literally, a field of marks is also found in the work of Reta Cowley, Dorothy Knowles and, bringing us up to a young generation of Saskatchewan painters, Rebecca Perehudoff. It is a way of registering the detail of the landscape without painting the details.

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007

Jeremy Deller. Baghdad, 5 March 2007. Imperial War Museum, London.

Originally Jeremy Deller had proposed a bombed car from Iraq (called The Spoils of War (Memorial for an Unknown Civilian)) for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, an ongoing rotating sculpture competition. Unfortunately, it wasn't chosen.  Unfortunate, because for the countries responsible for the war in Iraq, collateral damage is very abstract.  Four thousand American troops were killed in Iraq; hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Iraq.  That abstraction alone is near meaningless: numbers as synecdoche.

What Deller did do was to take a car from Iraq that had been completely crushed by the bomb in in the Mutanabbi Street book market in 2007 which killed 38 people. He installed it at the New Museum in NY (called It Is What It Is) and then towed it through the red states of the US showing what a bombed Iraqi car looks like.  It is now installed at the Imperial War Museum in London (called Baghdad, 5 March 2007) in a hall full of the official hardware of war. 

It isn't art, but Deller said on the Strand last night, I am an artist, so I can propose things.  And in this case, the Imperial War Museum took it – a statement they clearly felt they had to make.

Jeremy Deller. It Is What It Is, 2008. On view in the United States.

prairie landscapes

Greg Hardy. Distant Rain Across the Marsh, 2008. Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 64"That carving out a little corner of the wilderness in which to live, seen in colliery and garrison towns and which Margaret Atwood's Survival, her thematic examination of Canadian literature, discusses in depth, has never really been how Canadian prairie artists have seen the landscape and their part in it. 
Perhaps this is because settlement of the prairies, much later than that of eastern Canada, was facilitated by the CPR which didn't carve out settlements, but rather overlaid the great plains with the Dominion Survey Grid, charting the land with a system that made everything equal in importance. 
The land, indifferent as ever to ill-prepared settlers, was, by virtue of its abstract delineation, made to seem disinterested in the people living on it.  The relationship between town and land was not precise: the Homestead Act clustered services at the grain elevator and around the railway tracks.  The land was simply the surface upon which such things occurred. 

Compare this Greg Hardy 2008 painting with the 1962 L S Lowry painting, Hillside in Wales.  Lowry is looking at the land and human occupation, Hardy is looking at the weather.  Lowry's horizon is up near the top of the frame, Hardy's is at the bottom.  This is what I mean about the indifference of the land on the prairies to our little struggles: it floods, it dries out, it freezes, it is hailed upon— all these things would happen whether we were there or not.  Yet the mindset of the early immigrants to the Canadian west had developed in the impacted landscapes of Britain, where centuries of manipulation of the landscape had occurred.  One is constantly driving over surprising hills that turn out to be fragments of Hadrian's Wall or some such thousand year old installation.  People and their activities, their material culture, their animal husbandry, their system of fields, crops, stone walls and complex hedgerow cultivation – all that was irrelevant here.  Wind-scoured fields hundreds of acres square was how the prairies were farmed, and how they are still painted.


Halifax

Here is another example of a settlement carved out of what was perceived to be a fairly hostile and certainly unknown landscape.  Halifax, 1750; a commercial map inviting settlement.   A bit ominous is the large cannon wrapped up in the blue ensign at the top of the cartouche, protecting plucky workers building a wooden building below.  What I've always liked about this map is the precision with which Halifax was laid out: a garrison, all the blocks militarily aligned – an orderliness against the wilderness. 

This block of buildings and roads constitutes central Halifax still; the Grand Parade is as it is shown here.  What doesn't show is that it is all built on a steep hill going down to the water, so each block becomes a terrace. 
Oh well, it is caveat emptor when it comes to maps.  

coal mining towns

Eric Ravilious. The Vale of the White Horse,  circa 1939. Pencil and watercolour on paper: 451 x 324 mm Tate Collection N05164. This cutting of small villages into the landscape, especially in the L S Lowry painting (of yesterday's post) where in the front of the village are some fenced off yards as stony as can be, brings to mind the 3000 year-old Uffington White Horse cut into the Berkshire Downs.  These are inscriptions in the landscape, rather than sprawls across its surface. 

Nanaimo, which today sprawls determinedly north and west up the mountain, was originally a coal mining town, incised in the woods as a tidy fan-shaped diagram around the harbour.   You can see it drawing from the British colliery typology: small compact houses in small compact towns.  One can already see, in the 1891 map, new development inching northward.  In 1891, 762 working men lived in the south end; 70% were miners.  
They are almost gone, but Nicol Street (now the Island Highway going south) until fairly recently was lined with tiny miners' houses, no bigger than two rooms.  It was a rough place, early Nanaimo, very unlike its present prosperous and prolific self.

Nanaimo, 1891