L S Lowry. Hillside in Wales, 1962. Oil on canvas, 762 x 1016 mm. Tate Collection T00591The 1824 drawing of Bath reminded me very much of the 1962 L S Lowry painting of a coal mining village, believed to be near Abertillery in South Wales. It is another town carved out of the rural landscape: tight, dense and relentless. Do we mistake this density for a kind of urbanity or should it be more realistically considered expeditious worker's housing, one step up from the hostels of Fort MacMurray, or South Africa. Lowry didn't include the rest of the colliery landscape, seen in this photograph below, with the pit head at the end of the terrace. It is this historic spatiality that allows England to fit 51 million people into an area a bit larger than Vancouver Island and still have huge agricultural landscapes, estates and forests.
Panorama of Bath from Beechen Cliff, 1824, Harvey Wood
In all the lectures I have attended in my life on Bath and Georgian architecture, I have never seen this image. Bath as we value it developed throughout the 18th century; by time this drawing was made, some of the terraces would have been over a hundred years old, yet how raw it appears. Nature was clearly to be held at bay, providing a prospect from which one might consider the elegant city.
I once stayed in a bedsitter in Queen's Square (1730, John Wood the Elder, Grade 1 listed buildings); elegant it was not. Unheated, cold water tap, toilet on the landing, no bath access, dingy and absolutely freezing. There was an architectural value in the Georgian city, but little social value. There was still, in the early 1970s, unmended bomb damage from WWII and many of the terraces had been divided into hives of dark low-income bedsits. This was also just the tail end of the council tower block which looked pretty good in comparison: modern, heated, full of space and light — again, an optimistic but discrepant architectural solution that soon foundered on social realities.
It is still surprising how quickly Britain shed its social housing programs once the 1980s came and everyone, no matter how impoverished, was encouraged to cut free from the state and to become a property owner. It took almost thirty years for this political, economic and social project to crash in the sub-prime bubble. It would be difficult to find anything to rent in Bath today, certainly bedsitters are not considered legitimate housing any more unless as emergency housing for homeless families, and they certainly wouldn't be found in the classic terraces, squares or crescents of Bath.
Rosalie Gascoigne. Magpie, 1998. sawn wood on wood, 55 × 54cmIt is summer, nothing is urgent, I feel a great need to stick with Rosalie Gascoigne this week. I think about type a lot. I wasn't trained as a graphic designer, rather I was trained as an architect in a time and at a school when graphic design was part of the tools of the trade. Stencils, hand lettering, Letraset, those bars with the attachments for the Rapidographs that traced perfect sans-serif letters with rounded ends – pre-computers one was very busy with one's hands, one's pens and inks.
Graphically, Kurt Schwitters said it all: subversive, obsessive, beautiful work from scraps of paper, fragments of words and letters and then he built his merzbau – subversive, obsessive, beautiful rooms full of scraps of wood painted white. It was always about assemblage for someone trained as I was, and that is still how I see much of the world, from cities to buildings.
However, I have just re-read an article in Eye 64 from 2007 by Jason Grant about Rosalie Gascoigne and her use of type. Assemblage is almost incidental for him: he calls her work 'stammering concrete poetry' and asks 'Why, when typography is the assertive visual feature in Gascoigne's most emblematic work, it is never really paid much attention? It is like discussing Picasso without African art'. This is a typographer speaking clearly. What Grant does do is present Gascoigne's assemblages of pieces of signage, printed wooden crates and scraps of wood as something beyond the concrete material surface of the works. They respond to what he calls the 'fallout' of post-structuralist literary theory of the 1980s: dislocation and disruption, migration and fragmentation. Because of this, her work is at home with the 'diffused hierarchy of interactivity where the linear conventions of written language are undermined by internet, email, hypertext and SMS'.
Well, perhaps. They are this, and they are assemblage. They are graphic, and they are visual fields. They are found materials, and they are intentionally crafted. They speak of an era when pop bottles came in wood crates stencilled with red 7-UP letters – Grant says that when Gascoigne died in 1999 her favourite materials were disappearing in favour of printed plastics. Her work uses the materials of the mid-20th century, and she rejects the inherent nostalgia of the discarded object.
Kaltwasser and Kobberling. Jellyfish Theatre, 2010. South London Jonathan Glancy wrote yesterday about this project in the Guardian, with a quick survey of informal building practices from found materials, from the precision of Walter Segal and the eccentricity of handmade houses in the 1970s to more current informal architecture in European cities.
A theatre out of pallets and scrap wood, ephemeral, shaggy; a political and social project. Kaltwasser and Kobberling's projects appear to be quite loved and propose an alternative to, as Glancy says, 'more public places and shopping malls'.
Here, and I can't see why it would be any different in Europe, building is so regulated and so narrowly conceived, that the thought of alternatives to our increasingly tedious urban environment is both fragile and socially provocative. It speaks to an intolerance of any kind of alternative ideas for everyday life. Propriety is a powerful social force, from Mrs Grundyism to repressive community associations that pass visually illiterate judgement on all new buildings proposed for their neighbourhoods.
We seem to be out of love with things that can be valued for their materials, or their cleverness, or their inherent beauty. Instead we seem to love brands and all that they represent. City branding is a particularly hot topic. Calgary is abandoning its previous brand, 'Calgary, the heart of the new west' underlined by a crayon cowboy hat, and has hired Gensler Los Angeles to come up with something better, which is going to be, evidently, 'Canada's most dynamic city'. As long as we think of a city or a building, or a house or a pair of shoes as a brand, it doesn't really matter what it actually is: the thing becomes invisible behind the brand.
Will there be room in Canada's most dynamic city for a theatre made out of pallets? Um. I don't think so, but we do have an enormous new Holt Renfrew, dazzling and white, and just like the Vancouver one.
Drive in near Clayton, New Mexico. 1996Rural isolation is at the heart of Rosalie Gascoigne's work in yesterday's post. Yes, rural communities are lively and busy, but these are islands of intensity in a much wider landscape that receives little human attention except for the extraction of resources or the harvesting of crops. Small details such as highway signs, fenceposts, billboards, here a drive-in, there a barn from an earlier farming era, small towns – such things are left in place where they eventually fall down, bit by bit.
According to the biographical material available on Gascoigne, from the beginning her work was made from salvaged iron and steel, wire, wooden boxes, construction debris: the detritus of rural occupation. This is not the rubbish from aboriginal occupation which is in an entirely different realm, but rather the cast-offs of the struggle for settlers and farmers to bring an order to a huge landscape project.
In the background of the old drive-in screen with its field of speaker posts is the armature of a centre-pivot irrigation system. Its days are probably numbered as well.
Rosalie Gascoigne, Party Piece, 1988. retro-reflective road signs on plywood, 108 × 83.5cmRosalie Gascoigne's first exhibited her work in 1974 when she was 57. She was just of the age to have completed a BA at Auckland University before the war started after which she found herself a New Zealand war-bride married to an Australian astronomer and living in a remote scientific community north of Canberra. Her work is made of salvaged materials, notably, road signs and packing crates, and later, construction lumber such as formwork, cut into thin slices and assembled as flat pieces.
For all the robustness of the raw, salvaged materials, the precision with which they are cut and trimmed is incredibly delicate.
Roslyn Oxley 9 shows a wide range of her work on their website.
Rosalie Gascoigne. White City, 1993/94. wood on craftboard 110.5 × 108cm
apartment entrance, southwest CalgaryAnyone, no matter how little formal schooling they have, realises that the equation 2 + 2 = 5.37 does not look right. Yes, we were taught, but taught so young that simple arithmetic becomes common sense.
Could we not teach basic visual literacy, also at a young age, so that when anyone sees the picture above (never mind the people who originally drew it up, bought the materials and built it), common sense would tell them that this simply cannot be right?
The old Highway 5A runs from Merritt to Kamloops up the Nicola Valley. It is a beautiful road, and allows one to avoid the arid Coquihalla. On it is this graveyard, established in 1905 by St Michael's Anglican Church. Most of the old graves are fenced off, ranging from a plain picket fence to chain threaded through four corner granite posts, to a very elaborate wrought iron fence and gate. Some of the headstones, most from around 1910, are granite or marble, beautifully carved, elaborately inscribed
It is a dry landscape, dry grass, pines and sage; the fences are quite precise delineations of territory, even in death. Clearly the grass is mowed here at some point during the year, keeping down weeds and sage, so one finds even today, a century later, the fences often enclose a kind of indigenous garden. There are new graves in this little cemetery, closer to the river, so this isn't entirely an archival landscape. No fences for the new sites, but lots of flowers which sit in all their plastic gaiety like bedspreads.
Stephanie White. First Nations graveyard off Highway 12 near Lytton, BC. 1996In yesterday's post, the Paul Nash photograph 'Totems', a series of shaped boat parts still attached to the piece of tree from which they were carved, reminded me of a graveyard I saw in the mid-1990s off the road from Lytton to Lilloet, somewhere around North Bend. I've misplaced my slide notes so can't pin point it more closely. However, it was in a meadow on one of the glacial till benches high above the Fraser River. There is an old, unpaved road that runs up the west side of the canyon connecting fishing camps on the river side with small farms on the other side of the road; mostly First Nations people live here: a parallel and, to everyone whizzing up the Fraser Canyon on the Trans-Canada Highway, a very hidden life.
The headstones and crosses are all wood, and all carved out of tree trunks. This is ponderosa pine country, now much diminished by both the pine beetle and forest fires. It is very dry in the Fraser Canyon; some of these crosses were extremely old and checked, others recent.
My photos are not taken with a surrealist's eye, rather they document how things are made, and how many variations of something as straightforward as a headstone there can be when people make such things themselves. The relationship between the cross, the tree, the earth and the life is so clear and elemental here. The placing of the head cross at the head of the open grave – the tree section is as deep as the grave – the filling in of the grave, the cross growing out of the earth, there is a ritual aspect to all of this that has been lost in our present day civic cemeteries where headstones are flat slabs of marble, laser engraved off an Illustrator file and which arrive weeks after the ceremony.
I've never seen this way of doing crosses anywhere else although in other small graveyards in the canyon there are sometimes a couple of these carved timber crosses. In this particular graveyard, it was all carved crosses stone shapes.
S White. First Nations graveyard off Highway 12 near Lytton BC
Paul Nash. Chain and Net, John Nash’s home, Meadle, Berkshire.More from the exhibition of Paul Nash photographs. Margaret Nash wrote on the original negative of Chain and Net, 'surrealist a very important experiment'. This is not the surrealism of distorted vision as in Magritte or Dali, but rather the surrealism of Duchamp who seemed to find everything curious, even more so if ordinarily curious things were reassigned slightly twisted names.
It is the attention given to the ordinary that moves these images from snapshot to study. They aren't documentary, although they have toponymic titles and dates. They don't reveal a passionate study of a place, although they are all 'placed'. There is a loving interest in form, not for its perfection, or its pathetic fallaciousness, but for its shape. These seem quite pure photographs in the sense of being disinterested in the rules, the conventions, the emotive content of art.
Paul Nash. ‘Totems’, old shipyard, Rye harbour. 1932
Paul Nash. Boat on the Shore, South of France, 1933/4
Last week the Guardian had this photo on their website from an exhibition of Paul Nash's photographs currently on view in Sheffield. Coincidentally, I just finished reading Pat Barker's novel about the Slade, WWI, war artists and the purpose of war art, Life Class, published in 2007. This appears to have been loosely based on the WWI experience of both Paul Nash (1889-1946) and his brother, John Nash (1893-1977) who also enlisted in the Artists Rifles. Both might be called meticulous and passionate landscape draughtsmen, rendering complex landscapes into simpler sheets and planes that record an ancient topology usually scarred by some form of modernity.
Between 1931 and 1946 when he died, Paul Nash had a No. 1A pocket Kodak camera with which he photographed landscapes, objects, rocks and rubbish with a slightly crooked surrealist eye. The exhibition mounted by Abbott and Holder shows a few of these photographs, from the White Horse at Uffington to an Avebury standing stone. Tree trunks and fence posts become sculptural, ploughed fields become pattern, a topiary garden with a large looming house on the other side of a hedge becomes comically Gothic.
The Guardian blurb mentions a pathetic fallacy at play in these photographs. I must say I'd forgotten what the pathetic fallacy was for a moment, but I don't think this is what it is. One might project all sorts of social preoccupations on the subject matter, but if one was a visual artist, a surrealist and insisted on using your pathetic little pocket Kodak for everything, I would take the cue from surrealism instead. These are photographs of curious, inexplicable things.
Paul Nash. The Box Garden, Beckley Park, Oxfordshire. 1943
Lateral Office. Emergent North, 2010The Canada Council has announced this year's Prix de Rome: it is Lateral Office, Lola Sheppard and Mason White, who have proposed a research project called Emergent North. They are off to Nunavut, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, Alaska and Greenland to find and document northern settlements: 'the public realm, civic space, landscape and infrastructure emerging from a unique geography'.
Good, and grand. At last a Prix de Rome which is not dependent on going off to Europe or Asia, and while we are at it, might we also not shed the colonial name Prix de Rome and call it Prix d'Ottawa?
There are three components of Lateral's proposal. In Ice Road Truck Stops, ice road reinforcement mesh acts as a self-maintaining road building process and a support habitat for lake fish. Caribou Pivot Stations are installations which provide feeding oases for migrating caribou (which find it hard uncover moss and lichen under an increasing number of ice layers in the snow pack). These micro-climates are made by a building which manipulates snow and wind to keep a clear feeding field throughout the winter. Liquid Commons is a water-borne education system of school boats that operate between eleven Nunavut settlements: the opposite to the aggregate medical and educational facilities in the north that draw people out of their communities to a central hub.
The projects are a combination of ecological, social and infrastructural propositions. Yes there are physical things drawn out that one could call buildings, but which really are less relevant than the ambitions of each proposal. This is profoundly political architecture, moving the very definition of architecture from stylish spatial modulations of surface – especially in the north of metal siding in bright colours, to charts of concerns and how they might be addressed.
I think it is the first significant and independent Prix de Rome we have had.
Watching the World Cup in Kilifi, KenyaDigital Planet had a thing on the Kenya Field Of Dreams project this morning. This is an inflatable screen set up in Kilifi, a town north of Mombasa. It is supported by UK Sport, Google and Moving the Goalposts, a charity that uses football to empower girls. The BBC has given this project a lot of coverage, Digital Planet is the most recent.
Where to start. Nominally, in a town where hardly anyone has a tv, a large inflatable screen was set up to broadcast the FIFA World Cup games. The screen came from Open Air Cinema, donated by Google. Stuart Farmer of Open Air Cinema provided support and training. The Open Air Cinema package is just one of many kinds of inflatable screens, usually advertised for showing movies on the beach or at pool parties. The least horrible video I found of how they are set up is this one from Airscreen:
They all follow the same principles: the inflatable screen and support structure are stuffed in a big bag accompanied by a small suitcase with a rear screen projector, a hammer, stakes, speakers and a fan: it's a tidy package. Inflatable screens withstand the weather better than a fixed screen. They bounce around in the wind, but don't blow away. On the Kenya Field of Dreams blog Alix in Kilifi writes: 'Oddly, it's not the high-technology which struggles here — we have a satellite internet connection, 3G broadband dongles and excellent mobile coverage for organisation, and imminent arrival of WiMax – it's the low tech: Weather, sanitation, electricity.'
The fan that inflates the screen is run off a generator and it inflates quickly, in a minute or so. It is the girls of Moving the Goalposts who set it all up, make the connections and fix bugs. The girl who was interviewed on Digital Planet said that after the World Cup they will show educational videos about health and education.
Now, remember all you fellows who can't figure out how to work a digital camera and Photoshop, these are teenaged girls at risk in extreme poverty. The Moving the Goalposts Kenya site describes its mandate: 'Girls and women in Kilifi District, Kenya are some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people. Low retention in school, early and unintended pregnancies and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS trap them in a cycle of poverty. Moving the Goalposts Kilifi (MTG) uses football to empower girls and young women, helping them to fulfill their potential both on and off the football field.'
Moving the Goalposts Kenya, raising self-esteem through girls footballMoving the Goalposts Kenya started in 2001 with a small grant from the British Council and advice from Moving the Goalposts UK. Football teams were formed, matches played, there are now over 3,000 players. It has reproductive health rights programmes, HIV/AIDS programmes and a new economic empowerment project. In 2008 MTG Kenya built a headquarters building with help from the British HIgh Commission and the Ford Foundation.
Moving the Goalposts Headquarters, Kilifi, KenyaThere is something about this story that makes me feel as if I am the one living in an impoverished society.
A couple of nights ago heard a radio documentary on Franco Luambo Makiadi on BBC World African Perspectives. You can get it as a podcast from the African Perspectives website.
'Mario' was Franco's most famous song, the opening soukous guitar chords are unmistakable, as is his voice. This is OK Jazz, from the Congo. Aboubacar Siddikh has posted a 1985 version in two parts: there's an interview and discussion in the middle between 4:16 - 6:30. This is the link to Part 1, then it continues in Part 2.
African jazz was the soundtrack to my life in the early 90s where I would spend the summers in Calgary and drive to Austin Texas for the rest of the year. The drive down in mid August was terribly gruelling: the temperature goes up 10 degrees each day, so one leaves Alberta at 15°C (5° at night) and arrives in central Texas at 45°C. These were the days of cassette tapes, of which I had two shoe boxes. By the end of the day when a campsite showed on the map and one could leave the relentless, fiery heat of the highway, I'd put on my African tapes — Salif Keita, the Malathini Queens, Franco: spirits lift, the pets would know we were about to stop, all would be repaired. This is music for heat and high humidity where languid is the only way to move.
While looking for Franco's Mario, I found Scott Shuster's posting of Mario done by Jonal and Malage de Luendo. This is long - 17 minutes or so, but just the thing to ameliorate the coming week of deadlines, deliveries delayed, and all that work to do.
Shuster writes (on the original YouTube posting):
LOKASSA YA MBONGO rhythm break about 12:45-minutes into the clip, & great Franco-style solo work by Shiko Mawatu throughout. Also modern Congolese male dancing -watch the WHOLE 19-minutes! They play the Azda Volkswagen commercial commercial at the end, brining back radio memories of the 1970s for millions of Zairoise, Congolese, and others of the Central and East African region. Congolese rumba newbies can learn more about this music at africambiance.com and at tribes.tribe.net/soukousguitar
Malick Sidibé. Nuit de Noël, 1963Each spring when TVO does its photography month of documentaries it shows Dolce Vita Africana about Malick Sidibé. Sidibé opened his photography studio in Bamako, Mali in 1958, and is best known for his photos of Bamako youth, dancing at clubs, clowning around on beaches, posing formally in their coolest clothes. He photographed everyone however, from babies to the very elderly charting over 50 years and hundreds of thousands of photographs.
Malick Sidibé. Friends, 1976 In Dolce Vita Africana he meets up with a group of men, in their seventies as was Sidibé at the time, with all the photos of them in their teens and twenties. Much laughter at the clothes, at their youth at their beauty. One says of all the girls in their bathing suits, 'some of these girls are in burqas now'. When they have a party, for old time's sake with all the old 45s and everyone dresses up, yes, most of the women are very covered.
Mali achieved independence from France in 1960; it is 90% Muslim, speaks French and has a secular constitution no doubt greatly influenced by the French civil system. The original Mali Empire controlled trade in the west Sahara, a fluid empire and territory which, after several internal shifts in power over 600 years fell to the French in the late 19th century and became French Sudan. With decolonisation French Sudan became the Republic of Mali and Senegal. At which point Sidibé opened his studio and documented the effervescent and heady gaiety of newly postcolonial Mali. The old shackles were off, the new ones had not yet arrived.
There is a brief postcolonial interregnum which is a social free-fall, a period of great creativity as paradigms crash before some new ideological system moves in. Cuba between pre-1959 American colonisation and post-1961 Soviet interest. Spain between Franco's death in 1976 and joining the EU in 1992. It is a delicate time, when new values are tried out and either kept or discarded. Sidibé comes out of that time. His eye is so free. His studio is small, difficult, he lives a social life in his neighbourhood in Bamako, he takes, still, thousands of pictures of people who are presented calmly, formally and respectfully. The photographic space is shallow, people are significant.
The relatively recent discovery of Malick Sidibé in Europe and the attendant exhibitions, prizes and lifetime achievement awards perhaps indicates the appreciation of a photographic eye that is not ideological and cares very much about the subject, rather than the process of making photographs or using photographs as text, as voice. This is Sidibé's photographic clarity, his modernity.
Malick Sidibé. View From the Back, 2001good interviews and reviews from LensCulture, Frieze, and the Guardian.
Darkroom - Chambre Noire On the obsolescence of the sliver gelatin process in the age of digital reproduction De la désuétude argentique à l'ère de sa reproductibilité numérique
Twice this morning Walter Benjamin has been evoked. Benjamin liveth.
Michel Campeau has just been given the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography from the Canada Council. The CC press release states that 'Michel Campeau has been part of the contemporary photography scene for four decades. His work explores the subjective and narrative dimensions of photography, that contrast with the conventions of documentary photography', which tells us precisely nothing. However, on the web is a site for the Darkroom project, series of photos of darkrooms —'a monography of images articulated around the decline of sliver-gelative photography, taking as my object the obsolescence of the darkroom.'
One could see this as an homage to a lost art form: the trays, the darkness, the rickety wires and clothespegs -- something very romantic, but this work isn't romantic at all. The darkrooms are photoographed in the glare of the flashbulb in all their tawdriness, in all their squalor, actually. The distance between these ad hoc environments, surely the only environments where appearance does not matter as they exist only in the dark, and the products produced in these environments is immense. The clinically beautiful iMacs used now will never be the subject of such a photo project. Pixels and levels adjustments have no physicality, the terrors of virtual reality where all is disembodied came with the first point-and-shoot digital camera.
Campeau however has a classical photographer's eye: the subject matter is at once interrogated for its really pathetic expedience while rendered beautiful. The photo above, the poetically identified CRW3446 – layers of plywood partitions hacked through with a skilsaw for a drainpipe, is phenomenally eerie, beautiful in its details: the splintered paint surface, the necklace of steel strapping, the hose clamps, the crossed lines at the corners of the openings as if it had been casually drafted with a sawblade. It is a most lovely thing, graphically, abstractly, and in its capture of a very human struggle with obdurate building materials.
Monday, August 30, 2010 at 9:09AM 
L S Lowry. Hillside in Wales, 1962. Oil on canvas, 762 x 1016 mm. Tate Collection T00591The 1824 drawing of Bath reminded me very much of the 1962 L S Lowry painting of a coal mining village, believed to be near Abertillery in South Wales. It is another town carved out of the rural landscape: tight, dense and relentless. Do we mistake this density for a kind of urbanity or should it be more realistically considered expeditious worker's housing, one step up from the hostels of Fort MacMurray, or South Africa.
South Wales mining valley, early 20th century.
