Happy New Year: Peace and Love (yes, again)

Christmas Greetings : Love and Peace

It's in the timing

I have a mind to write about time.  Where does each moment go once it's passed?  Only fragments remain in our heads, reachable by those (invisible?) wires attached in our brains to memory or somewhere else perhaps?

My problem at the moment (these moments passing by and passing by on toward wherever they go) is that I have little time to focus on thinking or even researching about time because time is in short supply.  McTaggart's 'The Unreality of Time' becomes 'The Disappearance of Time'.  Impermanence and Unknowing cut through the order of events revealing them as shards that prick us on their journey through our moments.

Meanwhile, I am listening to Leonard Cohen's 'Everybody Knows' followed by 'In my secret life'...

Looking and trying out

I recently had the privilege to join in.  Not done that in a while.  Hermitville is where I've been living.  It's a strange life choice, the hermit one.  Little chance of getting feedback when you refuse to come out of your cave.  Muttering away there inside that empty place (apart from me) the only feedback your own echo which by its nature comes back as more muttering, only louder.  Quite a crescendo it can build up to, but fairly useless and ultimately rather boring.

So...

From this new place of placing a foot (perhaps even two) in the outside world I have met some really lovely, generous and interesting people and begun the process of showing work again.   It is gratifying and promotes more thinking, as if I didn't already know that.   The art of forgetting is something that comes easily.  Remembering takes effort.

The roll call interested in photographic interventions who permitted me in are Mary Morris, Sue Barnes, Lucy Phillips, Steve Rutter and Mel Brewer.  http://on-the-map.org.uk

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside (to a Ukelele rhythm)

Which apparently isn't far off a guitar one, but I wouldn't know not being able to play either.

The day before the pier burned down I was arriving in Leicester to the smell of smoke and thought to myself - there's a fire somewhere here.  It wasn't difficult to spot.

Waking the next morning and seeing a horribly recognisable burning pier on the tv, in the hotel room I'd been consigned to, was soul destroying.  Two fires, two days in a row but the one on tv made me feel really sick.  My pier.  The pier I've gazed at for years, walked on in all weathers when it was open,  drank on, danced on, admired and loved from a distance and up close. 

 
A whole agonizing day later I arrived home and followed the constant stream of people toward the awful sight of our (it's not just mine really) lovely but awfully distressed pier to stand with this continually fluctuating mostly silent crowd of people gazing at the the carcass of all our memories.

We British, despite our sometime appearances, are made of stern stuff.

As demonstrated today at 4pm.  David Francis, reclaiming a site of our dubious history from the degradation to which it's been subjected, and to celebrate our pier, began his year long odyssey of a gentle stroll, half a mile each week, down Bottle Alley which stretches toward and meets the pier.   Amounting to a marathon of Ukelele playing.  Singing all the while, accompanied by a band of like-minded Ukelele players, members of the public, a tea trolley and a mountain of cakes.

 

It's tempting at times to lie down

Lying down.  

Lying down can be a relaxing and strangely energising thing to do.   I happened to be lying on the beach in Bexhill because someone asked me to - as part of a simple yet terrific response to Antony Gormley's work Critical Mass at the De La Warr Pavilion by a group of artists working under the name of Runway.  Entitled Critical Mess.  Lying there and watching the sea at an odd angle was a new experience.  It is something that I will continue to do (lie down) and photograph, see previous image/post.  

We now have a critical mess of our own here in Hastings.  The Pier has burned down.  This view observed by the man in the collapsible chair, the couple embracing and the photographer with his tripod, taken just a few weeks ago no longer exists and I am so saddened by that. 

Let's look at this another way

Do you see the clouds as I do?

You are there and I am here and wondering: do we see the clouds in the same way?  The shapes and the forms they take,  their fleeting nature?  My friend gave me a book on clouds:  'The Cloudspotter's Guide', knowing that I have great views from my windows.   It's blue cover has gone bluer, the print's reaction to the sun's rays, placed as it is in it's obvious space next to a window.  A local bookseller must have gone to ground - all the books in his window have turned blue, even the yellow plastic designed to protect them has taken on a blueish hue.   It's quite a spectacle. 

Cirrocumulus lacunosus undulatus is something that particularly draws me visually.   Although to be fair most do apart from those damn dark flat grey ones that allow no sunlight through.

While taking photo's of clouds I'm reminded of my friend who dislikes the retinal photograph/image and conversely Alfred Stieglitz and Minor White: their interest in metaphysics and their attempts at making the photograph as metaphor or symbol.  Lynn Silverman too who photographed them and made them large (as if they aren't already).  Unlike Turner's paintings which were shockingly small, I'd always imagined them to be large having until that time only seen representations in books.  I am interested in how images of clouds become more like abstract paintings.   How, once their context is removed, they might imply something else.   The last but one painting I made might have been of clouds except it was vividly, lividly gyrating deep red, the last was blue and rising, it was about the sea where I'd finally landed.    Does the sea reflect the sky or is it more of a collaboration - so each reflects the other in a cosmic distant flirtation?

And then, in amongst all that dreamy retinal gorgeousness, my eyes are brought down to earth by the crazy eejit across the road who doesn't want his dog to look where the dog wants to look. 

Spot the difference...

Pants and all

It's been an odd day.

It started this morning (no I'm not stating the obvious) while driving past the beach opposite my home.  A crowd had gathered, I knew why but was still a bit surprised.  Paying little more thought to it I grinned to myself and carried on. 

Friday and Saturday's are my favourite days.   It's something to do with people beginning to unwind and relax - it's infectious.  And I trawl through my favourite shops (we call them 'Harrods') to see what someone may have recycled.  Virtually my entire wardrobe this year has come about through recycling - the trouble is, it's addictive and so now I find myself recycling stuff that was already recycled, without  wearing any of it.   My Mum tells me to see it as a donation.

After a full day of successful trawling (is it through living by the sea?) - the car was ditched a lot earlier - I'm heading home and there in the distance is still the crowd.  They are opposite the parish church, is that a clue?  What are they doing there, looking at, searching for?  Have they found a weeping virgin?  Or a new messiah swinging from the bottom of a chinese lantern?  Except, apart from the occasional glance at the church they are mostly looking out to sea - or is it at the beach?  Have they spotted ET? 
 

Why and for what are they keeping vigil? 

Later I take a walk to see my brother, there outside a new crowd, it's becoming odder, these people are wearing garlands of the sort they did in Hawaii Five-0. 

On my way home again people are still there, milling about or sitting and gazing in what looks like awe at the wall of the steps that lead up to the promenade from the beach.  Have I stumbled upon a brand new pilgrimage?

Neil Diamond's fans used to throw their pants at him.   Have I a new fan?  For there, on my balcony, are a pair of men's pants, yuk.  How did they get there?  Seagulls do not wear them.  It can't have been the wind this time.   It can't either have been the builder from upstairs (do builder's wear pants beneath the trousers that sit at least 6 inches below their waist when they bend down?), although he does often fling the last of his loaf from his window at the end of a days work.   He should have grown up with my Mum - she often told us to 'use your loaf' (as in 'loaf of bread' = 'head', Mum being a cockney) - he couldn't fling it if he was trying to use it.  The stupid man doesn't even break it up for the birds - why fling half a loaf intact - even the seagulls aren't that big.

I'm glad I wasn't sitting looking at the crowd when these pants flew, there's some recycling that I just don't do.

Glen Jamieson, reviewing...

Reflections on Time Travelling (with Sea Piano Fret)
Lucinda Wells, Trinity Buoy Wharf 

With the bare ground flooring of the Gatehouse at London Docklands' Trinity Buoy Wharf under feet, I sat mesmerized by the image of an unfurling St. Leonards seascape. The sea moving gently under an early evening sky is a familiar scene to many seaside dwellers. But even if it is watched on many occasions from the same viewpoint, the same favourite bench or balcony, a seascape is ever changing, and it can evoke different impressions, recall memories, and encourage reveries. Viewed from this sofa for sale on a peninsula where the Thames joins the River Lea, I watched the sea reclining, the tide and the waves creeping and curling away from land. Unlike any seascape I had seen before, a fear grew in me that this sea gestured to an end of an era, that we had gone as far as we could in time and now we were moving backwards, as land and time was being recovered.

A piano melody emerged from the seascape, faintly muffled as if the piano was being played on the seabed, growing in intensity and in harmony with the unfolding of each wave. The tune is evocative of a certain era in Britain - or of a wartime film (the era is before my time), say Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988). I learned that Lucinda Wells' "Mum" ("a Londoner through and through") played this tune, and as was her usual way, would play by ear - "the music was inside her head and her hands found the notes". Surreptitiously recorded by the artist, this reticent song that could not be emulated with the same sentiment by a pianist or a performer speaks remarkably loudly and expressively of histories in Britain, both personal and collective. Conceivably, I had travelled to a time I had never been before, a time loaded with histories and memories that are poignant for many, but to a place that was undeniably Britain.

On the walls were images of uncarpeted floors, with the artist's feet in red shoes at the foot of each photograph - at the foot of doorways, staircases, and garden paths. Here Wells seemed to have traced a path through her family home, where her mother's piano would have resonated between rooms, and from where, like many a British family, they would leave for and return from days out by the sea. The red shoes at each open doorway present an eternal future of possibility and at the same time reveal the marks of history. Indeed, we can learn a lot about ourselves from looking underneath our carpets and wallpapers, scratching beneath the surface. But as Wells takes us through the house, across the surfaces of her personal history, we arrive at the foot of a closed door. We might conceive that these photographs of open doorways document the last time Wells would have walked through them - what was once a gateway to a different room has become a preserved pathway to the end of an era.

As the waves recline away from land, and the piano plays the sea, it's as if the marks of time scarred in these floorboards and traversed by Wells' red shoes for the last time have become reopened wounds - where not only the artist's history but thousands of British memories and fictions are seeping out. When the tides creep in again, perhaps these surfaces will play host to new life, with new carpets and new families, and bear the marks of more comings and goings, with new histories and memories to take their place. At the same time, one cannot help but wonder of the fate of the St. Leonards seaside resort, and whether these connections and memories will be lost at sea in the following generations - only to be glimpsed when the carpets are stripped off the floorboards and the marks of history are re-opened in reveries of time travel or when watching and listening to the sea.

As I sat in the next room of the Gatehouse with a blank projection screen in front and the sound of the sea piano behind me, I contemplated the bare flooring beneath my feet, and pictured this London Dockland building in the time the now distant piano evokes.

Like Lucinda Wells' mother finding the notes on the piano that were in her head, visitors were invited to draw on wallpaper the marks of their time travel reverie as the sea piano resonates from the next room. This was not a simple invitation to write a reflective account of the experience in an installation guest book, but an invitation to mark out and visualize the experience, and respond to one another. Perhaps future wallpaper can be peeled away to reveal this one, and the many fictions and histories of Time Travelling (with Sea Piano Fret) will be discovered - as it is not often that we listen closely to the sea, look under our carpets, or draw on wallpaper to discover our roots.

Glen Jamieson

(Jamieson is a Photographer and Writer based in Norwich, Norfolk. His latest book: Suspicions of a Peninsula Town (YH485 Press, 2010) is available from http://yh485press.org - Contact mail@yh485press.org for more details).

http://glenjamieson.blogspot.com

Trinity Buoy Wharf: Impromptu ebb and flow

Just had a surprising weekend. Spent two nights eating and drinking way too much for too long with Adrian and Kathrin and then the next night getting thoroughly rat-faced with Mo so it was amazing that I was able to find my way to and from TBW let alone get the installation in place and functioning properly, myself included. Fortunately a brilliant local connection helped me put up the work, contributed ideas, and climbed up high without ladder training, I'd taken a car full of all manner of things just in case, good job I did.


As a result I got to meet many people who got to meet some of my work. Of particular note: Hayden the composer and pianist with his wife? a lovely art therapist, he wrote a note to my Mum on the hanging wallpaper about playing the piano by ear. Roy the sculptor and his mate the porter from Hackney who sang along with the video correctly identifying each of the numbers. Sylvia from Golders Green who'd walked all the way from Canning Town, she's a Holocaust survivor and came with her juggling balls to juggle to any music that might be playing - she juggled to a fiddler outside the cafe. I gave her a lift back to the train since she'd also brought her slippers with her and was wearing them after having walked so far. I found her with her feet up on the sofa watching the movie and relaxing: she told me a bit of her story it was fascinating and sad and inspiring. The biker who is in his third year of doing "the knowledge" and hopes to qualify next year - they have to fund everything themselves, hard indeed. This future London Cabbie introduced me to The Aluna Project: www.alunatime.org/ - how lucky is that? I would have missed out on knowledge that really interests me had he not walked into my temporary space. Eileen and Michael Woods came in from Haring Woods Studio, they use art to communicate, educate and influence policy on climate change, it was great to meet them.


The artists and people who are based there were excellent, being helpful and generous.

People drew some lovely stuff on the wallpaper and it all related to the work even though I hadn't stipulated what they might do - that was really gratifying - and they seemed to react to whatever the person before had drawn too, a visual chinese whisper (much earlier post). It created a brilliant form of feedback - someone drew a heart awwww that was nice. Each time I re-entered the wallpaper room there was another surprise.

Putting something together at short notice was nerve-wracking. I've learned much from the people who came, the work itself and the space it was in. The work is developing into something more. It was a good thing to do.

Working hard

I am working hard. It can be hard to work hard. Sometimes though the result comes easy - it all seems to fall into place without too much angst. The days, weeks, months or years of thinking that preceded it coalesce simply into something concrete. That feels good. At the moment it is all feeling mostly good (only a little angst) and is yet still a bit scary. I've made the video (but should I make the other one that is on my mind? not tonight - maybe begin it tomorrow). In total I've got two other parts that might go with it. Not sure about either at this stage. Only a few days to go so I had better make up my mind (each of them will be more about sound than image - the sounds I have recorded).

Overall, it has to do with music and memory, London (my/our roots) and family. Ancestors and history. Water too: the sea and rivers have memory, always trying to get back to their original path (roots) if diverted. These things I have explored and thought about for many years now. And yet the present wants to be uppermost. So the present is there.

Sometimes it would be easier to think about nail varnish.

Sea piano fret

It's a prelude and it's begun: I'm making a new piece, a collaboration with my resistant Mum (purist of the piano) and possibly Dad and Adrian. Getting back to my roots in video has taken a while (a number of years) and though I've shot and shot and shot stuff in that intervening period most of it remains on its original source tapes waiting for the time when (and if) it will be harvested, but its certainly not to be just now.

Now, this time, is urging another particular investigation into what fascinates me on many levels. The subject that has always been uppermost in my thinking, that of memory - cultural, societal, local - is requiring a re-visit. Time itself is asserting its presence.

Rea Tajiri wrote about a kind of memory which wants to be explored because it is a whisper of something hidden, unknown yet in some way known, referring to her cultural history and what is omitted. Laurie Anderson wrote in 'Words in Reverse' about the Cree Indians "I am singing the songs of my fathers... I never knew the words of the old songs... I never sang the songs..." I admire too the work of Vera Frenkel who used her imagination to imagine the grandparents she never knew.

My previous video work was about memory, my memory and not my memory. Sometimes it was just a memory, plucked from the space where my mind resides. A construction a la Boltanski or Marker.

Growing up I was surrounded by generations of family (cockneys) who played the piano and sang, it was what was done at that time (if you were lucky). Mum played by ear (no it didn't hurt apparently - yes that joke has been made before) from the age of 5, her hands so small that her fingers couldn't stretch for the melody and she'd use the side of her hand instead. She was much in demand and, to her eternal regret, everyone at that time said she didn't need lessons because she could play any tune requested having heard it only once. I love the stories she recounts of her playing in the dark during the blitz or even when the lights just went out.

The music was inside her head and her hands found the notes. Mum doesn't like the sound of her playing, because she says that when you hear the right cords as they are meant to be played from sheet music it is altogether 'better' but I don't agree, her music is a sound all of its own - of an era and a place, it is joyful and sad, uplifting and poignant. It is full of history and extremely visual. No wonder silent movies always had a pianist.

At the Barbican - another diaristic post

Feel impelled to write something about this event. Wellers Auction House collaborated with The Barbican (and eventually me and Greg) to put on an auction of Lost Luggage as part of The Surreal House. We went along with some trepidation - located in a room some way from the main event - what would it be like, how many would attend? Well. It was awesome. Wellers professionalism shone - they dressed a non-descript room and made it into something quite spectacular - Elvie, Cieran, John and Alastair (not forgetting Andrea, Mark and Chris who couldn't be present). The whole company consists of real visionaries. If I were to work for a business again they would be first on my list. Their ethos of inclusion is truly heartwarming and inspiring. Anyway, having shot the video which will be tightly edited to give a proper sense of the evening I can honestly say the whole affair was truly superb and people totally loved it (being carried away with the energy meant that I forgot to shoot the exterior of the building - hey but that's life on the wing). There was a real excitement and energy to the whole thing. People squealed with delight when opening their cases - it was like a huge manic Christmas. Someone found a man-size Superman outfit - how could Superman lose his clothing...

Resistance

Resistance

Resistance

What's all the flap about?

Just got back from a short and very local break. Seen the most bizarre and often self-centered behaviour while travelling. The lengths some people will go to reach their tiny goal, like getting to the breakfast table before anyone else, even if it means queue jumping a severely disabled person in sweltering heat and requiring them to wait for the lift a whole lot longer... To the man who did that: "Comment avez-vous pu faire cela?" commonly translated as "What's up with you, you selfish git" to put it very mildly.

Well, travelling in another age, several generations ago, things were very different obviously - it was a much more serious affair, even sombre some might say. Look at the trunks - heavy, hardy things able to withstand all manner of treatment, but also looking a bit like they would hold treasure. In the 30's Cecil Beaton wrote an article for Vogue: 'Maiden Voyage' in it he describes the arrival at his departure point "All roads to Southampton were busy with a stream of cars speeding to the Queen Mary. On the dock, a large yellow caterpillar, the awning gangplank, led to the new monster ship, where a Hieronymus Bosch inferno of activity, so strangely in contrast with the bucolic scene outside, assumed an almost terrifying unreality."

Thinking of treasure I have a 'handed-down' book (from my much travelled Great Aunt who was, in her time, a bit of a Flapper) "What to say in French" by Y. Fussot. The language both English and French is very beautiful and so much more serious than now (pardon the lack of ecute and grave accents): "Le voyage m'a derange, je me sens deprime. Pouvez-vous me donner un tonique?" "The journey has affected me, and I feel depressed. Can you give me a tonic?" And "What do you ask for the three rooms and the kitchen?" (I could list the entire book it gives me such geeky pleasure every time I refer to it).

Looking at this later bunch makes me aware that travel had become much less serious in this time, more often, more at the drop of a hat. Look at the cases (no longer trunks) they are smaller, less robust and seem to be smiling. In this period travelling abroad was accessible to a greater number of people and certainly it was quicker, however something quite necessary was lost in the process. Elegance, stature and decorum. Call me a romantic.

I remember as a young adult going to parts of Southern Europe and being beguiled by their differentness and over time seeing these places producing English breakfast, lunch and dinner and so on, how daft is that. Why go abroad if the only thing you will eat is English food? I even saw the archetypal male wearing a knotted hanky on his head and the flag on his arse. That was a long time ago. Maybe it's changed now (I hope so).

However, if our cases are anything to go by (and my recent experience) things have become more downcast, rather ugly and mean.

L'espoir et le desespoir sont freres.

Separation Coda

Anything is possible

Separation

finding this