Through a variety of case studies, it offers a British perspective of international spaces, from the British metropolis to the post-communist European city. By situating the current strand of psychogeography within its historical, political and creative context along with careful consideration of the challenges it faces Walking Inside Out offers a vision for the future of the discipline.
Through a variety of case studies, it offers a British perspective of international spaces, from the British metropolis to the post-communist European city. By situating the current strand of psychogeography within its historical, political and creative context along with careful consideration of the challenges it faces Walking Inside Out offers a vision for the future of the discipline.
Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography
272
Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography
272eBook
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Overview
Through a variety of case studies, it offers a British perspective of international spaces, from the British metropolis to the post-communist European city. By situating the current strand of psychogeography within its historical, political and creative context along with careful consideration of the challenges it faces Walking Inside Out offers a vision for the future of the discipline.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783480876 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2015 |
| Series: | Place, Memory, Affect |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Tina has had a number of articles published, including in Spaces and Flows and disClosure. She has presented a number of conference papers, for example at ‘Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now’ (University of Sussex) and was the invited speaker at the Land2 Symposium "Close to Home: Artists Reconsider the Local" (Leeds). Tina acted as co-editor for Parallax and associate editor for Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and Extraurban Studies. Shefeatured on Radio 4 as a psychogeographer and in the local press in regards to a recent psychogeographical talk she presented on the musician Nick Drake.
Tina runs a blog dedicated to Psychogeography and Cultural Theory called Particulations: http://particulations.blogspot.co.uk/ which she has been writing since 2009, in addition to a website oriented around her own form of psychogeography: www.schizocartography.org and a research-based twitter account @concretepost.
Read an Excerpt
Walking Inside Out
Contemporary British Psychogeography
By Tina Richardson
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Tina RichardsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-087-6
CHAPTER 1
Longshore Drift
Roy Bayfield
Approaching Liverpool from Another Place
There was a single silver hair resting between the pages of the free Metro newspaper I found on the seat of the train to Waterloo (Merseyside) Station, the starting point for the walk. It was quite early, but the Northern Line train had already been back and forth a few times between the Lancashire market town of Ormskirk and the centre of Liverpool, an artery for a half-hour commute. The strand of hair, with its burden of time, could have belonged to anyone. The cover of the Metro that day was a wraparound advertisement for Merseyrail asking the question, 'Want to know more about you and me?' (Metro 2013). Inside, a short article stated that 'ONE in six of us is so averse to walking that we rarely venture 500m (1,600ft) from the car' (ibid., 9). Signs were starting to manifest.
I changed trains at Sandhills and travelled to Waterloo, not quite reaching the city before heading out to its edge. At the station I had my first sighting of an image of Antony Gormley's Another Place sculptures (a.k.a. the Iron Men) on a fading print over the stairs from the platform up to street level. It would be the first of many — sightings of two-dimensional digital ghosts outnumbering the three-dimensional metal figures of the actual installation. As well as the Gormley image (a lone metal figure staring out to sea), there were other images of people sited around the stairs: pictograms depicting various ways to exit the station — climbing stairs, using the lift in a wheelchair, or pushing a pushchair. Outside the station, a map of the area included a sponsor logo based on a Gormley figure rendered into silhouetted pictogram form; I now knew that (wherever else I was) I was in the territory of the Crosby and Waterloo Business Village Partnership and that an Iron Man was their avatar. From prewalk research, I also knew myself to be in Merseyside; the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, Church Ward; the L22 postcode area; the Parish of St. John; at one end of the (discontinued) Northern Way and the (continuing) Northern Trade Corridor; part of what was once the County Palatine of Lancashire, also part of what was envisioned as a future Liverpool City Region, and in a place remade as Mongolia in Frank Cottrell Boyce's novel The Unforgotten Coat (2011) and its simulated Polaroid illustrations (Hunter and Heney 2013).
I met up with my walking companion for the day, artist Robyn Woolston, and we decided to go for a coffee to consolidate our plans. Crosby's South Street has its share of bars and coffee shops, but the Queens Picture House, a former cinema converted into a Wetherspoon pub, looked spacious and anonymous enough for a discussion involving fully unfolded Ordnance Survey maps and notebooks. It was around 10 a.m. Patrons at the time included a family eating cooked breakfasts; two men drinking beer, their loud conversation sweary and demonstrative; and us with coffee, gearing up to be psychogeographers. Like all of the Wetherspoon chain, the pub was large enough to comfortably accommodate such disparate groups. Also included in the corporate theme were old photos and local history information, making it a kind of drinkers' micromuseum, and a vast wall painting of an aircraft, a reference to pioneer aviator Henry Melly, who, just over a century previously, had flown his Bleriot from Waterloo Sands to make the first nonstop flight from Liverpool to Manchester. I suggested to Robyn that this image of flight was a good omen, reflecting the Aeolian theme that had emerged in the planning of the walk.
Liverpool, Merseyside — as the names suggest, this is an urban place, defined by its relationship to water. The coastline is therefore a natural locale for exploration, walking the most intimate way of going about it. Antony Gormley's statues are widely used as an image of Liverpool; Another Place has become one of Liverpool's public faces and therefore a logical way into the city. I knew from colleagues at Edge Hill University that there was a geography research station on the same stretch of coast, analysing the effects of wind on the landscape over long periods. These avatars of art and science, separated by a few miles of beachside, seemed to offer the structure for an urban walk, namely:
• Beginning: Gormley statues (art);
• Middle: whatever may be encountered; and
• Destination: Edge Hill University research site (science).
I contacted Dr. Irene Delgado-Fernandez to find out more about the research station. I had an inkling she would be sympathetic as, despite being a physical geographer, she had an interest in psycho geography, having been involved in a conference on the subject at the University of Guelph. It transpired that the research station had been obliterated by vandals, but work was still being carried out on the dunes. Irene seemed interested, so I elaborated on the idea of a Liverpool-coast dérive, writing a proposal for a walk that would 'Explore human interventions on the Sefton coast, including Antony Gormley's Another Place sculptures; the remains of a scientific research site; participants' own experiences brought to, and emerging from, the walk.'
I was attracted to the aesthetic of geomorphological research undertaken by Irene and colleagues, (mis)reading research papers (such as Delgado-Fernandez et al. 2013) as if they were some kind of Ballardian creative writing. I was struck by the term Aeolian research and decided to work that in, too, using Aeolus, the god of winds, as a point of reference, e-mailing Irene to suggest that
some psychogeography practice has taken mythology, occult and esoteric para-science such as leylines and applied it to real landscape, as a way of destabilising expectations ... so one could, if only temporarily, choose to interpret the term 'Aeolian' as used in, for instance, the name of the journal Aeolian Studies as being on some level a literal homage to the god of antiquity. This could logically lead us to keep a weather eye open for mystical correspondences to Aeolus such as the extensive list provided in Aleister Crowley's 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings (Crowley 1986) — which includes such things as 'mermaids,' 'a man with bowed head and a bag in his hand,' and 'artificial glass.' That is not to say that literal mystical visions are expected — a mermaid, for instance, might be observed in a Starbucks logo or pub sign. (Roy Bayfield, personal communication, 7 July 2013)
Rather to my surprise, Irene seemed to absorb all of this without demur.
Meanwhile, I had met Robyn Woolston, who was making an art installation for the Edge Hill University campus, Habitus, which was to involve information signs for a range of geological eras, pointing toward a Las Vegas–style sign welcoming people to our own, human-influenced Anthropocene Era. As Robyn wrote,
The word 'Anthropocene,' proposed by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen ... refers to the period within which we are currently living — a time perhaps unlike any other where physical markers within the geological record are pointing towards permanent global impacts upon the Earth's ecosystem as a result of human activities. (Woolston 2013)
I gathered from her Twitter account that she had an interest in psychogeography and invited her to be part of the walk. In the end Irene could not make it, which left Robyn and me, sitting in a Wetherspoon's with coffee and maps, planning an expedition.
We worked out an approximate route and got ready to leave — but first I went in search of lavatories. The Picture House stairwell, which would once have led to the screens (last shown film: I Only Arsked, starring Bernard Bresslaw, a spinoff from the TV sitcom The Army Game; supporting feature: Buchanan Rides Alone, starring Randolph Scott), was decorated with a large black-and-white image of the Iron Men, edited to appear more crowded together than they are in reality. Clearly the Wetherspoon designers had been unable to resist referencing the local sculptures (and improving on them) as well as riffing on the building's cinema history and the flight connection, the latter also resonating with today's jury-rigged Aeolian mythology.
We set off down South Street toward the Crosby Coastal Park. A red brick building (a disused toilet block) had some historical photographs mounted on its exterior walls. These had faded so that only cyan, the most persistent print pigment, remained. We walked on further. Sand had drifted into the park, part of an ongoing process that seemed to need keeping in check — a man was busy shovelling sand from the path.
We reached the coast. Behind us, the city; before us, across the water, the hills of the Wirral Peninsula and North Wales. And the Gormley sculptures, now visible in original form — a set of one hundred cast-iron figures, modelled on the artist's own body, positioned over a two-mile stretch of beach, all facing out to sea. Depending on the tide, some of the sculptures can be up to their necks in water. Another Place was installed in Crosby in 2005 following appearances in Germany, Norway and Belgium dating back to 1997. Intended to be temporary, the installation became permanent in 2007 as a result of campaigns to keep it in Crosby, supported by the artist ('Gormley's Statues Stay Out to Sea' 2007), a story that is well known locally.
The installation has made this stretch of beach a notable landmark and tourist destination. It has been claimed that the installation 'increased tourist revenue and attracted a reported additional 350,000 visitors per year, with a £5 million impact on the local economy' ('Welcome to the North Public Art Programme' 2011). Another Place is, for instance, one of a thousand entries in a book titled The Most Amazing Places to Visit in Britain (Reader's Digest 2012, 214); it is featured on postcards and appears on the covers of books about Liverpool (e.g., Real Liverpool [Griffiths 2008]). The sculptures have become so strongly associated with the Waterloo/Crosby/Blundellsands area that they almost seem to define the place — for instance, the popular Liverpool Centre of the Universe graphic used on posters, tea towels, cards and other merchandise, which substitutes the names of stations on the Merseyrail map with those of notable individuals associated with their locations, like depicting Hall Road (the station at the northern end of the installation) as 'Antony Gormley.'
Another Place, then, is a unique and famous landscape feature. Does anyone arrive at it and see it with fresh and innocent eyes? Gormley has 'always insisted on the work as an "open space" for interpretation; each new viewer finding for themselves a new meaning in it, is, he believes, "making it again"' (Caiger-Smith 2010, 91). However, the artist supplies a detailed and compelling interpretation of his own:
According to Antony Gormley, Another Place harnesses the ebb and flow of the tide to explore man's relationship with nature. He explains: The seaside is a good place to do this. Here time is tested by tide, architecture by the elements and the prevalence of sky seems to question the earth's substance. In this work human life is tested against planetary time. This sculpture exposes to light and time the nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal, just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet. ('"Another Place" by Antony Gormley')
Describing the initial intentions, Gormley stated, 'This was no exercise in romantic escapism. The estuary of the Elbe can take up to 500 ships a day and the horizon was often busy with large container ships' ('Another Place' 1997). His statements imply that the proximity of industrial shipping and busyness displaces transcendent, romantic readings. However, the 'romantic gaze,' as described by Urry and Larsen in The Tourist Gaze 3.0, does seem to be facilitated by the installation to an extent; the scale and location allow for 'solitude, privacy and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze,' although not quite the 'deserted beach, the empty hilltop, the uninhabited forest, the uncontaminated mountain stream' (2011, 19). The sculptures are both in nature (literally immersed in sand and water) and in the human environment of trade, transport and travel. As human figures they are also looking at these things — Another Place is a sculpture of seeing — staring out at wind farms, drilling platforms and shipping, as well as at sea and sky. On the edge of a city, an endless act of watching, of the movement between the city and other places, and the natural forces that shape and threaten it.
Evidence of the open readings desired by Gormley can be seen in the playful subversions and additions made to the sculptures. On this day they were mostly unadorned, but I have seen photos of them sporting scarves, glasses, Liverpool football tops, Santa hats, hi-vis vests; coated in paint; endlessly co-opted into posed photos. Other accretions have resulted from nonhuman nature; there are men covered in barnacles visible at low tide, and all of them are slowly transforming into rust. Interaction with the beach itself has a particularly profound long-term effect on the sculptures; some have sunk, while in other cases the plinth on which they stand has been partially revealed. Robyn and I speculated on the reasons for this — how and why the sands are changing — wishing Irene, our physical geographer colleague, were there to explain. Our idle thoughts of underground streams would have to suffice.
A sculpture of a man on a plinth is different from a sculpture of a man standing on sand, and different again from a buried man, the natural changes allowing for new readings. There is also an element of inner workings being revealed. Carl Hunter, a filmmaker and musician who lives locally, recalls seeing the totality of the sculptures in a temporary, preinstallation 'installation':
By day they were stored horizontally, in a car park, lying in metal bunk beds, very eerie, a dorm for metal men. Men with legs and legs with a huge screw attached to their feet. I became fascinated by this and would watch as the men were lifted from their beds, carried to the sand and like a corkscrew twisted into place. (Carl Hunter, personal communication, 16 April 2014)
We walked on, aiming for a UFO-like leisure centre. Signs announced its fifty-five fitness stations, adverts of a 'Summer Bodies' programme framed with jaunty 'Expressions Fitness' branding. As if to point up this celebration of the body, there was a sudden flurry of joggers running along the sandy path. A fading information sign about Another Place bearing Gormley's 'planetary time' quote still spoke of the future removal of the work in 2006. Water incursion had created an estuary of decay through the board's landscape image of the sculptures in the seas.
Drifting along the beach, we scanned the ground for signs. There were dead jellyfish on the sand and some uncanny-looking black capsules, the egg cases of dogfish, ray or skate known as 'mermaid's purses.' Poet Jean Sprackland describes these in Strands, her account of a year spent walking this coast, 'cast like small, cryptic gifts all along the strandline. The folk name "mermaid's purse" marks these out as enchanted objects' (2012, 23). She also points out that 'enchantment has its darker side — an alternative name is "devil's purse."' The mermaid connection was pleasing, as it ticked an item on the list of Qabalistic correspondences I had brought along (on an official-looking clipboard). Also the research site destination was called Devil's Hole. Synchronicity seemed to be kicking in as we moved beyond the ambit of the authority-sanctioned artzone, as if we were getting back onto some kind of elusive psychogeography ley lines or reaching the moment when the 'surface of the landscape around you is about to give way to the sinkholes of id' (Smith 2014, 32).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Walking Inside Out by Tina Richardson. Copyright © 2015 Tina Richardson. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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