Unit 4 essay | mysite-1

Unit 4 4000 word essay

Green Wall : 3

March 8th

It was a very blowy beginning of March sort of day, though some people were eating lunch on benches by the river. Like viewing a film, I watched as a couple rowed along in an open canoe, blown about on the river which was windy and full,at high

tide, and moored alongside the recently cleared section of the Phoenix site, actually probably at the very site of the original wharf which was used to transport pig iron etc up river when the Ouse was a busy navigable channel, hence the many riverside industries. They tied up, nimbly hopped out and then toured the demolition site, taking photos, all of five minutes, then they were quickly in their boat again and casting off.

How can our understanding of concepts of space and place, elucidate the politics of land use, in relation to a particular site in my local town. How can this, then, help to open up the space, so to speak, for a wider understanding of the concepts of multiplicity and transversality , believed necessary to comprehend better our posthuman world, according to Braidotti, (Posthuman knowledge, 2019). Through a description of my investigations, including local history, physical walking on site, and reading across various disciplines, I have begun to see that my questions about why I have been drawn to study a particular place, a ruined place, might lead to further questions about the definitions, and political implications, of place as ‘local’ and space as ‘global’, together with the ecological crisis regarding land and land use. Alongside this, I have had a continuing fascination with the decentred subject in art, in relation to land art, off-site and on-site, installations and happenings, and other aspects of art in the expanded field, together with “activated spectatorship as political in implication”. (Bishop. .2005. p 13)

My feelings, wandering among abandoned, marginal spaces, are a kind of relishing, an enjoyment, of being and becoming (in an ‘animal’ sense according to Guattari and Deleuze), the ‘ruins’ that I am investigating, are dominated by a sense of alterity, a non-conformity, which being in these spaces offers, a place to hide, a space to ‘dream’, a creative space, outside the quotidian.

However, something about this ‘ruinlust’ and wandering in abandoned edgelands sits uneasily with me and the work of artists inspired by them, for example George Shaw, appear like flat, surface representations, snapshots, from a fixed viewpoint, and human centred .

The work of the artist and writer, Oldfield-Ford, is, to me, embedded with a kind of ‘hauntology’ - defined by Derrida in 1993, Spectres of Marx, that our present is populated or haunted by ghosts of our lost futures, events that failed to happen and explained more recently by Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 2014, - has a sensation of nostalgia, a held-in-time quality, (she quotes Jameson : “the project is an ongoing mapping of ruptures like the London riots, the breaks in the flattened time of a “continuous present”, Studio International 9/2 2017 ). Some artists engage with particular urban communities, in consciously different ways, for example Verity-Jane Keefe, literally takes her artwork to the site with a Mobile Museum, and focuses on the relationships she builds between people and a lived-in place.

The poetic prose of Farley and Symmons Roberts in their ode to the wastelands, evokes familiar, marginal spaces, populated by ‘boys’ building dens and swinging over abandoned ponds and quarries; yet somehow for me it fails to evoke a meaningful sense of place and to bring to life the ghosts of the Edgelands (2012). And it is a lack that is present in the anonymity of Edensor’s black and white, undated, photographs of nameless factories (industrial Ruins : Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality. 2005)and ,also, though they are beautiful and evocative, the serial industrial images of Hilla and Bernd Becher, with their lack of much social-historical information. Intensely moving though, are the photos of abandoned Pripyat, near Chernobyl, by the Wilsons, made during a visit there in 2010, an abandoned school room, a hurridly left kitchen, hospital beds, all at one particular time, within the context of the hasty evacuation, the empty spaces.

Back to the Edgelands, the ‘boy’ on the swing image chimes with the modernist motif of the artist as a lonely individual, often troubled and wandering in liminal spaces. Suzi Gablik, looks beyond the individualism of modernism, to an aesthetics of connectivity, here described by Rendell : “The kind of art rooted in a ‘listening’ self suggested for Gablik a flow-through experience that was not limited by the self but extended into the community through modes of reciprocal empathy… where one listens to and includes other voices.” (Rendell.2006. 150). A decentring happens when art is taken off the wall, out of the gallery, and into different places, places that can represent alterity and eventfulness, and have varied meanings. The viewer can have multiple view points, is more aware of their body in space, in relations to others, similar to the sensations of being within a derelict space, a flat representation fails to present the multiple, human and non-human viewpoints.

Gablik, also, emphasises the lack of connection with the earth, the land, and the damage done by a consumer driven art-sociey, quoting Thomas Berry ‘referring to the damage done to our air and water, and soil and to severely damage all our basic life systems under the illusion that this was progress.’”(Gablik. p 81)

Back in Lewes, it all changed considerably in 1971, when the Phoenix Causeway was built and cut through this whole riverside industrial area, and also cut across the recently disused railway line between Lewes and Uckfield, Beeching incidentally lived in East Grinstead, not far from Lewes. The supermarket has changed hands several times, from Safeway to now Waitrose. I approached Waitrose (John Lewis) to make drawings in the oldest part of the timber-framed warehouse, now owned by them. I climbed into the old warehouse with my daughter, early one evening. The atmosphere was incredibly changed from the noise, light and dust of the working woodyard, I had visited when it was still open. It was derelict, with discarded objects, from its time as a work place, and now as haven for skate boarders, graffiti artists and others seeking hidden sites. It was messy, sticky, and with the introduction of different elements of discarded rubbish, plants, and huge numbers of pigeons roosting, had become a hybrid sort of place.

In February this year, I went into the new demolition site by the river, on Phoenix Way; I stood on the recently cleared remains of most of the run down industrial buildings, including part of the original iron works, and looked across the river to Tesco with a beautiful view of the south Downs beyond : prime riverside land, which makes it clear why this is such a contested, valuable site, with small industries being swept aside to make way for new homes. People who work in this town will not be able to afford to buy the new houses. There is no new social housing being built, just an estate of luxury riverside houses, with a very small percentage of ‘affordable’ homes. Our economy has relied on income generated by the increased value of our land since Thatcher’s right to buy legislation in 1980. Now there are just 2 million council houses compared to 6.5 million in 1980. (Shrubsole. 2019. 35) These issues are happening worldwide; whole postcodes of our cities have become a no go area for most people, too expensive, enclaves for the very wealthy, I spoke to a Greek Phd student last year about his research on a gated community in Kolkata, India, which was built on the site of an old factory with a long history, and the cases of crime that have risen in this gated community, because of the displacement of the original communities affiliated with the factory. It all felt very interconnected, and we talked about the loss of communities that occur as a result of these sort of developments. This is referenced by Anna Minton (Ground Control 2009), and relates to recent ‘back door’ developments in London, and segregated play areas in new housing developments.

This is to do with home, but it equally affects our work places. The two are inextricably linked. Our work patterns have changed and will do even more in the future. Greater numbers work in the zero hour economy. I work in a restaurant at a local cinema with mostly young people, still living with parents. Working full time at a job like waitressing you would not be able to afford the rents in Lewes and support yourself. A Polish couple ,working there full time, barely make enough money to live, pay rent on a room in a shared house, and send money to family in Poland. There will only be fewer jobs in the future, because of automation, such as robots to pick strawberries, unless something changes. Plans for a universal income would go one way to help this, I believe. “It would be a pathway to a different kind of economy. But for both left and right it would challenge the last vestiges of what Gorz called the “utopia based on work” which has sustained us for two centuries, but may no longer”. Paul Mason, Guardian, 2015.

I had planned to make lots of on site drawings in Lewes and find ways to paint, specifically, to represent the state of decay, the messiness of what was left. And to explore the history of the communities and the legacy of post industrialisation, and subsequent new work places. However, my landscape had changed, my internal landscape had altered after the sudden death of my sister in May 2017, and also the exterior one of the site, was very different to how it had been. My process evolved into one of wandering, meandering through the site, collecting bits and pieces, It became in part a journey of grief, my preoccupation with ruins, echoes, remnants and traces became also a metaphor for how we find ways to preserve and remember, people and places.

At the same time also, as a family we searched for reminders of my sister, amassing large numbers of photographs as reminders of her. Barthes, on photography, and his grief for his mother, became even more poignant. Also, I had an image that recurred in my mind of a folded up photo, carried around with you at all times, in a pocket, or bag, somewhere close to you, which changes and decays over time, showing the creases and fading; and this turned up in my practice. A notion of a talisman, a relic. An action of finding and unfolding traces of something lost.

My wanderings/walks documented with bits of writing and photos, allowed for chance, random encounters and I let this become the basis of my research method, creating an archive of sorts, collections of ‘findings’. To me this open, aimless, being-in-the-place feeling, with a reliance on chance and disruption in the form of random encounters, is as important as a more predictive, scientific list of aims and objectives. Lucy Lippard : “my methodology is simple and experiential : one thing leads to another, as in life”. (Lippard. 2013. p 5). Some examples of encounters : I met one of the Phoenix Rising people at work and would get regular updates on my shifts there. I met a homeless man under a tree and chatted about how the council were trying to rehome him miles from where he had grown up in the immediate countryside around Lewes. On talking to a man outside his van/home who was carefully cleaning off a piece of carved wood, I discovered the carving was originally mine, bought when I lived in Norwich in 1989, I gave it to my son, who consequently left it in one of the warehouses on this site a few years ago. We are all part of a living kind of constellation of events across this site. This local place suddenly, briefly became connected with another place, in my past.

The chance encounters also included the feelings, sensations of being in the empty spaces, the many layers of tarmac markings on the pavements on Phoenix Way, with graffiti markings, drain covers, the woodlice, the empty ruined disused work place, and also the gaps, the ghosts, the people I didn’t see or speak to. How to connect with the living things that did and still do inhabit this space/place. A sudden death of someone very close does propel you to feelings of the supernatural; where have they gone ? (Justine Picardie. If The Spirit Moves You. 2003). Ghosts and hauntings are all around in the chance meetings I have had wandering around this site. An entirely random set of encounters, often only offering traces of the people, an abandoned suitcase, the caravan door, a makeshift lean-to sheltering empty bottles and a sleeping bag.

Historical snippets presented themselves too, I met a man who remembered jumping on the black sand hills created by waste from the ironworks when he was a child, I met him walking fast and climbing walls to look at the demolition site, called Brian, in his eighties , though I could see him now, jumping nimbly over time and place. And from chatting to the author of a book on historical paintings in the Town Hall, I discovered the fact that many women were also employed at the ironworks, and their recorded accounts are available in an oral history made in 2000 with funding, available at the Sussex Records Office, at the Keep. And also that the portrait of the unknown woman in the town hall was actually Mrs Nehemiah Wimble, wife of the owner of Baxters print works who outlived all her family, and along with other widowed women in Victorian Sussex, became a woman of power and authority only once her husband died. Important businesses funded local leisure (the Pells Pond and outdoor Pool given to the town) and housing, and the feuding non-conformist chapels they belonged to. And the Phoenix Ironworks, along with supplying cast ironwork for Brighton and other piers, in other seaside towns, also cast iron grave markers, here at St Annes in Lewes, and their owners the Every family donated the Paddock recreation ground and pavilion for workers and their families.

However, all these snippets, all these different histories, converging in this particular place felt overwhelming, whose local history was this ? (and the display in the local museum showing the early iron industry, on faded brown hessian was more like a relic itself). It confirmed for me that place couldn’t be defined just as a concrete place, but that it could be many places, fluid and happening at many times : “ Place is all over the place, not just here or there, but everywhere…It is an issue of being in place differently, experiencing its eventfulness” (Casey. 1997. 337). Also, being within the space, the largely empty abandoned space, allowed me to focus on how I felt within. And Bachelard illuminates these interior spaces so beautifully : as Casey illustrates : ‘ Bachelard discerns an “intimate immensity” in the nonmaterial realm of the psyche. He lays bare an impressive array of placial phenomena that reside in the interiority of psychic life – in the ‘being of within”, (Casey. P335)

The being in a place, is a being-in-the body, it was a physical sensation. Masseys unravelling of colonialism explains how many many differences overlapped in the same place and in other places all at the same time with the use of a word, coeval, she references Fabian who defined the ‘denial of coevalness’. How also to confront the notion that I was looking at concepts of place, and the local. The concrete reality of the remains of the brick built buildings of the local ironworks, which, in its prime, produced iron castings that were used all over the world… eg. Can concepts of space share characteristics with place, and reinforce each other rather than work in opposition : “ local/global, place/space do not map on to that of concrete/abstract.” (Massey. 2005 : 184). And in relations to the technology-led understanding of globalisation reinforcing a position of information/technology as disembodied, in space : “One cannot seriously posit space as the outside of place lived, or simply equate ‘the everyday’ with the local. If we really think space relationally , then it is the sum of all our connections, and in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may go round the world.” (Massey. 2005 : 185)

A lecture by Jo Melvin, highlighted the early work of Barry Flanagan, and how it related to the history of land art in Britain, and how it evolved differently to in the US, referencing also the exhibition catalogue, Uncommon Ground, Hayward Gallery, 2013. Flanagan, in Japan in 1970, for the Tokyo bienale used whatever materials he could find locally – cardboard, wood shavings etc . Most of the famous American Land artists were men, who had money and support from patrons to make large artworks, more permanent structures. I looked at my own practice, determined by many factors : I don’t drive, I use an old shopping trolley to collect found materials and to transport art works. I don’t particularly want to accumulate lots of big pieces of unwieldy art work and I wanted to make artworks which reflected this, which also didn’t rely too much on help with particular technical processes. It needed to be light, thrifty, and also, more importantly made from materials I had found, preferably on the site I am looking at, or recycled, or repurposed, as much as possible. The research group Repair Acts, which Geographer Caitlin de Silvey, is part of, believes we need to stop looking at growth as progress, and Instead look “towards how we attend, nourish and care for the everyday, with a focus on the disconnect and the discarded, what is in ruin and broken as a means through which to reimagine what we define as growth” (Repair Acts. Led by Teresa Dillon). As part of their own declaration of aims they make reference to the artwork of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!. Realising she had little time left to make art after child care and housekeeping, she vocalised a need to readdress systems of maintenance, both in the domestic space and the public space.

Matthew Gandy’s film The Brachen of Berlin, documents the unique brachen (in German translates as fallow land) or wastelands in Berlin, - individual biotopes particular to this city after the rubble aftermath of bombing of the Second World War, the island status created by cold war, and the empty spaces left after the Wall came down; the deliberate and meaningful preservation of them and, and research by experts into their unique biodiversities. They contain traces of railways, relics of industrial buildings etc. Since the film was made, land in Berlin has become a much more valuable commodity and many of these brachen have been developed and built over. Though some do survive. I like the idea of places being wastelands for a while, leaving them fallow, then becoming something else, and then other places being allowed to decay and decline. In the UK there is often a dislike of urban nature, derelict wastelands; they are viewed as evidence of economic decline, with suggestions of people living on the margins, and ,though it is becoming more common to have wildflower planting on roadside verges, this has not yet translated to much nurturing of biodiversity, bountiful in railway sidings, and other temporarily abandoned brownfield sites, though they have been found to be the most biodiverse areas in the UK, with rich ecosystems with mosaic of habitats for rare and threatened species of wildlife and plants, and consequently biologists etc are recognising importance of maintaining them. However, because of land values rising and a constant need to expand our exisiting cities and towns, they are constantly under threat. In deep time our urban centres, completely rewilded, may be seen as nothing more than a ‘golden spike’, Davies 2015, referenced by Gandy in the Anthropocene in Cities in Deep Time (2018).

June 21st

Cleavers, ragwort, groundsel, valerian, rosebay willowherb, herb robert, speedwell, bent grass, buddleia, elder, yellow hawkweed, hawkbit,bindweed, wood sage, green alkanet, hedge woundwort, dead nettle.

On this, the longest day, I met Jo Carter, contacted through the Lewes wildflower forum, down by Green Wall to look at the ‘weeds’, that have flourished there since Gosnells moved out. Where we were standing will have a view of a car park in front of it, though providing access to a much needed new doctors surgery. At the moment the corrugated grey roof of the old soap factory building has melded with colours of landscape. How shall I record, just this conversation ? I like the idea of a conversation being a remnant remembering the vision of this bank covered in wildflower profusion over years of plastic and rubble.

Who Owns England, Shrubsole, points out the huge inequalities in who actually owns most of the land in England. His research is based on a series of maps which show, finally, who really owns most of the land. It also demonstrates how maps historically are diagrams of power and means of control and how current technology has made it possible to make available this previously hidden information. He also highlights the small groups that are trying to change things, including the Landworkers Alliance, focussed on land reform, and how our farming practices rely on large, industrialised farms practising mono culture which depletes the soil, its better to grow diverse range of crops, on smaller farms, and :

“And we can look to the nascent movement for land reform that exists in England today: the housing activists, land workers, community food growers, ramblers, cyclists, environmentalists, students, homeless charities and many others of all political stripes, who have seen that the route to a better future lies in uniting around the common issue of land.” (Shrubsole. 2019. 272)

I began to look for different ways to create traces of my walks, the experience of being within the place, a personal map-making, which became a process of making rubbings of areas of the site, and of found objects. It also seemed to satisfy the desire to make things that were akin to drawings, and also to a kind of cast of the site itself. The reverse side of paper would often get bits of stone, earth, rubbish etc, pushed into it too; all of the materials were lightweight, easily folded up, and cheap, and mostly recycled. Kneeling down on bits of wasteland, stones, rubble, plants, and undidentifiable mess, also felt very close to the land, to all the mixture of things it was made up of. The wastelands and then demolition sites all share similarities with building sites, and also road mending and the grafittied blue, yellow and red spray markings on the ground, safety and hazard stuff, netting, signs, and piles of raw materials, and rubble; it brings to mind Calvino’s“Thekla”, in Invisible Cities, the city endlessly under construction, like all our big cities. The word hoarding comes from medieval word for castle security walls, Lewes castle has its own. The areas of the site that have been demolished have been cleared of this interesting ‘rubbish’ that I have been collecting. They are clean now and swept clear of detritus, with just bare bones of the foundations of buildings remaining. Somehow they are less evocative as places, with most of the traces of their former inhabitants, hybrid ghosts, their itinerant plants and other life forms dispelled. The security hoardings that are put up are so huge, so high, like a fortress, no one could climb in. Hoardings and security fences are similar structures to those built at borders, designed to keep people in and keep people out.

One day, by chance I saw a suitcase sitting by the hoardings, abandoned. Rubble bags and sand bags, are all made of a similar plastic to tarpaulin and rubble bags, they are seen everywhere, like hazard tape. The plastic remains are seen by all of us all the time, a ubiquitous remmant of the constant demolition and rebuilding process. Sandbags, used in wartime, and ubiquitous to building sites and road works, were originally made of hessian. Hessian is made of jute and used as it is waterproof, named after fabric used as Second World War German soldiers’ uniform, in the state of Hesse, known as Hessians.

For me a way forward, is a practice of interdisciplinary exploration. Transversality as way forward, to engage with others in an open way, there are so many knowledge centres now outside normal academic universities. (ref Braidotti Posthuman World 2019) In terms of art practice, we can be economic and thrifty, reusing, repurposing, engaged with techniques that are ephemeral, durational, above all engaged and crossing disciplines, working with geographers, scientists , and as artists we have much to bring to the discussions, a way of looking and an intensely open ended way of gazing, moving through time, feeling in the body.

Rebecca Chesney is an artist who looks at small details of the non-human and how it interacts with the land and our interventions; Rebecca Chesney : “I am interested in how we perceive land : how we romantise, translate and define urban and rural spaces.” (Chesney 2018). She dissolves boundaries between science and folklore in her investigations into the impacts of human activities on landscape.

Life is small, human lives are brief, a life of a building and its contents can be brief. The artist and activist Ravi Agarwal talks of an urgency and uses poetry and myth to tell narratives to take us through these times. We need the river, the earth, the sky, the paths, to help navigate and tell stories, to be intensely aware of the non-human, to create images of time passing, at different speeds in different places. We also need to preserve traces and absences, the spaces in between, to help us understand our places.

May 14th

Two years on and we are all moving on. We lay on the earth and all drifted off in the hot, hot sun,a memory of the burial day; how hot we were , dizzy with heat. Our global warming in your face, and sunburn. Us all part of and together in this, moving forwards. We found the fir cones left to mark the place, but it is ever shifting, belongings less imbued with significance, within us. Folded up and hung up used clothes, gathering dust but still cared for, and curated. Another moving on, a letting go. Less need to hold and keep, a more expansive feeling.

Sara Grisewood

July 2019

Bibliography

Agarwal, Ravi

Bachelard, Gaston

Bishop, Claire. Lecture : Art History Association , Brighton University, 2019.

Braidotti, Rosi. Lecture : Our Post-Human future, Harvard, 2019. Youtube.

Brent, Colin Pre-Georgian Lewes

Chesney, Rebecca

Casey, Edward

De Silvey, Caitlin.

Dillard, Annie

Farley, Paul

Gablik, Suzi

Gandy, Matthew. Website :matthewgandy.org

Jack, Ian. Guardian.

Hell, Julia, Schonle, Andreas. 2010. Ruins of Modernity. Duke University Press.

Landworkers Alliance, website : landworkersalliance.org.uk

Lippard, Lucy. 2014. Undermining. A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West.The New Press.

Liptrot, Amy. 2016. The Outrun. Canongate

Mah, Alice. 2012 Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place. University of Toronto Press.

Mason, Paul.2016 Postcapitalism, A Guide to our Future. Penguin

Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. Sage.

Melvin, Jo. 2011. Barry Flanagan. Early Works. Tate publishing

Minton, Anna. New ed. 2012. Ground Control. Penguin

Palmer, Katrina. 2015. End Matter. Artangel and Book Works.

Repair Acts, website : repairacts.net

Rendell, Jane. Art and Architecture.

Sebald, W G. Rings of Saturn

Shrubsole, Guy

Solnit, Rebecca

Truitt, Anne

Sleeman, Joy. Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966-1979

References

Bachelard, Gaston. (1958) .2014. The Poetics of Space. Penguin Books

Bishop, Claire. 2011. Installation Art. 2005. Tate Publishing

Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Polity Press.

Calvino, Italo. 1997. Invisible Cities. Vintage. First published 1972. Einaudi. Italy. As Le Citta Invisibili.

Casey, Edward. S. (1997) 1998. The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History. University of California Press.

Farley, Paul and Symmons Roberts. 2012. Edgelands. Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. Vintage.

Gablik, Suzi. 1992. The Reenchantment of Art. Thames & Hudson. London.

Gandy, Matthew. Film. 2017. Natura Urbana : The Brachen of Berlin.

Lippard, Lucy. 2014. Undermining. A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West.The New Press.

Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. Sage.

Mason, Paul. 2016. Postcapitalism. A guide to our future. Penguin.

Minton, Anna. (2009) 2012. Ground Control. Fear and happiness in the twenty-first century. With new chapter on the true Olympic legacy. Penguin.

Palmer, Katrina. 2015. End Matter. Artangel and Book Works.

Rendell, Jane. 2006. Art and Architecture. A Place Between. I.B.Tauris.

Shrubsole, Guy. 2019. Who Owns England ?How we lost our green and pleasant land and how to take it back. William Collins. London.

list of images

Jane and Louise Wilson, Untitled (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) 2010 © the artists. Courtesy 303 Gallery and Helga de Alvear Gallery.

Pells pool 1967

Phoenix Way Lewes

Ukeles, 1973, Washing tracks outside.

interior of disused Wenban woodyard, winter 2018