MA Week 46 - Mini Mabgate psychogeography, the End of Year show, and more reading

Reflection on the past week, 8^th November 2016

 

Still nothing visual to share, but I have been doing something a bit more interesting this week.

A mini wander

On Friday afternoon I finally got to visit the End of Year show of the graduating cohort. I had an unexpected mini-urban-wandering around the area too. The first thing was that I managed to get some images of the semi-demolished British Gas offices off Regent Street. Some definite fodder for visual work there –nice rectangular shapes coupled with the bleakness and strangeness of the still-standing skeleton. I couldn’t get near the building (and wasn’t for leaping over the 10 foot fences) but I could get the camera lens through a gap. I’m thinking of possibly some charcoal sketches but no doubt it will end up in a print at some point.

 

Dereliction. No doubt to be followed by gentrification.

Wandering up then towards the studio on Mabgate, I was a bit circumspect as it’s not the most salubrious part of Leeds. My eye was taken by an unexpected iron bridge over a beck. The most unusual thing was that there was a building over it, and the beck flows in a culvert underneath. I felt into conversation with an interested and interesting man who works out of that building. He told me it was in constant danger of collapse into the beck! He also told me that the area wasn’t very good, with drug addicts around on a night, but that it is being gentrified. “The town is coming this way”, he said, referring to the new Victoria Gate over the other side of the urban motorway flyover. He pointed out a building that will soon be converted to apartments. Whether or not this is true, I’ve not checked, but there seems no reason to disbelieve him. So gentrification makes its way out West. It was interesting, therefore, to find this Guardian article a couple of days later. If what the bloke said is true, there is at least something correct in what is otherwise an error-laden article.

 

Building, beck and bridge shadow

 

I also found a disused foundry, Hope Foundry, which now evidently houses a music charity. Such a fascinating building, but I didn’t have time to loiter. The City of Mabgate pub, with its sage green faience tiles, is now closed, but later a colleague told me she used to go to lock-ins there. The tiles reminded me of the ones on the Albion pub in Armley. I guess they are from the same time. So many stories, so little time… and yet all brought to the surface by the same psychogeographical approach of connecting with the environment and its people.

 

The City of Mabgate, as was

The End of Year show

I had to press on to the exhibition itself as I was already running behind for the day. I was disappointed that I couldn’t make the opening night, but in a way it was probably better for me to be able to see the artwork without dozens of people around. I thought it had been curated really well, with a kind of band of colour running left to right across the middle of the room. My erstwhile fellow students, John and Lorna, were invigilating that day and we talked about how a lot of their work was monochrome, as was ours in the work in progress exhibition in June.

MA Creative Practice Show 2016, Studio 24, Mabgate

 

It was fascinating to see how their work had developed. I remembered Lorna talking about pieces of paper discarded from archives, and she had worked up a piece based on stitch, discarded paper clips, wood and metal. It formed an installation in its own right and spoke clearly of the past, memory, the unwanted, the discarded – all repurposed and given shape, form and importance again as an art piece.  John’s work involved a lot of layering and printing into acrylic medium, which is much closer to my own practice than Lorna, but which also refers to memory and representation. I was particularly interested in some transfer prints of very abstract, mainly black photographs onto found paper, board and plaster. There was a lovely layering, a sense of decay and temporality. It has started to form ideas in my head of not only testing out paper when I get printing again, but other substrates.

 

The exhibition showed the work of 11 artists and it seemed to hang together harmoniously despite very different styles and subject matter. Some of the pieces were colourful and based around graphics; others more muted and based around memory and experience. The venue suited the pieces better than I’d expected. It’s one of the old buildings in Mabgate that has been partly boarded out to form an exhibition and event space. So there are plenty of areas of bare, peeling wall, and part-hidden floor tiles, alongside the white gallery space and the tiny, homely café bar in the corner. It was a real palimpsest of a place, wearing both its history and its current use concurrently and very well indeed.  I don’t know what will happen with our end of year show – there are rumours that it will be in the college – but this place was different, something away from the endlessly white walls. It did open a new perspective on the idea of the exhibition space contributing to the exhibition (which it did in this case – I suppose the wrong choice would subtract from the exhibition).

Quite bizarrely, one of my Access tutors then turned up, and it turns out he runs the place with two other people! It was great to catch up with him and to hear how they are making a success of the place. He reassured me that the area wasn’t too bad and that you had to hang out there to catch its… rhythm? Atmosphere? I’m not sure which word I’m looking for. Again there was that idea of the connection with place, becoming part of place, which keeps cropping up again and again as I read about psychogeography.

I was reluctant to leave as I’d really enjoyed this little window into another world, seeing friends’ final pieces, and meeting up with old acquaintances again. But the dissertation waits for no man (or woman), and I discuss this week’s progress (or otherwise) below.

Dissertation progress

I had a really useful and insightful tutorial on Thursday, in which Sharon pointed out some holes I knew were there and some I didn’t! It was really useful to get another viewpoint on it and she kindly took the time to comment in some detail. Basically it is going along the right lines, but there are some places where I have edited too much out of it, particularly about nostalgia, identity and Northernness. Sharon also gave me a couple of references, one of which I’ve looked at, and which should be useful.

To get back into the idea of nostalgia, I read a paper called “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography” by Alastair Bonnett (2009). It seeks to compare and contrast “the use of the past to critique industrial modernity”  and the “suppression of nostalgia” (p45). I’ve discussed this in more detail here. There is some useful information, and some useful quotes, in here. There is more reading to do, especially around Northernness and around the everyday. I feel that I need to read selectively – I know now where the gaps are, and I need to fill them – but I find it difficult as everything is so interesting and new.

I think a large part of the problem I’m finding is that I am pulling elements of theory from so many different places. Heritage theory and identity theory are only the start points, and psychogeography is so big and so interesting. On top of this is this idea of everyday theory, then there’s the use of and attachment to place, and memory/re-memory. Within 8000 words I can barely scratch the surface.

One other thing that came out of the tutorial was a discussion about influential and relevant artists for me whom I had discovered via Twitter rather than the white walls of the gallery. Sharon suggested that this may be another manifestation of needing to tell a narrative in a different way, with social media almost acting as another means of distributing information vs the “official” of the gallery. It is probably too early to judge whether social media will ever be mainstream enough to be able to cite in an academic paper, but there is no doubt that it is an important source of information and inspiration for me. I do have a concern, though, that it is experience at arms’ length; seeing images on a smartphone can never get near to seeing the complexity of a piece of work in real life. It was really good to be able to get out and visit the End of Year show as it seems an age since I’ve visited a real life gallery, so perhaps that is a strand of research I will be able to pick up on once the dissertation is finished.

MA Week 46 - Psychogeography readings (3)

 “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography”

by Alastair Bonnett (2009).

 
This paper seeks to compare and contrast “the use of the past to critique industrial modernity”  and the “suppression of nostalgia” (p45). He explains that radical politics of either side doesn’t like nostalgia as it stands in the way of progress, and he links psychogeography with trying to understand the past; radicalism moves on, but psychogeography is of itself avant garde so it seizes on what’s not in fashion, i.e. nostalgia.

This is all interesting but not directly related to what I’m doing. Of more interest is that it gave quite a lot of useful information about Iain Sinclair and his influence causing British psychogeography to become nostalgic, which Richardson had mentioned; in the mid-1990s psychogeography had a “quixotic, love-hate relationship with the past” (p47). I think we all probably do, to be honest.  Bonnett also pinpoints the feelings of loss for place as society moves on and the everyday space changes: “within avant-garde praxis, it was at the level of everyday space, especially of the changing urban scene, that we find nostalgia most forcefully asserted”(p52). This is much more pertinent for me as I try to find traces of my heritage and identity within various places around Leeds. There is a definite sense of nostalgia, and possibly psychogeography has (is?) more concerned with nostalgia and the past than I had thought; I had found it to be more about connecting with the environment and allowing open-ness to new experience. But perhaps the fact that you are walking in a place that many people have walked before you means you are just part of an ongoing palimpsest of passersby.

Tellingly, Bonnett states that “Contemporary British psychogeography may be viewed as a creative space in which feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated”. This can be extrapolated to mean a physical space or a mental space (“headspace”), and possibly other types of space I haven’t thought of yet. But it is very much a creative space, a thinking space, a linking/connecting space. The visual outcomes that I’ve been producing for the past 9 months all depend on psychogeography of some kind, whether through an actual wandering or an item of interest seen on a car journey.

Bonnett also touches upon the idea of the power structures which bind us and whose disruption fuelled the original derive. These are easily forgotten as the walker takes the urban wandering with their own viewpoints, but if we stand back they too can reveal something of the hidden. One thing I never commented on during the seminal Armley walk was the fact that some workmen (they all seemed to be men) were building the new Bradford – Leeds cycle superhighway on Armley Road. Quite why we need to spend so much money and disruption on this (bus stops removed, 10 passengers waiting in the rain, whilst one cyclist goes past once in a while) is not for me to answer, but the answer must lie in some political power construct somewhere.

Possibly the most pertinent statement comes in Bonnett’s conclusion; “attachments to the past and feelings of loss becomes sites of repression and potent resources for resistance and technique”(p63). I believe he speaks here to (at least part of) what I am trying to do; to critique and resist the loss caused by the deindustrialisation of Yorkshire.

 

MA Week 43 - Psychogeography Readings (2)

Psychogeography readings (2)

Tina Richardson’s chapter A Wander through the scene of British Urban Walking in the book she edited, Walking Inside Out : Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015) gives a good overview of the current stated of psychogeography. I’ve summarised below a few key points.

Richardson quotes Situationist International member Abdelhafid Khatib’s definition of the dérive: “At the same time as being a form of action, it is a means of knowledge”. She further clarifies that the dérive cannot be just a stroll and that the wanderer must be conscious of the environment. Psychogeography concerns itself with crossing boundaries, whether logical or physical (p2). This is certainly something I’ve experienced in my own wanderings.

 

Richardson is very inclusive in her discussion of the urban walk, and certainly does not equate it only to the SI dérive. She considers that numerous factors are at play; the walker, the place, the method. Neither is she precious about the style of the outcomes, citing zines, blogs and academic papers as equally valid outputs. The walk necessarily causes a subjective and individual response. She encourages readers to define their own form of psychogeography if they wish or need to do so. (p3-5), urging the reader to name their own approach and formulate it into a more clearly defined methodology (p18). She suggests (p13) that “artists (both performance and visual), while not always describing themselves as psychogeographers, might call themselves ‘walking artists’.” Possibly the idea of walking as a way of challenging the traditional boundaries of art? It has certainly felt that I have pushed my practice forward through urban wandering.

Interesting is her mention of Iain Sinclair, a contemporary British psychogeographer who often takes a nostalgic view, and whose influence has led to British psychogeography taking a nostalgic bent. The nostalgia has a danger of leading to a type of repurposing the past, of revealing or perhaps inventing forgotten characters, a rose-tinted longing for a time that never really existed in the way that it’s presented. This I interpret as a veiled criticism of viewing history “at a distance”. (p10).However, the nostalgia connection is interesting as it also occurs in Harrison’s discussion of heritage (see this Week 16 blogpost). Richardson here comments on a connection that I’d already made by my own wanderings, namely that of  heritage and psychogeography.

She demands (p18) “if a psychogeographer is not revealing the hidden topographical layers of social history or questioning the physical manifestation of some capitalist edifice or other, is psychogeography actually taking place?” - good question. My wanderings revealed some layers of social history to me, at least, and in turn I tried to depict these visually for other people to view and critique. I suppose there was also some anger at the capitalist destruction of industry too.  So I must be doing psychogeography….?