Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: english section of the situationist international, internationale situationniste, not bored, SI, the revolution of modern art and the modern art of revolution, tim clarke, TJ Clark, vaneigem
‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ is the only substantial document produced by the short-lived English Section of the Situationist International. Chronos, who first published the document as a pamphlet in 1994, report that the essay was produced in 1967 for the first issue of an English Situationist journal, although the English Section’s expulsion on December 21st meant that the essay long went unpublished. The group was composed of Charles Radcliffe, Tim Clarke, Christopher Gray and Donald Nicholson-Smith, and whilst Radcliffe had already resigned for personal reasons, the latter three’s expulsion was due to their allegedly having sided with the American Ben Morea (of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker) in a dispute with Raoul Vaneigem, as reported in Internationale Situationniste 12 (September 1969). Although Ralph Rumney and Alexander Trocchi had both previously been members of the SI, Radcliffe, Clarke, Gray and Nicholson-Smith represent the SI’s only recognised English Section.
As Not Bored note, the ‘Revolution of Modern Art’ essay displays a curious time-lag in its sole citation of the SI, using a quotation from the first Internationale Situationniste, which had been published nine years previously, in 1958. Rather than this lag being due to the unavailability of translations of Situationist work, or to ‘the relative “immaturity” of the English situationists’ theoretical development’ (the quoted passage is taken from the SI’s earliest self-pronouncements, whose tight focus had dispersed into much broader concerns by 1967), Not Bored propose that the English situationists were producing ‘an intentional distancing’ between themselves and the SI as it then existed, ‘because they [the English section] weren’t ever really committed to being members of any type of official organization’. Not Bored are surprisingly approving of the post-SI trajectories of the English situationists, who ‘were and are still deeply committed to the dissemination of situationist theory and to the undertaking of the situationist project by as many autonomous people as possible’. This commendation stands in stark contrast to Chronos’s blurb, which accuses the English situationists of ‘a certain amount of vulgarisation’, before individually denouncing Gray, Clark, Radcliffe and Nicholson-Smith.
‘The Revolution of Modern Art’ attempts four things: to recapitulate (or introduce) the central tenets of Situationist theory, presumably to a British audience underexposed to the movement; to denounce the contemporary Left; to call attention to a selection of situationist theses most relevant to Britain, with particular consideration of the potentially revolutionary role of the lumpenproletariat; and to more generally reconfigure what should be the concerns and praxis of a modern revolutionary movement.
The essay does not introduce the SI as such, only aspects of its theory as articulated at its moment of inception. The English situationists are thus most concerned with ideas of play, of rewriting urban space, of the game, and of the necessity of a ludic revolution: ‘Life is revealed as a war between the commodity and the ludic’. They criticise the New Left’s failure to recognise that a critique of capitalism must incorporate a willingness to invent new ways of living. On art, the English situationists recount familiar lessons of the irretrievable recuperation of the artwork as aesthetic object, and offer a narrative of the historical avant-garde as a descent into nihilism.
The most interesting developments – or divergences – made by the English situationists are those borne of their attempts to anglicise situationist theory. Most of this anglicisation addresses very directly a particular period of the British Sixties counterculture. So, the essay is dismissive of the beatnik/hippy scene’s retreat to mysticism: ‘Without the drugs it could be explosive’. Antonioni, Ionesco, and Robbe-Grillet, as well as Leary, Warhol and Burroughs, are all said to ‘re-enact a Dadaist revulsion from contemporary life – but their revolt, such as it is, is purely passive, theatrical and aesthetic, shorn of any of the passionate fury, horror or desperation which would lead to a really destructive praxis’. In their attack on Ionesco, Leary and Burroughs in particular, the English situationists were attacking ex-situationist Alexander Trocchi’s generation of avant-gardist cultural activity, demonstrating that the development of English situationism was not linear. The English Section were not taking over from Trocchi’s situationist-inflected ‘project sigma’, but developing tangentially with a very different interpretation of the original Continental theory.
An overarching concern of the English Section is locating the site of the most promising avant-gardist activity within spectacular-commodity society. Theirs is a world of social distinctions, between and within the intelligentsia, the proletariat, the artists, the counterculture, and so on. Regarding the intelligentsia, the English situationists draw a line between the majority which has ‘quite crudely, sold out’, and ‘its truly dissident and imaginative elements’ which have withdrawn increasingly from production and collaboration ‘to become indistinguishable from the rest of the new lumpenproletariat in their open contempt and derision for the “values” of consumer society’.
The question of the lumpenproletariat is critical for the English Section. Not Bored explain that, ‘In the “lumpen” the English situationists include rioters, juvenile delinquents, petty criminals, thrill seekers, shoplifters, members of such organized groups as the Provos and the Hell’s Angels, and working-class subcultural groups as the Mod and the Rockers’. In what Chronos call their ‘crass eulogy of the violence of juvenile delinquents’, we can assume that the English situationists were drawing from Morea’s Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker group and their self-identification as a ‘street gang with analysis’, although the notion of politicising delinquent violence was also explored in Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life and the ’66 pamphlet ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’. King Mob, the incarnation of the English Section after its expulsion from the SI, practiced more immediately the combination of situationist critique with hooligan aesthetics.
‘The Revolution of Modern Art’ makes the claim that ‘the juvenile delinquents… are the true inheritors of Dada’. As a ‘spontaneous rebuttal’ of capitalist prerogatives and a ‘grass-root refusal of hierarchically organised distribution’, shoplifting is rather spuriously cast as something that Michel de Certeau would later call a tactic: resistance from within, an everyday gesture of noncompliance. At present, we are told, such gestures are limited, again leading only to nihilism. Deliquent violence, then,
Is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the deliquents’ inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic.
The English Section advocate that the aforementioned ‘rebel intelligentsia’ should operate within the lumpenproletariat, to harness the latter’s energies whilst precipitating its crisis, which will prefigure a revolutionary scenario. Again, the English situationists display close concerns with Vaneigem, who wrote: ‘Nihilists, as de Sade would have said, one more effort if you want to be revolutionaries!’ Not Bored highlight a difference here between the anglicised situationist theory and its continental forebear:
For the continental SI, the goal was to negate the separation between the intelligentsia (which includes the art world and the student milieu) and the proletariat; but for the English situationists, the goal was to negate the separation between the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat.
This tension between lumpen and prole (a distinction, I suspect, founded more in caricature than any sort of research) is what Not Bored also recognise as the driving force of punk, whose origins have previously been traced through the English Section of the SI, and especially Chris Gray’s desire to produce ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.
This type of street fighting logic, often cartoonish and caricatured, which arms the lumpenproletariat with situationist theory, has coloured much of the development of English situationist practice: from King Mob’s street gang posturing (later renounced by Dave and Stuart Wise as a ‘hysterical over emphasis of violence’); to Stewart Home’s early fiction, with its skinheads and bootboys; right through to Laura Oldfield Ford’s aesthetic of Special Brew and ultraviolence. Even in France, The Coming Insurrection echoes this glorification of delinquent violence in finding its promise of future revolt in the banlieu riots. At a later date, I hope to investigate these motifs as they continue beyond the English Section into King Mob.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Aberdeen, aesthetics and politics, Black Mask, Charles Fourier, detournement, Guy Debord, Jorgen Nash, king mob, Marquis de Sade, Oz, Recuperation, Rethinking Complicity and Resistance, Roland Barthes, situationist, situationist international, Spur, Tom Vague, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker
Below: my paper from the fantastic ‘Rethinking Complicity and Resistance’ conference at Aberdeen last weekend (abstract).
‘The existing images only reinforce the existing lies’: The Situationist International in and against visuality.
Still from ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ (1978)
‘The existing images only reinforce the existing lies’.
This statement, from the voiceover of Guy Debord’s 1978 film, ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’, is striking not only for its absolute denial of the radical or emancipatory potential of the image, but also for its melancholy, its despondency. Though we might imagine that Debord was ruminating on his failure to discover a visual language that could destabilise what he had identified as the spectacular order of modern capitalism – the society of the spectacle – he had actually shown signs of having lost faith in the image as early as 1952, when his first film, ‘Howls in Favour of Sade’, had consisted of a black screen with no accompanying sound, interspersed periodically with nothing more than a white screen and some fragmented voiceover. ‘Howls…’ contained nothing of the visceral Sadeian exuberance suggested by its title and in its imagelessness it discarded the fundamental unit of the cinema. By contrast, ‘In Girum…’ was far less absolute, far less cynical. (more…)
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I would thoroughly recommend anyone living in London to go see the Gustav Metzger exhibition currently being held at the Serpentine gallery. I would try to say something clever about auto-destructive art and so on, but I’m tired so fuck it, I’ll just point you towards Stewart Home instead.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: english section of the situationist international, Occupation, Tim Clark, TJ Clark, UC Santa Cruz
My name is Timothy Clark. I came to Berkeley in 1988, and the 21 years I have taught and researched here have been in many ways the most rewarding of my life. Therefore my feelings are painfully contradictory, you can imagine, as I look out at these old and new friends. It is an honor and a privilege to make the first speech on this occasion, but at the same time a tragedy. (more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Aberdeen, Rethinking Complicity and Resistance, situationist international
Just found out that I will be speaking at this conference, which is rather exciting. I think Aberdeen may well be the furthest north I have ever been. Anway, below is my abstract, I’ll post the full paper after the event, although I need to write it first.
‘The existing images only reinforce the existing lies’: The Situationist International in and against visuality.
The Situationist International (SI) introduced two key concepts to the study of the relationship between visual arts and politics: spectacle and détournement. These terms can be mapped onto Walter Benjamin’s distinction between aestheticised politics and politicised aesthetics: the spectacle as the mediation of social and political life via images, and détournement as a tactic of cultural resistance that turns the spectacle’s visual productions against themselves. Yet the paradox of détournement is that every gesture of resistance is accompanied by a latent complicity; thus, the SI identified recuperation as the spectacle’s reciprocal absorption of oppositional or radical voices. The vortex of détournement-recuperation – the instability of visual meaning within the spectacle – would lead the SI to renounce visual production, and concede that the image had lost its potential for resistance.
This paper explores the denigration of vision within the SI’s political-aesthetic program, read against the SI’s inability to engage productively with contemporary discourses of sexual revolution. Sexual politics remain a conspicuous absence within the SI’s professedly comprehensive critique of consumer capitalism. Though this paper does not speak of sex as such, it uses posters and images produced by the SI to demonstrate the proximity between resistance and complicity, and the shortcomings of an aesthetic program organised entirely around negation.
The paper moves on to consider the legacy of the SI via ‘pro-situ’ groups like Black Mask (US) and King Mob (UK), whose attempts to move beyond the spectacle necessitated a movement beyond the SI itself.
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Finding this online collection of the Nation of Ulysses’ self-produced zine, ‘Ulysses Speaks’, has reminded me how fucking great Nation of Ulysses were!
And, as far as I can tell, Ian Svenonius will be playing with Publicist very near my house in a couple of weeks. Whilst we’re on the matter, can anyone out there recommend The Psychic Soviet? I’m curious as to how well Svenonius’ schtick translates to the written word.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adbusters, Alexander Trocchi, Crimethinc, Giorgio Agamben, Glenn Beck, Guy Debord, Invisible Committee, project sigma, SOciety of the Spectacle, Tarnac 9, The Coming Insurrection
A little late, as always, I’ve recently finished The Coming Insurrection. This is the text that the French Interior Minister has called a ‘manual for terrorism’ and whose authors, ‘the Invisible Committee’, are allegedly the Tarnac 9, allegedly responsible for the sabotage of TGV lines last year.
I shan’t really comment on the case itself, as it has received a fair amount of coverage elsewhere, not least on the ‘Support the Tarnac 9‘ blog. My general impression, following Giorgio Agamben’s article in support of the group, is that the events have revealed the paranoia, hysteria and volatility inherent to the French government’s treatment of those whom have been too-easily labelled ‘terrorist’. Certainly, The Coming Insurrection prophesies more and increased violence of the type seen recently in the Parisian banlieus and in Greece, which in these post-9/11 days practically invites immediate and excessive police repression; but the fallibility of the material situation, the weakness of the case against the Tarnac 9, which Alberto Toscano has called the ‘legal obscenity of basing arrests on a text’, all suggest that this has become a symbolic-ideological battle for the French government, blown out of proportion in order to maintain a state of fear that instantly criminalises any radically oppositional voice. ‘Pre-terrorism’ is conjured up in a manner not dissimilar to Cold War, McCarthyite vilification of any suspected ‘Reds’. As Gérard Coupat, the father of Julien Coupat of the Tarnac 9 has said, ‘They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs’.
So, to speak solely of the text itself with as little speculation as possible on the trial, the events or the figures involved, it’s worth considering the Situationist influence on The Coming Insurrection. Much media attention to the group, the Tarnac 9, has sought not to examine what they are saying or doing, but to simply cast them as the return of Baader-Meinhof or Action Directe-type ultra-left militancy. Attention to the book itself has more often made the connection with the Situationists, and particularly Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The first thing that I notice, however, is that The Coming Insurrection is much more reminiscent of Raoul Vaneigem and The Revolution of Everyday Life in its affective calls for affirmative and immediate action, rather than the dense Hegelian logic and attention to history of Debord.
The Coming Insurrection begins with a declaration of the state of play: the situation in which late capitalism has found itself, particularly in France, particularly following the Parisian banlieu riots of 2005; and the direction that opposition to modern consumer society must take. The text’s logic – if not its literary style – contains perhaps the Debordian element, characterised by Society of the Spectacle’s assertion that ‘In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false’. (For Debord this was a détournement of Hegel, of course; and The Coming Insurrection is itself loaded with détournements, including those of Debord). So, in The Coming Insurrection’s first two paragraphs, we are told that ‘the future has no future’, that ‘from left to right, it’s the same nothingness’, and that ‘it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote’. Though it doesn’t make the link so explicitly, the text essentially argues that we are living in the society of the spectacle, but the impression of vitality and the pretence of substance that Debord’s spectacle once offered has now passed. We live on the corpse of spectacular society, and deceive ourselves that it still lives and breathes.
The second concern of the first chapter (‘From whatever angle…’) is the rejection of existing modes of protest and opposition, again forecasting more of the type of unorganised, insurrectionary violence seen in 2005. An introduction, added earlier this year, adds the recent Greek riots as another sign of things to come. Such forms of protest, such outbursts of energy, constitute a negation of politics, or, perhaps, a politics of negation:
No one can honestly deny the obvious: this [2005] was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it had nothing to do with “politics”.
The new forms of invisible insurrection are the reason, we are told, for the anonymous and communal authorship of the text itself, under the name of The Invisible Committee. Although this Deleuzian emphasis on invisibility and amorphousness has attracted some criticism within anarchist circles, the author(s) deny their own authority: they say that they are mere ‘scribes of the situation,’ whose task is to simply show things as they currently exist:
It’s the privileged feature of radical circumstances that a radical application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough to say just what is before our eyes and not shrink from the conclusions.
The following seven chapters, the bulk of the text, each offer a critique of a different aspect of modern life. The chapters (or circles, ‘First Circle’, ‘Second Circle’, and so on) focus on: selfhood and subjectivity; schools and hooliganism; work and leisure; the city-country divide, and the idea of ‘the network’; the economy and a critique of zero/negative growth; the environment and a critique of eco-capitalism; the nation-state and the West.
Toscano associates the type of analysis offered here as ‘more in keeping with the recent concerns of critical French sociology than with prophecies about Homo Sacer’. The text, really, is a mish-mash of the last forty-or-so years of critical and cultural theory. There are Foucauldian tones in the discussions of the workings of power and control (instead of, say, history or capitalism) in relation to eco-capitalism, and even some notes of Adorno, formally in the aphorisms that punctuate the text, and thematically in the concerns over capitalist society’s anti-logical reversals (truth as falsity, and so on) and the relations of the part to the whole: ‘the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture’, ‘[literature] is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accommodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom’.
Another parallel with the Situationist International (SI) comes by way of The Coming Insurrection’s glorification – or at least theoretical justification – of hooliganism and rioting. More specifically, this reminds me of the British Section of the SI, and their post-SI group King Mob, who sought most actively a radicalised form of street violence by way of gangs and football thugs. However, whilst the first and second-wave Situationist critiques of gang violence and rioting was based on what Dave and Stewart Wise of King Mob would later call a ‘hysterical over emphasis of violence’, The Coming Insurrection is rather more critical. The text argues that the 2005 banlieu riots were not a moment of control being lost, of ‘dispossession’, but instead a moment when territory was (re)possessed:
People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organise, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and common enemy.
As such, in these moment of strategy analysis, the text is particularly proximate to the SI’s analysis of the 1965 Watts Riots, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Commodity Economy’, which contests the reading of that event: not as a race riot, or a class riot as such, but a revolt against the commodity. Likewise, with its Deleuzian inflections, The Coming Insurrection’s strategy analysis is reminiscent of the work of people like Eyal Weisman, who has studied the ‘military urbanism’ of the Palestinian occupation and the nomadic forms of resistance consequentially engendered.
For me, there are two areas of uncertainty in the text. Firstly, the ‘Fifth Circle’, which critiques the negative growth movement (such as the left-ecological French group La Décroissance and associated doctrines of voluntary simplicity) as capitalism’s self-reform, or eco-capitalism. However, many of the text’s accusations are sweeping and unfounded. For example, the text argues that the various slogans and exhortations to live simply and economically of the negative-groth/eco-capitalist movement will result in a regression to ‘daddy’s economy, to the golden age of the petty bourgeoisie: the ‘50s.’ Yet these claims are not substantiated, and moreover the text is itself full of anti-urban sentiments and romantic pastoralism perfectly commensurate with the idylls envisaged by the groups that the text stands itself against. (This is to say nothing of the return to nature of the Tarnac 9 themselves).
The problem, I suspect, is one of affiliation and its denial. The Coming Insurrection disapproves of nearly all organised contemporary anti-capitalism and cultural opposition, yet never clearly differentiates itself from these already existent entities. For example, the magazine Casseurs de Pub (apparently the French equivalent of Adbusters) is cast as a means of testing out the new social ties that will lead to capitalism re-establishing itself in the green-era in its own terms. Yet the text itself seems to share so much with the philosophy of Adbusters, which is partly foreboding eschatology and partly nicey-nicey, be-good-to-each-other, platitudes.
The final four chapters (‘Get Going’, ‘Find Each Other’, ‘Get Organized’, ‘Insurrection’) offer some avenues for praxis, despite the text’s earlier claim that things will happen for themselves. Adding to the Adbusters-style ethical condemnation of consumer capitalism, The Coming Insurrection occasionally reads like the poorly-digested situationist theory and individualist adventurism of Crimethinc:
Escaping this fate calls for a long and consistent apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive experiments. It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight…
We are told that we cannot wait, that we must do something, even if ‘we can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin’. We are told that we must avoid ‘all existing social milieus’, and avoid becoming one ourselves. We are told that we must form communes, but the definitions of the commune are so vague (‘The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality’) and so reluctant to offer any conceptualisation of practical organisation, that we are left in the dark as to how a commune differs from a social milieu, or (more positively) how a commune may resemble the type of council communism advocated by the SI. The text is littered with such contradictions: between inevitablism and an adventurist insistence of the necessity of immediate direct action; between ethical exhortations and this-is-so pronouncements; between individualistic action and images of new community. The SI rarely advocated practical action – and when it did, the actions were micro (détournement, dérive and so on) – so The Coming Insurrection’s uneasily alliance of a Situationist critique with anarchist direct action feels impatient and devalues much of the text’s purely theoretical content.
There are many powerful ideas in this book, though perhaps little that any reader of recent Continental theory hasn’t come across before. Those who associate this text – and, by extention, the alleged actions of the Tarnac 9 – with 60s and 70s forms of direct action are incorrect: this has been passed through a more Deleuzian, poststructuralist paradigm. As document of contemporary oppositional critical theory, the text is invaluable, bringing together many useful and disparate theoretical currents. However, its desire to move beyond theory into application is more problematic, as the theory it bases itself on is so distanced from material praxis.
I suspect that this text’s future may resemble something like British Situationist Alexander Trocchi’s sigma project, which was itself introduced by an essay entitled ‘The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds‘. Though more concerned with a cultural coup-du-monde than militancy and politics, Trocchi’s project never fully realised itself or achieved the cultural purchase it desired, because it was perpetually vague, immeasurable in its successes. The notion of ‘invisibility’, it seems, has yet to be formulated in a way poses a threat to a capitalistic order determined by the visual.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Tony Blair said that his “mission would be completed when the Labour Party learned to love [Peter] Mandelson”. Far from rejuvenating the Labour Party it seems that the legacy of Blair et al., is to destroy it – which, if the Labour Party do truly learn to love Mandelson, it surely will be destroyed.
Scintillating character attack by the ‘Prince of Ridiculousness’, Mr P Hadley, on the ‘Prince of Darkness, Mr P Mandelson over at Down With This Sort of Thing.
When Mr Hadley says, by the way, that he fell off his chair, this is not a rhetorical or metaphorical device. He almost certainly did actually fall off his chair. He doesn’t have the best relationship with gravity.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: chris petit, iain sinclair, psychogeography, Richard Long, Tate Britain, Will Self
Psychogeography, as a term, is now so bandied about that its promise of a radical revaluation of the urban environment is, if not entirely exhausted, rather drained. Increasing popular attention has distanced the concept from its radical and political roots: Will Self’s PsychoGeography column in the Independent as the becoming-banal of the term; Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s Audi advert as the concept’s cooption by the all-pervasive forces of marketing (‘The way to demonstrate the English landscape is by way of a car, rather than by train or walk’, say the producers of London Orbital, a walk around the M25 – via IT).
Beyond the City. Nonetheless, as a form of political praxis and as a means of directly engaging with social spaces, the term still contains some appeal. Paradoxically, one way of thinking beyond the current limits of psychogeography – its recuperation, its depoliticiation, and so on – may be to remove it from the urban context with which it has primarily been associated. By moving away from the overdetermination and occultism-mysticism that has come to characterise much contemporary psychogeographical practice in London at least, psychogeography as an immediate practice may be rejuvenated, by shedding some of its accumulated baggage.
A rural psychogeography may thus illuminate how psychogeographical principles can evade a logic of instrumentality and means-end rationality. Psychogeography, after all, is anything but rational. A form of psychogeography may reappear which manages to function in way that makes it completely discrepant with the reified logic of marketing or the smug of the features column.
Richard Long. The work of Richard Long – currently on exhibition at Tate Britain – provides an example of what we could take as a rural psychogeography. Long describes his work as ‘art made by walking in landscapes’. Typically, these landscapes are dramatic, expansive and usually unmarked by human development. Long’s artistic practice is, mainly, walking (perhaps there is an association to be made with the radical histories of rambling), although he regularly produces, within the landscape, some ephemeral marking of his presence, some sculpture produced by way of rearranging the landscape itself: ‘A hundred sticks placed on a beaver lodge’, a ‘whirlwind spiral’ of concentric circles marked of dust, a pirate-map X of trampled daisies.
Immaterial Production and Its Representation. With his artistic practice so transient and, essentially, so immaterial, representation is a key theme of Long’s exhibited work, not only in expressing the artistic import of simply walking, but also of finding appropriate forms to convey the different aspects of these experiences. In the following, I argue that Long’s work can be divided into three formal categories: the site-specific paintings and installations; the photos of landscapes, altered or unaltered; and the iconographic accounts of individual walks.
EARTH 2009
RICHARD LONG SCULPTURES IN TATE BRITAIN
The first category – examples of which are the first pieces you see upon entering the Tate exhibition – is the site-specific and installation work. ‘Heaven’ and ‘Earth’, for example, are based roughly upon character-symbols from the I Ching, hand-painted onto the walls of the gallery using watered-down mud from (I think) the River Avon. Likewise, one room is given to six large arrangements of rocks collected from different places, placed together on the floor in geometric shapes. I find these works less appealing than the photos, maps and lists that relate more immediately to Long’s walks. The installations and site-specific works seem like something of a concession on Long’s part to the exigencies of gallery exhibition. These works, produced specifically for the gallery-space, claim most directly their own status as artwork: the wall-painting or the installation does not necessarily require or need to make reference to the prior walk, so their productive impulse can be obscured. The walk, the psychogeographical act, is in this instance mere research, used to produce a solid and self-contained artwork, and can thereafter be jettisoned.
In the final room of the exhibition, which is itself given to displaying the various books and documents that have accompanied his exhibiting history, Long tells a video interviewer of the distinction between the out-there where his artwork happens, and the gallery space where it must be represented. The transition from out-there to gallery is what seems to determined Long’s status as an artist, rather than as a rambler.
A LINE MADE BY WALKING ENGLAND 1967
A CIRCLE IN ALASKA
BERING STRAIGHT DRIFTWOOD ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE 1977
The second category includes Long’s photographs and maps, though the latter is used less frequently than the former. In contrast to the previous category, Long’s photographs (though well-shot, dramatically-framed, attractive images in themselves etc.) bear witness to an artwork rather that offer themselves as the artwork. They act as evidence of the pile of stones, the lines of dust, the trampled flowers; and they record temporary pieces (moments?) of art that probably do not exist any longer. Sometimes, Long has not produced anything, and the photo simply documents the site of a walk. Most photographs are labelled with the basic details of the walk: ‘A four day walk on Dartmoor 2009’, ‘A seven day walk on Chokai Mountain Honshu Japan 2003’.
Earlier in Long’s career, the exhibition suggests, he took recourse to cartographic forms more regularly, which seem like the obvious form to explore for someone so interested in traversing landscapes. In 1968, for example, at the beginning of his career as an artist, Long created ‘A Ten Mile Walk, England’, which is a map of Exmoor, dissected diagonally with a ruler-straight line. The line, representing the walk, asks the question of which comes first, the impulse to walk in a perfectly straight line through the countryside, or the experiment of introducing onto a map such an inorganic feature which is no less real for its inorganicness? Introducing into a familiar form something unfamiliar is a common theme in Long’s work: maps with perfectly concentric circles or perfectly straight lines; photos of otherwise untouched landscapes with pyramids of stones and structures of sticks. Long’s interventions in the landscape are thus given an uncanny status, and become reminiscent of the ley-line/hidden-hand/occultist versions of psychogeography seen, variously, in the paranoiac histories of Iain Sinclair and the stone circles of Stewart Home’s 69 Things…
WHITE LIGHT WALK AVON ENGLAND 1987
ONE HOUR
SIXTY MINUTE CIRCLE WALK ON DARTMOOR 1984
The third and final category is essentially a continuation and an abstraction on the second category, replacing the usual map symbols with other iconographic and textual forms. So, for example, a map of a walk’s route is constructed that consists only of arrows pointing in the direction of the wind at that point, echoing a weather map but specific to the period and place of Long’s individual walk. An experiential element,the psycho in geography, is here given more prominence in Long’s walk-art. Following psychogeography’s situationist definition, this is Long conveying that environment – or, more precisely, our traversing and, later, memories of it – is determined subjectively.
In terms of artistic production, though, more interesting with these works is how they produce an artwork from such immaterial practices. Not only do they attempt to represent a walk, a fleeting experience in itself, but they represent that walk via experiential factors rather than reference (as in a regular map) to solid and identifiable objects like trees or castles or whatever. Most typical of this category is the ‘textwork’, usually a list of observations, feelings or conditions from a walk. The status of one of Long’s textworks is complicated, as it presumably has some personal meaning to Long himself yet remains only suggestive to the observer. Most of the details – including the date and place included on each work – are irrelevent and unverifiable. What these textworks comment upon is not the walk itself, nor the place walked, but the relationship between experiential moment and material representation. A claim is also made for the relevance of a rural psychogeography, calling for a different type of sensitivity to environment and experience than that which a map demands.
[continued, hopefully, in the comments]
