Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 15

SPRUNG

 There is, evidently, some crossover between walking and scavenging.

 

When I walk I often pick up objects I happen to see.  Depending on where and when I’m walking these may be interesting rocks, the very occasional bird skull, a discarded shopping list or two, even bits of mechanical hardware.

 

The items end up in my shed which one day, I promise, will turn into the Nicholsonian Wunderkammer.  Visits strictly by appointment.

 

This is not exactly what the American conceptual artist Mark Dion gets up to but I like to think it shares of some of the same impulses.  Dion’s enterprise, I think we can say, is to question the whole nature of collecting, curating, organizing, hierarchies, and so on, and also the change in status that comes about when  an object is put in a cabinet or under a bell jar, or in a museum:

 

This kind of thing:

I don’t claim Dion as a soul brother or even fellow traveler – I’m really just a fan, but by definition I do reclassify, reorganize and recontextualize the objects I find.

 

So when I was doing my now legendary A10 walk for the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, the route started in this rather unpromising though intriguing bit of territory: 

And I picked up this spring as a souvenir.

 

I wouldn’t claim it’s the most wonderful or significant find but I didn’t have time for a full archeological survey.  It's now in the collection:

Obviously Mark Dion doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground, but blow me down, on his Instagram feed a couple of days ago there was this image.

 

Coincidence?

 

Is there any such thing?

BUT IT'S OK

 You know I’ve always felt ambivalent about Sergeant Pepper.  For every cracking song like 

‘A Day in the Life’ there’s some horror like ‘Lovely Rita.’

 

But without wanting to appear perverse, the song I really used to like and still do is ‘Good Morning,’ which apparently John Lennon hated, saying ‘It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought.’  I can see his point, the words are  all over the place, but throwaway isn’t always bad, the song does rock, and there’s some tasty lead guitar by Paul.

 

The song was on my mind when I was in Sheffield recently, especially the lyrics.

 

After a while you start to smile now you feel cool
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school
Nothing is changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's OK

Good morning, good morning
Good morning ah

 

They had some resonance because I did indeed take a walk by, and to a limited extent inside the grounds of, the old school: King Edward VII, Glossop Road, Sheffield.  And an awful lot had changed.

 

For one thing, they’ve built a stonking great extension, and there were some forbidding security gates, though not all THAT forbidding because you could easily walk through whenever they opened to let a car in and out, which happened all the time.  I assume I was being filmed.

 

Other changes: some art in the car park:

 

And they even have a school mini bus:

 

Many changes, though the main school building still looks like the same forbidding satanic mill that it always did.

 

It was early evening when I took most of these pictures so I had no reason to sing, or say,  ‘Good morning.’  But it was OK.

The Beatles version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3O23zqqaE

And, hold on to your hat, the Micky Dolenz version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyA_xBYUPw

"WALK TALL, KICK ASS, LEARN TO SPEAK ARABIC"

 It was the 3rd of June, a not especially sleepy dusty delta day.  All over Britain people were 

celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and I was participating in a project titled A-10 

Live presented by the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

 

The plan was that in crew of artists (of all kinds) and indeed flaneurs, covered the territory from London to Cambridge via the A10, which the Website says, describes as 'a 110 mile celebration of the UK's most multicultural road.' My section was from the M25 to Hoddesdon, much of it along the New River Path.

 

In preparation I’d been rereading parts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and my eye had 
fallen, hardly for the first time, on the section that reads, 'Every now and then when your 
life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on 
heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas’

 

Substitute walking for driving, substitute M25 for Hollywood and Hoddeson for Las Vegas, define ‘heinous chemicals’ as Ibuprofen and Buscopan, and you can see how this might work.

 

It was a grand day out in the company of Dr. Pete Gomes, Simon Poulter and Caroline Gannon.

 

Nicholson-Gomes-Poulter

Parts of the walk were intensely bucolic with ducks and trees and water and sky but I must say I enjoyed it best when these elements rubbed up against other more inscrutable features:

 

Waterside structures that looked like sculpture:

Improbably-placed no trespassing signs

 

Suburban exuberance, including Cheshunt, where Cliff Richard once lived (though not in this bungalow).

And of course there was the M25. This was where the walk started, under a concrete flyover, with the traffic yowling by just a few feet away. This was a liminal space or an edgeland or absolutely nowhere, depending on your point of view.

 

And, damn it, I made some ecological “wild” art.

 

I noticed were snail trails under the bridge – the gardeners’ nightmare - and I discovered a surprising number of snails, small but very varied in colour – and all of them dead as far as I could see.  This seemed a sad thing.

 

I didn’t give them a decent burial but I arranged them on a bit of rusted metal pipe.  I think the queen would have approved.

He’s some footage of what we did:

https://www.a10-live.co.uk/day-five.html

 

Incidentally I'm not quite sure who was responsible for which of the above images.  Most are by Caroline Gannon who was generally too busy taking photographs to be photographed herself.  But here she is on a different walk:

 

 

ART LOVERS WALKING

 

People go the Yorkshire Sculpture Park for a variety reasons, and looking at art seems to 

be just one of them. Many people seem to be there to have a picnic or look at the sheep, 

and a surprising number seem to be there just for a walk.  I saw small armies of people 

trudging dourly across the landscape, and yes their eye may have been caught by the 

occasional work of art – a Damien Hirst is hard to ignore - but a long joyless walk seemed to 

be their real reason for being there.

I realize that I’ve been going to the YSP for rather a long time, since it was known as plain old Bretton Hall.  Over the years the amount of land has expanded – it’s now over 500 acres - and although the amount of art has increased too, it seems to me that the land to art ratio is weighted very much in favour of the land, so that if you want to see any art at all you have to do a fair amount of walking.  Of course, if you’re a walker, you may well think this is a good thing.

 

If the walkers find a Damien Hirst hard to ignore, they definitely don’t react the same way to an Andy Goldsworthy.  

The piece above is called Shadow Stone Fold which I looked at, admired, and indeed walked around inside.  Nobody else was doing this, I think because the piece looked very much like an actual sheepfold and visitors didn’t recognize it as art.  They possibly thought I was some crazed eccentric.

Across the water and up the hill there was more art by Goldsworthy, three works collectively called Hanging Trees.  These definitely looked like art, but not many art lovers or walkers got up to them.

 

And even higher up the hill, in a bit of woodland, there was another Goldsworthy titled Outclosure.  But the day was hot and the hill was steep and I have to admit it defeated me.  Next time.

 

         There was also a temporary Robert Indiana exhibition which was mostly in a gallery, but some was outdoors so there were still some opportunites for walking.  

 

And showing in the exhibition was Warhol’s Eat (starring Indiana).  That was wonderful and didn’t even involve any walking.  Or in fact any sculpture.

 

WALKING WRONG

 

There was a brief news item in the Metro newspaper a couple of weeks back that read, ‘A 

lifetime of brisk walking can make your “biological age” 16 years younger by mid life.  

Health data from 405,000 Brits showed those who walked quickly had more of the DNA 

that reduces ageing, a Leicester University study found.’

 

         I didn’t know there was a kind of DNA that reduced ageing, but I’m no scientist.

       In any case, it seems I’m doomed.  I’ve never been a brisk walker.  I just haven’t. I mean sometimes I walk faster than others, if I’m in a hurry or especially eager to get somewhere, but generally I’m a bit of an ambler if not a dawdler.  It seems I’m walking all wrong.

 

It’s not the first time I’ve been told this. My dad was a great one for telling me that I was doing things wrong.  Walking was just one of them.

 

He insisted that a boy should walk with arms swinging like pendulums: right foot and left arm forward, then left foot and right arm forward,  I had difficulty with this, and I still do, but I see the point. The swinging arms surely help carry you forward.

 

Some guys at the University of Michigan would agree. They measured the energy used by people who walked in different ways—swinging their arms, holding them to their sides, and so on, and they found that the swinging actually reduces the overall amount of energy it takes to walk.  According to the study, people who hold their arms still while walking use 12 per cent more metabolic energy than people who swing their arms.

 

Of course some people walk in order to ‘keep fit,’ which may be akin to lowering their biological age, so I suppose in fact they’d welcome the chance to use extra energy.  More research required, lads.

 

I found this information while doing an online search for ‘walking wrong,’ and it appears the Internet is awash with articles telling me, and you, that we’re walking wrong, articles with titles like, ‘Common walking mistakes,’ ‘The 97 walking errors you didn’t know you were making,’ ‘101 walking blunders to avoid,’ and so on. These guys were a bit hit and miss:

         Who knew?  But my response to all this is pretty much the same as I said to my dad back in the day, ‘Leave me alone. I’ll walk to hell in my own way. And at my own pace.'

 

This is Raquel Welch in the Seinfeld episode where she doesn’t swing her arms:

 

And here she is in life – swinging with the best of them.

WALKING IN AND OUT OF NATURE

 

I went for a walk, not a very long one, at a place called Nature in Art, at Twigworth in Gloucestershire, according to the website ‘the world’s first museum and art gallery dedicated to fine, decorative and applied art inspired by nature’ which sounds a bit catch-all for my tastes.

 

Not so very long ago people spent a lot of time saying to themselves and others, ‘Yes, but is it art?’  These days we pretty much accept that it IS art, whatever it is.

 

I spend rather more of my time saying, ‘Yes but is it nature?’  I don’t find ‘nature’ quite such a simple concept as so many people seem to. 

 

Nature in Art is in fact a permanent, though changing, exhibition partly inside Wallsworth Hall, a Georgian mansion, and partly in its garden. In the house are galleries featuring depictions of ‘natural’ subjects – frogs, lions, elephants, snakes, dodos and whatnot.  Some of these are paintings.  Some of them are three dimensional.

 

And of course you walk around the galleries just as you walk in any other gallery, but the real action is outside, a chunk of land, looked after but not too well-groomed, with pieces of sculpture scattered around it:  a metal squid, giant poppy seed heads, the tail of a whale (seen above).

Now, it seems to me, you might ask yourself whether a walk in a garden really counts as a walk in nature.  I mean a garden is green all right.   It has things growing in it.  But a garden is as much a creation as any piece of art. I don’t want to sound like a sour puss, but I’d have thought Art in the Garden would have been a better name for the outdoor space; but names are tricky.  The place is run by the Nature in Art Trust which was established in 1982 when it was called the Society for Wildlife Art of the Nations, so it’s definitely made a step in the right direction. 

And in fact I had a great time strolling around between the sculptures and the teasels, but I also spent a certain amount of time agonizing about what exactly is meant by ‘nature.’

 

         If you’ve ever pulled up a weed, trodden on an ant, or, lord knows, planted a tree, you have by definition interferred with nature.  You know, just like Capability Brown

 

These thoughts were nothing new.  I happen to live in the Stour Valley which is ‘An area of outstanding natural beauty’ (AONB – yes, I know it should be AOONB).  AONBs are protected by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW - yes, I know it should be CAROWA) which is all about protecting. conserving and indeed enhancing natural beauty, because obviously nature on it’s own isn’t enough.

 

The Stour Valley is a great place to walk, but do I really need government legislation to tell me what’s outstanding?  Or what’s natural or indeed beautiful? I’d have said not.

This may be because I enjoy walking in areas that some might call areas of outstanding unnatural ugliness.  That’s how we flaneurs are.  And of course I don’t need the government (or anybody else) to tell me what is and isn’t ugly.

    

 

DESERT DRIFTERS

 One of the cool things, possibly the only cool thing, about being me is that people send me 

free books from time to time.  The most recent is a book of photographs by John Brian 

King titled Ghost Variations.

 

         

The images are the results of King walking through the Coachella Valley desert at night, carrying a basic instant film camera loaded with black and w

hite film, and from time to time taking a picture using the built in flash.  In fact to my eyes the end results look less black and white than varieties  of dark grays and blues.

 

         Rocks, boulders, scrub, a couple of palm trees, a fallen branch, are caught in a cone of light with dark, distant shapes looming and lurking in the distance. The pictures are sometimes mysterious, aften ambiguous, sometimes very dark, sometimes washed out.  If you’re so minded you could consider these things metaphors for the desert itself.

 

The results are eerie, indeed occasionally ghostly.  And I can imagine that some people would find them scary or disturbing, but I suppose it all depends on how you feel about deserts. Personally, with the occasional I’ve generally felt at home in deserts, found them a source of wonder, beauty and solace.  Great places to walk and take (often not very good) photographs. But I know that other views are possible.  

I thought Ghost Variations was a great idea, beautifully executed.  It made me want to go wandering through the desert at night with an instant camera, even though I know it’s already been ‘done.’

 

         Thanks to all involved for sending me the book.  Publication day is May 5th,  

published by Spurl Editions.

 

Ghost Variations becomes part of what I realize is a small, not quite randomly accumulated, collection of what we might call books of desert photography.

 

There’s Ansel Adams of course, and especially his book Manzanar, about the Japanese internment camp.

 

There’s John Divola’s Isolated Houses

          Lee Friendlander’s The Desert Seen

           Richard Misrach’s Bravo20, the Bombing of the Ameirican West.

 

Mark Flett’s Saguaros, a giant book of giant and wonderfully strange-looking saguaros.

 

All these books I assume involved the photographer in doing a certain amount of walking, although I also assume that John Divola’s Dogs Chasing My Truck in the Desert involved no walking at all, and that’s one of my favourites.

 

I wish there were more women in the collection, but that’s my bad. I can name plenty of great female desert photographers: Karen Halverson, Wander Hammerbeck, Michelle VanParys, Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves.  I just don’t own books by them.  

 

Karen Halverson

All these photographers look at the desert with different and very selective eyes.  The desert is an inexhaustible subject but then I suppose all subjects are.

 

I learn there is also a recent book (which nobody is likely to send me) titled Georgia O’Keefe, Photographer, edited by Lisa Volpe.  O’Keefe is an interesting case because according to Volpe ‘she didn’t pick up a camera until she was in her late 60s.’ 

 

Obviously she was a walker long before that. Volpe quotes her as saying ‘I don’t wale to get places.  I walk to be inspired.’ I’ve never thought that these two things are mutually exclusive.

 

Below is the first picture I ever took in anything that could even vaguely be thought of as the desert.  It’s somewhere in California.  I was hitchhiking across the States, as was the style at the time, but we’d stopped for a walk to stretch our legs.  They were good guys. They didn’t understand much of what I said, but who does?

(Obviously I don't own copyright in any of the above photographs except the one of my own - I hope nobody sues me, cos I ain't got nothing.) 

CHARACTER, DESTINY AND SO ON

 And another thing about being a writer, especially one with an interest in quirks and 

obsessions, sometime you feel that the world is delivering the right kind of ‘character’ to 

your door for your delectation and potential exploitation.

 

Today a new window cleaner came to the house.  I opened the back door to be friendly and to say hello, and I noticed he was walking very slowly and gingerly down the garden path.  

That didn’t strike me as remarkable in itself but he said, ‘I’m walking slowly because I’ve got a false leg and I don’t want to end up falling down and you finding me on my back in your garden.  I’m not worried about the leg.  I’m worried about my pride.’

This was so perfect that I didn’t say anything else and now of course I wish I’d asked him all about how he lost the leg, was he in pain, was he able to get about, etc etc. But perhaps that would have spoiled it.

 

Incidentally I used to date a girl whose father had one leg.  He claimed that in his youth he’d been quite a hit with the ladies.  I can well believe that.

 

CAGE VERSUS CAGE

 

Here is a Zen parable as retold by John Cage in Indeterminacy.  It’s not specifically about 

walking, but it definitely involves walking.

 

*

In this version it looks like she could have got across without any help, doesn't it?



John Cage is also responsible for the profoundly wonderful piece Water Walk, in which he walks around the stage (or in the most famous version, see below, a TV studio), and creates watery noises using a bathtub, kettle, watering can, pressure cooker and so on.

 

The best thing is that he’s wearing a suit and tie. I think more avant-gardists should try that.

*

John Cage alas was not related to Nicolas Cage. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if he had been?

I can’t swear that Nic Cage is much of a walker but obviously acting always involves doing a bit of walking now and then:

 

Nor can I confirm that he’s carried women across rivers but it wouldn’t surprise me. However floating around the internet I did find an image depicting Nic performing a sort of Water Walk. 

HOPE AND GLORY

 I like land and I like art, so obviously I like land art, work by people like Nancy Holt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long etc.  Some of this art, and certainly seeing some of this art, involves a fair amount of walking, which is all to the good.  And of course in some cases the traces of walking create the art.

 

Certain works of land art look like they must have been massively difficult to make, like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty:

  

But other kinds look less so. You go to some out of the way place, rearrange some stones or twigs or leaves or pieces of wood and Bob’s your uncle.  Not that art needs to be difficult.  This is by Andy Goldsworthy:

However, this sometimes raises the question is it art or just a row of rocks? 

 

Is it a JG Ballard-inspired installation of crashed cars?  Or is it just a row of crashed cars?

 

Perhaps one doesn’t preclude the other.

 

On Sunday I was in Shingle Street in Suffolk, where there was a white line of shells that led from the sea’s edge all the way up the beach, more or less to where the houses were, about 300 yards away. 

This looked about medium difficult – a lot of searching to find the shells, a chance of back ache because of all bending to create the line, but I assume that cranes and earth movers  were not involved.

 

A little research reveals that the Shingle Street line is the work of Lida Kindersley and Els Bottema who both grew up in Delft.  The former is a letter cutter, the latter a ceramicist.  The line was first made in 2005 when they’d both been diagnosed with cancer and has endured as a symbol of friendship and survival.

 

This image from their website, shows them at work: