life in the day

'When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. Looking at the colours in an ice cream I caught my breath just as if I had jumped into cold water up to the waist: they had somehow been made fluorescent by the sky at Skegness: it had entered them. After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence. Most children feel like that, I suppose'.

*****

'So we went, as he put it, arseholing down the M6 with the radio turned up full: AC/DC, Kate Bush, Bowie's 'Station to Station' already a nostalgia number. 

How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field, between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination. The music is immanent in the light, the day immanent in the music: life in the day. It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how. 

Ever since Gaz had fallen off into the sea I had felt an overpowering, almost hallucinogenic sense of happiness, which this time lasted as far as Bolton'.

Extracts from M. John Harrison's novel, Climbers (Gollancz, 1989). 

For a fine article about Mike Harrison's work, see Richard Lea, 'M John Harrison: a life in writing', The Guardian, 20 July 2012, here. "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that."

Photo by muskrat

gravity's pull

In a café off Via della Libertà, looking through a folder of images that have haunted me for years, taken by two of the great chroniclers of Palermo’s suffering and injustices. Firstly, Letizia Battaglia, one of Italy’s most celebrated photographers and a legendary figure in the city who, from the mid 1970s, obsessively catalogued hundreds of mafia killings, funerals, arrests, trials, chain-smoking prosecutors, illegal backstreet horse races, religious festivals, and the embattled daily lives of women and children at home and in the street. 

Shattered bodies, crumbling buildings, fragile dreams. Over 600,00 images, all in black and white: an unflinching archive of death and life in a war zone. 

Over the past 40 years, Letizia has also been a filmmaker, theatre director, writer, publisher, elected councillor, and environmentalist. As Leoluca Orlando’s combative, outspoken ‘Commissioner of Liveability’ in the heady days of the ‘Palermo Spring’, famously she took to the streets of the old city with a team of council workers to clear away rubbish and needles, replant gardens and parks, in an effort to reclaim pride in public spaces. Of the thirty-three resplendent palm trees she planted on the derelict seafront, in the site of an ancient grove, only three survive today; the others are sawn-off stumps. 

Now in her late 70s, and largely in retreat from public life, her most recent photographic projects explore a ‘working through’ of mourning by superimposing portraits of Palermitan women over her earlier images of violence: an unsettling frictional montage of bloody (masculine) past and contemplative (feminine) present that invites reflection on uncertain future possibilities.

And secondly, Shobha, Letizia’s daughter, a photographer of international reputation in her own right. She arrives for our meeting to find me looking at one of her mysterious images; it shows a young girl in a long cape with expansive wings, her back towards the camera, as if flying quietly along this shuttered backstreet in Vucciria, past a dog asleep in the gutter, towards the market stalls just visible in the distance. “Ah yes, the angel, she brings a different quality of energy. We need blessings in this city. We need imagination and poetry”. 

Since her return to Palermo in the mid 1980s, having lived and studied abroad, Shobha’s work as a photographer has complemented and developed her mother’s, her own critical rage contoured differently by living and working elsewhere for much of the year and by a determination to “pursue life rather than death. The opposite of my mother’s images, and yet exactly the same impulse. We are both on the side of life. Palermo is above all a schooling in compassion. Extreme contradictions live so closely together here. You have to pass through pain to move forward, and I’m not afraid of that. What I really fear is ignorance and forgetting, that’s the void where the mafia and other abuses of power thrive. 

"When I first came back to Palermo, I threw myself into that beautiful, optimistic movement around Falcone and Borsellino, Orlando and others. After years of terrible violence and corruption, there was a renewed sense of life, of awakening, generosity, support, a collective endeavor to make things the best they could be; and for ten years I photographed life. But since then so much of this has been compromised and destroyed, and people forget what’s possible. And once more Palermo feels like an abandoned child ... 

"There are still people of such quality here, angels who bring light, and there is always beauty to be found in everyday life; but sometimes it feels like the city’s falling backwards into the darkness again. It's not all shit of course; but I live in the moment, and this is a dark moment”.

Shobha describes her recent international projects and how they relate to her work in Palermo: women labourers in Karnataka cutting stone in caves, driving trucks; women disfigured by acid attacks in Bangladesh; refugee nuns in a temple in Cambodia. “Always the same ethic. How to use photography to give light to a person’s dignity. How to bear witness to suffering with honesty and compassion”. 

She talks animatedly about teaching photography in Sicily, working with single mothers, autistic and Down’s syndrome kids, and about the professional training workshops she runs here and internationally: “I try to teach people to be aware, to be awake and ready, here now. I try to teach attention. Attention is hope”. 

Finally, she reflects on the differences between Palermo and her other home in India, where “lightness is mixed into the gravity of everyday life, there’s a greater softness and buoyancy there that supports people’s belief in the possibility of growth and change. In Palermo gravity has such an aggressive pull, its heaviness sucks people down, eats their energy. Here we have to really struggle to react and rebel against inertia, to pull ourselves from the mess. Last year this café was firebombed three times within a month. Why? Pizzo, competition, territory. Small minds. Because it’s nice. A normal life is not possible here. It’s the Wild West”. 
_____________________________________
 
For Shobha's website, and examples of her projects internationally, see here

For Letizia Battaglia, see her book Passion Justice Freedom: Photographs of Sicily, New York: Aperture (1999); and Giovanna Calvenzi's collection, Letizia Battaglia: Sulle ferrite dei suoi sogni, Milan: Mondadori (2010). For a recent Observer article by Peter Jinks about her work (4 March 2012), see here

Photograph of Letizia Battaglia and Shobha: © Cristina Garcia Rodero 

shuttle 17: rocking (in time)

'It was the high point of his morning. Change the canaries. Feed the mule. Stand transfixed for half an hour' 

(Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles & Hawk Moon, London: Faber, 1982)
_________________________

'"The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question? Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field" ... 

Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable except to us, each of us inexpressibly, this man, that woman. Childhood is lost life reclaimed every second, he said. Two infants alone in a room, in dimmest light, twins, laughing. Thirty years later, one in Chicago, one in Hong Kong, they are the issue of that moment. 

A moment, a thought, here and gone, each of us, on a street somewhere, and this is everything. I wondered what he meant by everything. It's what we call self, the true life, he said, the essential being. It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever ...

The landscape began to seem normal, distance was normal, heat was weather and weather was heat. I began to understand what he meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies'. 

(Don DeLillo, Point Omega, London: Picador, 2010)
_________________________ 

Bill Viola - ‘In 1981, I made a videotape in Japan, Hatsu Yume ('First Dream'), in which there is one sequence where a fixed camera views a rock on a mountainside over a long period of time. When it comes on the screen, the images are moving 20 times normal speed, and gradually, in a series of stages, it slows down to real-time, and eventually to extreme slow-motion.

People usually describe that scene by saying, “ … the part where the people are all slowed down while moving round the rock”. What I looked at in that scene is the rock, not so much the people. I thought it would be interesting to show a rock in slow motion. All that is really happening is that the rock’s time, its rate of change, exceeds the sampling rate (the recording time of the video), whereas the people are within that range. So the rock just sits there, high speed, slow speed … it doesn’t matter.

I think about time in that way. There are windows or wavelengths of perception. They are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain frequency range. This is directly related to scale changes in space or sound, proportion in architecture and music. A fly lives for a week or two, and a rock exists for thousands or millions of years’.

From Bill Viola (1995), Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, London: Thames & Hudson / Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 151
_________________________

'Hatsu yume' is a Japanese term for the first prophetic dream in the new year. Viola: 'I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite - darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water; it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish; darkness is the death of man'.

Photo at top: Ansel Adams, 'Rock and Cloud, King's River Canyon' (California), 1936. 


Left: Glen Baxter drawing

“I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite — darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water — it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish — darkness is the death of man.” - See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/9443-hatsu-yume-first-dream#sthash.UnxqBMN7.dpuf

“I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite — darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water — it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish — darkness is the death of man.” - See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/9443-hatsu-yume-first-dream#sthash.UnxqBMN7.dpuf

“I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite — darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water — it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish — darkness is the death of man.” - See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/9443-hatsu-yume-first-dream#sthash.UnxqBMN7.dpuf

shuttle 14: crystallize

'To get back to that metaphor of Oz ... through the force of the twister, you're propelled to this central image ... The people go there, the child and the scarecrow, to the Emerald City of Oz which is a palace - but essentially a crystalline buildup ... to me, on a kind of fairy-tale level that's indicative of something ... I don't exactly know what the actual building of Oz looks like. Oz, like Atlantis, is this difficult place ... a vanishing point, you know' (Robert Smithson, 1970) 
_________________________

The Crystal Land

"I turned on the car radio: '... countdown survey ... chew your little troubles away ... high ho hey hey ...'. My eyes glanced over the dashboard, it became a complex of chrome fixed into an embankment of steel. A glass disk covered the clock. The speedometer was broken. Cigarette butts were packed into the ashtray. Faint reflections slid over the windshield ... Under the radio dial (55-7-9-11-14-16) was a row of five plastic buttons in the shape of cantilevered cubes. The rear view mirror dislocated the road behind us. While listening to the radio, some of us read the Sunday newspapers. The pages made slight noises as they turned; each sheet folded over their laps forming temporary geographies of paper. A valley of print or a ridge of photographs would come and go in an instant. [...]

The quarry resembled the moon. A grey factory in the midst of it all looked like architecture designed by Robert Morris. A big sign on one building said THIS IS A HARD HAT AREA. We started climbing over the piles and ran into a 'rock hound', who came on, I thought, like Mr Wizard, and gave us all kinds of rock-hound-type information in an authoritative manner.We got a rundown on all the quarries that were closed to the public, as well as those that were open.

The wall of the quarry did look dangerous. Cracked, broken, shattered: the walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration,rock creep, debris slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence. The grey sky seemed to swallow up the heaps around us. Fractures and faults spilled forth sediment, crushed conglomerates, eroded debris and sandstone. It was an arid region, bleached and dry. An infinity of surfaces spread in every direction. A chaos of cracks surrounded us. [...]

As we drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, we talked about going on another trip, to Franklin Furnace; there one might find minerals that glow under ultraviolet light or 'black light'. The countless cream colored square tiles on the wall of the tunnel sped by, until a sign announcing New York broke the tiles' order ..."

Extract from Robert Smithson, 'The Crystal Land' (1966), reprinted in Jack Flam (ed.), The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996
_________________________

"Entirely lifeless, based on nothing but the dynamics of inorganic chemistry, the crystal nevertheless is said to 'grow'. It invades and coats a surface with absolute indifference, like mould or rust. And yet, unlike either of these - organic or inorganic processes - it is not necessarily an entropic process. While a mould might exploit the decay of a dead tree that it grows on, or while rust signifies the alteration of iron as it is exposed to air and water in a process of oxidisation, the process of crystallisation is one of resolution; it is what happens when the internal chemical instability of the copper sulphate solution resolves itself through the formation of the crystal.

Perhaps it is also significant that in the process of crystallisation, transformation is achieved through an internal process rather than external application. In a biological process such as the growth of a mould, the transformation of one sort of matter into another requires some external input of energy or outside substance. Similarly, with an inorganic process such as rusting, the process occurs only through a combination of external elements - the presence of oxygen and water. By contrast, crystallisation is an ordering of molecules within the crystal solution itself.

Crystallisation, then, is the purest expression of a self-contained, self-producing process of matter which goes from internal instability to stability, indifferent to materials and energies outside of it. In the iconography of Roger Hiorns' work, it is the clearest expression of the auto-generative theme that runs throughout. In the context of Harper Road, and of the crystallisation which has overcome an entire space of habitation, it is also the most absolute contrast to the processes of life and of living that this space bears witness to. [...]

The dense, dark cobalt blue of Seizure, its implacable and complete smothering of the straight lines of the original flat, seems to express a blank indifference to the troubles that afflict human building and human dwelling. If Seizure had continued its growth, one might imagine how the angles of the space would progressively disappear, as the crystals continued to grow inwards, towards each other. Ingrowing, like a crystal geode, this former space of human habitation - with its worn lino and peeling paint, with all the marks left by a living person - would be filled up, would disappear, transformed into pure crystal growth, with all signs of former human habitation obliterated. And with its cave-like floor, undulating with compacted crystals, Seizure suggests a return of the geological and inorganic world of prehistory. Rather than the complex and unstable relationship between human beings and their own built world, Seizure offers a lifeless form which, with its poisonous and lacerating surfaces, cannot even offer the primitive human shelter of a cave.

Auto-generative, inward-looking and ingrowing, independent of human intervention and human touch, Seizure contains Hiorns' fascination with the metaphorical potential of the inorganic, and of the strange life of inhuman processes. 'Seizure' might indicate the recovery of something that is rightfully owned, or a moment of paralysis or sudden arrest in the processes of a living organism. Here, in this flat that has become not a cave but a crystal geode, it is as if the living space of modern humanity is being reclaimed by the inorganic. While a more conventionally Romantic ecological narrative might imagine the reclamation of human space by organic nature - ruins overgrown by plants and trees - Seizure expels even organic nature in favour of the inorganic, choosing simple molecular growth over that more complex and curious molecule, DNA.

Seizure's perversely inhuman spectacle doesn't present us with the scene of a modern world, derelict or abandoned, or a futuristic fantasy of the ruins of a bygone civilisation. Instead it negates this human world and its human-scaled architecture, filling interior space with hard, inert matter, reclaiming it from those who have given it up. Seizure's paradoxical existence lies in the fact that, like any crystal geode, it has to be cut open to reveal its internal order and complexity, its hidden opulence and dazzling colour. In other words, the very act of seeing its internal form assumes a human presence; yet in this scenario, it is the human witness to the crystallised space which has become alien. No longer a derelict space of modern human habitation, Seizure positions the human spectator itself as trespasser. Seizure's internal order is a physical phenomenon before it is a visual one - by entering it one brings to it one's own human sense of visual, aesthetic value as if it were an intruder. However much we think of it as an artistic spectacle, Seizure remains indifferent. All it does is grow, in darkness. [...]

In this poisonously downbeat cultural atmosphere, it is not hard to grasp how Seizure resonates, even as it remains indifferent. Seizure's entropic, mineral and inhospitable formation, independent of human will, echoes all of our worst moments of doubt about what a world without humans would mean. The machine for living in has stopped. There are no signs of life. Art enters in".

Extract from JJ Charlesworth, 'Signs of life', in Roger Hiorns: Seizure, London: Artangel, 2008
_________________________

Images: (top) 'Iberian quarry no. 3', photograph by Edward Burtynsky. For Burtynsky's website, see here. (Bottom): Robert Smithson's drawing, 'Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis)', 1969

For further details of the conception and making of Roger Hiorns' Seizure, a 2008 Artangel commission in South London, see here and here

shuttle 4: dusting

'[Dust] is not about rubbish ... It is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed. The fundamental lessons of physiology, of cell-theory, and of neurology are all to do with this ceaseless making and unmaking, the movement and transmutation of one thing into another. Nothing goes away' 

(Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 164). 

______________________

'Dust is particulate matter, the dispersed, disordered raw material from which everything ordered and coherent arises, and it is to dust that the complex decays.

From the beginning to the end, dust underlies all existence. It is the species of light one sees flickering in a sunbeam, the molecules of gas dashing randomly in all directions. It is the atoms and molecules of matter that can be recombined and reshaped into something new such as the ordered array of atoms in  crystal or in a living cell, and it is the dusts of interstellar space that condensed to produce the sun and its planets and all the galaxies.

Everything that we understand as consistent, the living creature, the machine, the tree, are dust in its coherent phase, part of its continuous evolutionary cycle from order to disorder, from growth to decay repeated in seemingly endless variations ...

Most dust particles have crystalline interiors, but the microcrystal in one speck of dust cannot coordinate its order with that of another grain, and the dust remains chaotic. Yet it is from these dusts that the complexities of our civilisation are built. Dust on one level is chaotic, and orderly and precise on another.

As the universe evolves it creates new dusts for its various eras ... The dusts of our era, though but a transitory formation in an evolving universe, will persist for many trillions of years. Its great miracle, life, is a cycle of ordered dust that strives to perpetuate itself. The great by-product of life, intelligence, is also like dust, with bits and fragments of coherence being produced out of disorder, but all too often lapses back into chaos again'.

(Agnes Denes, extract from The Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter, Rochester NY: Visual Studies Workshop, 1989: quoted in Graham Gusin & Ele Carpenter (eds), Nothing, London: August, 2001, 84-6).

 ______________________

‘Quick: why aren't you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial.

It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy … because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently, the snap off easily, and go blowing about.  Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folk who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.

We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take” … Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as “salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred micro-fragments from tropical forest fires”. These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk, the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil ...

We live on dead people's heads’

(Annie Dillard, For The Time Being, New York: Vintage, 1999, 123-4).

______________________

Photo at top (Professor Larry Taylor): lunar dust, including volcanic glass beads and agglutinate, viewed under a microscope.

P.S. Some years ago, an artist friend in England (who shall remain nameless here) told me that he had been invited to set a piece of moon rock in a ring; the owner had worked at NASA, I think. One evening at home, in a moment of alcohol-induced lunacy, he decided to crush the rock fragment, roll it in a spliff, and smoke it. Disappointingly, it seems it didn't help him achieve 'escape velocity'. The following morning, he found a piece of rock of similar size and colour on a local building site and used that for the commissioned ring.

night falls on oxbridge (help)

 Images from the Florence Nightingale Museum, London, 2012