A field student's notebook 1992/1993

Details from a notebook made during 1992-1993. The book contains a lot of material, including the field notes for the lost and found properties field study at some of London's premier cultural institutions. There is a more extensive album of notebook images posted on Picassa.

a field study of countercultural saxophonics

 

Michael Horovitz (with 'Anglosaxophone') at News from Nowhere Club

The Epicentre, Leytonstone

Saturday 12th March 2011

 

My highlight of the evening with Michael Horovitz, at News from Nowhere Club, was his rendition of Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem, ‘The Furore of Sneezing’, performed 46 years on from ‘The First Great International Poetry Reading’, at the Royal Albert Hall. Horovitz, a renowned beat poet convenor, was in the less grand surroundings of Leytonstone’s 'Epicentre', to talk about countercultural connection and creativity. 

 

The community announcements from the floor, prior to the talk, included clarion calls to our hearts and minds to protest about draconian public spending cuts. How can the belligerence of a government alliance, purporting to Big Society, be countered culturally? With hope, energy and poetry?

 

Horovitz, with his ‘Anglosaxophone’, appeared to transcend the frailties of his age. He sprang about, animated by the ecstasies of poetic and primal communication. His returns to nervousness and awkwardness, restlessly fiddling with his hair, voice flattening, speaking gloomily, contrasted with the energy and sonority of his performance. He reflected on the darker side of his experiences, be they political and personal. 

 

He recalled his unsettled childhood as a German Jewish refugee in Britain during World War II. This experience marked the beginnings of his resistance to bellicose and internecine doctrines of faith and ideology. The young Horovitz grew up defiantly unconventional, resorting to skies painted green, and trees painted blue, to express his poetic Utopian resistance. This was, he recounted, much to his mother’s consternation.

 

His 76 years form a turbulent stream of consciousness, criss-crossed with stepping stones connecting his fellows, his radical accomplices, including Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Smith and Cornelius Cardew. 

 

How potent and radical is such a Dada-infused exclamation as, ‘The Furore of Sneezing’? Is the potency in flux and context? How could the poem/performance challenge a presiding sense of cultural capital based on liberal higher education and associated class values? Perhaps, at its most contrarian, the performance was silly. A member of the audience helped answer some of these questions by elaborating on the life of Kurt Schwitters.

 

Schwitters and Horovitz are both refugees, sharing an artistic consciousness born of alienation, rupture, survival and adaptation.

 

The poem’s originator, Kurt Schwitters, featured in the Nazi curated,  'Degenerate Art (entarte Kunst) Exhibition'; a show which toured Germany extensively in 1937. Six months prior to the show opening, Schwitters fled Germany, finding temporary exile, first in Norway and then Britain. He was interned as an 'enemy alien' at the Douglas Camp, Isle of Man, for a year and a half. 

 

We heard how those World War II ‘enemy aliens’ created a university at the Douglas (Internment) Camp. This was an account of counterculture responding to dehumanising forces defiantly and hopefully. Schwitters may have been a student and teacher at the university. Michael Horovitz’s spirited performance of one of Schwitters' sound poems represented a playful testament to the aspiring and liberating powers of art.  The capacity to learn by making art, and anti-art, in the most difficult of circumstances, shows playful resilience even if that learning comes from something as ephemeral as a sneeze. 

 

Horovitz’s performance was not an iteration or explanation of the title; the performance sneezed for itself. However, I speculated about the phonics and linguistic learning games the interns may have played and practiced in the Allied internment camps. What if the "furore" (furor/furore) of the title, is spoken or uttered in accented and dialectical English?  How could inter-cultural wordplay, with "furore" as a homophone, be a taboo deformation? Furore elicits an ominous "f" / "fu" speech sound; a phoneme formed when air is blown through the top teeth touching the bottom lip, which involves baring of the teeth. Baring, sucking of, and blowing through the teeth can signify hostility and defiance depending on the culture in which the gestures are made. And are the similarities in English pronunciation between "Führer” and “furore” just a coincidence? I wondered about the roots and myths of curse words in English, and the common misconception that 'the f word' is Anglo-Saxon. My thoughts about the performance jumped around conceptually in the limited time and space of the occasion.

 

Michael Horovitz, in furious and furtive fits of playful sneezing, presented a tissue of defiant international Utopianism born of the ruptures of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

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a field student of operating system recoveries

Maynard Path / February 2011.

a field student of provenance and nestduftwarmebindung

Sean Hearn explaining some of the complexities of nestduftwarmebindung

Detail of the insulation of Organiclea's Hawkwood classroom - straw bale construction

- nestduftwarmebindung in action -

Detail of a section of a Warre hive - used by natural beekeepers.

Detail of a Warre hive super showing comb formation on hanging bars.

Apiary with new willow hedge

A Warre hive/apiary in situ

Sean Hearn of Organiclea Community Growers organised an awareness day about natural bee-keeping at the Hawkwood Nursery. The event was attended by a group of practising bee-keepers based in north and east London who are in the process of establishing an east London bee-keepers network or association. The event was attended by apiarists of various kinds and was intended to foster awareness, understanding and constructive debate about issues affecting bees and the environment.

a field student finds a bottle

detail: From Castaway to Plague Years (photo: David Dellafiora)

Stoke Newington Library, October 1993

reproduced by kind permission

I'm indebted to David Dellafiora for venturing into his archive and returning with a more detailed photo study of the Daniel Defoe homage. The photograph features just a small selection of the many items sent to David and Daniel. Among them are some of the bottles I posted; more of them than I remembered at the time of writing 'a field student pays homage' . My imagination was specifically caught up in Daniel Defoe as the author of Robinson Crusoe. I was particularly pleased to see and be reacquainted with the bottle in the lower right hand corner. It shows how I created these offerings as objects for the post, attaching luggage labels around the necks, to which I affixed the stamps. I don't remember if I took the stamped bottles to a post office to post via an office counter or if they were pushed and gently forced into a post box as, I hope, a quirky encounter for the 'postie' on his/her collection rounds. The bottles were posted unwrapped as seen in the photograph. The thought of a bottle in transit, bobbing about on the surface of a huge sack of post made me smile - as it does now, bobbing about in a very different contemporary medium.

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What has washed up on the shores of this time? In this bottle there was (or is) a collection of clippings of holiday makers carefully cut from brochures and magazines. What sort of vision this is, of invasion by beach landing/assault or of salvation and rescue is the question and purpose of the art. There is an (obvious?) irony of Robinson Crusoe being joined by a community of tourists hoping to lose themselves on a paradise island for two weeks - and I wonder, having spent a couple of weeks together, if Robinson Crusoe would want to leave with them?

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From what I understand of some of the critiques of psychogeography I have read, the aims of some of it's practitioners have included the subversion of capitalism - of which tourism is a huge part. The ethos of the mail art network was and is to create a free and sometimes subversive exchange of artefacts to question and undermine the constraints and exclusions of capitalism (and arts place in it) as well as other ideologies. Those visitors might have been an anathema to the idea of Crusoe as a shipwrecked adventurer - an erroneous idea I have of him for he was a plantation and slave owner and he was en route to bring slaves from Africa when he was shipwrecked.

Much of modern capitalism and colonialism is founded on the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Robinson Crusoe was an agent in that. He seems to be a difficult and contradictory character to have as an archetype for a discipline(?) which sets out to subvert economic exploitation and the banality of the capitalist spectacle. Perhaps the cultural relativist struggles of Robinson are what make him fit for this purpose?

One of the ways I have interpreted the assemblage of envelopes is as a map of social spaces; an irregular grid portraying David's temporary residencies in and by the hands and minds of the mail artists before they cast him back into the sea.

a field student searches for a fact

I’m approaching the gruesome climax of David Peace’s, GB84, (faber and faber). Peace tells a story of the 1984 miners’ strike through fictitious characters (Arthur Scargill aka ‘The President’, David Hart aka ‘The Jew’) portrayed in an episodic and parallel manner. It’s in part an imaginative account of intertwining venal, devious and callous motives which manifest in instances of extreme violence, of which there are many legacies. How do I know there is a gruesome climax?

I have not enjoyed the author’s writing style or the interrupted narratives. A few weeks ago I flicked to and read the final chapter and so decided I would still stick with it, out of morbid or forensic curiosity. What specific relevance could this conspiracy thriller have in the parochial terrain of Lost and Found in E17, aside from a fact I bought the book from, Bargain Books, on Walthamstow’s High Street?

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David Peace states the novel ‘is a fiction, based on a fact. That fact was found in the following sources' -
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‘Blood Sweat and Tears’ by Roger Huddle, Angela Phillips, Mike Simons and John Sturrock (Artworker Books, 1985)
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- is among the 32 listed.

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Is the ‘Roger Huddle’ the same Roger Huddle who resides in Walthamstow and keeps the history of its anarchist and radical past alive by a variety of means necessary - among them, a forthcoming talk for the News from Nowhere Club ( June 2011 / http://www.newsfromnowhereclub.org/ )?

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If he is, does he know of his place in the book and what does he think the 'fact’ is? I doubt there could be a broad consensus about the miners’ strike or its consequences, and the current political climate is one in which ideological differences are likely to grow bigger and more divisive. ‘What is the fact?’ might be a question to ask again at the talk.

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It was the recent encounter with the dragons in the foothills (or is it, concrete jungle?) of the mcalpines which seeded a brainstorm of confused and confusing associations concerning the relevance of facts in the ramblings of this here blogger. Those mosaic beasts occupy a site on the wall of the Chingford Hall Estate at one of the dedicated pedestrian entrances to and exits from Ching Way. What are they protecting the estate’s residents from - miscreants straying from the badlands of the Tarkovsky Trail, across the motor moat which is the A406 otherwise known as the North Circular or Southend Road?

What a wall! Replete with flying buttresses and cctv cameras, bordered with a suitably spikey evergreen shrubbery - ideal for snagging, absorbing and deflecting the flotsam, jetsam and roar of the North Circular flow. It appears to be brick but is it brick?

And below are a couple of images of the railway bridge at Selborne Road/Hoe Street (Sept’ 08) which reveal a brick construction to be more substantially a concrete one. Bricks of one sort or another have been used to clad concrete structures since Roman times.

Could the brick be a thin veneer panelling, faux cladding (erectable in any weather) to make the surrounds seem more humane? It could be as if the wall is rising from and belongs to a ground in which there is a history of (thicker more solid) local brick making? What if concrete was and is at the heart of the wall?

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On one of the Chingford Hall Estate plaques I saw McAlpine and thought, ‘Concrete Bob’. This muddle of Alfred and Robert took me (mistakenly I think) to a rendition of McAlpine’s Fusiliers.

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I stripped to the skin with Darky Finn down upon the Isle of Grain,
With Horseface Toole I learned the rule, no money if you stop for rain.
For McAlpine's god is a well filled hod with your shoulders cut to bits and seared
And woe to he who looks for tea with McAlpines Fusilier

From The Dubliners

The presence of Norman Tebbit (blogger by The Telegraph) on one the plaques, further enlivened the psycho squall about this place. Norman Tebbit was, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry / President of the Board of Trade (16th October 1983 to 2nd September 1985), during the time of the miners’ strike. His self acclaimed ‘greatest achievement in Government’ was, The Employment Act 1982. The latter created many difficulties for the character, ‘Terry Winters’, in GB84’s rendering of the intrigues and struggles of the NUM’s national strike committee - ‘hiding’ union funds in overseas accounts to avoid seizure, and making furtive and unwitting trips to Libya to seek funds and other support for the strike.
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So what is this place built on?

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At the beginning of GB84, there is a collection of excerpts from reviews of the book. The excerpt for, The Times:

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‘Internalising J.G. Ballard’s suggestion that because we live in a world ruled by fictions the writer’s task is to invent the reality, [Peace] has brought that very old-fashioned strike kicking and screaming into modernity ...... A violently original novel.’

The reality or fact of it's fictions?

a field student steers a path into the foothills of the 'mcalpines'

Nowhere near the Chingford Hall Estate, 2/02/11.