Surface

land/water and the visual arts symposium 2004

Simon Standing

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781841509365
• eBook ISBN: 9781841509457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book is a collection of six papers from the 2004 Land/Water and Surface symposium. These works contribute both to contemporary academic debates within artist and curatorial practices, and to understanding within related areas of experience and knowledge. Central themes include: sustainability; representation of change, journey, place and visual practice; West Country and regional specificity. There is particular focus on coast as a littoral space, and interest in exploring relations between site-theme-art process-narrative. The collection also includes material about the Land/Water Research group, the programme for the 2005 symposium and speaker biographies illustrations, and a poem by Thomas A Clark written especially for the occasion.

IAIN BIGGS ________ _ _ _ _ _ _

Unearthing other voices – a ‘polytheistic’ approach to landscape

Taking his own long-term project exploring the Scottish borders as an instance of approaches to artistic practice, Biggs explores the inter-discursive spaces which frame and influence artistic exploration and production. Since he did not use slides, no images are reproduced here. However, the project has been published as Iain Biggs (2004) (ed.), Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig, Wild Conversation Press and TRACE.

Introduction

My point of departure is a quotation from Merleau-Ponty, who writes:

Everything is cultural in us (our Lebenwelt is ‘subjective’) (our perception is cultural-historical) and everything is natural in us (even the cultural rests on the polymorphism of wild being) (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 253)

I start here because this commitment to ambiguity is central to Edward Casey’s concept of landscape as ‘the world-text on which the much more discrete texts of history… are inscribed’ (Casey 2002: 275) and also to the idea of ‘polytheistic’ landscape I am concerned with here.

When originally asked to participate in this symposium, I envisaged making a conventional slide presentation of recent work. However, having done some slide presentations on the Southdean project, I realized that I was avoiding the core issue it raises: that of the ‘other voices’ that Mary Watkins calls ‘invisible guests’ (Watkins 2000). So this paper is an experiment, an attempt to write about those ‘other voices’ or ‘invisible guests’, of which I have direct experience of a kind, but also about the powers they mediate and the significance of this in terms of what I have called a ‘polytheistic’ landscape.

During the course of this paper I will repeatedly suggest that to be changed by an image or text, including landscape, we first need to be in some sense lost, ‘at a loss’. Only then are we able to ‘hear’ or apprehend something other than our own authorial monologue, the voice that speaks constantly to confirm that we are ‘in control’, are already ‘at home’ with ourselves. Since we are professional specialists of some kind, that monologue will usually be colored by what I will call ‘Apollonian’ assumptions or habits of mind. One of these habits is a profound distrust of phrases like ‘other voices’. When academics think about the construction of identity they usually name abstract categories like ‘history’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘geography’ and ‘politics’, rather than use phrases like ‘invisible guests’. Distrust of phrases like ‘invisible guests’ protects us against the discomfort that fantasy andimagination can bring to our self-image as rational, professional people. Phrases like ‘invisible guests’ embarrass us, suggesting something naive or childish. There is a truth in this, as an example makes clear.

A while ago I was asked to help edit material for a book. One of the papers was by a poet, playwright, scholar and translator who publishes in both English and Bengali. Her paper was both beautifully written and lucidly argued. However, in a paragraph discussing her creative work, she wrote:

I may be sitting alone... but what I write will be shaped as much by me as by a host of other agents, visible and invisible. I am a child of the world I inhabit, but not a passive child, for to some extent I create my world too.

I queried the clumsy phraseology in the first part of this sentence and the author replied that what she had meant to write was:

… what I write will be shaped as much by other agents, visible and invisible, as by myself.

She was clearly taken aback and slightly embarrassed both that she had made, and then missed, this simple error. She observed that:

… the childish ‘me’ remained tucked within the phrase, somewhat incongruously, like a breathless little girl who says to her teacher: ‘It’s me who’s done it, Miss’.

I think it is significant that what she calls ‘the childish “me”’ appeared at exactly the point where the phrase ‘invisible agents’ enters the text to acknowledge the part ‘invisible agents’ play in our work. I have no idea why a ‘breathless little girl’ chose to send this tiny, disruptive ripple up through the immaculate surface of the author’s prose at just this point, and it would be impertinent to speculate here.

My point is that it is in this almost subliminal manner that ‘invisible guests’ announce themselves, often unearthing a sense of buried or forgotten times and places in the process, in this case the childhood classroom. If we acknowledge them the barriers we normally erect between physical and psychic space, rationality and imagination can become more permeable.

If, as Edward Casey maintains, being in place is prior to the possibility of thought, I need to ask where are we placed today, here and now? On occasions like this we use the conventions of titles to indicate ‘where we’re at’. So what has my title – ‘Unearthing other voices – a “polytheistic” approach to landscape’– got to do with the title of this symposium: ‘Land/Water and “surface”’? Very little if we take either title too literally. However, if ‘Land/Water and “surface”’ is understood imaginatively in terms of the relation of earth to water, and to issues of ‘unearthing’ what is beneath literal surfaces, we come closer to a common topic.

James Hillman, writing of the Greek understanding of distinct levels of earth, refers to the Goddess Ge – whose name still echoes in geography, geology and geometry, who can be ‘imagined as the physical and psychic ground of an individual or community, its “place on earth”’ (Hillman 1979: 36). I take this to mean that in Ge we find a personification of our ‘home turf’, our natal territory, our community or group’s place of origin. Today we are a professional gathering of artists and academics that work for, and/or were educated in, higher educational institutions. So it is probably fair to say that, as a gathering, the psycho-physical space of Higher Education is our professional birthplace. Consequently to speak of landscape here is not to imagine some other place, elsewhere, out of doors. Our dialogue with landscape, seen from the perspective of Ge, starts now, in this room.

If Ge figures earth in this sense, how then are we to understand water? For Casey, water ‘is somehow the ultimate medium… in the literal sense of standing between things’ (Casey 2002: 35), a point to which I will return. In the context of the Goddess Ge, however, water suggests the moistening or dissolving of earth and brings to mind the figure of Dionysus. It is Dionysus who, after all, dissolves the literalisms that ‘keep us on the straight and narrow’, ‘in our place’. Seen in this way, the processes that govern the elements water and earth begin to suggest the processes through which different forms of thought interact. For example, Paul Ricoeur observes that ‘the power of metaphor’ is that it has the ability ‘to break through previous categorization and to establish new logical boundaries on the ruins of the proceeding ones’ (Ricoeur 1991b: 81). This might be better understood, however, in the more fluid terms of the constant ‘dissolving’, ‘evaporating’ and ‘solidifying’ of categories.

Fixed categories can become so constraining that we feel silenced by them, voiceless because our thinking cannot flow. The research I am drawing on today came about because, five years ago, I felt that as a Ph.D. supervisor I was in danger of becoming a ventriloquist’s dummy, a mouthpiece for conventions of academic research that went against the grain of my own understanding and judgement. My response was to start a project to ‘unearth other voices’ – to journey away from what I was experiencing as the monologue of academic research and out into another, polyvocal, landscape. I was encouraged in this by reading Mary Watkins who, writing about imaginal dialogues and reason, notes that reason is only ‘a prescriptive and valuative notion of what thought should be like, ideally speaking’ and, as such, has no ‘natural’ superiority over other forms of thought (Watkins 2000: 12). This paper is, then, both an account of a ‘return journey’ into the landscape of academic research and about landscape in a more general sense.

My concern to unearth ‘other voices’ in our landscapes follows Casey in seeing landscape, at least in the first instance, in terms of the inextricable interplay of ‘Apollo and Dionysus, self-revealing surface and self-concealing depth’ (Casey 2002: 269–270). It also contests Alex Seago’s argument that ‘Dionysian’ research should be subsumed within an ‘Apollonian’ position, used to justify the ‘normalisation’ of practice-based research at the Royal College of Art (Seago 1995). I want to ask why Seago wanted this other voice excluded from research, from the task of orienting our ways of understanding of the world, of better articulating our perceptions? More importantly, what does this exclusion mean in terms of our understanding of landscape’s ‘self-concealing depths’?

Barbara Bender suggests an answer to the first question when, writing about landscape, she reminds us that ‘even in the most scientific of Western worlds, past and future will be mythologized’ (Bender 1993: 2). We see the world, and in particular the ‘natural world’, in terms of what Ricoeur calls ’the imaginary nucleus’ of our culture - the ‘hidden ... matrix of distribution’ that assigns to the institutions and functions of a society different roles in relation to nature, to individuals, to other institutions, and to other societies (Ricoeur 1991b: 482). In Western Europe that matrix is shaped by the secular reconfiguration of the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian tradition.

Perhaps the research culture of the university, an institution founded by the Church, wants to exclude ‘other voices’ because monotheistic thinking favours the subordination of ‘voices’ to one Voice – in our case the instrumental rationality of the secular Logos that has replaced the Word of God. So, for example, when I need money for research I must translate my particular concerns into a special language. In the case of the Southdean project those particular concerns became something else, a formal research question about the relationship between memory, place and identity, a neat clustering of abstract concepts into a respectable research topic. That question reads:

Is it possible to represent something of the complexity of our contemporary understanding of identity by working with a hybrid ‘creative research’ model; one that interweaves various types of creative and scholarly material in such a way as to explore and critically reflect on issues of the role of memory and place in the construction of identity?

However had you asked me at the time what I was actually doing, my answer would have been;

I still don’t really know. It’s to do with growing up in the country and narrative identity, and Janet Wolff’s essay ‘Eddie Cochran, Donna Anna and the Dark Sister: Personal Experience and Cultural History’ is important. So are various songs and their relation to places or landscapes. I’ve linked Southdean to versions of the old Borders ballad Tam Lin. I’ve walked to, identified and photographed Bronze and Iron Age sites, the remains of fortified farms and two graveyards. I’ve been working away in the studio and I’m reading up the archaeology of the Borders region, but also wolves, fairies, witchcraft and their histories. Oh, and I’ve been listening to a lot of music that relates to my teens and early twenties.

This haphazard description is nothing like a research proposal, but it does have the single advantage of conveying something of the strangeness, ambiguity and uncertainty implicit in the dialogue I was having with the landscape of Southdean, qualities entirely hidden by the formal research question.

Ambiguity and uncertainty are, as I have already indicated, central to my topics because they are characteristics shared by landscape and what I will call, borrowing from Ricoeur, the ‘hermeneutic wager’ (Ricoeur 1991a: 88). This is the gamble involved in first losing, and then finding ourselves, in our encounter with texts and images. We lose ourselves in order to enter their world. We then find our selves renewed, the result of having been changed, however slightly, by encountering that world. Like walking in a landscape, common sense tells us that in this process something is ‘always slipping away and something is constantly gained’ (Tilley 1994: 31). However, as Hamish Fulton makes clear by using the word ‘deaf’ in relation to walking in nature, we cannot ‘gain’ anything new unless we are first drop the screen of our habitual thinking, our fixed concepts (quoted in Auping 1983: 88). It was this understanding that led me to spend five years ‘listening’ to the metaphoric resonances of an old song and the Southdean landscape.

The Southdean project

The focus of the Southdean project is a one hundred and sixty seven page artist’s book. It exists in an edition of five hundred and there are copies in the five national libraries and various collections, including those of both the Tate and the V & A. In addition to a text of about forty thousand words, the book includes documentary landscape photographs, altered maps, small monochrome drawings, and two visual chapters each made up of twelve digitally produced images. The book is focused by what Richard Kearney calls ‘testimonial imagination’ and is concerned to ‘remember the repressed, to represent the unrepresented’. ‘Between’ Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig I set out to find the unrepresented ‘voices’ behind an old folk culture implicit in Border ballads, traces of a polytheistic pagan culture in which the landscape was originally itself both divine and a thin surface through which particular Divinities might appear at any time. Historically, these Divinities then metamorphosed first into the figures of the pagan counter-culture Christianity associated with ‘witchcraft’, and then into the characters in folk tales and songs that are still narrated and sung today.

The particular nature of this ‘space between’ depends on the tensions inherent in both the title Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig (Biggs 2004) and Tam Lin’s name. The title refers to two specific places. The first, Carterhaugh, is fictional or mythic, despite Sir Walter Scott’s suggestion to the contrary, and locates the unfolding narrative of Tam Lin. The second, Tamshiel Rig, is a physical site in Southdean parish, just over the border into Scotland. The Rig was once the most complete remains of an early Iron Age farm system anywhere in Britain. In 1947 it was over-planted by the Forestry Commission as part of the post-war drive to replenish woodland in Britain. Although still marked as an impressive archaeological site on large-scale maps, it is now almost impossible to find on the ground.

The imaginative space of the book is located somewhere between the psycho-physical terretories represented by these places. Carterhaugh is associated with the end-of-year Celtic festival of Samhain Eve; a time that mutated, via All Saint’s Eve, into our Hallowean. Samhain Eve was the period between sun set and sun rise when time and space as we normally understand them were dissolved, as were all the normal distinctions between the living and the dead, Divinities and mortals. Tamshiel Rig, on the other hand, is in part identified with the increasingly dystopian nature of rural life since 1945 and with the recent foot and mouth epidemic, itself emblematic in a local history where plague and famine have been central since at least the sixth century.

The title’s coda, the phrase ‘borderline episode’, is taken from classical psychology and refers to experiences or events in which a person is seen to be bordering on the psychotic – he or she may, for example, hear ‘imaginary’ voice. Anthropologically speaking, however, such experiences are central to major rites of passage, taking place in liminal spaces where Divinities are sensed, heard or otherwise met with. The ‘borderline’ events and images that make up part of the book’s narrative are ambiguously located somewhere between these two understandings.

In the Celtic languages, a lin is a pool and Tam Lin’s name marks him out as a man dedicated to the Goddesses associated with water and particularly reflective pools or lakes. Places which, as already indicated, mediate between the sky, the surface world of the living and the hidden depths or underworld. Tam Lin’s intermediary status is important to the book because, as Casey reminds us, ‘to be “in-between” in a landscape is not to fail to have a place’. Rather it is, as he puts it, ‘to be a place in a formative sense’ (Casey 2002: 35). Tam is, then, ambiguously, somehow both a person and a representation of a place. I will return to this in connection with Griselda Pollock’s view of landscape pai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Thomas A Clark: Poem
• Liz Wells and Simon Standing: Introduction
• Iain Biggs: Unearthing other voices – a “polytheistic” approach to landscape
• Patricia Townsend: Transitional Spaces: surface, fantasy and illusion
• John Goto: Landscape gardens, narrative painting and High Summer
• Ingrid Pollard: Lost in the Horizon
• Interviews with Susan Derges
• Christopher Cook: re:surfacing