HYPER-OBSERVERS

 

 I was dipping in to Genpei Akasegawa’s Hyperart: Thomasson, as I do from time to time, and I came across this picture:

 

For those who’ve missed it previously, a Thomasson is an architectural feature that remains in place even though it’s no longer functional: bridges and staircases to nowhere, third floor doors that open into space, and so on. The name is Akasegawa’s invention.

 

That picture was actually taken by Yomota Inuhiko, back in the day, in the Rue De Cardinal Lenoine, in Paris.  Yomota Inuhiko writes, ‘At first glance, it looked as though huge band-aids or strips of scotch tape that had been affixed to the building had, over the years, become rotten and faded leaving behind only a scar.’

 

In fact I’m not sure that the photograph really shows a Thomasson.  I think it’s just a badly repaired bit of masonry, but it made me realize that in my own wanderings I’ve developed quite a taste for looking at and photographing badly, or eccentrically, repaired walls and brickwork, if not strictly speaking masonry.

 

Further research (although ‘research’ sounds a rather grand term for it) revealed an article by Terunobu Fujimori titled by ‘Under the Banner of Street Observation.’  Tom Daniell seems to be the man who made it, and much more information on this subject, available to we gaijin.

 

The article is partly about the Street Observation Society, formed in 1986 by the author of the article - Terunobu Fujimori, an architectural historian - and Genpei Akasegawa (op cit) who is probably best thought of as a multimedia artist.

 

Alone, together and with others, the pair wandered the streets of Japan, looking, photographing, making drawings, giving names to things.  But above all looking, and if that meant looking at things in a new or different way then so much the better.  The Japanese name for the activity was, and I suppose still is, Rojo Kansatsu -- Street Observation.

 

I find this just wonderful both as a practice and as an idea.  And yes of course it involves many of the same activities as psychogeography, but I find this Japanese version so much more appealing because it involves going out walking and looking at whatever’s there, not making any claims for "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals,”  a la Guy Debord. 

 

Among many wonders in the article, some of them quite inscrutable, there is this photograph captioned ‘Genpei Akasegawa photographing a tsuboniwa (spot garden) in a manhole cover, in 1986. From Kyoto Omoshiro Watching (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1988).

 

That would be fine in itself but it also brings in Joji Hayashi (about whom I can find very little), described in the Terunobu Fujimori article as ‘a bizarre individual who finds everything worthy of close attention and orderly documentation; he glues train ticket chads into albums, places pebbles that lodge in his shoes into small bottles, all carefully dated, and has famously taken thousands of photographs of manhole covers.’  There’s a book:

There’s something Zen about this I think, though my understanding of Zen is patchy.  And I realized that I too have photographed a certain number of manholes and even coalholes in the course of my ‘street observation’ though the ones I’ve photographed aren’t nearly as cool as the Japanese ones.

                                             

If the Internet has proved anything it’s that there you’re never alone in your obsessions.  However arcane your interests may seem, there’s probably already a website, a chatroom, a Facebook page, for people who share your interest, and in this particular case there’s now an activity called Drainspotting.

 

But the notion of street observation raises the issue of whether you go walking and look for specific things – manhole covers, Thomassons, brick work repairs or whatever, or whether you try to walk and be open to whatever turns up, whatever happens to be there.

 

I haven’t solved this problem.  I don’t see how you can be equally open to all stimuli.  That would be like some intense but amorphous acid trip.  Human consciousness is nothing if not selective. And a lot of the time I don’t even think it’s a problem.

 

And then, out of the swamp of the Internet this appeared.  I'm not so sure about that, Stanley:

THE KING'S RIBBON

I like maps and you like maps, of course we do, otherwise we wouldn’t be such good friends.  And if you’re a regular reader with a moderately good memory you may recall this pic of me unfurling a map I bought in Tokyo, showing the whole of Japan:

I suppose it’s a kind of ribbon map, but I’m sure the Japanese have a much better word of their own for it.

And here’s an 1866 ribbon map of the Mississippi that appeared on Atlas Obscura recently, from the David Rumsey Map Collection.  It’s eleven feet long and three inches wide, totally pocket-sized, and its title is Ribbon Map of the Father of The Waters.

Now that I’m temporarily living in Chelsea, in London, every time I walk up to the tube station I pass, and in some cases walk over, this map set in the ground near to Duke of York Square:

If there’s any onsite information explaining the map I’ve yet to find it.  It’s near to the Saatchi Gallery so it might be a work of contemporary art, but I can neither confirm or deny that.

However, digging around online I did find this map on the National Archives website.  

Paper and concrete versions aren’t identical, not least in the variant spellings of Majesty’s and road, but they're close.

The paper map dates from 1830, but according to the National Archives  it shows King’s Road (nobody seems to care either way about the apostrophe) as it was in the early 18^thcentury.  Before that, King’s Road, was the road belonging to the King, in this case Charles II, for the use of the royal family, travelling between London and the out of London palaces.  I don't suppose they walked.

1830 was the year it cased to be a private road and became a public highway, but from 1720 or it had been a toll road that the public could use if they paid for the privilege.  So the map is a kind of route finder and a guide to the fare stages.

In vaguely-related matters, a few weeks back I picked up, for a quid, a copy of the Ladybird Book, Understanding Maps.  No mention of ribbon maps, but there is this totally wonderful guide to help you understand gradients:

LOST IN THE MISTRANSLATION

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Here’s Beryl Markham writing in West With The Night, 1942, which is a book about her travels in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya.  “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’”

         

Safe to say that Beryl Markham never went to Tokyo, but I just did.  I walked a lot while I was there and most of the time I was carrying and frequently consulting a map.  Unlike Ms. Markham I didn’t feel as though I had the earth in the palm of my hand.  Mostly I felt as though I was carrying a rather useless piece of paper.  Sometimes, of course, I was also consulting a rather useless graphic on a cell phone screen.  True, given the dense population of Tokyo, I was rarely alone, but a lot of the time I was lost.

         

To be honest, only rarely was I completely and utterly, irredeemably lost.  Most of the time I had some rough, nebulous idea of where I was, and I’m enough of a psychogeographer to find that experience interesting, even desirable, but getting from where I was to where I wanted to be was (let’s say) challenging, and often confusing and ultimately downright exhausting.

      Roland Barthes had something to say about this.  In Empire of Signs he writes, of Tokyo, “This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.”

         

         Not completely sure about that, Roland.  For one thing I would say that by no means every discovery in Tokyo is fragile; many of them are extremely robust, but they’re intense certainly. Still, does Barthes make Tokyo sound like my kind of town.  And it is.

I walked in Tokyo, I walked a lot, in Shinjuku and Akihabara, in Ueno and  Yanesen and Roppongi Hills, and it was very alien in some ways, surprisingly familiar in others.  I mean we’ve all seen those pictures of the big bustling neon lit main streets.  And if we’ve seen the photographs of Araki and Moriyama then we’ve seen the back streets and alleys too. 

These images were accurate enough.  I was rather more enchanted with the alleys than the main streets, and of course we’re always told how safe Tokyo is. I wasn’t taking anything for granted but I was probably less guarded as I walked around the edgelands of Tokyo than I might have been in some other cities.

I took a couple of maps with me, but once I got there I kept picking up dozens of the things.  They seemed to be everywhere.  Some, of course, were just tourist maps whose main reason for existing wasn’t to help travelers go wherever they pleased, so much as direct them to some very specific places, i.e. the businesses that had paid to have advertisements on the back of these maps.  This was a plain enough illustration that maps are always in somebody’s interest, and that these interests may not necessarily be the same as yours, though of course if you’re looking for a sushi restaurant then these interests may coincide.  Here's part of the collection:

There were also a lot of public maps, on street corners, in parks, in stations, even sometimes in the sidewalk.

 And I did find it some consolation that as I walked I saw many locals who seemed as lost as I was.  They too stared at those street corner maps with as much confusion as I did.  I’d also see them staring at maps on their cell phones, sometimes using the cell phone to photograph the street corner map.  It made me feel just slightly less of a buffoon.

There were also these helpful signs directing you to places where you could cross the street.  I’m an observer of these things.  I have photographs taken in Suffolk, in England only a few years back in which the walking man is wearing flared trousers, and here the walking man was wearing a hat:

The parts of Tokyo I was in weren’t absolutely, completely free of graffiti, but by any standard I know they were very limited, and such street art as there was seemed very minor.  I don’t know if this means Tokyo really needs Banksy or whether they’d just throw him in jail. 

But oddly enough those street crossing signs were quite a target for low level doodling and stickering and general abuse.  I haven’t worked out why that is.  Maybe it’s because of the hat.

Tokyo, certainly to a first timer, though I’d imagine to anyone, seems to be a place of strange and complex and often mysterious spaces, some are big and broad and strangely empty, elsewhere there are tiny alleyways and gaps between buildings that are barely wide enough for a human being to walk through, though the cats seems to like those places just fine.

And there are certain spaces, under freeways or bridges or railway lines that do feel strangely different from their western equivalents.   In the west they might be considered non-spaces, but in Tokyo they seem much more part of the fabric of the city.  Maybe that’s because there are so many of them that if you thought of them as non-place then you’d have to think of much of the city as a blank.

I walked reasonably far and reasonably wide, though I could certainly have walked further and wider.  Most of the walking was not quite aimless.  Generally I was trying to get somewhere, say to a gallery or bookshop or bar or restaurant.  More often than not I got there, but not absolutely always.  Still I was well prepared for serendipity, and that I found in spades.

And if nobody was in any doubt that I was a tourist and didn’t belong there, I never sense any hostility, nor frankly much in the way of curiosity about me.  Maybe this was an illusion.  If we accept that the Japanese are a very polite race, maybe they were just too polite to express either their hostility or their curiosity.  Just one old jogger came up to me and me where I was from and how long I’d been in Tokyo, otherwise I was ignored as just another gaijin.  I was prepared to settle for that. 

Since I got back I’ve been reading Barrie Shelton's Learning from the Japanese City.  He writes, “To a Westerner, the Japanese maps may be seen to fragment the landscape. The Japanese maps are rather like a cubist painting where one can see on a single surface, many aspects of a three-dimensional object which could not be seen from a single static viewpoint. Considered another way, they may be seen to integrate the landscape for they show it, as it is commonly experienced by the majority of those who move through it. In other words, it is more a product of experience than the Western map which is more one of intellect.”

I think I know what he means, though of course I also think you could argue that one of the main duties of a map is to offer information for people who don’t have experience of moving through a given landscape.  If you “commonly” move through it then why did you need a map?

 

Shelton also refers to an early eighteenth century map showing the whole of Japan, a map that was 7 inches high and 28 feet long.  I haven’t seen this map and it doesn’t sound as though Shalton has either, but it sounds a wonderful thing.  I wonder if Ed Ruscha knew about this map when he did his Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Then and Now).  In any case, in honor of this concept I did buy the map you see below, by no means as long and thin as the 18^th century map, but long and thin enough.  Suitable for framing no doubt, but quite a challenge for the framer.