A LONDON BRIDGE

I’ve said it before so it must be true, that sometimes you want to walk in certain places or along certain streets just because you like the name – Ducksfoot Lane, Spanker’s Hill, Camera Place.

And so it was last week with Wormwood Street (no connection with Wormwood Scrubs), close to Liverpool Street.  The London Encyclopedia (Weinreb and Hibbert) says the name derives simply from the fact that wormwood used to grow there. It also leads into Camomile Street, which again gets its name because of the historic presence of wild camomile. But I had another reason for walking down Wormwood Street - it’s currently the site of a sculpture or installation or anyway a work of art titled ‘Bridging Home, London’ by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh. 

Wormwood Street usually looks like this, crossed by a pedestrian walkway, or even, in architect-speak, a pedway.

But now, thanks to Do Ho Suh, it looks like this:

The added structure is a representation of his childhood home, a traditional Korean house, and I’m sure the vertiginous angles say something about the instability of culture and tradition, about the inevitably temporary existence of houses, of all architecture, and no doubt about the insecure nature of the immigrant experience.  But it’s also fun, like seeing an alien but unthreatening spacecraft that’s landed in the middle of the city.  It’s also quite moving in its apparent precariousness.  I say apparent because I assume the health and safety folks have been in to make sure its not going to free itself and fall into the traffic.

As far as I could see there was no way of getting up to that walkway for a closer look at the ‘house’ and certainly I didn’t see anybody up there.  Perhaps the work of art is just too unstable.

I’d never heard of Do Ho Suh, and I assumed he was some bright young spark who’d just got a break, but that’s not the case.  He’s in his late 50s, online sources tell me he has a BA and MA in Fine Arts from Seoul University, another BA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, another Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Yale.

       He has work in collections at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney in New York, atMOCA in Los Angeles, The Tate in London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo – among others.

According to Wikip he currently has live-in studios in London, New York City, and Seoul. 

This of course is nothing to hold against him, but it does suggest that his version of the immigrant expression is more singular than most.

Do Ho Suh is not a walking artist but he does create works that you can not just walk around, but also walk inside. Though not, it seems, in Wormwood Street.

PHOTO WALKING

         Eureka.  I’ve been looking for the above photograph for years.  I knew it existed - I’d seen it often enough before - and I knew I had a copy, but it had gone missing somewhere in the choatic arrangement of files, papers and photographs that make up the Nicholson archive.  Then, yesterday suddenly while digging around in search of something else, there it was.

         It shows my Aunty Daisy and my Nan, in Sheffield walking along what is recognizably Fargate, across the road from the Peace Gardens.  Young cousin Margaret is in there too, between them, but apparently not wishing to be seen.

The picture comes from the golden days of a certain kind of street photography when you might be walking along and a ‘professional’ photographer would pop out and take your picture, hand you a ticket, and then later you’d go to his kiosk, see the picture on display and if you liked it you’d buy a copy.  Hence it would be possible to have quite a few pictures of yourself walking.   Incidentally, this family picture has a very pale ink stamp on the back that says, I think, ‘One Snap.’

I’m sure these street photographers operated mostly at the seaside, when people were in holiday mood, and in that Sheffield photograph my aunt Daisy and my Nan don’t seem to be in holiday mood; they’re obviously out shopping, and I do wonder what Daisy’s got in that paper parcel under her arm.  Nan's got one too, bit it's smaller.  But for whatever reason they decided they wanted a copy of the picture.

Above is another ‘walking photograph’ which I’ve always known the whereabouts of (or at least the whereabouts of a scan), this one showing my grandparents, though I don't know the story behind it.

I don’t know where they are, but they’re quite dressed up so it must be some kind of occasion. It could be at the seaside though somehow I don’t think so.  I’ve always thought they might be at the races in Doncaster – it was the kind of thing they did - but I’ve no hard evidence for that.

But it does remind you how few photographs we have these days of people walking.  When the camera or phone comes out, people stop and pose.  They might be in restaurants, on the beach, in the living room, even the bedroom, but chances are they aren’t walking, unless of course they think of themselves as ‘walkers.’  In which case …

MORE OBELISK WALKS

My obelisk ‘thing’ continues: let’s call it an interest rather than an obsession at this stage.  It ties in with walking, of course.  I don’t in general go walking in search of them, but if in the course of a walk I happen to see one, then my heart leaps up.  

This in turn partly ties in with my love of graveyards (I don’t think I’m a full-on taphophile).  If I’m walking and I see there’s a cemetery nearby I tend to walk through it, and although I don’t necessarily expect to find an obelisk there, it’s surprising how often I do.  As in this cemetery attached to Saint Saviour’s Church in Walthamstow:

Or in the churchyard at Stithians in Cornwall:

I was there with automatist Paul Spooner -  we were having a Sunday afternoon walk - and we stood and looked at the obelisk.  I suppose I was looking at it with rather more fascination than he was, and the time must have been a minute to one, because a minute later the church bell rang very loudly and simultaneously, out of nowhere, a fierce blast of wet wind hit us in the face.  It scared the life out if us.  This is what Paul Spooner looks like, when not having the life scared out of him:

I came across this war memorial obelisk in Manchester (I was there for the cricket):

And a different kind of war memorial obelisk in Chelmsford:

If you’re visiting Colchester General Hospital you’ll find this rather inscrutable one right by the bus stop:

And if, by any chance, you’re in Bristol and you walk down to the Arnos Vale cemetery, you may well think you’ve hit the mother lode, obelisk central:

And just last week I saw this one in Circus Place, adjacent to Finsbury Circus in London.  

It’s quite an eye-catching beast, and it commemorates George Dance the younger (1741 - 1825), an architect, who in 1768, so while he was still in his twenties, became Architect and Surveyor to the Corporation of London, a job he inherited from his father, George Dance the elder. 

Now, a true connoisseur of obelisks will look at the George Dance memorial and protest that it isn’t really an obelisk at all, because it lacks a pyramidion – the pointed bit at the very top, 

That’s perfectly true, and there’s a good reason for it.  The monument is in fact a sort of ventilation chimney – those indents on the shaft are in fact air holes.  Down below street level there is, apparently, a gas storage facility and the passage of air in and gas out prevents explosions, which is obviously a good thing.  But that also means that this obelisk is hollow – so again, it’s not an obelisk at all, since a true obelisk has to be solid and made from one piece of stone.  Still, you can’t be too sniffy about these things.

Nor can you be sniffy if you’re on the train from Manningtree to London, somewhere north of Cherwell Heath, and you look out of the window and see a large white obelisk flashing by.

They’re scattered all over the place if you know where to look, and they mark the points at which duty was payable on coal being taken into London by rail. An obelisk seems rather a grand marker for such a workaday activity, and they do come in various kinds and sizes, some much grander than others, and some not obelisks at all.

THE PEDAGOGIC WALK

The mighty John Baldessari died recently, which was a great shame,  though he was 88.

He was not, in the current sense, a ‘walking artist’ but walking sometimes featured in his works, as in Walking Forward-Running Past, 1971(single-channel video, black and white, sound; 12:45 minutes). 

According to the New York Met, it’s a piece in which ‘John Baldessari examines the chronological relationship between still images and motion pictures. The artist constructs a purposefully crude moving image from still pictures of himself walking toward the camera, then running past it. By creating a video with still images, Baldessari urges viewers to question notions of sequence and cinematic time, and how we depict the past, present, and future.’  Well yes.

Another is A Movie: Directional Piece Where People Are Walking, 1972-1973; 22 black and white photographs with acrylic paint on them that looked like this when installed:

And there’s Walking the Plank, again acrylic on black and white photographs, 1988.

I can’t say that John Baldessari and I had much in common, though we did both teach at Cal Arts, in Valencia, an hour or so up the road from LA.  We taught at very different times and with very different results.  He was there 1970 to 1986:  I was there about 30 years after he left.  He was well loved.  I was not.

An article by Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker described one of Baldessari’s artistic strategies. ‘They had a game, in which a student would throw a dart at a map of Los Angeles, and then they’d all go there and spend the day, taking pictures and Super-8 films or videos.’ 

I assume they drove to the place where the dart pierced the map, but walked when they got there.  I have also read, though can’t currently find the source, that Baldessari described this artistic practice as ‘fucking about.’ 

I think my time at Cal Arts would have been much more enjoyable if I’d done more fucking about. As it was I took things rather too seriously.  I did try to incorporate some walking into my pedagogic method, with limited success.

            However, given how things are these days in American colleges, with students who regard themselves as clients and consumers, determined to get their money’s worth, if you did too much fucking about you’d no doubt be fired. Probably best just to walk away.

THE REMAINDER WALK

I just read the novel Remainder by Tom McCarthy.  It’s a good book, I think.  I wished it had been a bit shorter but then I wish that about most books.

If it’s about what it appears to be about, it concerns a man who’s been hit by ‘something falling from the sky,’ and is severely injured, so badly in fact that he has to learn to walk again

The narrator says, ‘And if you thinkThat’s not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you’re wrong.  Completely wrong.  That’s just it see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French or tennis.  You just do it without thinking how you do it: you just stumble into it, literally. I had to take walking lessons. For three whole weeks my physio wouldn’t let me walk without his supervision, in case I picked up bad habits.’

This is good stuff.  It sounds absolutely authentic and believable.

         Then the guy’s compensation comes through – eight and a half million quid  - and I honestly couldn’t decide whether or not that was really enough money to carry out what he has in mind, even given that he invested it wisely. Essentially he decides to reshape the world, or at least some very specific parts of it, and make it exactly the way he wants it.

In the first instance, this involves searching for a building that he once lived in.  The search is long and arduous and he decides to employ some oblique strategies to help him.

‘I cooked myself some breakfast and pondered how best to make my search irrational.  The first idea that came to me was to I-Ching the map; to close my eyes, turn round a few times, stick a pin in blindly and then go and look in whatever area it happened to have landed on… Colours was the next idea I had: following … I also considered following a numerical system .. Or I could devise a corresponding process using the alphabet… I could …’

The guy has turned into a psychogeographer!!!

I went onlike to look for an author photograph of Tom Mccarthy to illustrate this post.  There’s no shortage, and he evidently meets quite a decent class of photography.  But in the end what struck me is that he resembles (in some pictures anyway) a rather more stylish Dwight Shrute of the American Office fame.  Unforntunately we cannot choose who we resemble.

LOAFING WITH BRYSON

I have nothing against Bill Bryson but I admit I couldn’t make it all the way through his recent book The Body: A Guide for Occupants.  There was just too much about death and decay,  which reminded me of the death and decay going on in my own body; and frankly I needed no reminding.

But I did read the chapter titled ‘On the level: Bipedalism and exercise’ because it had some stuff in it about walking. Most of it was pretty well known to pedalists such as you and me but I my eye was caught by the information that ‘Today the average American walks only about a third of a mile a day – and that’s walking of all types, including around the house and workplace …  According to the Economist, some American companies have begun offering reward to employees who log a million miles a year on  an activity tracker suck as a Fitbit.  That seems a pretty ambitious number but actually works out to just 2,740 steps a day or a little over a mile,’

Those must very short steps - 1.92 feet per step by my calculations: that is not the step of anybody engaged in actually walking.

But then Bryson was in the Times last weekend saying ‘I’m very active.  I walk between 16,000 and 20,000 steps a day.’  I have no reason to doubt him, and nobody believes that walking in itself makes you thin, but I would say he certainly doesn’t LOOK like a man who walks 20,000 steps a day.

WALKING UNWOUNDED (AS YET)

I have no idea of the real politics (or even realpolik) behind the killing of Qasem Soleimani, but I do know that on CNN, Nation Security Analyst Samantha Vinograd said that as a result ‘all American citizens are now walking prime targets.’  

Again I have no idea if this is actually true – I’d have thought if you were working on a ranch in Wyoming, the Iranian Quds Force is unlikely to come after you - but in any case I find something strangely tonic about the notion of being a ‘walking target.’  It seems so much better than being a sitting target or even a running target.  Let’s take comfort where we can.

AS I WAS GOING TO ST IVES ...

During his expedition to Mecca (1851-3) Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and the rest of his party anchored at a place called Marsa Mahar on the Red Sea.

Burton writes, ‘Wading ashore we cut our feet on the sharp rocks.  I remember to have felt the acute pain of something running into my toe; but after looking at the place and extracting what seemed to be a bit of thorn, I dismissed the subject, little guessing the trouble it was to give me.’

It seems he had stepped on a sea urchin, and the foot was so seriously infected that he couldn’t put any weight on it. He had to be carried for part of the journey in a sort of litter or shugduf, and later he rode on a donkey that was itself lame.  Various treatments were recommended for the foot but they all failed.  Dressing the foot with onion skin only inflamed it further, although by the time he got to Mecca it must have healed – he was fit enough to make a good few enthusiastic circuits of the kaaba.

Burton has been on my mind since I was in Cornwall at the weekend, and partly in St Ives which is home to the Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton Museum, in a private house run by one Shanty Baba (conceivably not his real name).

It was great – a kind of son et lumiere, enjoyed while sitting in a room modeled on Burton’s smoking room in Trieste (don’t you find that fewer and fewer of your friends have smoking rooms these days?) surrounded by Burtoniana, including a page from a Burton manuscript, Burton’s medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and this fine little figure, also from the Royal Geographical Society.

There was some walking to be done in St Ives, by me, not by Burton, who as far I can tell never set foot there.

There was Mount Zion and there was Teetotal Street – I’ve searched in vain to find how these places got their names

There was also some intriguing ground, for those of you who like that kind of thing.

Burton would have been taking notes and measurements, learning Cornish, and probably finding his way to the nearest brothel.  I did none of these things.  But I did have a Cornish pasty.

 Incidentally, Burton once wrote, 'The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.'  I don't know how you'd test the accuracy of that statement, but it seems all too likely to be true.

ALL OVER IN DOVERCOURT

Back in the day, and it was a long day, I had an idea for a sort of travel book to be titled The Seaside in Winter.  The pitch was that I’d buy a camper van, a Volkswagen no doubt, and in the course of a long winter I’d travel around the coast of mainline Britain.  By day I’d walk and look and feel the wind and rain and icy chill, and in the evening I’d return to the camper, park up, and spend the evening writing up my notes from the day, which would involve reflecting on and savouring the bleak melancholy of deserted seaside spaces.  

I can still see how it might have worked but I never turned it into a proposal, because I also thought it might be recipe for doom.  ‘Promising melancholic young writer found dead by his own hand in VW Camper.’  That might have boosted sales a little, but it wasn’t enough.  Yet that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped enjoying the seaside in winter.

And so at the weekend I went to Dovercourt: north east Essex coast, next to Harwich, and the casual flâneur might be hard pressed to say where one town ended and the other one started.

Dovercourt is where Hi Di Hi was filmed, in Warner’s Holiday Camp, renamed Maplins for the show.  I wasn’t a regular viewer, but I don’t remember many scenes being shot outdoors, though evidently some were.

Dovercourt in late November had many of the things I thought would be components of my long lost book, even though I’m well aware that late November isn’t truly winter. There was the empty seaside shelter – with pro-Jesus and anti-Satan graffiti.

They’ve got two  19^th century steampunk(ish) lighthouses (no longer in use):

There was crazy golf – I would have played if the kiosk had been open:

And you know I love signs, not least this one, 

I think, and again I may be wrong, it’s warning you that you could be attacked by a blob of black ectoplasm rising from the beach and attacking you in the trouser region.  In general I think life requires a few risks, but I’m all in favour of being warned against that particular danger.

As well as being proper seaside, with groins, lighthouses and (rather small) stretches of beach, Dovercourt also has some serious suburbia, which of course I’m deeply attracted to.

Note how the two bungalows above are apparently mirror images of each other, but they have a different kind of pvc front door and a different kind of lamp adjacent to it.  That’ll make a house stand out from all the others, not that everybody in suburbia wants their house to stand out.

Anchors are another option:

So is a horse:

PROBE

Meanwhile Nicholson probed ever deeper into the Obelisk 

Jungle of Death. 

(photo by Yana Wormwood Smith)