SPEKE MEMORY

If you’re looking for a catchy but modest (possibly faux-modest) title for your travel book then you could do a lot worse than A Walk Across Africa, James Augustus Grant’s 1864 volume, especially since it has the knockout subtitle Or, Domestic Scenes from My Nile Journal.

Grant’s book tells in part the story of his expedition with John Hanning Speke in search of the source of the Nile at Lake Victoria: they found it, more or less.

Speke was a profound, and in some sense perhaps ultimately a mortal, enemy of Sir Richard Francis Burton.  They too travelled together in search of the source of the Nile, and failed to find it, more or less.  

The two men loathed each other.  Speke shot himself (accidentally? we don’t know) the day before he was about to have a public debate with Burton.  This is Speke being chased by Somalis, on an earlier expedition with Burton.

There’s a tendency, and I share it, to find yourself ‘supporting’ either Speke or Burton as though they were opposing football teams, and I’m totally with Burton, even if I accept that at this point in history it’s a fairly meaningless kind of support.

Burton’s great memorial is his famous tomb in Mortlake in the shape of a Bedouin tent. 

Speke’s memorial, which I only recently discovered, is an obelisk made of Aberdeen red granite, which is located in Kensington Gardens, not a million miles away from the Peter Pan statue.  A plaque set in the ground tells us the memorial was sponsored by Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society, and paid for by public subscription.

My unscientific observation when I went there is that the people who walk through Kensington Gardens, often with their dogs, pay very little attention to the Speke obelisk, although one or two of them did pay attention to me because I was looking at it with such intensity, and taking photographs, and they probably thought I was a nutter, so they walked on that much faster.

The memorial, as all true obelisk fans with observe, is not a true obelisk since it’s in three parts.  A true obelisk is made from a single piece.  I suppose that Aberdeen granite doesn’t come in big enough chunks.

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.