WALKING ROUND WEIWEI

 We’ve discussed previously whether or not Ai Weiwei is much of a walker.  The jury is still out, although hard core ‘walking art’ is one of the few conceptual practices he hasn’t embraced (as far as I know – I stand to be corrected). In any case here he is at least strolling in Portugal where he now lives.

However if you go to London’s Design Museum to see the Ai Weiwei: Making Sense exhibition, you do have to do a certain amount of walking as you explore the huge space where the works are displayed and laid out.

 

There are video screens showing 20 hour video pieces, his photographs of liminal spaces in Peking, other photographs of the Birds Nest National Stadium on which he worked as an ‘artistic consultant’ before deciding he didn’t want to be a ‘tool of government propaganda’ – I’m quoting from the catalogue there.

 

And there are 5 large pieces laid out on the floor, which the Design Museum describes as ‘fields,’ rectangular expanses filled with broken teapot spouts, chunks of porcelain from Weiwei’s sculptures that were destroyed when his studio was demolished by the Chinese authorities in 2018.  There are also Lego bricks, porcelain cannon balls, and my favourite by miles, rows and rows of what the museum says are Stone Age tools, some 1,600 of them.

This work is titled Still Life and I believe it was shown in a different form at the Royal Academy a few years back, and that consisted of 3,600 Stone Age items rather than 1,600.

 

This does, as they say, raise some interesting questions.  We’ve often discussed the joy of picking up rocks, stones and detritus while walking and I would definitely pick up a Stone Age tool if I came across one on my travels. But so far I haven’t had that pleasure.

 

Some sources describe these items as ‘found objects’ but where exactly do you find 3,600 Stone Age tools?  Where do you find even one?  The Design Museum says they were bought at flea markets, and I know that Chinese culture is inscrutable, but a flea market where you can pick up a few Stone Age tools, well that's obviously a flea market unlike any most of us have ever seen.

Which reminds me somewhat of Jim Ede, the man behind, and sometimes in front of, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge – there’s a new biography by Laura Freeman, titled Ways of Life.  Ede was a collector, curator, patron of the arts, and it’s a long time since I visited Kettle’s Yards but I do clearly remember the displays of carefully arranged stones and pebbles, seen on the book cover and in the house/gallery itself.

 

And the result of all this was that I found myself in my shed rearranging a few of the rocks I’ve collected while walking.    I’m no Ai Weiwei, but I think we already knew that.

Photo, and artistic consultancy by Caroline Gannon

SINCLAIRIAN RETURNS OF THE DAY

 I read online that yesterday was young Iain Sinclair's birthday.  80 years and still counting.  So I wrote this post.

    Then, incredibly, I found that not all information on the Internet is 100% correct, and his birthday is in fact on the 11th.  Ah well, it's the thought that counts.

And today the postman brings me a copy of Sinclair's Agents of Oblivion, published by The Swan River Press. I don't know much more than what it says on the front flap.  Four  stories (not necessarily fictions), 'starting everywhere and finishing in madness' inspired by Ballard, Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood.  What more could you want? Expect a more nuanced response in due course.

And another reason I know it's gonna be good is that it comes with a bookmark and a free badge!

A LONG WAY TO WALK

 Will Pavia interviewed the now late Martin Amis in 2018, 

when Amis was in his late 60s, not so very long before 

his death as it turns out.

Amis said, ‘I’m more and more averse to any kind of exertion.’  And then discussing the walk to his local grocery store he said, ‘When I come around the corner and look up the street (I think) that’s a long way.’ 

I wonder if it had something to do with the cigarettes.

 

From the Smithsonian magazine

You know, sometimes I look out of my window and see old people struggling with walking sticks and Zimmer frames and occasionally Nordic poles, and I admire them enormously because they’re still out there, determined to carry on walking.  But at the same time I think, if I had that much difficulty walking, if I needed a stick or a Zimmer frame or Nordic poles I don’t think I’d ever leave the house.  No doubt time will tell.

 

IT'S NOT THE REST ...

 

Because I’m such a cool and well-connected guy, people sometimes send me things, books mostly, and last week my own publisher sent me this, Calligraphies of the Desert by Hassan Massoudy.

 

Massoudy has a reputation as one of the world’s great calligraphers, this is him:

and although this isn’t my area of expertise, I can see it’s a terrific publication, works of calligraphy inspired by thoughts and quotations about the desert.

 

And because of the nature of the subject, one or two of the quotations also relate to walking. There is, for example, a Bantu proverb, ‘It’s not the rest that reduces the distance, it’s the walking,’ which seems unarguable.  And the Bantus knew of what they spoke.  

This is just one more area in which I lack expertise but I’m aware of the Bantu Migration.  By some accounts (meaning that it’s a contested anthropological hypothesis),  4,000 to 5,000 years ago (estimates differ), about 300 million members of the Bantu-speaking population roamed many, many thousands of miles, most by walking I assume, from the Niger Delta all across southern Africa eventually to what is now Angola and Zambia, looking for new places to settle.  

 

Elsewhere in Massoudy’s book there’s a quotation from St Augustine ‘Go forth on your path, as it only exists through your walking.’  I like that, although I assume there most be some paths that exist because of other people’s walking.

 

      The quotation comes from St Augustine of Hippo, not to be confused with St Augustine of Canterbury who landed in Kent baptised King Ethelbert in 597, and in due course set England on the course of conversion to Christianity.  

In his memory there is now a walking trail, the Augustine Camino from Rochester Cathedral to the Shrine of St Augustine in Ramsgate: 

To be fair, Saint Augustine of Hippo’s walks look a bit more lively.

 

STUMBLING IN THE SHRUBBERY (FOR INSTANCE)

I’ve been thinking there might be a book to be written, and one that I could possibly write, about walking in gardens. Of course I wouldn’t call it Walking in Gardens – that sounds like something Alan Titchmarsh would write – I’d be going for something like Shambling in Eden (yes, yes I know it needs work).

And of course it wouldn’t be all about the joys of walking around, say, the Chelsea Physic or Kew, though here, for reference, are some people walking in Kew:

I’d be more concerned with, say, the Poison Garden in Alnwick, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, Charles Jencks’ The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, and so on. 

Photo by Richard Tulloch (I think)

And of course I’d also be concerned with imaginary or fictional gardens, the suicide garden in You Only Live Twice

and perhaps most obviously the one in Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (Le Jardin Des Supplices), a book that’s obviously driven jacket designers mad over the years.

 There’s also a somewhat faithful film, Le Jardin Des Supplices 1976 directed by Christian Gion:

and there’s the 1967 film Torture Garden starring Jack Palance and Burgess Meredith that has almost nothing to do with the novel, but hey, it stars Jack Palance and Burgess Meredith.

 

And so, as research, I’ve been rereading the novel. The edition I own is the one above with Catherine Deneuve on the cover, and it also has a quotation on the back from my cineaste pal Anne Billson ‘This decadent classic flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones and is le denier cri in kinky exoticism.’  Fair enough. She knows of what she speaks.

Self-portrait by Anne Billson from her blog Multiglom.

There’s a key scene in the book where the narrator goes walking in the Torture Garden, which is at the centre of a prison, with Clara, the deracinated English ‘heroine’ who only feels at home and free in China, where the garden is located. 

(Spoiler alert - everything grows so well in the garden because it’s fertilized with the corpses of tortured prisoners; actually not much of a spoiler, you would almost certainly have guessed)

 

Clara started walking again, very quickly … She walked on – a hard shadow on her eyes and her eyes aflame… Clara continued walking.  I walked beside her and everywhere was a fresh surprise … Suddenly Clara stopped as though an invisible arm brutally descended on her. 

‘Do you smell it?’

‘I smell the aroma of peonies.’ 

       ‘No that’s not it ... it smells as it does when I make love with you … Here it is here it is oh my darling.’

In fact a powerful phasphatic odour, an odour of semen wafted up from that plant (a ‘thalictus’ in the text, the RHS prefers the term thalictrum)  

‘Why do so many flowers resemble sexual organs if not because nature ceaselessly cries out to living beings in all its forms and through its perfumes, ‘Make Love.’

 

I don't doubt that Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville West felt much the same way.