HOBBLING WITH OBELISKS

 As I’ve said before, I accept that not everybody is as moved by and as interested in obelisks as I am.  But once you start looking for them they pop up all over the place – you’ll be walking along and boom – there it is, often in the least likely place.  

 

Let’s say, for example, one afternoon you’re ambling in Mistley in Essex, just up the road from where I live, and you see a garden containing a tall, green topiary obelisk, well you’re going to be impressed by that: but wait. 

Then you walk a little further up the street and you see that behind the live, growing obelisk there’s a wooden garden obelisk, as they’re called.  These aren’t really obelisks in any real sense – they're not made from one piece and they lack the all-important pyramidion –  but they’re still a good thing.

 

And then say, one night having been to a lecture by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan on the lost gardens of London, and you’re walking along the Albert Embankment between Lambeth and Vauxhall, and you see this thing tucked away behind a hoarding.  I took a picture, not sure what I was taking a photograph of.  A spot of Photoshopping helped a little, but only a little.

Some online research reveals that it’s standing tight beside the headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation: 

and further messing about with Google streetview indicates it’s actually in a car park.  

More than that I don’t know, but I’m inclined to think it must be some kind of ventilation duct, most likely for the Tube, like this one in honour of George Dance the Younger, who laid out the Finsbury Estate in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Frankly it seems to me that if you’re going to have a ventilation duct for a subterranean railway, then why wouldn’t you have it in the shape of an obelisk? 

And then, and I don’t want you to think my life is glamorous or colourful or anything, but last week I was given a personal tour of the Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House (currently under refurbishment).  My guide was Edwin Heathcote, who writes about architecture and design in the Financial Times, and is also ‘The Keeper of Meaning’ at the house – a job title that’s hard to improve on. (I get to call him Eddie).

 

And as we walked through the postmodern and indeed cosmic wonders of the house, there were obelisks galore, small ones, decorative objects, many of which if I understood Mr. Heathcote correctly, were bought by Jencks on souvenir stalls around the pyramids in Cairo. 

 

There was also this marvelous and unusual tableau, someone working at a computer while bracketed by obelisks.  I may have to find a way of doing that myself.

WALKING IN FOOTSTEPS

On Sunday I went on a guided walk led by my pal Jen Pedler, with Footprints of London, a walk based on Rose Macaulay’s book The World my Wilderness, following in the footsteps of the book’s heroine Barbary.  This is Jen keeping her anonymity:

 

The novel, published in 1950, is set in London shortly after the Second World War, mostly around the City of London where St Paul’s Cathedral remained intact after the Blitz even as much of the area around it was in ruins. Then the ruins became a wilderness, and in that wilderness a certain kind of life flourished.

 

Barbary is sent from France to London by her posh Bohemian mother Helen to study art at the Slade.  She paints and sells postcards of ruined London, and she meets various colourful and dodgy working class types. 

 

I’ve read critics who say that the name Barbary is supposed to raise questions about what is and isn’t barbarous, and I don’t doubt that’s true, but personally I thought of Barbary pirates, because there is something piratical and lawless about the characters in the novel, even if unlike the actual Barbary pirates they’re not slave traders.

 

At the centre of the novel is a bilingual pun.  In France during the war, Barbary and her stepbrother Raoul ran wild with members of the French Resistance – the Maquis.  But maquis also means scrubland or bush, therefore a kind of wilderness, leading mother Helen to think, as Jen pointed out, ‘The maquis is within us, we take our wilderness where we go.’

 

  And so we walked with our inner and outer wildernesses, seeing London ruins, some of which dated from long before the Second World War to at least Roman times, while all around them, and us, were new big shiny buildings including the sprawl of the Barbican estate. 

 

I’d have said that I knew the area at least somewhat but a lot of what we saw was new to me including the Physic Garden belonging to the Barber’s Company, which is on the site of the 13th bastion built by Emperor Hadrian in AD 122. In 1666 the garden acted as a kind of fire gap to stop the Great Fire spreading, and if I’m reading the Barber Surgeons’ website correctly, it was derelict from World War Two until 1987.

 

Rose Macaulay is best known in many quarters for the novel The Towers of Trebizond which I admit I haven’t read. I know her best for the book Pleasure of Ruins, a title I can never quite get right; I always think it should be Pleasures of Ruin, and I tend to put in a superfluous definite article or two. 

 

The version I like best is the edition with photographs by Canadian Roloff Beny.  He does have a few photographs of British ruins but none in London.

 

Our walk was a very fine walk, taking two hours or so, and of course serendipity always plays a part in these things.  I wasn’t entirely surprised to see a Nicholson, because they get everywhere

 

But I really wasn’t expecting Monkwell Square, a place I had in fact been to before, to be the scene of such hot, compelling obelisk action. OK, I accept that not everybody feels the same way about obelisks as I do.

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

DAY TRIPS WITH DAPHNE

 

One of my infinitely minor claims to fame is that I was once, in some sense, “portrayed” on radio by Bill Nighty.  He read my book first-person travel book Day Trips to the Desert on BBC Radio 4. Bill NIghy doesn’t sound remotely like me and yet I thought he got the tone of my “voice” and of the book, exactly right. 

 I met him very, very briefly in a studio in Broadcasting House and he was entirely the Bill Nighy you would want him to be.

 

Day Trips to the Desert isn’t exactly a walking book (whatever the heck that is) but there’s a reasonable amount of walking in it, walking that I did in Australia, the United States, Morocco and Egypt.

 

I can’t say how much of a walker Bill Nighy is but there are quite a few online pictures of him walking, such as this one in which he’s carrying a jar or Marmite, no I don't know why.

 And sometimes he’s seen, in a professional capacity, with Helena Bonham Carter:

 

Just last week the two of them were on the radio performing a play titled

Beside Myself, with Bonham Carter as Daphne du Maurier and Nighy as “man”.   To quote the publicity materials, the play allows the listener to “follow Du Maurier as she starts a conversation with a stranger while on an amble.”

Yes really, an amble!

“When a stranger approaches, Daphne … picks up her stiff stride, eager to get away. However, this one’s not to be deterred. As they walk along Daphne, to her own amazement, finds herself revealing much to the man about her life. Why is she compelled to divulge so much? Perhaps too much.”  Why indeed.  Perhaps it was the rambling.

 

This is Daphne du Maurier:

 

And this is Helena Bonham Carter, not walking.

 

She seems to be divulging quite a lot, but not too much, I’d say.

 

 

 

 

METHODICAL WALKING

If you find yourself at London’s Temple tube station there’s every reason to follow the signs and walk up a set of steps to the Artist’s Garden which is ‘an open-air public space for art by women artists.’  So maybe it should be 'Artists' Garden'?

    It’s actually on top of the station building itself; a roof terrace or I suppose roof garden.  It’s surprisingly big, 1400 square metres. I mean it’s not like walking around Versailles but it’s definitely a place you can wander.

 

The current exhibition is by Holly Hendry and titled Slackwater, a sprawling installation chiefly made of industrial ducting. The contrast of the curved shiny metal of the art with the solid straight masonry of the buildings behind it, is spectacular, and of course on the other side you have the Thames.  

 

There was also this by Annabel Tennyson-Davies who’s artist in residence at the garden.

I’ve been up there once or twice and it’s never been busy with people, although I did see one visitor who’d found it a great place to have a kip.

 

If you walk down the stairs when you’re finished you can then go into what you might call the non-artists' garden, or in fact the Victoria Embankment Garden, with a sign directing you to the Middle Temple Gardens, the end point of the City of Westminster Fitness Route, which is apparently a thing, though when you think about it, isn’t the whole world a fitness route if you want it to be?

 

In fact I was only in those parts because I was on the way to see a ‘site specific and participatory installation’ by Zheng Bo in the center of the Somerset House courtyard.

 

The artwork’s title was ‘Bamboo as Method’ which according to the online artspeak ‘pays homage to the Ming Dynasty thinker and scholar, Wang Yangming. Wang’s pursuit of enlightenment through the practice of gewu zhizhi (the acquisition of knowledge through the investigation of the nature of things) is encapsulated in Zheng Bo’s profound reference.’  There’s also a board up in the courtyard telling visitors that Zheng Bo is ‘eco-queer.’ 

 

But none of that was  obvious from seeing the work itself.  In fact it looked as though Mr. Bo had done a tour of quite a few garden centres, bought up all their bamboo and arranged it in planters to provide what was really a very interesting environment in which to walk.  

I like bamboo a lot ,without being any kind of expert, but I understand there are over 1,400 known species in 115 genera.  Zheng Bo had managed to round up 10 different types.

 

     The participation wasn’t the walking, or even the looking, but visitors were invited to draw the bamboo, or I suppose draw anything else they fancied, - pencils and paper were provided – and then drop the result in a box. 

 

        But one participant hadn’t made a drawing. He or she had made a paper plane and dropped it on the ground.  Of course I found myself thinking about Harry Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker anthropologist, and collector of ‘lost’ paper planes.

As discussed elsewhere in this blog Harry Smith used to walk the streets of Manhattan in the late 60s to early 80s, finding discarded paper planes wherever he went, picking them up, then annotating and cataloguing them to form a ‘proper’ anthropological collection.

 

But this was the first time I can ever recall seeing a paper airplane lying on the ground when I was walking.  Obviously I swooped on it. Do I feel an anthropological collection coming on? No, but the plane has gone straight into the archive of ‘things found while walking,’ which is a form of participation.

 

 

 

WALKING AS ART SUBJECT AND ART OBJECT

 

As a person walks through the world he or she inevitably sees other people walking through the world, and it seems that lots of people have decided this is a suitable subject for art.

 

More often than you might imagine, you see sculptures of people walking through the world.  This is Brancusi’s Walking Man:

 

You would have to say that Brancusi walked the walk as well as made the art.  In 1903 and 1904 he walked from Bucharest to Paris – Peter made a film about it, Walking To Paris.

 

Of course there are walking women too, though not as many as we might like, including this one by Giacometti, Walking Woman1:

 

You’re unlikely to be walking along and suddenly come upon a work by Brancusi or Giacometti – for that you probably need to be in an art gallery or sculpture park - but I realized that in my walking, without actively looking for them, I’ve come across quite a few sculptures of walkers.

 

Not so long ago, walking in Holland Park I came across this by Sean Henry, titled Walking Man. The statue is painted bronze but the path he’s walking on is genuine concrete:

 

And I was reminded of the Walking Manin Sheffield by George Fullard, which I know fairly well, being a deracinated Sheffielder.  It’s positioned outside what is now called the Winter Garden. I feel that most Sheffield walkers aren’t quite as lean as that statue – but let’s call it artistic license.

 

Naturally there are some interesting ironies in all this.  The viewer is walking but even though the statue shows somebody walking they’re perfectly still, frozen in a moment.  And sometimes of course the human walker stops to admire the stopped walking statue. As in this statue by George Segal, titled Walking Man which is at the (wait for it) Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

And then it clicked that Sean Henry, the artist who made the walking man in Holland Park was also responsible for this Walking Woman in Colchester, who’s a favourite of mine.  

 

Apparently there are different versions of Sean Henry’s woman, placed in different locations, often in snowy climes. Frankly she doesn’t really look quite dressed for it.­

 

And then there’s this fellow by Toni Matelli, titled Sleepwalker,who was in Regent’s Park for Frieze Sculpture 2023, who doesn’t seem to be dressed for anything at all.