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psychogeography and art and such
May. 2nd, 2007 10:31 amAtlanta friends Evan Levy and Benita Carr's inclusion in a summerlong series of art and performance curated by Predrag Pajdic has sent me back to Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances, which had been sitting unread for weeks if not months.
The chapter near the end about Old St. Pancras church surrounded by construction for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link station is a splendid piece of writing, and a reminder of how layers of history are sedimented, figuratively and literally, in all sorts of unprepossessing places. The tale of the King's Cross war memorial (which I've noted frequently over the years) leads, in another piece, into a search for family history that should delight anyone who has ever hit dead ends in public archives, an experience probably known to most of the readers of this blog.
Some more strictly psychogeographical explorations illustrate the topic's site between art and history, probably, like all such hybrids, outraging purists in both camps. I'm struck by its particular mixture of aesthetics and politics, much more agreeable than the American version that usually smothers its subject in self-righteousness at the uncovering of the past's skullduggery. It is possible to engage in socially revelatory art without having to engage in offputting rhetoric about it. (I suppose I should have posted this note yesterday, but I was busy working.)
I would guess that my original reflections on the emotional tone of historical investigations was as useless as the aforegoing wisecrack, but the subject deserves analysis by someone wiser or less sleep-disorder-diminished than I. I was impressed by the recent effort of the neighborhood's First Existentialist Church to find out the history of the stone building in which it meets. On discovering that the original church had been built by an African-American congregation that was gradually edged out of the immediate neighborhood in the early part of the twentieth century, they invited that congregation's choirs to join them for what will become an annual homecoming celebration. Most rituals of reconciliation are forced, committee-designed and halfhearted; this one was as genuine a grassroots act of reparation as one could wish.
What our present culture defines as progress drives its plow not only over the bones of the dead (as in William Blake's axiom) but over the houses of the living. If, as Walter Benjamin observed, every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism, perhaps the less utopian among us can hope to do no more than temper the barbarity.
Perhaps I shall be allowed sufficient mental clarity to make more sense of this at some later date.
The chapter near the end about Old St. Pancras church surrounded by construction for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link station is a splendid piece of writing, and a reminder of how layers of history are sedimented, figuratively and literally, in all sorts of unprepossessing places. The tale of the King's Cross war memorial (which I've noted frequently over the years) leads, in another piece, into a search for family history that should delight anyone who has ever hit dead ends in public archives, an experience probably known to most of the readers of this blog.
Some more strictly psychogeographical explorations illustrate the topic's site between art and history, probably, like all such hybrids, outraging purists in both camps. I'm struck by its particular mixture of aesthetics and politics, much more agreeable than the American version that usually smothers its subject in self-righteousness at the uncovering of the past's skullduggery. It is possible to engage in socially revelatory art without having to engage in offputting rhetoric about it. (I suppose I should have posted this note yesterday, but I was busy working.)
I would guess that my original reflections on the emotional tone of historical investigations was as useless as the aforegoing wisecrack, but the subject deserves analysis by someone wiser or less sleep-disorder-diminished than I. I was impressed by the recent effort of the neighborhood's First Existentialist Church to find out the history of the stone building in which it meets. On discovering that the original church had been built by an African-American congregation that was gradually edged out of the immediate neighborhood in the early part of the twentieth century, they invited that congregation's choirs to join them for what will become an annual homecoming celebration. Most rituals of reconciliation are forced, committee-designed and halfhearted; this one was as genuine a grassroots act of reparation as one could wish.
What our present culture defines as progress drives its plow not only over the bones of the dead (as in William Blake's axiom) but over the houses of the living. If, as Walter Benjamin observed, every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism, perhaps the less utopian among us can hope to do no more than temper the barbarity.
Perhaps I shall be allowed sufficient mental clarity to make more sense of this at some later date.
