Robinsonnage

"In 1894 Joris-Karl Huysman wrote Against Nature (the novel that inspired Oscar Wilde to write A Picture of Dorian Grey) at one point, the Parisian hero of Huysman's tale, fascinated by the novels of Charles Dickens, orders a taxi and visits an English pub in Paris, before embarking on his trip to London.

Except...he finds himself unable to complete the journey and returns home.

Whereupon he realises that the imaginary experience is more than a preferable substitute for the real thing."

The Book of Persephone

A robinsonner is a traveller who does not travel. A cousin of the flâneur, the robinsonner takes their name from the character of Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe without ever having visited a desert island himself, or indeed having ever left Europe. Defoe has a special place in the history of psychogeography, with Merlin Coverley claiming that his 1722 novel  A Journal of the Plague Year represents the beginning of the psychogeographic tradition. Patrick Keiller, of course, references this in his character of Robinson, who's (adopted) name is also a reference to his being 'marooned' in Britain. 

Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

First, I should like to note that, although as with Keiller I have apparently rubbished the concerns of Sinclair several times, I hold him no actual malice. On the contrary, I actually like him quite a lot both for his qualities as a writer and for his qualities as a person that appear to be revealed through his writing. In fact, I haven't really got anything bad to say about any of the London psychogeographers, except Stewart Home, who I have disliked for years for reasons unrelated to his work as a psychogeographer. My verbal assaults against London are largely a rhetorical device, and, in fact, many of them are echoed in Sinclair's work. What I have objected to, mainly, is the focus on London as if it is the most interesting thing in the UK. Sinclair's take on this is interesting, simultaneously defining London as a microcosm and as something special and apart from the rest of the world (suggesting several times that everywhere beyond the M25 is 'nowhere') whilst simultaneously acknowledging that the road he is studying is an engine that drives this solipsism. He says of the motorway:

"By the time you've driven it...you should be way out in another eco-system, another culture: Newport (Mon.), or Nottingham, or Yeovil. The journey must mean something. Not a wearied return, hobbled, to the point of origin."

Gone Walkabout: Flânerie

I have actually been pretty hard at work, despite the lack of updates. One of the problems with this project, and with creative endeavors generally, is how much of the work is 'invisible'; the processes of conception and refinement which it is almost impossible to document. With Vectis this particularly comes down to the walking.

I am on to the longer walks now, Section 2 and Section 3. These walks require more logistical forethought than the other walks, particularly now the days have closed in so much. Rather than being loops that start and end at my house (as the walks are in section 1) the walks require bus travel at either one or both ends. This places a new financial strain on me as well; bus travel on the Island is regrettably expensive.

So, since I've been doing a good deal of walking, I think it's probably time to talk about Flânerie. The first question we have to answer is: why the French? How do we justify the pretension, isn't there some equally adequate anglo-saxon expression for what we're getting at? Flânerie translates as something like "strolling", "sauntering" or "loafing", but none of these really provide a full meaning. The word evokes a literary and cultural tradition, particularly associated with 19th century Paris, of the man (always a man, it seems) of leisure who draws inspiration from the matter of everyday life, observed on strolls that have no purpose except observation. The Flâneur is simultaneously apart from and integrated with the urban environment during the process of walking through it; the Parisian literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve described it as “the very opposite of doing nothing." It implies a form of non-passive observance that is a great model for artistic practice and for psychogeographic walking. The body as recorder moves along streets like the needle on a record, scratching away an infinitesimal amount of new material each time, subtly altering the song that it sings.

Obviously, when I talk about using Flânerie in my work, I am removing it from an urban context. I am also breaking, quite deliberately, the concept of moving with and observing other people in crowds. This is quite necessary, of course, as there are no crowds on my walks (though there are people, who are not entirely absent from my images and observations). So why don't I adopt a rural term, such as rambling? First, Flânerie has strong associations with psychogeographic practice that I wish to evoke, and for good reasons. A rambler moves over the landscape, and leaves it as they find it. The 'countryside code' states that the walker should endeavor to 'Leave Gates & Property as You Find Them'. But this is not appropriate for psychogeography, nor is it really an accurate description of what walking through the countryside means. On un-metalled highways and holloways more than anywhere else, walking on a path reinforces the path, carves it, and helps create new paths. The walker moves not across but through the landscape, helping to carve the interface between space and time that we have already mentioned.

Magick Without Tears

It’s time to return to the subject of the occult, a topic I dealt with all too briefly first time.

Particularly, I want to talk about the concept of Ley Lines. Leys are an idea with a wonderfully strange intellectual history. By the time they reach the milieu within which I am conducting business they have gone from archaeological theory to new age belief system to psychogeographic metaphor, via Atlantis, Glastonbury and other places between. Although when talking about the occult and psychogeography it might at first seem that we should be looking at the secondary evolutions of Leys (into great, world-encompassing mystic energy currents; more on that in a bit), but actually in many ways the use of Leys by figures such as Iain Sinclair signals a return to the origins of the concept.

The theory of Leys first finds expression in a frankly quite charming little book called The Old Straight Track, written (and illustrated) by travelling salesman, photographic pioneer, naturalist and amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins. ‘Ley’ was a neologism that he developed from the philological component of his ideas, and his theory (put very simply) was this: that the stone age peoples of Great Britain travelled around and organised themselves based around a network of straight pathways, marked by stones, arrangements of trees and notches cut out of the tops of hills and ridges. Watkins developed this theory during his career as a travelling salesman, from prolonged personal contact with the landscape of his native Herefordshire. It seems he first came up with the idea in a flash of inspiration, when reading a map and noticing chance alignments between church towers, standing stones and notches in the skyline. He went on to develop his idea painstakingly, trying to work out the position and purpose of various leys, and marshalling a body of evidence to support his ideas from various sources; place names, intricate maps, photographs. The Old Straight Track is obviously the culmination of several years of diligent and careful work, a fascinating record of one man’s obsession.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Occultism

It is impossible to get too far in to the matter of modern psychogeography without dealing with what we might call the occult, or the esoteric. More or less directly, many psychogeographers (particularly the London school) have tapped in to a variety of concepts common to various traditions of western mysticism; hermeticism, alchemy and gnosticism, via modern occultism. Particularly important (as they are, framed differently, in much modern art practice) are ideas of symbolism and correspondence. Alchemists believe that an object can be manipulated through its reflection or image; hermeticists believe in the direct correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm ('as above, so below') and gnostics believe that the reality we perceive is simply a deceptive projection, a curtain pulled across our eyes. In occult psychogeographic writing, the landscape and the individual become reflections of each other; the landscape becomes the medium through which wider social forces shape the individual, and vice versa. It also becomes the point of interaction between the real past, the past-as-myth and various conceptions of the present. Place here is not simply the banal reality of physical geography, but an imaginative (and imagined) space. The very use of occult language (as opposed to what can often be equivalent artistic jargon) is employed deliberately, to create an air of mysticism. The landscape, whether urban or rural, is a place of secrets and a battleground for interpretations. The occult psychogeographers employ their mystical methods in order to reinforce their own interpretation, without necessarily seeking to make any claims towards truth.

Walks & Walking: an outline

So, Vectis is an artistic project. Its final outcome is intended to be a book. The subject of this book is the Isle of Wight. The methodology is psychogeography and the method is writing, drawing, photography and walking. 

I've always had a suspicion that it's a bit dodgy to talk about 'methodology' when you're creating something purely artistic. It seems to have a whiff of a mis-appropriation of scientific terminology, implying something more rigorous than you ever really end up with in art. The term I would personally like to use in its stead is 'motive'; since methodology is the 'why' (opposed to the 'how' of method). Motive, to my mind, implies that even if the project is a failure, there might have been something interesting in its conception. It also allows you to potentially draw more terminology from the world of crime. Walking is part of my modus operandi.