Brown Studies of Mid-Winter

John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, c.1824

J M W Turner, Shade and Darkness: Evening of the Deluge, 1856

Ivan Aivasovsky, Storm, 1886

Turner has just opened at The Met, and the New York summer is simmering with his sublime and stormy vortices. Yet, Turner is more in tune with the dark and brooding mid-winter mood that pervades the south of the southern hemisphere at present. The days struggle by, life is eked out, the small servings of sunshine are so diluted as to be all but pointless. And so the mind counters with its store of memories. Of encounters with Constable in England, and of remembering the trip to the Russian State Museum and the Hermitage, and the revelation of Ivan Aiavasovsky, those tumultuous, turbulent images ... an amplification of winter's depths, and a moment of ascetic, aesthetic pleasure on a morning of pack ice and freezing fog, in a brown study ... winter is a nineteenth century season ...

Reading Reveries

Reading The Bird Artist means a simultaenous re-reading of The Shipping News. Not literally re-reading, but re-visiting, re-plotting, re-living. E Annie Proulx's book was a central thread of a design project some years ago, of narrating by knots, and through this process of a re-working of a work it becomes almost pathologically ingested, as part of one's self. At one stage there was a total seamlessness between The Shipping News and my methodology of design, a hybrid had formed. And as part of this an eidetic placefulness developed, even now, at the slightest mention of Newfoundland, it is all suddenly there again, augmented by a past friendship with a native of Halifax, whose accent was richly twisted, rolling and imbricated, marvellous to listen to. The project was fixated on the concept of the monument, and it had become, appropriately, buried in the sands of time.

Exhuming words from the past ...

Knots are thickenings, fastenings, aides-memoire. A knot is a hard part in an otherwise soft material, a concentration, a gnarly bit. A knot can join two things, be a sign of unity: tying the knot. Knots can give strength, hold something in, keep it in place. A knot in a handkerchief is a reminder of something, and has come to symbolise the act of remembering. Knots vary greatly in their symbolism, as anyone who has read Proulx's The Shipping News will testify. Referring to the Ashley Book of Knots, the author uses the knot descriptions to enrich the narrative. Knots are decorative, with entire textiles worked in knots through the art of macramé. Knots are also used in orientation, as in the knotted navigational charts of Pacific Islanders, where knots indicate seamarks and other clues to wayfinding.

Knots are tricky things, they confound and perplex ...

The correct tying of a knot is critical to its efficacy. Any change in direction might mean disaster: "In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there are 256 different 'over-and-under' arrangements possible.... Make only one change in the 'over and under' sequence and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result." (The Ashley Book of Knots in Proulx 1993). Orientation is important in monuments too ... the monument to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, leader of the first British expedition to the South Pole, contrasts with the other figurative statues in Christchurch, in that it is pointing northwards. This means the light falls directly onto the face of the statue (the sun shines from the north in the Southern Hemisphere), and the play of chiaroscuro is not as great as on those statues which face east or west. However, the orientation of Scott is highly symbolic and critical to the monument's effectiveness. Scott and his companions perished on their homeward journey, heading north. The Scott memorial immortalises this unfinished northward journey, and underscores the significance of the orientation of monuments.

And so on, where the analogy of the knot is central, driving a process of divining and designing ...

"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have."

Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1918

The Shipping News' knots, and The Bird Artist's birds, both evoke that melancholy longing ... the elusive completion of a collection, yet the not wanting to. Proulx's Quoyle and Norman's Fabian Vas stand nearly a century apart, yet both are within a certain timelessness, amongs the threads and snags of what time is, what place is, or to cite Kevin Lynch's now cliched title 'what time is this place?" Resonances ricochet back and forth, in that ambience of place, in the concern with the thingness of things, of knots, of birds, of drawing - ink, paper, paint, of Quoyle writing for the newspaper the Gammy Bird. Time compresses into a mere wisp, and turns upon itself...

Listening and watching

On days like this the gulls come reeling up the valley, as the rain pours down, and sheets of water cover the hills, the river nearly filled to overflowing. The water is brown and swirling, filled with sediment and other impediments like branches and nature's bric-a-brac. The gulls' calls are reporting a storm at sea, and their forlorn and salt-laden cries are carried away on the wind. The looping forms bring The Love Artist back to mind again ...

Sea birds are swooping and shrieking overhead – one, it seems, in particular. He glances up: its wings came close that time, and he does not like the look of its beak. It soars off into the sky, and he shields his eyes and follows. Far now, just a speck, it swings in great looping circles, drawing O’s and O’s against the blue. On and on they go, those circles, graceful and languorous…
Suddenly, with an irrepressible surge of ego, of desire, of wild awful need, Ovid believes the O is for him. Immaculate, principal, ovate letter! Yes, it is – it is a sign – showing that he shall be fixed in the sky as he so awfully longs to be: borne aloft, transfigured, forever.

Language in the landscape, Rudyard Kilping, Just So. Imagining the W ... “a little bit of the winding Wagai River for the nice windy-windy wa-sound”...

And then the smell of firewood, newly cut, sappy, and the smoke from the chainsaw hanging for a moment in the rain-soaked air. Helen Keller, “The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a disturbing odour made me pause in dismay. Then followed a peculiar measured jar, followed by dull, heavy thunder. I understood the odor and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down.”

A grey day, but one inhabited by presences, words woven into world ...

Words for Mid-Winter, June 2008, JB

Spawning Season

It is one of those times when books begin arriving ... they make their way with a stoic deliberateness to my door, and are there mewling on the step when I arrive home. Unpacking them, placing them together, the words of Norman O. Brown come to mind, from his book Closing Time, (about an unlikely juxtaposition of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova) that "two books get on top of one another and spawn." Presently spawning are Umberto Eco's On Ugliness (a lusciously revolting companion to his History of Beauty) and E M Cioran's Tears and Saints. The sparks flying between the two are intriguing, as they strangely cohabit the same sublime marshes, way beyond the pale. Both invite mid-winter dips, plunging suddenly and shockingly into the water, then emerging, with a splutter and an alarmingly heightened sense of one's self. Navigating the two with a randomness borne of surrealistic strategies (vague and senseless instructions to look at particular pages, certain paragraphs, exquisitely corpsing the two together) a call and response ensues ...

Cioran: Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

Eco's echo: Take this, and that for you again! -- But hold now I am seized by a tremor. What a torment! What a delight! Like kisses. My bones are melting. I am dying [...] (from an extract of Flaubert's The Temptation of St Anthony)

Cioran: In fact, there is only God and me. His silence invalidates us both.

Another Eco extract, this one from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (describing the devil...): He is a rather scrawny man, not very tall and even shorter than I am, wearing a casual beret pulled down over on ear, while on the other side reddish hair sprouts from his temple. He has reddish eyelashes, flushed eyes, and an ashen face, and the tip of his nose curves downwards a little. Over a stitched shirt with diagonal stripes he wears a check jacket, with sleeves that are too short, from which stubby-fingered hands emerge. His trousers are too tight and his shoes so beaten up that they can no longer be cleaned. A pimp, a parasite, with the voice of a theatre actor.

Cosson Smeeton

Palimpsests and tapestries

And so, if 'reality is a shell game' ... as Michael Taussig observes below, where's the pea? Is there one? Where is the art of history, and the contingency of fact, not to mention the science of fiction? After all, as Artemis Cooper writes, in a deftly wrought piece on Matrin Edmond's Luca Antara, "history is more than a series of facts laid out in the right order."


Patrick Wright strolls across my vision, bearing his A Journey Through Ruins, where he 'accumulates' history as a montage. In an interview, for the Strangely Familiar group's book The Unknown City, Wright conveyed his task of tacking between the real and the not so real, "It is quite true that I combined objective description with occasional disappearances into rhetoric and even fiction. I never faked the archive, but I did sometimes allow my perceptions to override reality or to twist it a bit. I would justify this on several grounds. To begin with, it is a way of saying that this street, in this incarnation, doesn't exist except as I put it there. ... Obviously, you can't fix a street. The minute you've finished it it's gone, although actually it's you that's gone, not it."


It is a cliché to call history a palimpsest, yet it remains an apposite term, evoking the obscuring and revealing that filters the reality of the past. The flatbed, as in the work of Robert Rauschenberg (who died last month), is a palimpsest of sorts, an accumulative surface, where things collect. The flatbed enlisted the idea of the printing press of that name, where the plate was wound through the press, squashing and compressing the gathered fragments together, changing their form, and their relationship to the other collected pieces. And the filmic sense of montage, of cross cutting, jump cutting, and the like, plays the shell game too, of undoing certainty, of leaving lingering doubt, of just where that pea is now.




The places where memories inhere vibrate with potential, whether fictional or factual, or somewhere in between. Pierre Nora's magisterial study of the landscape of France, the lieux de mémoire, maps the palimpsestuous terrain, of remembered and misremembered sites. Nora moved from the idea of milieux to lieux to mark the shift from a shared, collectivity of memory sites, to the more particular, place-centred sites. He began his seven volume Les Lieux de Mémoire in 1984, and the project took eight years to complete. A year before this, in 1983, Benedict Anderson had written Imagined Communities (a new edition of which has recently been produced with an intriguing retrospective essay by Anderson in which he carries out an acrobatic self-critique ... a fascinating reflection on the effect an author can have on the trajectory of thinking), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published their The Invention of Tradition, another insightful work, which charges straight to the wavering line between fact and fiction. While all of the above works have, in turn, been subjected to extensive critique, their important contribution lies in their agitation of the taken-for-granted associations between history and story telling, and the untying of the neat knots of the past...

Memories of the Future

Squint Opera's recent project, Flooded London, is showing as part of the London Festival of Architecture. Amongst the images sent to me was one which sent shivers down my spine, a wormhole between the centuries, echoing Gustave Doré's engraving of The New Zealander, from 1872. Squint Opera's figure is about to dive off the ledge of St Paul's Whispering Gallery, into an interior flooded by rising sea levels. While Doré's New Zealander is outside, in both time and space, sketching the ruins of St Paul's. The images destabilise conceptions of permanence, and offer instead the frisson of history rubbing up against the imagination, a fantastic frottage.

Squint Opera, St Paul's

Gustave Doré, 1872, The New Zealander

Rainy Days

Scaup on the River Avon, Rainy Sunday, jb