Seaside Surrealism

In 1936 the painter Paul Nash published an article in Architectural Review titled ‘Swanage – or Seaside Surrealism’. To my mind if you were after seaside surrealism today you might be even better off visiting the oddly named ‘Manhood Peninsula’ in West Sussex – a bulge of land, south of Chichester that includes the town of Selsey, the sandy beaches of East and West Wittering (where you’ll find the home of rock’s most mummified guitarist, Keith Richards) and the wonderful Pagham harbour.

The peninsula is not the place for flashy spectacular surrealism – if it is an extravaganza of the uncanny that is wanted then a visit to places like Clacton or Scarborough out of season would be more in order. Instead what you find on the Manhood Peninsula is a more quietly disquieting form of surrealism, of historical memory poking through the fragile membrane of the present. Wandering around the town of Selsey you start to notice how many of the houses on or near the seafront are made out of railway carriages. Sometimes all that is left of this history is the regularity and smallness of the windows, but other houses declare their roots (and routes) by fully restoring the carriage-work. Setting up house with a couple of railway carriages is a way of making an immediate habitation, and an immediate claim to a piece of land.

Elsewhere, as you travel from Selsey to the Witterings you’ll find the home-made museum ‘Rejectamenta’ – which sometimes feels a bit like ‘Dejectamenta’ – a collection of ephemera from the early 1970s onwards. For anyone who grew up in the 70s this is a slightly trippy return to a time when commodities gathered loyalty by including tiny – and pretty useless – toys in cereal packets and collectable cards in packs of tea. If you want to know what those ‘free gifts’ look like then Rejectamenta is the place for you. It is part of Earnley Butterflies, Birds and Beasts, and as well as collecting the most ephemeral of the ephemera it also has Biba dresses, posters, and such like.

Pagham Harbour is now a nature reserve presided over by the RSPB (the royal society for the protection of birds). It is, incidentally the place where my son first became interested in bird watching. The RSPB website claims it as an ‘unspoilt haven of big skies, coastal marshes and sea’. But rather than this being one of the few undeveloped areas of an intensely over-developed coastline, Pagham Harbour has a history as an important port in the middle-ages through to the late nineteenth century. Pagham Harbour was taking the lead in developing this coastline for trade. What produced this area of ‘unspoilt’ coastline was a series of massive storms early in the twentieth century that reclaimed the area as a wetland, and cast all of human endeavour into the sea. In this case the ‘unspoilt’ is a double negative that results in the spoiling of the spoilt.  

Put perhaps the pinnacle of this quiet surrealism is Selsey’s very own sound mirror. Sound mirrors, or acoustic mirrors were an early form of radar, built between the wars as early warning systems used to detect incoming air attacks. Built out of concrete they were massive, cumbersome parabolic microphones, that worked by pointing a huge unmovable ear-trumpet to the sky. If you placed a stethoscope-like instrument on the acoustic mirror you could hear aeroplanes, but you couldn’t quite make out where they were coming from, you could also hear the noise of nearby traffic and everything else. But unlike the sinister-looking sound mirrors that you find in Dungeness, the sound mirror in Selsey Bill has been turned into a house that has long since been abandoned and has been cast adrift on a traffic island.

Sound Mirror, Selsey

Sound Mirrors, Dungeness

Never Realised Projects

            When I was at art school in the mid-1980s one of the projects I never got off the desk was a magazine especially designed to collect never-realised projects. It would have consisted primarily of book reviews, exhibition reviews and obituaries. These would have all been fake: reviews of books that had never been written and exhibitions never staged; obituaries of lives that had never been lived. It would be a way of collecting all those ideas and plans that might be less than fully-baked but don’t deserve to be completely rejected or abandoned to the curatorship of the bottom drawer.

            I imagined that the magazine would have made a good home for some of the more incidental ideas that were circulating amongst the group of people I knew. So, for instance, if you came across a particularly odd bit of amateur collecting – say someone who had turned a garden shed into a museum dedicated to all forms of knots and knotting – then you could write a review of a guide book to micro-museums. The guide book wouldn't exist and the micro-museums could also be fictitious (how about a museum of lost keys? Or a museum dedicated to objects with shells stuck on them?). You could cover a lot of ideas in such a magazine: even, or perhaps especially, ideas you found problematic. I imagined writing an obituary about someone who after a traumatic upbringing joined the army and developed a new form of camouflage. He would test out his camouflage by sending camouflaged troops out into the countryside and he would then stand on top of a hill and see if he could spot them: if he could see them then the camouflage didn’t work; if he couldn’t then either the camouflage was working perfectly or the troops hadn’t carried out his instructions. It was an uncertain outcome. After he left the army he became an abstract painter and seemed to be in a permanent state of anxious undecidedness. Needless to say his death was a suicide.  

            The magazine would have been perfect for all those ideas you have that seem good after a few drinks in the pub, or the sort of ideas that might be suitable for someone with more resources than you had. Of course, because the magazine was itself an unrealised project it could have been an item in such a magazine (if it had existed), or it could wait for the invention of the internet and blogging to find a suitable home.

The other day I came across an old art catalogue from the 1980s (Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture – it was an exhibition in Boston, USA in 1986). I must have bought it at about the same time I was imaging a magazine of unrealised projects. Inside is an essay by Thomas Crow. Crow writes about a made-up art critic who provides an effusive critical review of the exhibition by the made-up painter Hank Herron. Herron’s paintings in the 1970s consisted of making exact copies of the work of the abstract painter Frank Stella, a painter who actually existed and is still alive today. Stella made his name as a sort of post-painterly-post-abstract-expressionist-hard-edged-intellectualist painter who was exhibiting from about the end of the 1950s. He was painterly minimalist, who in the 1980s reinvented himself as a painterly maximalist. The made-up critic was claiming that the copies were better than the originals because they critically explored the hollowness of originality and the uncertainty of authenticity. It was a joke – a pastiche, a parody of what would become a world of artworks that cited other artworks. The article by the made-up critic was called ‘The Fake as More’.

Jigsawing

When I was growing up jigsaw puzzles were an important part of the arsenal we could deploy in our protracted war on boredom. Of course it wasn't our first line of defence, and probably lay near the bottom of the barrel: but sometimes that barrel needed scraping (to mix metaphors just a little). When friends weren't around, or if it was raining, or when feeling poorly or unsociable, you could get out a jigsaw to suck up some of the time before that thin sliver of kids’ TV started broadcasting (this was before kids' TV existed as its own entity, and well before it had become a central feature in the repertoire of modern parenting). A jigsaw puzzle in the toy cupboard wasn't something you did once and then passed on: it was something you did endlessly. You had your favourites and the ones you barely tolerated; you had the ones that you had to commit to, and the ones that were probably a bit too easy.

There was something about the jigsaw puzzle that both defeated boredom and felt remarkably similar to it: like a flu jab that gave you a minuscule dose of flu as an inoculation. Jigsawing mimicked boredom in the way it set out to encourage lugubrious dithering, and the way it instilled feckless indecision as the basic response to the world. It gave an ersatz sense of direction to the bored person’s lackadaisical directionless. It felt like the myth of Sisyphus stripped of any grandeur, any tragic dimension. It was like Penelope waiting for Odysseus, employing a tactic for fending off suitors (weaving all day, unpicking all night), but without any of the desperate love, without any of the fear that he wasn't coming home. But of course it also brought with it tiny shards of joy: those fitful feelings of success: Oh that goes there! I thought that was part of the sea, but it’s her nose! These little puffs of pride that pop before they can take shape: clever old you for finding out where that piece goes.

There were one or two jigsaws that went beyond the completion of a task that never needed doing in the first place. These were jigsaws that had a more ritualistic element to them. My The Man from U.N.C.L.E jigsaw was in this category. As you can see it featured a coloured pencil drawing of a scene featuring the unflappable secret agents Napoleon Solo (played by Robert Vaughn) and Illya Kuryakin (played by David McCallum). The Man from U.N.C.L.E (1964-68) was, as far as I can remember, a drama that at the height of the Cold War brought together Americans and Russians (can you guess which was which?) to defeat even more malevolent forces than communist world domination (or rather these dastardly forces looked a lot like the Cold War vision of communism as nothing but world domination). Verisimilitude obviously wasn't the jigsaw maker’s top priority: the flight of the bullet leaves a ruler-straight vapour trail, for instance. But they knew their audience; young boys who might aspire to draw vapour trailing bullets who also loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Doing this jigsaw was paying homage, offering cultish dedication. It was important that after completing the jigsaw you took it apart again, ready for the next votive offering.

Looking at the jigsaw now, I remember that I always expected to enjoy certain aspects more than others. I continually thought that the highlight would be fitting the pieces that represent Kuryakin’s gun as he reclines in his casual-clothing-for-men-catalogue-pose, or placing the pieces that are the dolphin-coloured tubular floats of the helicopter’s feet. But jigsaws have their own logic, their own peculiarities. The best parts, I remember, where finding and fitting the pieces that were the fronds of the palm tree, the loose purple shading of the hills in the background, and Napoleon Solo’s briefcase. 

Morning Delivery

Sheffield’s Park Hill flats opened in 1961, the year I was born. The flats are still the most complete example of the architectural project optimistically named ‘Streets in the Sky’ urbanism: networks of one-sided residential streets of maisonettes stacked on top of one another, threaded through the landscape and surrounded by park land, yet close to the city centre. The streets in the sky aren't quite the same as the streets that they set out to replace: these have roofs over them for a start, and a long drop on one side. Today they probably have more detractors then they do fans, and when in 1998 they were awarded grade II listing it caused a furore that is still going on today. The streets-in-the-sky were by any standard substantial. Rather than mere practical walkways they were designed for conviviality – for children to play and for adults to pass the time of day. The scale of the streets was also meant to accommodate traffic – but only one type of vehicle – the electric milk float.

The eager, breathless whir of the milk float – like an ordinary car calling out with a stage-whisper – isn't a sound you hear too much anymore. There is clearly much less milk being delivered. When I was about 11 or 12 I, like many other kids at the time, used to supplement my pocket money with money I earned by having a paper round. I used to get to the newsagents at about 5.30 in the morning to pick up my stack of daily papers (supplemented with a few magazines and comics); these were arranged by the newsagent in the well-practiced order of the route. Apart from at the height of summer, it was nearly always dark when I started and usually light, or getting light when I finished. Sometimes, especially if it was raining, it was really miserable, but often I enjoyed the quiet, empty streets and the crisp unfolding of the prelude to the day. It was a time of the day I shared with others who were out delivering papers and post, the odd insomniac dog walker, and the asthmatic wheeze of the milk float.

For the most part post, papers and milk are distributed differently today. Park Hill flats has changed too. Some of it has been erased, some of it remains as social housing, and a large chunk has been taken over and refitted by an architectural group called Urban Splash. Urban Splash has successfully turned many of the maisonettes and flats into up-market, urban living, for those who want the adrenalin of inner-city life and the aesthetics of the warehouse flat. The scheme is all bright colours and wooden floors. It is hard to tell, though, what has happened to the network of elevated streets that were the social heart of the complex. Have they gone? Or are they still functioning? Perhaps amongst the sounds of carbonated water being opened you can just about hear the ghostly echo of the milk float. 

Birds’ Milk

I think I was always lactose intolerant, culturally. When I was a kid, full-fat milk (though it was just called milk then) was delivered daily to the front door. Often the little metallic lids of the bottles would have been pecked open by hungry birds. As a child I always thought of milk as “birds’ milk”, as if by piercing the lids the birds now owned the content, but more crucially that they had somehow contaminated the milk with their worm-breath, with their dirty beaks, and with their fanatically deranged pecking. I think that bird-pecked-milk was mainly a winter phenomenon, but I could be wrong. In the summer, especially at weekends, the milk had other reasons for encouraging my disgust: it would have been warming-up in the sunshine for a while before breakfast. If this didn't instantaneously make the milk “go off” I was sure it sent it well on its way.

My mother’s culinary likes and dislikes might have been formed before the Second World War but they were irreversibly stamped by that war. Rationing might have been over by the 1960s and 70s but to my mother wasting food was both sinful and probably an act of treason. Whether it was because of rationing or not she has always been drawn to butter, cream and other fatty, milky products. She would keep a small bowl of brown congealed fat in the fridge. This was the run-off fat from the Sunday roast and would be used for her bread-and-dripping sandwiches. For me it meant that a visit to the fridge was always a fairly queasy experience. She was also a great fan of the “top-of-the-milk” – that thick plug of creamy milk that floated to the top of the milk bottle to produce a stopper made of curd. My mum would want this plug for her cornflakes and it would flop out onto the little flakes followed by a flow of less obviously cheesy milk (now, because she buys thinned, semi-skimmed milk, the plug has disappeared, so she adds actual cream).

During the summer we would always go to Padstow in Cornwall. We always stayed in the same chalet with a view of the dredger endlessly fighting the tidal drifts of mud in the harbour. There were always a few days when we couldn't go to the beach because it was raining, then the choice was either going to town and watch The Sound of Music for the zillionth time, or amuse ourselves in the chalet. My sister and I would play “Crossroads” – it was a game based on pretending we were running the famous, but wholly TV-based, Crossroads motel located on some ring-road near Birmingham. The chalet kitchen had a breakfast bar (endlessly exotic, endlessly glamorous to us) and we used this as the “pass” for our restaurant. I have a feeling that this was a game wholly ruled by my sister. We only served two dishes as far as I can remember: “Banana Bombarder” and “Orange On”. I have no idea of what the bombarder bit of “Banana Bombarder” was (or if that is indeed how you spell this made-up word), but I think “Orange On” consisted of orange squash and milk, and that the coagulated results were both fascinating and extremely repulsive.

Since my childhood milk has got thinner and thinner. The birds don’t peck the morning milk anymore because milk delivery is much less common and when it is delivered it comes in plastic or cardboard containers. We get our milk delivered as little pillows of milk (milk in a bag). I don’t touch it of course: to me it is already contaminated. It is and will always remain birds’ milk. 

Peter Doig in Edinburgh

Alongside the ravine that lies below Castle Rock, in amongst the crag and tail of Edinburgh’s distinctive geography, sits, on an artificial hill, part of the extensive Scottish National Gallery. From August through to early November 2013 the gallery has been playing host to a large exhibition of Peter Doig’s paintings. You couldn't find a more vivid contrast: Edinburgh, often cold and wet, made of stone and shops, with elaborate buildings that declaim their ambition and intent; and then Doig’s paintings depicting the tropical vegetation of Trinidad in a painterly language that is jewelled, mythic, and, considering the size of the canvases, often airily light. There is little in Edinburgh that you would want to describe as ‘light’.

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, spent his youth in Trinidad and Canada, studied at various art schools in London, and found success in the early 1990s when the boosterism around British art was at its height. Doig now lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, and paints in an old rum distillery which also serves as an improvised arts centre. The paintings collected together in Edinburgh under the title No Foreign Lands are nearly all set in the landscape of Trinidad and are peopled by figures that might have slipped loose from an opium dream – a man dragging a murdered pelican, a drunken and beatified Parisian holding onto a tree in a tropical forest, a man carrying a pink umbrella, a girl in white perched precariously in a tree, and endless figures – male and female – drifting by in canoes.  

The canvases demonstrate the sort of post-perspectival concerns that alert you to the fact that you are at an exhibition of ‘serious’ painting and not a Jack Vettriano show: walls, windows, picture frames are all used in the pictures to productively worry about the planarity and frontality of painting; swathes of coloured paint, in various transparencies, often flecked with painterly incidents, depicting sky, water, sand, and snow are deployed to puzzle over the pull and obduracy of the painted surface. Doig has learnt his art in close proximity to the palette choices of Gauguin and the Fauves, his painterly graphics are indebted to Edvard Munch, and the crust and feel of his mark-making remind you of the landscapes of Gustav Klimt and Egon Scheile. But such borrowings are not mobilised for ironic commentary, rather they are requisitioned to produce the stage effects of the paintings, to make and enliven an intricate world of visual, painterly dramas.

Of course these paintings, with their monumental scale and their breezy figuration, can sit a bit too easily in the Neo-Classical grandeur of the National Gallery. Their post-colonial allusions vacillate between a critical re-imagining of colonised landscapes and a revamped exoticism of the tropics seen by the well-heeled cosmopolitan traveller. Perhaps most of the paintings are caught in the grip of this vacillation, for example the massive speaker stacks of Trinidadian sound systems, depicted as Mayan-like monuments in Maracas (2002-8), or the cricket game on a Gaugin beach where the ball acts as visual puncture, as a white blob that interrupts the blue-licked orange sand in Cricket Painting (Paragrand) (2006-12) (below © Peter Doig). And perhaps there is in the worrying dilemma of those vacillations something that make the paintings more compelling, more intriguing.   

Doig’s paintings don’t answer the question: how do you make art after conceptual art, after the medium-specificity of modernism has been drained of meaning? Such questions, the paintings seem to suggest, are for those for whom time moves incessantly forward as one move trumps the next. It doesn't address the question of the institutional conditions of art, and doesn't seem interested in the curatorial buzz that you can still hear when words like ‘relational’, ‘situational’, ‘participatory’ are invoked. But perhaps they respond to other, more modest questions that are concerned with the state of painting as a global language where a history of expressive mark making can be turned towards the job of furnishing a body of work with an imaginative cosmology. It might sidestep the issue of critical art, but it does offer an imaginative landscape that, if you give yourself over to it, could colour your dreams. 

A Jam Jar of Gin

Yesterday, like a booze-fiend playing Russian Roulette with a pledge never to drink again, I opened a bottle of gin had a good sniff and then closed it. For me no drink is quite as evocative as gin – and there is no other drink I would prefer to dab behind my ears or smear on my wrists. The evocation is probably there in the smell slightly more than in the taste. Occasionally I like to take a hefty whiff of gin as a little mnemonic kick. It is one of my more reliable memory transporters: sniffing the distinctive juniper infused alcohol normally brings back memories of being fifteen and swigging neat gin in the lanes behind the school I went to. Sniffing the gin would sensually transport me to the cold nights where my little gang of refuseniks would pass round the jam jars of pilfered booze that we would have purloined from parental drinks cabinets. Sometimes it would be sherry, sometimes brandy, but most often gin. Yesterday however my little mnemonic spark wasn’t forthcoming. I think I must have worn out that particular memory trick.

Marcel Proust, of course, is the go-to guy for such things. It was his dunking and munching of Madeline cakes that named the experience of involuntary reminiscences as Proustian. Of course using cakes and gin fumes on a somewhat regular basis is not what involuntary memory is all about. Involuntary memory is meant to descend on you when you are least expecting it, corner you and mug you when your mnemonic defences are down, so to say. The regular subterfuge of forcing such memory-mugging isn’t in the contract – no wonder that repetition could destroy the mnemonic qualities of the material being used.

Sometimes memory vehicles wear out for other reasons than flagrant memory abuse. Smokers, after years of puffing, find that the occasional cigarette sometimes transports them back to those rushed Players Number 6s or Rothmans that were gasped on shivery afternoons in recreation grounds. But perhaps what happens after a while is there is a shift in remembering, and a second-order memory takes the place of this memory: the rush of memory energy does not reunite us with an event of giddy juvenile smoking but with the memory of the initial involuntary reminiscence seizing us. And then perhaps after more time has elapsed this become a memory of a memory of such seizing, till after a while all that is left is barely a memory at all, just a bare echo, or more like some nagging feeling that you’ve forgotten something and no concentration or effort will bring it back.

Before it dissipates, involuntary memory requires a force of energy to do its work. No wonder then that my examples all involve some slightly dodgy activity – underage smoking and drinking. They still, after all this time, carry with them a little charge that is probably related to the excited tension of transgressing and the possibility of getting caught. No wonder too that such involuntary memory is accessed via the sense forms that seem to, most reliably, escape rational processing: smell, touch and taste, in these cases trump sight and sound for mnemonic spills and thrills. The mnemonic forms that are going to last are also going to be those that are hardest to repeat: a particular smell of industrial cleaning products; the flavours of food that you’re not sure you would want to replicate; the occasional whiff of someone’s body odour.

I could imagine a memory club where addled Proustian types who had worn out their easily accessed mnemonic prompts, could go for help in tracking down these hard to find sensual memory stimuli. There would be rows and rows of jars replicating the smells of particular perspirations. A rack of scratch and sniff memory cards sorted year-by-year, place-by-place: “1963, seaweed in Clacton”, for instance. The smell of smoke-filled, beery pubs might become a bit of a favourite, but might also wear thin too quickly. Sweets might do it; especially those that sat on the edge of revulsion, like the twirls of cough candy. Giant rice puddings with slightly burnt tops might work for some, while for others it will be fiddling with out-of-date bicycle repair kits. There will be something there for everyone. It would look like a nineteenth century gin palace with hard-core reminiscence addicts staggering around befuddled from over-dosing on pear drops.