Richardson and Robinson in Ruins

Patrick Keiller's follow up to Robinson in Space, Robinson in Ruins, came out in 2010. This time narrated by Vanessa Redgrave, it gave me the opportunity to make a homage to Keiller based on my research in St George's Field, the cemetery at the University of Leeds. This film is re-appropriated from the trailer for Keiller's film. Please click below to see both.
The University in Ruins
Robinson in Ruins

The Art of Cartocraftery or Mischevious Mappage

Cartography: "The drawing of maps or charts"
Craft: "A skillful contrivance, a device, artifice, or expedient"
-ery, suffix: "classes of goods...used in the coinage of jocular nonce-words"

Full Definition: Cartocraftery is the tongue-in-cheek re-approriation of maps for the purposes of détournement (the recuperation of past forms and ideas). Old items are 'mapped' through the process of paper lacquering, then decorated and given an amusing name based on the map used. For instance, see Least Anglia and an interview about the object on Anything LS:

This, now, storage box is made from an old black 40-year-old suitcase, while the image, below, is an old gift box which has been mapped with Leicestershire and renamed More-or-Less-Tershire. The original box can still be seen through tiny holes which were punched in the small torn-up pieces of the county:

Click here to see the Easter cards which started off the whole project: Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?

Please feel free to contact me for commissions.

Cyborg Attack Over Bridgewater Place

Here are some images I took over Leeds from the top of West Riding House last summer (2011).

There's something surreal about this car park, which looks more like a childs' toy than a real car park.

While this one of cranes is a bit disorienting, I think I was fortunate to just be in the right place to get them to appear like they are crossing over each other.

Here is the famous Leeds Dalek aka Bridgewater Place. Where I was standing I was unable to get the sloping section on the other side which gives it the Dalek-effect. However, there does seem to be a supernatural/cosmic occurrence taking place above it, which can only be some kind of cyborg attack .

Links:

Armed for Armley

The Lickless Derive (Horsforth)

Knitting a New Holbeck

The Headingley Arndale Centre

Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?

Here are my limited edition 2012 Easter Cards. A short run of 12 , hand-made, that friends were forced to volunteer to receive. Many of the map-pouches were customised for the district that the individual lived in, well those who lived in London anyway. So the front showed their road and the back was perforated over a 'sniff here' instruction of which emanated the smell of rose incense. Here are the various comments, all hugely positive, I would say ; )

Anonymous from Hemel Hempstead council district (via text, not a psychogeographer): "Thank you for my Easter card. Not sure what to say really..."

Tina to Anonymous from Meanwood, Leeds (in person, a psychogeographer, should know better): "Did you get the Easter card?"
Anonymous from Meanwood: "Aah...yes...thanks"

Anonymous from Middlesex (via facebook): "Thanks for the Easter Card, Tina. I'm impressed with the way the white strip of paper inscribed 'Why did the psychogeographer cross the road?' passes right through my living room."

Anonymous from Golders Green (via facebook): "Thanks for my card too, Tina. Golders Green has never smelt so good!"

Anonymous from (district withheld) on expressing an interest in the Easter card: "I'd love a chunk of [somewhere in London] - I've no idea why the psychogeographer crossed the road but I bet when they got there they found Iain Sinclair had already written about it."

Author's brother from Milton Keynes:

SILENCE!

I bet my friends can't wait to see what Christmas brings...

Links:
The Psychogeography Franchise
Using Psychogeography to Discover the Hidden Consequences of Social Reproduction

Taking an Urban Walk With Freud (part 2): The Red Light District

This is the second part of my Freud-as-psychogeographer-blog. For the first part, please click here: Gradiva's Gait

Before I introduce Freud's urban wanderings in a "small Italian town", I would like to say a little about the complex term 'uncanny' as it appears in Freud's essay The Uncanny. Freud takes the word from the German unheimlich which means the opposite of what one might find familiar (heimlich meaning familiar - homely, but be careful here, because for Freud the two terms become conflated in what he means by 'uncanny'). So, the uncanny has the qualities of both the familiar and the unfamiliar at the same time. I would describe it as producing a strange kind of affective dissonance, which is disturbing. It throws you into this spaceless space in between the two binary oppositions (recognisable/unrecognisable, understandable/incomprehensible). Sometimes, the thing recognised is known, but is out of place and this decontextualisation can create the feeling of the uncanny.

Freud uses a super example in E.T.A Hoffman's story The Sandman to tease out what uncanny means. Although the term can appear somewhat contradictory, mysterious and hard to pin down, this is not because Freud does not do a good job in explaining it, but rather because of its unconscious origins in the person feeling this subjective reaction. Once you have started to explore the uncanny, you will understand it by comparing it to some experiences you will have likely had yourself.

Freud spends many pages analysing the term from a number of sources. Here is a definition he provides which I particularly like, and I include it here because it is a useful springboard for me to take you into Freud's walk in Italy:

"Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open."

So...Freud uses a moment when he accidentally walks into the red light district of this town in Italy, to provide his own example of the uncanny. Basically it goes thus (quotation marks are when I am using his own terms):

Freud strolls through "unfamiliar" streets in the town and stumbles upon the red light district. He quickly attempts to move out of this area and walks for a while down a few different streets. After a while he suddenly finds himself back in the same district and realises people were looking at him. He then attempts to leave again, but ends up there for the third time. At this point he gets the uncanny feeling. Freud describes this as "the unintentional return", which then enables him to talk about one of his well-known, and most fascinating theories, the "compulsion to repeat".

What I find interesting about Freud's example here is his lack of analysis (of himself) of why he might have ended up there three times. Freud would not have let his own analysand 'off the hook' if this story had been regaled to him, so I am sure he has his own theory about how his unconscious took him there three times, (well at least twice, let's say). So, in regards to the quote above: is what was meant to "remain secret and hidden" the overt buying/selling of sex by men/women on the streets of Italy, or is it some desire Freud had to witness this - what would be for him as an analyst - fascinating transaction?

Taking an Urban Walk With Freud (part 1): Gradiva's Gait

You may not be aware of Freud's text 'Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva'. In this essay, in his usual microscopic style, Freud analyses Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novel Gradiva, trying to tease out the latency inherent in the text-as-dream.

Being quite familiar with Freud, I hadn't considered him from a psychogeographical perspective until this essay was referred to me by one of my thesis supervisors. Here Freud psychoanalyses the behaviour of the protagonist of Jensen's fiction, Hanold. Perhaps his interest in the novel was sparked by a relief he had of Gradiva in his office (latin translation: the woman who walks), which you can see in my picture above. I have placed an image of the relief next to a photograph of an artists' mannequin that I have attempted to stand in the same position as Gradiva.

I haven't read the original novel (but it is on order now), only Freud's translation and specifically the references to walking, the gait and the footprints, which were of particular interest to me as a psychogeographer. Here are a few extracts by Freud, commenting on the protagonist in the story:

"But now he found himself confronted by an ostensibly scientific problem which called for a solution. It was a question of his arriving at a crucial judgement as to 'whether Gradiva's gait as she stepped along had been reproduced by the sculptor in a life-like manner'. He found that he himself was not capable of imitating it, and in his quest for the 'reality' of this gait he was led 'to make observations of his own from life in order to clear this matter up.'" (page 8)

"When they reached the Herculean Gate [...] Norbert Hanold paused and asked the girl to go ahead of him. She understood him, 'and, pulling up her dress a little with her left hand, Zoe Bergang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past, held in his eyes, which seemed to gaze as though in a dream; so, with her quietly tripping gait, she stepped through the sunlight over the stepping-stones to the other side of the street.' With the triumph of love, what was beautiful and precious in the delusion found recognition as well." (page 12)

Freud is fascinating. He always reveals so much of himself when analysing others. The projections (obsessions) of Hanold's he comments on in this essay, could likely be compared to Freud's own. Freud saw the original Gradiva in Rome, had a copy of the relief in his Hampstead office and then wrote an essay about Jensen's novel.

My second part of this blog will look at another 'psychogeographical' reference by Freud in The Uncanny. I will be providing my own analysis of Freud in this upcoming blog.

Links
Taking an Urban Walk with Freud (part 2): The Red Light District

References:
The extracts of Freud's text are from Crossing Aesthetics edited by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford University Press 1997).

St George's Field: Aesthetico-Affective Acts

Odette Dewhurst, at the University of Leeds, alerted me to this gravestone in the university cemetery, St George's Field. She found it in August 2011 and when I went there in February this year (2012) it was still there (see image below).

The gravestone is of a similar style to many others located in this part of the garden. It is not of a particularly impressive design and contains the words "IN MEMORY OF/ JAMES ROBINSON MASON OF LEEDS/who died March 15th 1840/aged 45 Years". With yellow and red chalk or pastel someone has drawn a flying (rising?) bird in an expressionist style, in a way that makes the bird look like it is taking off and moving upwards. Odette has called it a phoenix. I am not sure if it was the intention of the artist to be a phoenix, but it does look like one and the semiotic context (a graveyard, death, ashes) could suggest it is.

This drawing is temporary: if it was not removed by anyone at the university (by estates staff or students), it would eventually be removed by 'the elements'. The artwork serves as a schizoanalytical action in that it incorporates both an "aesthetic production" and a "micro-political act". (Guattari 1998: 433) The artwork could also be considered in relation to the concept of death, providing one assumes it is a phoenix; but, also because of its situation in a graveyard. Félix Guattari poses the problem of the death instinct in relation to desire, explaining that in contemporary society with its dominant capitalist subjectivity, schizoanalysis enables the death instinct to be side-stepped by desire which then subjectively changes in differing situations. (1998: 72) For this reason the phoenix drawing could be considered the symbol that represents the presence of schizocartography actually taking place in St George's Field. The Situationist Raoul Vaneigem believed that for a true aesthetic of daily life we must all become artists in our negation of the death instinct in the way it was for Freud in the superego's submission to dominant individuals and structures. (2010: 95) This demonstrates that creativity does not have to be opposed to death but that, in a sense, they rise concurrently outside of any dichotomous relationship that dictates some inevitably destructive end.

Guattari says of his aesthetic paradigm that:

it has ethico-political implications because to speak of creation is to speak of the responsibility of the creative instance with regard to the thing created, inflection of the state of things, bifurcation beyond pre-established schemas, once again taking into account the fate of alterity in its extreme modalities. (1995: 105)

The creative instance of the phoenix drawing is something that we cannot temporally tie down exactly, since we do not know when it was created, nor who the artist is. However, we can examine it in regards to its moving away from dominant modes of representation and pose some questions around its reception. For example, is it an anarchic work of art? Could it be considered to be graffiti? And, if there were relatives of the deceased still living, and they liked the artwork, would either of the two questions be relevant?

I ask these questions so as to place the art in the context of a potential viewer of the work in the sense that they would become the interface of a new assemblage: the 'university' would likely view it differently than a random student wandering through the garden. This is why this artwork could be considered a transversal object, because it helps us consider the situation from two directions:

The establishment of such a transversalist bridge leads us to postulate the existence of a certain type of entity inhabiting both domains, such that the incorporeals of value and virtuality become endowed with an ontological depth both equal to objects set in energetico-spatial-temporal coordinates. (Guattari 1995: 109)

The question of aesthetics is not only posed in regards to the multiplicity of the subjectivities of the potential viewers, but we are also pointed in the opposite direction, towards the origins of the dead person in the grave, to their personal and familial history. This also draws our attention to the issue of alterity as it is for St George's Field; not only in relation to the paupers grave, none of which were properly spared in the 1960s landscaping, but also to the question of who decided which gravestone survived and which did not.

Links to St George's Field posts in this series:
Subjectification and Singularization
Decontextualization and Desire
Traversing Transversality

References:
Guattari, Félix.' Schizoanalysis', The Yale Journal of Criticism, 11, 2 (1998), 433-439.
Vaneigem, Raoul. 2010. The Revolution of Everyday Life: An Illustrated Reader: Part 1 (Great Britain: Justpress).
Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.