"both sides of the river there is bacteria..."

Docklands

London

Melbourne

Yarra River, Melbourne, 26 March 2010

email to John

Dear John,

I want to thank you for your interest in my work and to point you in the direction of this blog, which I am using to develop ideas for the exhibition project.  The (working) title for the show is Public Water, it will be a multi-projection and sound installation, at least that’s how I’m currently thinking of realising it.  Things are very much in process though so it’s perfectly possible that it will change quite a bit by the time it’s exhibited, which should be sometime later this year.

The initial ideas come from thinking around public space, something that has been much contested recently; notions of what constitutes ‘public’ space have become shifting, provisional, and contingent.  In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombs in London (and I guess by extension of 9/11) there has been a distinct change in the way urban ‘public’ space has been policed.  To qualify, ‘public’ space is defined as space to which the public is freely admitted, however we know that this space is often not strictly speaking public or publicly owned, it is often in private ownership and as such subject to the dictates of private security companies and their guards.  An example of this in London is Canary Wharf.  In addition to the ambiguity that surrounds what is or isn’t permitted in private public space, there has been a change in the way that public public space is policed, and the law allows for the apprehension of, for example, photographers who might be thought to be behaving in a ‘suspicious manner’.  Press reports about photographers being apprehended have appeared regularly and there has become something of a movement against this. This is in addition to, in London at least, a continuing increase in the amount and number of CCTV.  The sum total of this is an ongoing increase in the surveillance and apprehension of people in public and private, public space for behaviour no more sinister than taking snapshots, or simply being in a certain place at a certain time.  This increasing paranoia has resulted in a culture, not of safety, but of inculcated fear.  This is well documented and unpacked, particularly in books such as Anna Minton’s Ground Control.

With this as the background against which contemporary ideas around the nature and the reproduction of images of public space circulate, it seemed to me interesting to speculate about how one might conceptualise around the notion of Public Water, considered here as large bodies of water in physical urban environs, so rivers, canals, bays, lakes in parks, and so on.  On one hand I was thinking, in quasi-legalistic terms, about what is the status of water, urban water, as public space, where does it fit in the regime of what is or isn’t public space being, as it is, in the public realm but, presumably, in terms of property, owned by, or at least under the authority of, somebody, or some body.  On the other hand, more imaginatively and conceptually, what does it mean to create images, photographs, moving images, of urban water, specifically urban space and architecture reflected in water?  There is, in the security driven world described above, the implicit question, not of what one is photographing, but where one is photographing, in other words the question is not about representation, but of the nature of space.  This begs the question though, if where, why not of what?  Why is there an objection to taking a photograph here, if there isn’t an objection to the subject of photography? 

While I’m not interested in the work becoming overtly about these political/legal questions, they are informing its development as the background to how one negotiates the reproduction of images in urban space.  So when one takes a photograph of water, one is also photographing whatever the water is reflecting if it is indeed reflecting something, and the question then becomes about the status of the reflection as a subject for photography when water becomes a reflective medium of the reproduction of an image.

Water as public space, water as a medium.

In the way that my own personal connections link experiences of Melbourne and London as urban spaces that are familiar to me, in the way that Figuring Landscapes links Australian and UK artists’ landscape works, so I’m drawn to considering the two places, the two cities, in this work, constructed from the thinking around, and producing images of, Public Water in London and Melbourne; eventually I hope it to be exhibited in both places.

The function of this blog is to work through the ideas and sketches for the work as I develop it.  There is something interesting to me about making this ‘sketch book’ public.  Unlike some artists, I’ve always rather shied away from the practice of showing the notes and sketches associated with realised works, however in this case it seems appropriate, an interesting thing to do, making the process transparent and documenting interesting ideas and diversions that might not necessarily make it as far as the final work.  Also, whether anybody is reading it or not, the blog becomes a kind of public commitment to the work.

I’m now in Melbourne and starting to cast around for particular sites to visit and to capture video and audio, and to describe in text.  In earlier posts to this blog I’ve experimented with ways of writing, descriptive writing which is also in some ways ‘poetic’, influenced by Barthes idea of Writing Degree Zero and the poetry of Francis Ponge.  This involves careful use of language and in particular metre, which determines how the text might be spoken, if I choose the option of using a recorded voice over reading.  This is something I’ve explored in other recent work such as Aboriginal Myths of South London.

No doubt the very different meanings of water will inform the work in some way, which is to say the significance of water is quite different in Australia where drought is a familiar condition, but at the moment I’m concentrating on the Species of Spaces, as Perec would have it.  I’m particularly interested in contemporary transformations of Docklands in both places, in both their transformation from spaces of industrial labour to mostly exclusive residential use and leisure activity, and their connection of the two places through colonialism and trade.  So here in Melbourne these will probably be the first places I’ll be exploring.  The results of my research, no doubt will be posted to the blog.

Earlier works around water

Periscope 180° super 8/1992 

At sea when it began: three months of water, and then down the west coast of Australia, nowhere else to go.  Three months of water and now a land-locked mast.  A western setting sun.  By the wharf, down at the docks, the pipes, the pipes are calling another aching load… and every day after that I went to the beach. 

Pools Between Land super 8 - video/1990
Still water, pooling water, not spilt like on land, collects in depression.

m-dot.report video/1991
… residents of the village of Elwood and other areas around Post Philip Bay, Melbourne, Australia, reported seeing a flying object hovering at about 250 metres above the water, 500 metres offshore at Point Ormond. 

Harmonic Maheno (Harmonic Three Three) super 8/1991 

As we drove north up the eastern side of the Island we came across the rusting hulk of a ship wreck; one of the more accessible of many such wrecks dotted around the Australian coastline.

Canary Wharf E14, 1 March 2010

Preliminary observations at Canary Wharf.

In spite of the number
and amount
of areas of public water

(which is
perhaps
not so public)

photographing buildings
reflected
in the once quays and docks
proved difficult























in particular the central and iconic One Canada Square.












Rippled reflection
perhaps caused
as it is today
by the wind

is the best that can be managed.


















In a way

perhaps

symbolic in its rippledness
of the critical aversion to representational imagery in photography

(as promulgated by religions such as Islam, Presbyterianism, Structural/Materialism and Homeland Security).

Perhaps the best view would be reflected
in the public waters of the Thames
[next stop Canada Water].

























Clustered buildings at ground level
afford
a view of the buildings
only as unfeasibly towering
adjacent structures
denying visual purchase on architecture.


As determined plan forms
streets
passageways
squares
plazas
steps
seemingly
to optimise the flow of traffic
human and vehicular.
















The distant view
the view visible from all over London
is
(designed to be)
the most impressive.




And then
back in Bermondsey
as Jamaica Road recedes into the distance
on the closest we have to a horizon here

there it is


still

symbolic

upright...