Public Water

Journey Down Under

Super 8 film of the sea journey from the UK to Melbourne in 1964. From the Immigration Museum Melbourne's exhibition Station Pier: Gateway to a New Life

video recce, Melbourne, Southbank, River Yarra, 5 April 2010 - binaural sound

View towards the central business district at 17:42 - 17:43.

video recce, Melbourne, Smithfield Road, Kensington, 13 April 2010 - binaural sound

Across a footbridge over the Maribyrnong river, up to Smithfield Road, a small storm water run off canal beside the highway.

video recce, Melbourne, Newells Paddock, Maribyrnong River, 13 April 2010 - binaural sound

Walking further north along the bank of the Maribyrnong the incongruous sight of a Buddhist temple under construction and a giant statue of Guan Yin appears adjacent to the area known as Newells Paddock.  

Beyond the temple a suburban railway line bridge crosses the river.  Under the arches of the bridge shallow water reflects graffiti.

video recce, Melbourne, Footscray Wharf, Maribyrnong River, 13 April 2010 - binaural sound

Starting at Footscray Wharf at 1pm, a notice by the river in front of the Footscray Arts Centre informs with historical photographs and text about the history of the river:

Footscray Wharf. Remnants of an industrial past.  In the 19th Century the Maribyrnong was known as the 'Saltwater River'.  Its west bank was a hub of activity with extensive wharves reflecting the river's importance as an industrial transport route.

The sky is cloudy grey, the river blue grey green: a saltwater river. The medium breeze creates consistent ripples.  The river’s steely surface seems reflective, but in the grey uniform light it is unyielding.  Starfish cling to submerged sections of mooring pole.  Sounds of present industry and its trucks reverberate from across the river, across the Footscray Road bridge, across Hopetoun Bridge...

video recce, Melbourne, North Wharf, River Yarra/Docklands, 5 April 2010 - binaural sound

 
Late afternoon (16:00 - 17:30) Closer reflections, detail fragmented, architectural form becomes liquified.  Low wind, low ripples. Binaural sound, some auto-level distortion/dropout due to breeze, headphones recommended.

video recce, Melbourne, Yarra north bank, 4 April 2010 - binaural sound

This time of the day (17:00 - 17:30) the river becomes quite reflective.  Low wind, mild ripples. First capture with binaural microphones - headphones recommended.

video recce, Moonee Ponds Creek, 3 April 2010

Late afternoon, by Macaulay station then walking south, beneath the elevated City Link freeway.

Low to medium breeze, low to medium ripples.

Towards a nomenclature of water

Having never read it, but having long been aware of its existence and perhaps pertinence to this and other of my projects, before I left London I bought a copy of Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec.  It is a wonderful book, full of Perec’s observations of otherwise unremarkable places and suggestions as to how to explore, examine and describe them.

I have noted in Species of Spaces correlations with his interests in formal concerns and those of some of my own approaches. For example early in the book he quotes Paul Eluard’s Children’s song from Les Deux-Sèvres from Poésie involontaire et poésie intentionelle (itself a title that I’d like to adopt):

In Paris, there is a street;
in that street, there is a house;
in that house, there is a staircase;
on that staircase, there is a room;
in that room, there is a table;
on that table, there is a cloth;
on that cloth, there is a cage;
in that cage, there is a nest;
in that nest, there is a bird.

This bears a close resemblance to the lyric of my song Aroundabout. I have never knowingly read the Eluard poem, and of course it’s possible that, like me, he was influenced by the old traditional English song The Green Grass Grew all Around which was reworked with a fecund twist as The Maypole Song in the film The Wicker Man.

Perec’s descriptions of bedrooms also reminded me of my description of a Brussels hotel room in Direct Language 3.

Of course there is always the anxiety of influence, something that I’ve been conscious of in many forms in developing this project, but also something I’ve decided not to be overly concerned about, and it’s something I’ll deal with in another post.

There is something of a descriptive zoom, or a pan, a cinematic descriptive in Perec’s writing as it shifts focus from the microscopic, the macro view, travelling across space; as he writes: “force yourself to see more flatly”.

There are interesting and often oblique connections to Public Water.  In writing about street numbering conventions Perec discusses the Parisian model where odd numbers are on the left, even on the right, relative to the direction of the street, but then a third determinant being a fixed point that dictates the direction of the ascension of the numbers.

“Streets parallel with the Seine are numbered starting upstream, perpendicular streets starting from the Seine and going away from it (...one might reasonably suppose that analogous solutions have been thought up for other towns).”

Have they?  Well a cursory glance at my wholly inadequate street map of Melbourne suggests that this might be the case in relation to the River Yarra, but the map is not detailed enough to be definitive.  If it is the case, what is the meaning of this numerical grid placed upon the physical grid that Hoddle superimposed on this township in the distant colony in the middle of the nineteenth century: a persisting, perhaps permanent marker of colonialism?

Perec suggests that  “...rather than visit London, stay at home, in the chimney corner, and read the irreplaceable information supplied by Baedecker (1907 edition): ...If one is in the vicinity of London Bridge, one should take advantage of every available moment to visit the port and its environs, the ships arriving or departing and the enormous traffic in the docks.  For those wishing to enjoy a grand spectacle, unique in the world, the excursion to Gravesend is especially recommended.”

Perec quoting from Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino: “... so the world and space seemed to be the mirror one of the other both minutely stored in heiroglyphs and ideograms, and in each of them could equally well be or not be a sign: ...one scratch out of eight hundred thousand on the creosoted wall between two docks in Melbourne...”.  I am looking for that scratch.

Listings. Typology. Perec is concerned with species of spaces, categories of observations, I am concerned with categories of water as public space, and I have looked in vain for a way of categorising ‘species of water’, beyond the purely generic (“creek”, “canal”, “river”, etc) in terms of describing types of waves in order to standardise observations relating to the same conditions in various places, other than the likes of “calm”, “choppy”, “flowing”, “tidal”, etc.  Maybe this nomenclature is enough for my purposes; conventional sources tend to range from the ultra-scientific, physics-based descriptions of waves and particles, etc, to surfing vernacular.  Perhaps there are better terms, maybe meteorological ones, but I’ve yet to find them.

video recce, Melbourne Docklands, 1 April 2010

 

Starting at Waterfront City ferry terminal, around the boardwalk with calm water protected from the wind below. Out in Victoria Harbour the medium breeze makes the water more choppy: medium ripple. 

I buy a chocolate chip and vanilla ice cream: single cone, two scoops.  

Continuing northeast along the promenade, the medium ripple waters reflect the Docklands buildings.

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.

Reflections on reflections on water

In most cities there are large bodies of water. 

In London there is the River Thames
there are lakes in parks
the Serpentine in Hyde Park
numerous canals
Regent’s Canal.

In Melbourne there are also canals
which
unlike those in London
are constructed primarily for storm water drainage.

Not for transport.

In Melbourne there are the rivers Yarra
a fresh water river
and Maribyrnong
a salt water river.
There is Port Philip Bay
into which both rivers flow.


Public Water.

The idea of urban bodies of water as public space.

But what is ‘public’ about bodies of water? 

Urban space can be public
loose space
but it is often
increasingly
pseudo public
it is often
private space
where photography and filming is not allowed
without permission.

This has increased
with fear of terrorism
and photography in public space
can attract police attention.


What is the status of urban water? 

What is the nature
of the ownership of water
as
fluid public space
never twice stepped in.

Transport and Recreation.

Reflections on water
when photographed
what is the image?

Reflection is an image
water is a medium
and a lens
reflecting
and
reproducing
(albeit distorting).





Will the security guards at Canary Wharf allow me to photograph the buildings as reflected in the water?