Herbert Corby: Reprisal

Imperial War Museum, WO201-2023 Middle East - dummy vehicles filling up with fuel, 1942

Reprisal

They worked all night with cardboard and with wood
to make those dummy planes to hoodwink the foe,
and in the chilly morning solitude
wheeled out the dummies to places they should go
on the dispersal fields, and went away;
the hours passed uneventfully, and even
no reconnaissance planes were overhead that day.
They evacuated in the twilight, just after seven
and when they'd gone the Germans flew above the drome
and by each plane they dropped a wooden bomb.


Corby was an RAF Armourer in a bomber squadron.  The poem is part of the operations leading up to the Battle of el Alamein, 1942.  Did it happen?  This is a poem.  Like the fabled Christmas Truce in the First World War, often written about in poem and song, this is the Second World War's registration of some sort of common humanity that renders the act of battle so much more inexplicable.

Isabelle Hayeur: in the middle of nowhere

L'île, 1998, Paysages incertains / Uncertain Landscapes, 107 cm X 244 cm / 42" X 96"

Isabelle Hayeur:  Au milieu de nulle part

As part of Paris Photo at the Canadian Cultural Centre
5, rue de Constantine 75007 Paris
November 14, 2012 to March 22, 2013
Opening reception on November 13, 6h30 pm

From Isabelle Hayeur's press release:

"in the middle of nowhere", which, come to think of it, raises the idea of a strange encounter between geometry and geography. A paradoxical expression that has a wide range of connotations (from irony to poetry, from disenchantment to contemplation), it is used to refer to an object or a place from a relatively unplaceable space. Here, photography demonstrates its power to represent space-time continuums outside our everyday world, outside its flux, noise and inattention. The subjects seem to be uprooted, deprived of rooting in nature, of links to the earthly continuum. For Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler, the framing is a crucial process that proposes another way of dividing up reality to take us elsewhere. Not towards some form of exoticism but, on the contrary and more colloquially, to the middle of nowhere.

« Au milieu de nulle part » est une expression qui pointe une chose ou un emplacement isolé, qui sort de l'ordinaire ou qui fait saillie de manière inopinée à partir de l'immensité plane. Littéralement une situation insituable – une absurdité, un paradoxe, une tromperie, un leurre, un éclat – qui représente un objet fabuleux pour la photographie. Les photographes Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur et Thomas Kneubühler, réunis ici pour la première fois, ont en commun cet intérêt manifeste pour ce qui n'est pas censé être au centre de l'attention. Par le cadrage photographique ils proposent un autre découpage du réel pour nous emmener ailleurs. Non pas vers quelque forme d'exotisme mais, bien au contraire et plus familièrement, « Au milieu de nulle part ».

Isabelle Hayeur: Castaway

CASTAWAY from Isabelle Hayeur on Vimeo.

29th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival
11.13.12 - 11.18.12 | Kassel

Une vidéo expérimentale filmée dans les eaux incertaines du plus grand cimetière de bateaux de la côté Est de l'Amérique. Situés près de la Chemical Coast du New Jersey et de l'ancien dépotoir Fresh Kills, ces rivages désormais toxiques ont été le théâtre de nombreux désastres écologiques

An experimental video filmed in the murky waters of Witte's Marine Salvage at Staten Island (New York). Located near New Jersey's Chemical Coast and the former Fresh Kills landfill, these now toxic shores have seen their share of ecological disasters.

Adrian Utley: Croft Castle, Sonic Journey

John Minton, filmmaker. Adrian Utley, composer. Sonic Journey, Croft Castely, Herefordshire, 2012.

The National Trust in Britain has commissioned a number of artists to do works about specific landscapes, both rural and urban.  Croft Castle has a number of ancient trees, including a thousand-year old oak, a triple chestnut avenue and 'mysterious ancient hawthorns', that magical tree. 

If you click on the image above, from the film, it will take you to the film and the soundtrack.  It is about 15 minutes long.  And if you just want to listen to the music, here it is:

Jane and Louise Wilson: the toxic camera

Jane and Louise Wilson / Whitworth Art Gallery Length: 3min 35sec Monday 22 October 201

From the Guardian site: 'British artists Jane and Louise Wilson's new film, The Toxic Camera, premieres at Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in November. The work was commissioned to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and was inspired by Vladimir Shevchenko's Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, made just days after the accident.'   Watch an excerpt here

Lebbeus Woods: May 31, 1940 – October 30, 2012

No one as influential to my generation as Lebbeus Woods.  He did not build, he drew, he thought, he continually shifted, like light and shadow, through the space of architecture. 

Lebbeus Woods, an imagined wall that would protect Bosnia where others failed.

'The wall would be built very high, with a vast labyrinth of interlocking interior spaces, creating a structurally indeterminate system that would be extremely difficult to bring down by demolition charges or artillery fire. Tanks and mobile artillery could not be brought through the wall. Foot soldiers could not climb over the wall in large numbers, but would have to go through it. Once inside, they would become lost. Many would not be able to escape. They would either die, or, as it were, move in, inhabiting the spaces, even forming communities. Local farmers from the Bosnian side, could arrange to supply food and water, on a sale or barter basis. In time, they would move in, too, to be close to their market. Families would be living together. The wall would become a city.'

War and Architecture

Oil: highway 63

Employees work at the new Devon airport near Conklin, Alberta. October 28, 2011. Todd Korol for The Globe and Mail

On the news this morning was how Highway 63 to Fort McMurray has become a no-drive zone for engineering and oil companies.  The Alberta Construction Safety Association has had a no-drive policy for a couple of years, and the major oil sands companies such as Suncor, Statoil, Devon and Syncrude have either their own airstrips at their operations or airports capable of landing a 737.  Suncor flies 25,000 passengers a month; collectively all the airports in the oil sands move 750,000 people a year.  Add that to the 750,000 people that move through Fort McMurray's airport and one starts to have an inkling of just how vast the oil sands region is, not just in area but in personnel.

So, who is left travelling the deadly Highway 63?  Trucks, equipment, ordinary people (it is the only all-weather road into Fort McMurray), families, busses of oil sands workers too lowly to fly, cars, pickups, lots of Newfoundlanders: search the accidents on Highway 63 and CBC St John's always has the report.

The Alberta government regularly announces the twinning of this road, now scheduled to be completed by 2016, but it seems to be waiting for the Oil Sands Development Group to pony up much of the financing.  Meanwhile, clearly there is a wide economic class division growing between those who safely fly, and those who drive.  The fact that there is an official no-drive pollcy amongst corporations and their ability to completely bypass the issue by building their own airports indicates just how autonomous they are.  As the Alberta government is fond of saying that this is the economic driver of Canada, the industry must be kept sweet.  The twinning of Highway 63 for all the people forced to drive on it seems way down the list of priorities. 

It's a class thing.

A roadside memorial stands along highway 63 near Grassland Alberta on May 2, 2012, where three people where killed in an accident along the dangerous highway to Fort McMurray. Jason Franson for The Globe and Mail

Great Lake Swimmers: Your Rocky Spine :: land as love

We should make this the theme song for On Site 29: geology.

Great Lake Swimmers. Original album was Ongiara, 2007; here a performance from the neighbor's dog.

Call for articles for 29:geology here.

Bang on a Can: music for airports

Brian Eno's Music for Airports, in an airport, perfomed by Bang on a Can, 18 September 2011, part of the Altstadherbst Festival.

Jana Winderen: Wind Over Old Land [Neumes Du Vent - Lágrimas De Miedo 15, 2010]

Because, it is still snowing.

Värttinä: Kylä Vuotti Uutta Kuuta

Because, it is snowing today.

Kevin Harman: Skip 13

Kevin Harman's gallery, Ingleby Gallery, has emailed a link to the latest skip reorganisation, Skip 13, part of Frieze Art Fair 2012.  There is a nice vimeo; click on the photo to be transported there. 

Kevin Harman. Skip 13, York Way, London. October 6-7, 2012

These stacks of material remind me so much of the piles of construction debris found in Sudbury, which I wrote about last year in Destination Earth.  Is there some deep epistemological urge we have to separate, sort and re-present? Or does construction debris itself lead to this.  Unwillingly deconstructed, it longs to be a thing again. 

Kevin Harman: Skip 7

Kevin Harman. Skip 7. 2007 Mixed Medium Friday, take all contents out of skip, break down and place all debris back in skip for opening on Sunday night, leave.

Kevin Harman, Scottish sculptor, has a series of reorganised skips full mostly of construction debris. This is Skip 7, before and finished.

At once performance, community project, statement about density, found materials, deconstruction of the already deconstructed, reconstruction leading to a complete absence of inner space.  Rachel Whitread filled a small house full of plaster, then removed the mould – the structure of the house itself, leaving solid blocks of 'space'.  Kevin Harman takes the materials of a house and squeezes all the space out, leaving a small block of airless density.

The process is public and good natured. Here is an 11 minute 2009 film from Harman's website:  www.kevinharman.co.uk/skip11video.html

Below, Skip 11, a strangely romantic reorganisation.

Kevin Harman. Skip 11, 2011 Mixed Medium Friday, take all contents out of skip, break down and place all debris back in skip for opening on Sunday night, leave.

37.2: Arteology

ARTEOLOGY / installation / wood, 120x100m / "Festival Arts Nature Horizons 2012" / Puy de Serveix, France / 2012 / built.

37.2 [very hot], Atelier de Microarchitecture, is Francesca Bonesio and Nicolas Guiraud, an architect and a photographer, based in Paris.

Arteology is a 37.2 project in the Auvergne: a skeleton that might be found had the Puy de Serveix, a volcanic hill, been an ancient living thing – which it was of course, but had it been an ancient living animal with vertebrae and ribs.  The scale is large, 100m from ridge to base, the scale of the enigmatic chalk reliefs in England: the Uffington White Horse, for example.

From 37.2's description of the project, roughly, 'the volcanic region of the Auvergne in the massif du Sancy seems both grand and sacred.  Our project is to stir the soil, to interpret the form of a ridge, to send a piton into the rock to see, as if by magic, the art in this singular form of nature.
As artists, our arteological search is to reveal nature's memory, rekindling the fire, the fear, the mystery, the questing metaphysics at the heart of volcanic activity'.

ARTEOLOGY / installation / wood, 120x100m / "Festival Arts Nature Horizons 2012" / Puy de Serveix, France / 2012 / built.The aims are immense, the project is simple: wood recovered from construction, no challenging structure, but rather 'it registers as a drawing, a layer, an intervention in the landscape, a poetry reading, a phantasmagoric of nature'.

We have a new call for articles out now, for On Site 29: geology.  We are interested in projects of this kind, where land is reinterpreted in a way that connects us with a deep past. 

Ebarme dich

Putting together this issue of On Site, on sound, has really made me listen to things.  And because music is the soundtrack, more so than traffic, or radio discussions, or mechanical systems, I find I'm listening to recordings and tracks with a different set of filters.

Several contributors to issue 28: sound talked about the purposeful manipulation of reverb time in churches and cathedrals.  This video of Michael Chance, with the Brandenburg Consort, singing 'Erbarme dich, mein Gott', from Bach's Matthäus Passion, Parte second:39, is clearly in a church – well, we can see that, but it is also in the sound of his voice, which is almost otherworldly.

When I looked about for other recordings of this same conveniently short and lovely piece, I came across Delphine Galou with Les Siècles, clearly not in a church.  More glamorous recording, a totally different but oddly more conventional sound, and it isn't just the difference between a counter tenor and a contralto, rather it is in that other active member of the ensemble, the space.  

David Sylvian: The God of Small Caresses

Uncommon Deities poem (Punkt 2011) on music by Jan Bang, Erik Honore and David Sylvian.

Uncommon Deities appears to be a reconstruction of an audiovisual installation by David Sylvian at the 2011 Punkt Festival at the Sorlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, Norway.  For the cd, Sylvian's poems are read against settings by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, Arve Henriksen and Sidsel Endreson.  

As all of this is alternative and for sale, the David Sylvian website has lots on information.  The piece that led me to this is The God of Small Caresses, of which one can hear an excerpt if you click on the image above.  

Otherwise, here is a rather beautiful video introduction to the cd with The God of Single Cell Organisms. 

Seamus Heaney: Digging

One can hear the slice of the spade in this poem Heaney wrote as a young man, and here in 2009, read in his seventies.  This was my father's favourite poem.  In his memory. 

Evelyn Waugh: 1960

A most interesting look at Evelyn Waugh in a 1960 BBC interview.  Curiously, Joan Bakewell's later introduction and John Freeman's comments seem to indicate that this interview is some sort of failure as Waugh was so bored, nervous, unforthcoming.  Curious, because it seems to me that Waugh answered some very strange questions very straightforwardly.  No, he doesn't get all chummy with the interviewer who soldiers on with what could be seen as dreadfully provocative questions, often a thinly-veiled prurient interest in a supposedly idle, well-upholstered, squirarchic life.  Clearly Waugh was on his way to being deeply unfashionable in the early 1960s, and actually still is.  

I quite respect Waugh in this interview and his resistance to the psychologising impulse that so dominates contemporary interviewing.  And yet, he does reveal so much.  For example, his self-indulgent sloth at Oxford where he was on an open scholarship and where he said he grew up, or public schools after WWI, bleak, terrible food, cold, shell-shocked and/or sadistic teachers: the basis of a terrific body of literature.  He wants to be seen as a wordsmith, a trade at which he labours.  The interviewer flounders, Waugh is implacable, he simply won't deliver what the interviewer wants.

Having recently been interviewed myself (a brief five minutes) and finding myself led completely off-track into fields I strenuously try to avoid, I wish I had the intelligence and sang-froid of Waugh, plus his patience.

John Berger and Tilda Swinton

via politicstheoryphotography

Chris Watson: El Divisadero

'El Devisadero' by Chris Watson.
From the 12" EP El Tren Fantasma