I was really pleased to have images of my work in a projection show on Norfolk Street in Sheffield as part of the Wealthy Weekend event going on in the city over 12/16 November.
WEALTHY WEEKEND takes place on one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year, the University of Sheffield and the Guild of St George present a weekend of talks, visual projections, artworks and activities to re-define wealth that matters, inspired by John Ruskin’s belief that ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE’.
This is the 7th post in a series that I still call psychogeographical maps (or cognitive mapping). Quoting certain sections and using a selection of photographs to widen the project, which at its core still has the intention to be a Cognitive Mapping of Now – aiming to be useful for locating the current socio-political mood, and the psychological impacts of it.
7 Nov 2014
“The Mary Celeste structure [overlooking Barnsley’s inner ring road] is darkened by the downpour. And in turn it seems to be a metaphor for the early dark turn of the conversational subject matter, once I reassert the uneasy truth that this structure has been in this state for over 6 years – yet it is a largely ignored fact. It provokes an intensification in our wrangling conversation over ‘just what the hell is going on?’ “.
” Hemmed in’ plantation woodlands [Flouch roundabout] mark the roadway to the moors. Two bleak landscapes that compliment each other. Both man-made, so to speak., but both important (I believe) to (initially) the Northern Industrial psyche, and (currently) the always-on, hyper-connected psyche. [They act] as a physical reflection of the [empty feeling this speed causes [in us].”
11 November 2014
“[Nottingham city centre]. Walking past recruitment centre. People of all ages sat facing computer screens, and people stood outside [the centre] waiting at the bus stop. I feel for them; what an incredibly rigged game it is when you’re at the bottom [and you’re trying to get a break]. I get the lyrics to [Pulp’s] Common People running through my thoughts: “yeah and the chip stains and grease will come out in the bath”, because there’s no way of disguising your poverty, it really does cling to you. Everyone can see it, no matter how you try to hide it. Look over [the road] at massive concrete hotel. Now highly unfashionable. Built in a different era; with a different social reality.”
“Find myself incredibly hungry, with well over 2 hours until I get the train back. [My mind starts running down old and unhelpful psychological warrens, and when it’s irrational thoughts VS illogical thoughts – one has to win over]. I lie to myself, convincing myself that the meandering that follows is for my ‘projects’. The hidden motive being the ‘eating disordered’ mental[ity] that returns when I’m low, lonely, tired and in an urban centre surrounded by (seemingly) infinitesimal choices. My thoughts pace back and forth between getting ‘food involving a drink’ in a pub, but I relapse [ever-so-slightly] into the late teenage me, who spent hours in supermarkets in a decision-making paralysis, due to all the choices on offer. the anorexic control mechanisms still try to get out of their cage from time to time; [the urge to have it back at the reigns is still very seductive].”
11 November 2014
“Large open-cast mining area; [this area is still] generally industrial-looking. A landscape you could mistakenly think was of the past, coming from Yorkshire. Sometimes feels as if Yorkshire has been made into one tourist attraction, as in covering up the truth (as all tourism does); greened over spoil heaps, and severe poverty hidden by lush ravines in Sheffield. As if Derbyshire’s ‘secondary’ position in contrast to Yorkshire’s (increasingly annoying) self-indentit[ification] has kept it more real.”
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12 November 2014
“Unused grassland/wasteland area between railway track and disused viaduct [just outside Leeds Centre]. About 10-15 police officers walk together [through the grass] in a line, looking for evidence. A serious crime has obviously been committed here, in [an] area that will no doubt be swept under the glitter of ‘regeneration’ once the south Entrance to Leeds [railway] station is [completed]. But, as it stands, it looks like a ‘ideal crime scene location’ – as if this wasn’t real at all, but actually film set for the crime drama A Touch of Frost, which was actually filmed in this area.”
“As I head for the exit at Darton station I noticed stickers all around where the train doors are: English Defence League and Britain First stickers vowing to ‘protect us’ from ‘muslim pedophiles’. A sickly and medieval style to the stickers, and far right party logos. [It] makes my heart sink: “this can only get worse”, it feels to me. ‘The diseased isle’ to [paraphrase] Carl Neville. I wish I knew a solution; as far as I see much anti-fascist protesting isn’t quelling such views. And it’s so bad around here – alienating me from “my own turf”, so-to-speak. Only yesterday I saw a poster on a road sign near Cawthorne saying “Halal Fox”. Stupid/idiotic coupling of presumed ‘lefty’ things, but also dangerously striking subconscious chords – I’m sure.”
This is the 6th post in a series that I still call psychogeographical maps (or cognitive mapping). Quoting certain sections and using a selection of photographs to widen the project, which at its core still has the intention to be a Cognitive Mapping of Now – aiming to be useful for locating the current socio-political mood, and the psychological impacts of it.
29 October 2014
“Perhaps due to lack of significant change in my [cassette] walkman-cum-CD-walkman-cum-mp3 player-cum Ipod, it still often occurs that music specific to certain haunts replays itself when I return to the haunts. Looking towards the landscape break [between] the rolling hills of Barnsley and the barren-Pennine hills, I remember how this landscape break functioned as an analogy for a break off occurring in my life, when I frequented this route, often by pushbike, aged 18. The song evoking this powerful feeling of [seemingly uncalled-for] loss is ‘Politik’ by Coldplay (one of the only tracks I hold dear by a band I largely associate as the main audio backdrop to [the] socially-cleansed ‘Bland Britain’ [that the 2000’s became].) Looking up at the green hills towards the (seemingly) always broody enclosure of Penistone, the song gives me a gut-wrenching feeling that I feel powerless to finally put to bed now. It is the break off of one reality to the general reality I occupy now. I see my 18 year old self with a sense of innocence, not really understanding where exactly he was leading his thoughts to the rest of this young adulthood.”
“Looking over to Burngreave’s cluster of row-rise flats that cover the sharp, hilly, incline. Remember being surprised to find out that there was once a large estate [Woodside], including tower blocks, just over the other side of this small hill, but is now long-gone. Although the flats may have fallen into decline, as a South Yorkshire resident I get a sense of deep injustice over the de-metropolising and de-futurising of Sheffield, inflicted on it from Thatcher onwards.”
“Young man, clearly homeless, sits outside the Division Street Sainsbury’s [store], on an evening where the temperature has noticeably dropped. Perhaps because I’m a little more beaten by things today, I haven’t got my ‘rat-race’ [need-to-get-things-done] mentality’ on, I feel genuine empathy for him – something I think we [generally] do our utmost to avoid [doing]. But I can’t avoid [doing so] because he has a relatively similar physical appearance to me, which makes the prospect of homelessness far more imaginable.”
30 October 2014
“Hill feels harder to climb today. Possibly due to the many headlights from cars, continuously blinding me and making it feel like a sensory bombardment. Look back over the M1 motorway – just a constant flow of lights, like little digits moving up to make one big picture. This predicament is not freedom .”
“Young [woman] stands in the middle of the generally depopulated (post 6pm) town centre with a charity bucket – the name of which I am unsure. I hear a male voice speaking to her, as a walk past [and onwards], in a strong working class London accent, saying “your security is also my priority, darling”. Something just doesn’t look right about it [all]. It seems like heresy to suggest that a charity [may be] dodgy, but it certainly strikes me as being this way. After all, surely in an age where everybody [is having to] scramble for every last penny. surely someone’s going to try it?”
30 October 2014
“Hill feels harder to climb today. Possibly due to the many headlights from cars, continuously blinding me and making it feel like a sensory bombardment. Look back over the M1 motorway – just a constant flow of lights, like little digits moving up to make one big picture. This predicament is not freedom .”
“Young [woman] stands in the middle of the generally depopulated (post 6pm) town centre with a charity bucket – the name of which I am unsure. I hear a male voice speaking to her, as a walk past [and onwards], in a strong working class London accent, saying “your security is also my priority, darling”. Something just doesn’t look right about it [all]. It seems like heresy to suggest that a charity [may be] dodgy, but it certainly strikes me as being this way. After all, surely in an age where everybody [is having to] scramble for every last penny. surely someone’s going to try it?”
3 November 2014
“Deep black heaps of coal lay in large car-park at The Old Post Office pub (next to motorway junction). The coal is being loaded onto large lorries. I think about how in our so-called ‘post-industrial’ times, we easily forget [due to its disappearance – at least in raw form – from our immediate horizons] that such [resources] still fuel the world we inhabit.”
“Walking under viaduct. orange bleaching by night lights. Craving for permanent urban meandering, free of hunger, expectation, responsibility …tomorrow morning.”
4 November 2014
” Windy lane next to ‘traditional’ Yorkshire scenes. I know that part of the reason I walk so fast is to, at least momentarily, con myself over my growing sense of immobility.”
“After miles of walking through clearly definable landscape I am finally upon an interspace container – a city to city train. Feel at ease, don’t even care if I look worn and ragged to the commuters that surround. I’ve exhausted the need for worry, care – just a human drone, in awe of the bright lights in the train as I stare up. And why shouldn’t I be? Sometimes I [crave] to be in these interspaces.”
“As soon as I get into the city I notice individuals carrying rucksacks, who [certainly look to be] ‘of no fixed-abode’. You can’t hide it [no matter how hard you try]. [because] the smartly-dressed office workers who pass them by are visibly not condemned to where those clothes all the time. [Such a predicament clings to you].”
“Walking down Bond Street. Odd layout. Hoardings, barring entrance to something, and bakeries and a [small] bus station that look ill-placed now that the 9-5 stage of Leeds day is over. Something feels missing in a much wider sense though; a real sense of an absence of something.”
This is the 5th post in a series that I still call psychogeographical maps (or cognitive mapping). Quoting certain sections and using a selection of photographs to widen the project, which at its core still has the intention to be a Cognitive Mapping of Now – aiming to be useful for locating the current socio-political mood, and the psychological impacts of it.
3 October 2014
London St Pancras to Westferry on foot, DLR to Greenwich, Bus to Deptford, on foot to New Cross Gate, Train/tube to Willesden Green.
Maps got destroyed. Little clear memory that remains.
“Find my mood caught out by the city this time around. Not tall enough today to stand up to city of tall asks. Strangely comforted by Greenwich. Always destined to head to once-to-be-familiar pubs in Deptford/New Cross. Hauntological hysteria intensified by 1990’s dance music. Lost in an intoxicated mood. Listen to slowed-down dance track in New Cross Sainsbury’s – it doesn’t feel real, I feel like the ghost this time. Too far gone.”
4 October 2014
Willesden Green to Southbank on foot, then on to London Bridge. Tube to Moorgate. On foot to St Pancras via Barbican.
“Come to realise why I could have never lived here. All thought liquidated by city. Round in circles in City zone. No reason to communicate anymore. A Meloncholic walking drone – no desire to be anything else. Just keep Walking, Walking, Walking.”
21 October 2014
“Arriving in Calder Grove, The Red Kite car park. The Red kite is pure simulcra, before it is anything [else]. Built to look like an ‘Olde Worlde’ pub. Even though it is no more than 12 years old, the self-advertised ‘vintage’ look fooled a friend into thinking it was much older. Yet it isn’t even a locally-orientated simulation [of an old building]. These pubs (like the one at the Dodworth junction) evoke a style of building that historically belonged [only in] South and Eastern England [not Northern England].”
“[Driving from the east into Leeds] The landscape changes abruptly from the early 20th century suburbia dream to the mid-20th century social housing reality. The dark red brick houses, typical of Northern England, tower-blocks appearing as we get closer to the centre. Yet [this] tower-block skyline is almost hidden from view [from within] the seemingly unbroken consumer/business-man landscape pf the centre. In many ways such [a] blotting of the central landscape brings to mind the ‘cleansing out’ of undesirable features in the 18th century designing of country estates”.
24 October 2014
“Something strangely reassuring about the [reasonably[ tightly-packed sprawl of Manchester proper. A would-be [more desirable] capital city? Quintessential red brick [housing] blocks, overlooked by supermodern complexes – like a safe metropolis compound? As if I could momentarily imagine this (that almost feels like a parallel world to Yorkshire over the Pennines) is free of the anxieties dealt by neoliberalism. Imaginary, yes. The reassuring feeling can only be felt in urban spaces I don’t spend much time in. I wish to be a citizen, a true city person; not a peasant or consumer (which, in reality, I am a mix of).”
“As the taxi approaches the chain pub complex at the roundabout (Redbrook/Barugh Green) the taxi driver says he’ll be voting UKIP at the next general election. I think we got to this point of topic due to talking about trying to survive on low-pay. He [tells me] UKIP have announced they [would] bring in an £8 per hour minimum wage. I find it hard to imagine how a party of right wing (largely well-off) reactionaries would ever truly action such a policy. yet, harder still is trying to explain to people how [I believe] UKIP aren’t really in their interest. Yet they’ve [UKIP] seeped into many peoples’ fears and desires. I exit the day with a sense of foreboding for the near future, feeling there’s very little I can do to alter this path”.
This is the 4th post in a series that I still call psychogeographical maps (or cognitive mapping). Quoting certain sections and using a selection of photographs to widen the project, which at its core still has the intention to be a Cognitive Mapping of Now – aiming to be useful for locating the current socio-political mood, and the psychological impacts of it.
7 September 2014
“[The] train now grinds to an halt of the middle of nowhere [between Sheffield and Meadowhall]. Just sits. Cramped, and overpriced. Old, rickety, late trains – and the ticket conductor has the cheek to ask to inspect everyone’s tickets. Cheated is the feeling; for living outside London; for living in the UK; for living in a privatised world. One thing I do hope is that Scotland vote for independence, and show us how a rail system should be run.”
7 September 2014
“[The] train now grinds to an halt of the middle of nowhere [between Sheffield and Meadowhall]. Just sits. Cramped, and overpriced. Old, rickety, late trains – and the ticket conductor has the cheek to ask to inspect everyone’s tickets. Cheated is the feeling; for living outside London; for living in the UK; for living in a privatised world. One thing I do hope is that Scotland vote for independence, and show us how a rail system should be run.”
20 September 2014
Wakefield to Leeds to Bradford to Halifax to Huddersfield to Leeds to Wakefield
Too tired to make notes…..
24 September 2014
“Sat outside the flimsy, skeletal, Mary Celeste [as in, never-completed] structure. Talking about the gangsterism prevalent in a lot of small (and large) businesses, [makes] this entire area, much of it urban wasteland, take on an incredibly sinister feel. Bleak, dark, ominous – often a reflection on how the world feels on a whole right now. Men parked in flash cars, [dressed] in suits, suddenly [feel] threatening; like wraiths – guards of this injustice-drenched landscape.”
29 September 2014“ [In London] Approaching the Brutalist success story ‘The Barbican’. New development (aiming at being incorporated under the Barbican success logo) has hoardings covered in grass imagery. As I look at the Brutalist skyscrapers, perhaps due to this age of incoming third world [level] poverty they conjure that that ‘deep Asian dystopia’ of dark towers hitting a smog-filled sky. The hoarding writing says [“creating Britain’s future”]. Yet this (the Barbican) was another era’s future! It feels stolen now – a future only for a very few.”
“Navigating the ‘tributary roads’, hoping they’ll take me to the torrent, over-capacitated, coastal river …The Old Kent Road (the new River Thames, making its way to Dover’s Europort).”
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29 September 2014
“[In New Cross] Feel like if I sat in this once-temporary old haunt for much longer I wouldn’t be able to go up again [as if it was some sort of final resting place – the very strange sensation I got when I temporarily moved down here in the first place]. Trapped in a time bubble like the final episode of Sapphire and Steel.”
[Central London] “Everybody is exercising! [Everybody jogging!] Super Professionals – wired-up to capital. In these places Capital has achieved its utopia. Bike shops (designer of course). [Even] exercise shops; toned bodies parading [like window mannequins].”
Being entombed in your own self-centeredness is not at all pleasurable, believe me. It’s a lonely prison cell, where the pass-code for exit is constantly altered, vapourising escape plans.
But the likelihood is, if you’re a decade or so younger than I, you know exactly what I mean already. I can’t be sure I’m right here, but scrolling the Tumblr and Pinterest profiles, it seems that society has produced a 18-24 age group, who a large proportion of seem locked in these aspiration-cum-desperation cells. Poor bastards – that’s how I feel about most of those ten year younger than me.
The cell is like a snow-globe, settled, shook up, settled, and shook up again; as the rebounded echoes of one’s hopes and desires are energised in a tightly sealed space, only for inevitable exhaustion by the inability for this energy to escape and materialise into anything (except art – “everyone’s an artist nowadays!”), and everything settles down into the same inert, cold, dead space; enducing the wasteland of depression.
But I feel wrong even ascribing a wider-social context to this condition. Maybe it feels wrong because at the times I find myself aware of my self-entombment, I am usually feeling at my most alone, alienated, and possessing a freakish, weirdo mind, and thus feeling immense shame. “What a fool I am thinking others are like this – I’m such a screwed up weirdo” (and then the lyrics from Just, by Radiohead, “you do it to yourself, you and no-one else” start pouring into my mind; chit chattering as a fluid of fatalist failure ferments all thought).
Why is shame felt? Why when ‘the downer’ catches you out in the middle of the day, in the middle of town, why is it shame that seems to hang from the flesh, making you feel as exposed as if you were naked?” It may sound ironic but when you’re entombed in self-centeredness you can’t actually locate a self. I don’t mean here, or believe in, the idea of a core person-hood that stays unaltered from birth to death; but I do mean at least a core security construction within a person that they can rely on.
For those entombed in self-centeredness there is nothing to rely on, no place of safety to rest in, when one’s person is attacked or thrown into a disorientating situation. Such a sense of self actually comes from interacting with and feeling part of the world; a secure self comes from that self being able to be porous to all that surrounds it – saturated by it at times.
The entombed self-centered person is envious when they see people touching, hugging, interacting, doing, and building things, seemingly without thought. He/she’s thoughts are always over-thoughts, unnecessarily rebounded contemplations of things that he/she is sure others don’t even contemplate. He/she retreats into depressive-pleasure-seeking every day instead, and the nihilist-pleasure compound of late capitalism yet again seems like the only world, and one he/she increasingly depends on when the external world looks more fucked up by the day. The only solution seems to be to share the burden – but the cell walls seem to respond like vinamold around attempts to escape them. He/she wished they could build something, join hands and build something. But art is the only thing the entombed self-centered person can produce; cave paintings, mere images of the world, painted within the cell.
Is this a externally-enduced condition that has then freed itself from it’s causation, only leaving the atomised self to answer for problems that arise? Well, surely under a dominant belief system that negates society for the individual when it comes down to success, achievement, wealth, well surely the opposite (perceived shortcomings) cannot help but becoming the individual’s burden?
Personally speaking, I have found myself caught between academia and personal experience, and find myself merely hoping my personalised analysis is somehow spotted and incorporated by one of the professionals into their own theoretical discourse – X Factor society or what?! (see here). I have found myself within a constructed reality that is way beyond comprehension for me (just hoping the theorists I quote can pick my unseen blogging-batton up). It is certainly a political issue, but explaining this to friends/family (to anyone) when the shit hits the fan (mentally) – as it is clearly doing right now – has proven unsuccesful so far. Where do I go from here?
Over the past 2 week I’ve had my works in two exhibitions:
In Unity Hall Launch exhibition in Wakefield I exhibited The Place of Dead Ends, The Index For Child Well-being and Whilst We Were All In The Eternal Now…
And in Our Corner: Art as Political Expression, at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield, I exhibited …Coils Tightening.
This is the third post in a series that I still call psychogeographical maps (or cognitive mapping). Quoting certain sections and using a selection of photographs to widen the project, which at its core still has the intention to be a Cognitive Mapping of Now – aiming to be useful for locating the current socio-political mood, and the psychological impacts of it.
“Homeless man [near bus station, Leeds], head tucked into jacket (probably soaked by the rain earlier on). He looks beaten [by life]. Strangely I never expect to see homelessness on a weekend. Has the 9-5 logic fooled me into thinking that homelessness isn’t a never-ending job?”
7 September 2014
“Around Wharncliffe, the displaced huge rocks, the tall, dark pine trees, and the almost monster-like pylons, make for an unusual and eerie landscape. A feeling of ‘something’s not quite right’ fits with my [current] feeling for a need for erasure or [momentary] disappearance”.
8 September 2014
“Realise with dismay that today is the day when Peak Hour rail prices are extended [by Northern Rail, meaning that I have to pay them if I travel after work now. Due to this, which just feels extortionate, and the increasing presence of ‘rail guards’ stopping you and asking to see your tickets (sometimes almost frog-marching people who just haven’t been able to get a ticket yet to the ticket desk), it is beginning to feel like this private company is harassing people already struggling to make ends meet, and seeing their earnings diminished. Yet I feel like I have to keep my mouth shut, because someone could always remind me that I haven’t attended a protest against it all yet (even though I haven’t had the chance yet)”.
9 September 2014
“Walk right, off The Moor high street. Barely anyone around already (at 6pm). A black male stumbles [just] in front of me, leaving a trail of smoke from something he’s smoking. He isn’t wearing any shoes, and at times looks as though he’s about to fall to the ground, but then seems to walk OK again. He looks like he’s broken down in life. Across from him a white male [sat in a doorway] who looks homeless clutches a can of strong beer. “It looks like America” is what I think to myself; a social space and people within it laid to waste by the cruel level of inequality we usually now – thanks to less rose-tinted US dramas – associate with the United States”.
16 September 2014
“Not sure why, but this area, the [hilly] former mill area of West Yorkshire, feels like coming home. Maybe it’s due to a mythical construction of home [as in ‘the north’] I learned from being a child. Or maybe it is because this area is [topographically, and settlement-wise] almost like an exaggerated version of where I grew up, so that it [this area] is laden with signifiers of early identity-forming?”
16 September 2014
“Looking at all the windows of the apartments lit up in the tall buildings, as the train leaves the station. I’m reminded about what lures me to cities; the promise of life, of people, of things happening. Yet they [cities] never fulfil the promise the lights seem to offer, at least not in neoliberal Britain. They always frustrate”.
John B Ledger 