June 20th
This week I went back
to the Bronx zoo, to draw the vultures and photograph them, it was free
admission day and really jammed and super hot. The vultures are really
chic, like Isabella Blow chic, it’s the cinereous vultures im most
interested in, they also have a King vulture up there and a condor. One
mother was tormenting her little kid saying how much the vulture wanted
to eat her, she went into so much detail,
he wants your belly and your eyes and your fingers, he thinks youll taste
like chicken, and she held her kid over the barrier close to the one vulture
who was right at the wire.
Another mother had lost her kid and was screaming at anyone who listened
to her about how she’d been too fucking busy taking care of other
fucking peoples kids her own fucking child had gone and dissapeared, she
was saying,wheres my boy at?I should have fucking stayed home and smoked
my blunt, fucking zoo, and the kid was called Isaiah and she had some
strong lungs on her. I loved how she just stood and roared his name.She
got into two fights with different groups of people for some reason, people
were totally into ganging up on her and ridiculing her instead of helping
her find her child.me and her happened to be going the same way, so I
was in her wake. then she turned in another direction to keep hunting
for her boy and drag her comet trail with her.She was a phenomenon. Really
beautiful and very thin with a small wrinkly bag of a stomache that looked
like she had just had a baby. Some women were really laughing at her for
letting her stomache hang out but I thought she was fearless, like who
cares, its a wrinkly post pregnancy stomache look at her exquisite face
instead then if you find her belly so unappealing.You knew that she knew
instinctively her kid was safe also, because she was with a big mesh of
other mothers and kids all scrambled up together, he was with someone
for sure,she was just really into having a big voice and using it.
Back at the Metropolitan museum, its still really overwhelming, I could only handle it by saying I would strictly only look at three specific things. I concentrated on the Chinese drawings. I really got engrossed in the style, the way nature was depicted with such controlled flourishes and loose gestural marks and the humans were located within the lanscape in such contrast, so neurotic, each meticulous fold of a garment painstakingly mapped out.These were really ancient works, long scrolls like timelines and one which depicted the forbidden city with all these enthralling little pockets of detail, the contemporary equivalent would be large scale pixel art, it was so detailed and exact to look at it verged on being un human, like only a machine could have rendered it.
Went up to Prospect Park in Brooklyn at round dusk on Saturday night.heaps
of families were there having barbecues, the parks here always seem enormous,
boundless, its really a great thing, I mean central park when you really
think about it is an urban phenomenon. I remember when I lived in paris
how stifled it felt sometimes, all the little manicured gravel spaces
with polite benches. I came back to the uk once suddenly and was on a
train from London to Glasgow looking at northern English football pitches
and thinking they were really beautiful and realising how deprived of
green space Id been without even realising.Ive really never been in a
city before where park space is so generous and so utilised, like I think
New York people really know fundamentally what a park is for and they
know how to make the park enhance the quality of their lives beyond just
sitting eating a sandwich on a bench or lying on a towel to try and get
a bit of colour.
There was a kite festival in Brooklyn yesterday as well, right down on
59th street down low, the more remote and isolated the subway lines become
the less gentrified areas are. This was sunset park, a diiferent kind
of flavour of new york, Hispanic neighbourhood. Big abandoned industrial
spaces and a burnt out car. The kite thing was very low tech, just loads
of local families down on the dock,flying their kites, and only one ice
cream van in attendance.
Thank you Janet Cardiff for our walk through Central park today.
Umm, if you live in new york and you might actually go on this walk, don’t read this, it’ll spoil it for you.
Ive heard people discuss this artist’s work, walks specifically, and ages ago I read a description of a piece she made with a choir or an orchestra which really intrigued me. I was pretty excited to have the chance to encounter her, I walked through Central park today guided by Janet Cardiff’s voice playing on a cd player given to me by a chick at the public art kiosk on Central park South and Sixth Avenue.
I was very hungover actually, and so I think ultra receptive because layers were missing, I just stepped off into her world like it was a lagoon and felt utterly grateful afterwards that she had made my life feel so enriched by what she had said to me through the headphones as I followed her directions.It was a beautiful day, hot, the park was particularly vibrant, there are some days the city seems more like new york than others, today was like 300% new york, everything looked 4 dimensional the taxis were yellower.
Janet Cardiff took you to different strata of the park, she showed you the park back through time in discarded photos found in a flea market, “walk to that rock” she says “the one by the tree, look at photograph number 5 ,” and you look at a photo of an unknown woman, her hair blowing across her face twenty years ago in the same spot. she tells you to put your finger in your mouth and trace the saliva on your cheek, so you can feel it there, wet, like an outside part of yourself.ive walked down this one path several times and never once have I noticed that if I walked over to the railing like she tells me to, I can see the polar bear in central park zoo.”look at him” , she says,
”hes making figures of 8” and the bear is doing exactly that, driven mad by captivity, the bear is doing exactly what she said he would be doing, swimming under water, ducking, turning back, you hear the people she heard the day she recorded the scene on her binaural microphone.she lets you watch the bear for ages, she reminds you that a polar bear’s territorial span is the size of Iceland.Then she guides you further …under tunnels, here she talks about the Civil war,by lakes,there she tells you that she likes to photograph her husband sleeping, all through the artificial park, once occupied by two thousand squatters during the depression.
Her aural construction is superimposed and synchronised on the reality of the place in such a beautiful way, it brings out the aliveness of everything, the walk lasted about an hour. I was with a friend but we drifted apart, being so engrossed. I took a wrong turn at one point and had to retrace my steps, pausing her voice till I could see the icecream stand she talked about, marginally devastated to have fallen out of step with her.
This was one of the best experiences Ive had here. Funded by Public Art Fund.
Im off to Prospect park shortly to see Burning Spear.
Today is park day obviously.
jJune 26th
June 14th passed and
that was my half way point for being here.
It took all this time to feel the way I feel now in New York.
My friend Kaffe was here very soon after I arrived and after she played
here at the Kitchen,I met Larry Seven after her gig, we all went for a
drink and Larry charted the states for me from the eighties to now, mainly
I was into the picturesque quality of his descriptions of cultural geography
and the appearance of the American population in the 80s.The new fitness
fads hadn’t reached the east coast back then when Larry left New
York to head for LA on a bus.People got less and less white and freakster
and more and more tanned and lithe the further away from the east coast
he got. Basically people looked more and more healthy and square the further
away from NY he drove and he was overwhelmed and undermined by that because
he had like a two foot high quiff and winkle pickers and ashen skin.
Ive just got back from PS1, a big party to launch their summer events.
I was with my friend david before that and we had gone to the SculptureCenter
in Queens to see TREBLE, a sound show, a good one too.
Treble was part of a whole spectrum of sound and architecture events which
is why Kaffe had come out to play in the Kitchen, Its been going since
March across the city. So Treble had some really nice pieces, some beautiful
glass bells by Jim Hodges, and some utterly fantastic home made records,
cast from vinyl with the grooves inverted…. by Terry Nauheim.You
could play them.
Then,up at PS1, the whole place was opened out and sunny and live improv
bands were playing in the courtyard. My friend david had gone to a play
so I just sat and watched everybody and thought about how supreme people
were to look at here and how that activity, in itself is so worthwhile.It
was sunny and there was a bar and it was really feel-good, great music.
I had been to a show up in soho as well on the Friday, Dearraindrop, an
art collective of kids born in the 80s.Inspired by Atari Sex Marijuana
and Andy Warhol,etc etc according to an interview I read. Id gone specifically
because I thought Lightning Bolt, a band from Chicago were going to play
live. That environment, again was spectacular, people just were so amazing
looking, especially the girls, the guys were more generic, the girls were
pretty codified too but there were some exceptions.The art depressed me
at first but when I lived with it for a while I got the hang of it more.
It reminded me so much of pockets of Austrailia, it seriously was deranged
and plural to the extent that it hurt your eyes and brain, when I first
walked in I was going oh Christ.I totally had the impression of people
m aking work inside dank dark spaces with the sun blazing outside.The
show was called The Riddle of the Sphinx. They “draw till it hurts”,
and every outpouring and scrap of psychadelic collage was on the walls.The
more I just relaxed and stopped resisting it, the more into it I got and
I found strong elements in the barrage, like a knitted smurfette, some
incredibly striking drawings.Ive thought about the show a lot since I
seen it, the art, the people and their behaviour, their youth, their antagonism(they
have been banned for life from the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art)
and their slack manifesto(they hate “art with a message”, they
hate “art schools” and they hate “new york art”).
So that was on my mind a lot. And ultimately it felt good to have seen
that work but it felt very exclusive and that’s always a yawn unless
you are equipped to counter or encounter that. Which I don’t really
feel that I am but that doesn’t matter because its only a small part
of whats important to me here.Ive just tapped into something else totally
by accident.
Friday night I went to meet someone who was with an old friend of his
mothers from Lewis in the western isles. She has lived here since the
60s. She tells these great anecdotes about people. like “oh so and
so,was there, and her father in law was Yul Brinner ,” so that was
fun but then suddenly she said to me, ‘I cant believe you have such
a strong Glaswegian accent and you have an education as well.” It
was the biggest pile of garbage.I had a fight with her because lately
I cant accept people saying stuff like that in my presence.
On Saturday there was a mermaid parade at Coney island. Chicks dressed
up as mermaids with tails, being pushed along on wheely chairs.
I flew to Liverpool Thursday afternoon from JFK for a project im working on with Foundation for Art and Creative Technology. The project is called The Children;s Crusade based on the real events of the 12th century, when 10,000 european peasant children attempted to march to Jerusalem as holy pilgrims.I first read about this Crusade in Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse Five and always wanted to make some kind of work around that subject. I did a lot of reading about pilgrimage in New York, and the work is also influenced by the current political situation in Israel,Palestine, though that aspect isn’t overt.
I worked with the same group of 28 kids last year , the project has been in further development since. They were in primary seven when I met them, now they’re in first year at secondary.We’re making an internet radio play, some of it was devised in a chat room last year and some of it is being made live through improvisations and scripting through consensus. So I was up at their school on Friday which is a sterile fortress and met some of them in a class where an extra girl with a black eye was also having fifteen minute’s detention.Her teacher couldn’t detain her for more than fifteen minutes without her mother’s permission apparently, well that’s what she was shouting and it seemed to be the case.
We did a workshop at FACT today and it was funny, they make me laugh, I love what comes out of their mouths…we did a lot of games then they got into character as the vision girls and their followers….more info on the crusades projects can be found at http://www.hamandenos.com./crusade.html… and Ross Dalziel was there working on sound effects and interludes with them. Its all more or less structured and written by both me and them but we don’t have an ending yet. We are going to record the play in one take with all sound effects and so on either archived to be played on cd or generated live, Im pretty excited and interested by the whole process, using different techniques to collate one sonic narrative. It’ll be like “the school play” streamed on internet radio, with ambience captured too, that’s what im most interested in aesthetically, the sonic qualities of a live performance.
I went to a park in Birkenhead today which is the 1/8th scale original model for Central park. A taxi driver told me that. I love Liverpool, I was walking back to my hotel last night at 8pm and a couple were getting out of a taxi outside a pub, they couldn’t get into the pub quick enough once they heard the strains of a cover band starting the chunky chords of House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals.The same taxi driver who told me about the park was playing Roxy Music and we had a nice drive back from the school, getting “cosy in the car” as Angharad describes it. Those times when you can use a car journey to unwind. First thing Im doing back home is learning to drive.
Yesterday I saw a fascinating Kara Walker show at the Tate, “GRUB FOR SHARKS: A Concession for the Negro Population.” Inspired by a work by JMW Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the dead and the dying-Typhon* coming on (The Slave Ship) 1840, and the book, Liverpool and slavery: An Historical Account of the Liverpool African Slave Trade 1884.
* old English spelling for typhoon.
Also on show there was Gormley’s “Field”. I spent ages looking at it trying to ascertain what I felt about it and didn’t get past flatness and resentment. The Tate is the only UK gallery to have installed Field twice. Last time in the 1990s it was fabricated by a Merseyside community with links to brick making, this time by Mexican artisans. It irritates me to think of people making these things, relentlessly,repetitiously making the head and eye holes and starting a new one.Visually,it made me think of Toy Story. I think the work is flawed, it upsets me.
There is a symmetry to being here whilst on the New York residency that i didn’t anticipate but seems obvious now, yesterday down at the docks I walked past the old Cunard shipping company building converted into a bank. In Manhattan, at Battery Park, I pay my bills in the sister Cunard building, now a post office.The first passenger ships to New York left from here. Im really aware of the significance of this chance to have come to Liverpool whilst a temporary resident of New York, to look at Afro American work around Liverpoo'ls slave history at the Tate.
On the Mersey ferry, to the strains of “ferry cross the Mersey”, I watched all the tobacco monoliths and the world heritage architecture of the docks.Got off the boat at Birkenhead, found the park, a big long walk away, and saw exactly the same scattered trees and the sense of wander that I see in Central park. Birkenhead park is acknowledged as being the first publicly funded park in Britain.Seeing the park today, I had expected to experience a reduced original version of Central, like a model,but I think the influence was ideological rather than literal. I read the paper there for a while, sat on the grass, people were playing football and cricket. It struck me that a successful park allows you to feel spacious whilst providing views of a good selection of activity.Also, I remembered how tense I get walking past a game of football, in case the ball drifts my way and someone shouts, that ball! And you need to kick it back to them. When I kick it back it goes even further away.Going to Birkenhead made me think loads about the locations I have made work in, or passed through on the way. Brislington, Stoke on Trent, Huntington, Aberystwyth, Saltcoats,Wigan…all these places you don’t go to under normal circumstances but whenever you do, I do anyway, you find real satisfaction in seeing their unique detail. The things that endure and coexist with Warner Brothers and Argos and all the shite that gets thrown up in small disenfranchised, post industrial or post day tripper towns.All the new homogenised garbage that seem more brutal in smaller places, all the things that youre glad theyre there anyway because everything else is shut on a Sunday.I saw the most totally unusual pub sign in Birkenhead,”The Cygnet” made from ceramic tiles with circles printed on them, a complete modernist baby swan made in simple constructed bird shape from the ceramic circles. Up there since maybe the fifties I don’t know , but beautiful,simple graphic, I had no camera with me.
And then a beautiful metal sthree dimensional swimmer made from sheet steel maybe, shiny, like the terminator and bolted to the side wall of some swimming baths.
July 13th 2004
I came “home”
to new york Sunday. To blazing heat after soft rain in Liverpool. The
journey there and back was so banal, I mean so normal in its duration
and its expectations, I knew what to expect both ends so I didn’t
have any sense of anticipation which was actually a really nice feeling.
The films both ways were appalling. Coming back was “Dirty Dancing
2” set in Havana in the 50s, yet somehow the final sequence , where
the waspy American girl becomes the salsa queen of La Rosa Negra, is palyed
out to a hip hop track.
The project in Liverpool went really well, we got a great one take recording
of the radio play and we did electronic and foley sound effects in real
time.It sounds like it was. I am definitely not going to make any post
production tweaks in any way, you hear them rustling scripts, approaching
the microphone and all the ambience of the school library is there. It
was a tough week. I don’t know how teachers endure those environments,
the noise is so extreme in a school, and the dynamic is always one of
resistance of having to exert x amount of mental force in opposition to
what might overwhelm the objectives.I had a good rapport with the class,
there was just too many of them and their attention span was pretty weak.
I found it really infuriating that somehow, they have an expectation to
be entertained. I don’t know if that’s because it was an art
work or because as a teacher you physically have to hold their attention
in an acutely concentrated way, but anyway they seem to operate on a task
to task basis.Im not a teacher, I don’t approach things that way,
I just had to try to persuade them that the experience was worth the effort.
Also, to break it up a lot with drama games and crazy voice work where
they all had to follow me doing abastract humming and sudden changes in
mouth texture.The headmaster came to the final listen through which was
formalised by certificates of achievement. I had written Kurt Vonnegut
in as a final character and once the children crusaders have drowned at
sea he appears on the beach to comfort a mother.
Kurt takes her backwards through the Palestine Israeli conflict, like
he does in Slaughterhouse Five where guns suck bullets back into their
barrels and the fires go out over Dresden and the planes take the bombs
home… to where women unpack the minerals inside them and they are
buried back in the mountains. Well, I paraphrased him. It was powerful,
a strong moment in the work, but the anti-war/anti-imperialism/anti-violence
content of the play got relegated to the back benches in favour of somehow,
the fact that it had actually been achieved. Its disappointing.Kind of
blatant in a way, totally ignoring any residual impact in favour of task
delivery. But im really proud of it, and what we achieved as a group,
we had cat litter and paper cups to make footsteps as well as laptops
triggering all kinds of electronic gizmos constructed by the kids who
worked with ross dalziel.
So that’s that.
Now I get back to whats going on here which is pretty seismic, I have
this feeling of exultation and limitlessness, I daydream while im knitting
this new vulture piece. Its really a strong sense of doing what needs
done and adrenalin starting to shift because I had a break from the city
and came back to a finite timespan so everything has a sense of being
valuable.I go home on the 13th of September. Walking around the day after
I got back I took some pictures and heres one of them. I love what it
looks like here.
