SINCLAIR, BICKNELL, LOST AND FOUND IN WHITECHAPEL
David Hackbridge Johnson
Private Printing MMXVII
SINCLAIR, BICKNELL, LOST AND FOUND IN WHITECHAPEL
By David Hackbridge Johnson
Prelude
Insufficient attention or too much distracted lurking may
have been the cause for a prolonged failure to locate Gallery 46. Yet an art space so curiously hidden,
(where searchers must hesitate up and down Ashfield Street –
no obvious signage for a gallery, rows of Georgian houses perilously wedged
between grey blocks of razor wired anonymity, where no thrown up awning of
Perspex illuminates Art Biz conjugations with dubious branding architects),
seems to invite furtiveness – is it here? No.
Here? No –
until the toing and froing narrows to a mere shuffle at the
doorstep, a strange jig that foots its own insecurity – and then you knock in
half hope of entry.
And luckily, after warm welcomes, a treasure trove awaits;
two of the fine Georgians given over to an art space, whose rooms have in recent
months held some extraordinary archives – most particularly those of Iain
Sinclair and Renchi Bicknell.
As it happened I nearly missed the show; the arrival of the
artists to de-hang their work was imminent.
So perplexed had I been on my perambulation of Whitechapel that I became
quite disorientated; my quest to find old haunts such as St. Boniface and the
East London Synagogue had been successful but then I became mesmerised by the
Legoland behemoth of the new Royal London Hospital, only to find I was but a
stone’s throw from the gallery.
Withal, I did manage to see the artwork before it became
bubble wrapped and boxed.
New Royal London Hospital
One
Anonymous Bosch’s pin
hole camera record of a Sinclair journey– this excited me; my friend, Paul Allen,
a wonderful photographer himself, first captured my interest in this medium
with his experiments in pin hole camera work over 35 years ago.
Part of the radical geographer’s work seems to (does it?)
hinge on the half-buried past, the memories of forgotten alcoves or pathways,
the under-map of our present day, yet also there might be a more urgent
concern, less to do with lost visions and cultural nostalgia, more to do with a
frantic tracing of the present in its moment by moment erasure.
No better is this erasure hinted at than in the artefacts relating
to the river journey undertaken by Sinclair and Andrew Kötting during which a
fibreglass swan pedalo is discovered and becomes the means of conveyance along
the rivers of the South East, the journey commemorated in Bosch’s photographs;
shots taken with a matchbox camera (also displayed) and then blown up into
dizzying, misty perspectives. The
weirdness of these blurry images is instant nostalgia round the edges, also quirky;
the chance happening upon the swan contraption leading, I suggest, to high
spirits. One imagines along the way foil
wrapped sandwiches crumbling in sudden gusts, thermos flask toasts to wheeling
birds, dithyrambs on habitat encroachment, instamatic poems on desolate tracts
of distant scrubland, more beverages (something stronger?) – a riverine tea
party of delirious mad hatters, their nobly moulded cobbe proudly riding the
current; undoubtedly the whole effort as unusually compelling as the walk in
the footsteps of John Clare featured in Kötting’s film By Our Selves – and yet like that journey a vital re-treading of
old quests whose recall is now fragmented, lost in a junking of the past, diced
by the ‘Cutting Edge’, post Blakeian visions replaced by ‘Vision’, borderlands
succumbing to board rooms.
For all these attempted recreations or re-navigations come up
against the insurmountable present, their points of erasure or disjuncture: the
straw bear that accompanies the Clare walk (perhaps a manifestation of the
poet’s bewilderment) stumbling amid bemused locals onto new builds that bisect ancient
woods and pathways, the fibreglass swan dragged overland as rivers dwindle, are
drained, are built over.
And finally the chain rope stretching from bank to bank, the post-Olympic
helicopters on aerial prowl, the threat assessment teams in Hi Vis, the river
as a no-go area other than for official parties and post-games legacy
carpetbaggers. Journey’s end in hollow
stadia and freshly, brutally sculptured walkways leading – where? Another vision of stakeholder inclusion? That excludes fibreglass swans? The journey charts its own demise, and these
wonderful pin holes of Anonymous Bosch are the remains.
Ashfield Road, Gallery 46 towards
the end of the street on the left
Part of Sinclair’s recent trajectory as a writer explores the
notion of the city of disappearances.
Disappearance might be expected as new replaces old but Sinclair sees
the galloping erasure caused by many recent grand schemes as so definitive and
final as to brook no remnant.
His writing on the Olympics (again) springs to mind in this
context; work which caused his local library to ban him from delivering an advertised
lecture. This particular Sinclairian
achievement speaks of a radical geography that won’t wait for cosy reflections
and pie charts; in challenging the raving and obligatory optimism of the
Olympic message, Sinclair put himself beyond the pale of Leisure Service
functionaries and pre-pumped olympio-librarians eager to dump Dewey Decimal for
interactive hub design.
The names of gold medallists might be expected to fade into
the annals of their exertions but what can be recalled of entire stretches of
the River Lea now subsumed by such attractions as the ArcelorMittal Orbit; that
promise of 4 by 4 relay adrenaline nostalgia?
I wonder if Sinclair shares with me the irony I feel when I read of ‘Lea
River Park: A New Landscape for London’, as if it was only discovered as a landscape
after its obliteration. Well, the
survival of the Three Mills could be viewed as a blessing but why the rigid
gouging celebrated in so many plastic walkways? the Velcro-sculpted remouldings
of utterly lost river meanders – aeons of quiet sediment dredged and bulldozed
in a matter of weeks? why these puny homages to the discredited Dome – (oh
look! there it is!).
And is the Permanent Poetry display a redeemer of this
landscape in any way? Will the aerobic
endeavours of 2012 have their just Pindarics?
Sinclair doesn’t make the cut, although Tennyson squeezes in. And the stadiums (all of which had iconic
status guaranteed at the blueprint stage) echo ever more faintly with two lactic
acid drenched weeks of straining musculature and frenzied flag waving, and must
now support themselves by means of sparsely attended athletics meets and
corralled school children on day trips. As I’m sure Sinclair has said this is
regeneration at the cost of, not the benefit of what existed before. In Hackney,
That Red-Rose Empire, Sinclair laments the uprooting of allotments to make
way for the Olympic temples; the ghost of Richard Jefferies came to my mind at
once, allotments being both ‘excellent and noble’. Their cultivation, Jefferies goes on, ‘cannot
be too widely followed or too much extolled’.
Any amount of extolling makes no difference when the diggers move
in. Velodromes for vegetables, podiums
for potatoes.
I think it is the ‘given’ that all must be swept away without
question that alarms Sinclair; all dissent an offense to the positive thinking
mantra gurus, even a quiet query seen as somehow betraying the Good-for-Britain
three line whip, somehow undermining the medal tally that all this investment
must justify, so that all and only all can pump their fists as a nation united
when gold is won. Somewhere on the River
Lea, snared in a thicket of oblivious selfie-sticks, a worse-for-wear
fibreglass swan rams its beak persistently against chains; the clanging of its
effort a silver voice.
Kept in or out
Two
Maps, photographs, posters, sketches – there are many threads
to the Sinclair archive. Also books – I
came away with two: The Last London
and an excellent collection of poems The
Firewall.
Sinclair has claimed that The
Last London will really be his last look at the city that he has lived in
for more than forty years. The book has
some tremendous set pieces, some previously published as such: on the Boris Bikes
(now Sadiq Cycles) and swimming in the high rise pool of the Shard. The Olympics still feature – an itch that
Sinclair cannot resist scratching.
Heroic walks abound, mock heroics of motley character. Kötting is often present as Lord of the
Madcap but also drummers, sound dredgers, an Edith Swan Neck impersonator –
walks that re-enact history with pin hole vision, lines of force retraced in
the hope that their ever fainter marks might survive in the triangulation of
old churches, buried kings and locked ossuaries. Sinclair’s walk to Barking where
disorientation beckons seems to bring him to the limit of endurance, the walk
to Tilbury likewise. All these walks are
adorned with a poetic ‘wildfire’ (Alan Moore’s word), a diagnostic probe of
words that delves into brick dust, memory, loss; roots around in rubbish and
comes up with gold, both real and fool’s.
Vignettes of friendship appear often, a common ploy with Sinclair;
he feeds on the shared footfalls of long journeys. The walk to Croydon with poet and translator
Stephen Watts leads via a series of Italian creameries to West Croydon in
search of Watt’s grandparents; a coffee sustained pilgrimage that slips within
my own borders and recalled for me my somewhat desultory, jejune rambles in the
shadow of Taberner House.
Always displacement is near, whether it be the removal of
Margaret Rope’s stained glass windows from the church of St. Augustine,
Haggerston, the social housing cleansing policies of aspiration junkies in
local planning (the last hangers on in doomed flats banished to the hinterlands
of Essex), the threatened seizure of homes to make way for the deep coring
machines that must gouge the earth for HS2 like a mechanised Pluto ravenous for
Persephone, or more insidious forms of displacement like the mental collapse of
Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz, feeling that his true life had been displaced and that
he can only achieve birth at the point of death. The ultimate displacement is of body parts;
the journey to retrace the steps of doomed King Harold as he force marches his
army from Stamford Bridge to Hastings.
Legends of his burial and the dispersal of his body parts fascinate
Sinclair and his fellow travellers; the journey becoming a quest for England’s
Osiris, the displaced funeral rites of the Anglo-Saxon world.
Yet the whole effect of the book is not as gloomy as it might
have been; Sinclair is always seeking out allies, or not even seeking but happening
upon them and seeing where they go. From
curious tramps to activists, poets to book runners; even the Vegetable Buddha,
a man beached on a bench in Haggerston Park, becomes an ally, or at least a
means by which Sinclair can meditate on an imagined field of view. It is these interactions that make the book
oddly hopeful; that despite the pitiless encroachment of those whose hollowed
out culture leaves them utterly amnesiac to what they wreck, there might just
be enough fellow walkers and mappers to keep hold of the thread.
Three
Ancient ley lines connecting former mental hospitals, bridges
and walkways, ribbons of Hindu mantras that hold localities in a cat’s cradle
of perilous perspective, glassy vestiges of Blakeian figures – snouty, peering through raptorine, glaucous eyes – topologies
where Victoria Park becomes a blue whale, where the M25 becomes a reptilian
slither through fields, where star maps hang luminously above ancient promontories,
as avatars of Krishna hover and give blessing – just some of the astonishing array
of layered reference to be found in the work of Renchi Bicknell on show at
Gallery 46.
I was most fortunate to meet the artist – he was packing up –
and was thereby able to discover from him how these layers interact. As I see it, the paintings are, in a sense,
memories of journeys, but of many journeys overlapping in different timescales:
the slow shaping journeys of hills and rivers, the changing landscapes of man’s
journey, the procession of constellations through equinoctial time, and look! –
there is Iain Sinclair entering a gateway at the start of another patient exploration
of lost avenues and abolished edgelands sucked into Total London. There is a delight in finding these maps that
jostle for time’s attention, a playfulness that nevertheless doesn’t distract
from what I take to be Bicknell’s central vision of connectedness. This vision can be gleaned from two
beautifully produced pamphlets: Relations
and A Pilgrim’s Progress. The centrality of Blake becomes clear not
only in Bicknell’s combination of image and text but also in a cosmic vision
that draws on universals from Neo-Platonism.
Linkages of kinship, landscape, memory and beauty.
The threat of the severing of such linkages forms an
underlying tension to be perceived in the sheer vertiginous detail present in
Bicknell’s work; the bird’s eye view that he sometimes favours keeps topsy-turvy
perspectives in play with a sudden leaping out of figures in proportions
deliberately out of scale with their surroundings that suggest the area centralis – the visual kill-zone of
the vigilant bird of prey; a falcon’s fovea alert to tasty anomalies on the
ground. Sinclair has spoken of the
helicopter as an emerging topos of modern landscape surveillance; perhaps the
highly colourful and perspectival disordering of Bicknell’s aerial views is his
way of both recording and commenting upon landscape change as the blades whir
overhead, plotting irresistible removal of such records. From the distance of a few metres the surfaces
of the larger Bicknell paintings, although apparently flat, have a luminous
texture to them which upon close viewing reveals the manner by which the images
are formed: the use of glass shards, grit, threads of schmatter and what I took
to be lentil seeds. Again at a quick
glance the paintings are decorative (and much pleasure is already to be had at
that stage) but the more one looks the more deeply the images become weighted
with meaning, and I felt curious gasps of delight quickly followed by slower
reactions where I caught a glimmer of profound connectivity. This trajectory of looking I noted in myself
again and again in these joyous but profound images.
I couldn’t resist an etching called ‘M25 Passion of the North’
part of The Pilgrim’s Progress cycle;
the Medicine Buddha, the asyla of Shenley and Napsworth (both now redeveloped),
star maps, and at the crux of the Golden Section, Sinclair entering a hedge
gateway to St. Albans with Bicknell just below; all moulded into an intricate
pattern for eye and mind to explore.
Epilogue
Journeys and maps. We
make our own if we can recall enough of our movements; the best maps woven from
wrong turnings, loops and returns.
So, my own diffuse superimposition on those lines and cradles
of Sinclair, Bicknell made that day, 17th September 2017:
first to Highgate, but off the train
at Archway to test my haunches (ached after 2 minutes), up the hill to see
whether the ancient bookshop half way up really had closed (the bell on the door,
the alcove at the back with a sliding window – empty until approach when
suddenly the venerable, bald, diminutive proprietor is revealed (the spitting
image of Billy Fine my father-in-law), as if suddenly he’d descended by
fireman’s pole from an upper floor, an homunculus guardian of faded first
editions and impossibly obscure pamphlets, several of which on the industrial
architecture of tin mining, or by slim volume poets, I was sure to purchase), –
it really had closed, ‘long gone’, said the denizen of an interior design
emporium nearby;
to assorted charity shops at the top
of the hill for further scavenging (2 beautiful LPs – Mercury Living Presence,
but suspiciously light; inside it’s Peters and Lee and Your Hundred Best Tunes,
not Dorati’s Minneapolis engraved on heavy vinyl – , a few paperbacks, a hardback of selections
from the Greek Anthology with lovely yet uncredited line drawings), (knees gave
out stooping for art books);
to The Woodman to meet composer Steve
Elcock and his wife Anneke; we symphonists (cranking them out in silence until
Martin Anderson took us up) must stick together since renewed pronouncements
over the death of the form erode our stock, fish and chips, humus salad, curry
surprisingly good despite its grey oil slick, trading the symphonies of
Havergal Brian until we agree the 8th is the best, what would you do
if you had four bassoons? – no it’s not the opening line of a joke but it
should be, forced outside by bar staff driven mad by gastropub-itis, barking
orders for artichoke compote across the yawning counter, bargaining loudly with
phalanxes of late-arriving prams;
then on my own to find Gallery 46, Underground
connections, city boys in shiny suits complaining of the latest cock-block in
the fiscal jungle, Whitechapel, temporary exit in Canal Street, blue painted
bridge where a man sleeps almost covered with open umbrellas, parasols of
impermanent lodging; folk have left gifts: some fruit, a sandwich, the contents
of a pencil case – he will record himself in prophetic books hopes the donor;
then St. Boniface – the German
Mission Church, modern, Plaskett Marshall & Partners,
with a magnificent bell tower, the old church (not as envisaged by Pugin whose
design was never built) bombed by, well, the Germans – mission accomplished?,
and where my mother sang and my father directed the choir in the masses and
motets of Mozart, Haydn, Bruckner, and sentimental marvels from the lower
leagues: Erb, Nussbaumer, Methsfessel, where I sat aged 7 or so, listening to
the splendid organ, thrill of the reed stops, catching the lengthy sermons in
German, knowing that the English version followed, Father Felix Leusacke’s
musical voice like a planate Schubert Lied, bells and beer, sausages and
sauerkraut, impossible German jokes with words like ‘bembissy’ and ‘bumfuss’
that dissolved all to helpless hilarity;
and to the relic of East End Jewry: the imposing edifice of the
synagogue; we always passed it on the way home from St. Boniface, Dad always
slowing the car and craning his neck, telling us about the waves of immigration
and long beards, all a mystery to me until I married ‘in’ much much later,
stunned by love, Lithuanian survivals, borscht and gefilte fish in Bloom’s;
and then sent spiralling into a dance between two hospitals, old and
new: the Royal Londons, one fenced off in all-to-familiar blue hoardings,
computer forecasts of regeneration, civic hub trumpery, disclaimers in tiny
print, the usual buzzwords not recorded here for fear of exhausting the scare
quotes quota; the other a monster of blue patchwork, stamping out the forlorn
terraces below, the hope of the sick and the wonder of walkers;
and finally, after a brief pause to capture graffiti and wire fencing in
the fading sun, where is that gallery?
Glimpse of the old Royal London Hospital
Nearby graffito
The previous, treated
Notes
Gallery 46 can be
found (it really can) at 46 Ashfield Street, London, E1 2AJ.
The Jefferies
quotation is from ‘Wiltshire Labourers’ in The
Toilers of the Fields, 1892.
On page 170 of Sinclair’s
The Last London, the bookshop I used
to visit in Highgate is mentioned: Fisher and Sperr; I had completely forgotten
the name but Sinclair’s description of it chimes with my memory.
The Last London author’s photo has the new
Royal London Hospital as a backdrop, the very building that had mesmerised me
with its blue squares on my way to the gallery. (Actually it isn’t the Royal
London ‘but ought to be’ – communicated to me by the author)
I haven’t written
about the work (but hope to) of the other contributors to the exhibition:
Effie Paleologou, Barry Burman, John
Bellany, Chris Petit, Brian Catling and Susanna Edwards, all fascinating; I really ought
to find something to say about Catling’s egg tempera paintings which put me in silence,
hence…..
Words and pictures: ©David Hackbridge Johnson 2017