Just has the weird experience of delivering a cup of tea to my flatmate Andy G’s room to discover he’s listening to my podcast completely of his own volition. I mean, I know people do listen to it but to actually be there in the same room… it’s just kinda wrong and nice at the same time.
Anyway, speaking of flatmates called Andy, Andy Zoop pushed a book, Elmet comprising of poems by Ted Hughes with photos by Fay Godwin, into my hands the other day. Part of Andy’s big thing, which he umbrellas under the label “Zoop” (hence the Andy-identification moniker), is examining not urban decay in itself but how the history of an urban environment exposes itself through it. I think. It’s all quite complex and fluid and based around a fair bit of poetry, an art-form I’ve never been able to get to grips with. I can deal with an avant-garde non-sequitur comic strip but a five line stanza is just ink on paper to me.
As part of this exercise Andy goes out walking in old areas of Birmingham, the Jewelry Quarter being a favourite haunt along with patches of brownfield sites that are stuck in limbo before their inevitable regeneration, and had taken some photos but wasn’t happy with them, it not really being his thing. having looked that the Plinth gig photos he strayed onto the rest of my photos on Flickr and evidently liked what he saw, particularly the canal photos with their mix of rusty metal and lush greenery.
In short, he’s commissioned me to go take photos. There aren’t any specific instructions other than where to go. He’ll then look through the shots and pick some to write about, hence the Elmet book where Hughes reacted to Godwin’s photos with poems. (That’s not to imply we’re in the same league by any means, but it’s a good reference.) Today was my first, well, assignment, I guess – a patch of wasteland that’s been used for flytipping somewhere in Selly Oak (no, I won’t tell you where it is – it’s a secret).
It was a quite different experience, taking photos for someone else, even with completely free reign to do what I wanted. At first I was a bit cautious, trying to put myself into Andy’s POV, but this soon became pointless and I went in the other direction, considering everything that caught my eye as a potential subject. What really struck me were the patterns that emerge as things are dumped and then smashed and decayed over the years. I don’t like to pose things at the best of times but it was completely unnecessary here. There was a distinct order to the chaos and a real beauty in the details.
I took seventy photos in total and while I’m pleased with them I really felt I was just scouting the area, not really getting into the details. A few more visits will have to be made. That is assuming Andy’s happy with the shots so far. He hasn’t seen them yet…
You can see the pick of the photos here.
great photos. The upcoming and commons sites are also very encouraging. Great to see all this interesting stuff coming out of Bham. I was trying to think of a word like ‘The Smoke’ to call it earlier today, and came up with ‘The Grime’.
yesterday i sat up on danebury hill and watched the clouds. for some reason i keep seeing faces in clouds recently, and yesterday provided a great variety. i saw the faces of golums, a wonderful classic lucifer, some sad faces, some happy faces.
these faces cannot be shared with anyone else because, like many ‘shapes in clouds’, it is such a personal thing. there would be no point in trying to capture these cloud faces with my camera.
the patterns that emerge from chaos and decay are fascinating. they have long been used as a source of divination. you may find a cross over with this project into urban-shamanism.
I really really like these photos.
That bit of Selly Oak between the Uni and the box stores is quite interesting. I was surprised to find that it’s a huge spoil heap – judging by the clinker-covered slopes. There’s a story of a ghost, there’s badger habitat, there’s wrecked cars, and the industrial detritus is fascinating.
The graffiti round the back of the factory is a colourful treat. There’s a similarly interesting place in Walsall near the art college. Several pieces by Shok1.
Really enjoyed looking at the photos. Intriguing how some of them invite the eye to stay much longer and others are less absorbing. Thanks!M
Brilliant photos. keep snapping
Philosophy of Junk
-Given the open-ended possibilities of
material signs, everything has multiple
potentials for significance. Anything
that seems random or out of place
introduces an element of the
unpredictability of “wild” land into a
cultivated area.
Grey Gundaker/ Judith McWillie,
No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African
American Yard Work
(University of Tennessee Press, 2005)
When I asked Pete Ashton if he would be interested in taking some photographs of a few hidden quarters of Birmingham, random places I had discovered in those hours when I should no doubt of been involved in something more ostensibly ‘socially constructive’ (i.e, like ‘working’), I certainly had no agenda in mind for what subjects he should select for his camera. What he has entitled a ‘wasteland’ is a specific physical geographical space, yes; but in fact, my real interest lies in the ‘idea’ of the countless multitudes of spaces spread out across the city and countryside and everywhere between where things have been left over, but live on. Sometimes they can be tiny corners of ground, sometimes large open un-reclaimed spaces. This invisible landscape we pass by everyday is a living environment containing unexpected clues, images and artefacts, all ready to be reconsidered, interpreted, adapted and reused in the creative process to help us understand elemental needs and social struggles. When you look at a photo of junk, you are not necessarily a spectator of someone else’s problem, someone else’s country. The junk belongs to all of us. Its part of our culture and our heritage. It’s not one place you need to find on a map. It’s the last ten feet, or the last ten inches of your back garden. That’s where it all begins for me. What are we going to do with it all?
A few disclaimers. I’m aware that some of the language I’m using here (reusing/recycling/rediscovering/reinterpreting) may echo that which is used by environmentalists, historians, or even those interested in opening up the psychic processes of understanding ‘spirits’ of landscape. I find these kinds of overlap creative and important- but I don’t feel particularly authorised to be specifically writing here in any of these capacities. Wearing each of those ‘hats’ is important. But what I’m interested in thinking about is really the creative possibilities that lie between, cross over and, possibly, go beyond those kinds of narratives and (often confining) languages. Nor am I primarily interested in collecting a ‘naïve’ art, or in dumping a rusty washing machine on the floor of the Tate and calling it a clever critique of consumer based societies. Those kinds of statements soon become far too general, loose their force of argument, their specific context, and lapse into aesthetic cliché all too easily: an ‘aesthetics’ of junk that has lost a meaningful relationship to a living landscape. But a real philosophy of junk (if I dare use the word) can restore a balance. Junk comments on our own things, our own environment, our own history, our own backyard. What does it reveal about us? How does it critique our actions? What have we wasted? What have we to gain?
Of course, one man’s junk is another man’s poverty. A limp curiosity in a ‘wasteland’ can overlook more upsetting facts of social deprivation, class exclusion, racist mentalities, displacement, destructive thought processes and physical trauma that give rise to such areas. But junk tourism in that form- (if that’s all it is) will never produce any positive outcome, in terms of art, historicism or landscape-understanding. A real study and use of Junk will recognise that bottles and and burnt cars are testimonies to anonymous men; that rusted washing machines are monuments to domestic and economic struggles; that all derelict objects are imbued with particular resonance in particular locations that can bring new (sometimes troubled) meanings to life. It is possible that junk can allow us to confront the more dangerous “wild” aspects of our social environments, as well offering a more constructive way of approaching our connection to each other across a divided social landscape.
My personal approach (which is a continually evolving process) is currently to explore how we might use the tools of photographs (visual junk) and words (textual junk) to screw together tiny rafts of new possibility out of the materials (physical junk) I see on my journeys between one place and another, point A and point B. Both the shopping mall and the church are significant places: but if you never see the bridges between, something will be missing from the greater picture. Why buy into so much existential and material excess when something so cheap, significant and plentiful is at hand? The scattered shells of junk are colourful reminders of our own impermanent natures. Junk also contains the creative potential to construct many temporary mental or physical solutions for many temporary abstract or practical problems. Much creativity comes from what has already been destroyed, rejected, branded useless.
And so to wastelands, canals, industrial quarters, railway lines. All these have a specific resonance, simply because they are really everyone’s extended backyards. They are the places where all of our junk really starts to connect. The junk of our memories (that journey you took to your grandparents) the junk of our labour (those old, empty and rusted warehouses stacked on top of one another as you approach the frayed verge of the city) the beauty-junk (mannequin face on the glossy magazine; heavy clank and deep drop of canal lock). These Junk-sites mark the intersections of our personal histories, underlying interests, conscious and unconscious desires. They may look dirty or offensive to some, but junk is really a slide show of our deep humanity, as well as our flaws. Junk helps to remind us that the lives we lived go on without us, long after the point when we have moved away into the distance. Along the inclines of the rail track, the chairs and the lampshades which witnessed the warfare of our front room are still there. We threw them away, over the fence, into the landfill, we tried to forget. But they didn’t forget about us. The imprints of our bodies are still pressed on the fabric. Thumb-prints on the broken light bulbs. X-rays of rain have revealed another side to the story they once told. We can revisit the husk of our old ghostly selves with new perspective.
Who says what is junk and what isn’t. A philosophy of ‘Junk’ is finally not so much a set of indiscreet objects, but a way of seeing that continually subverts the imposition- and domination- of any fixed, discreet set of meanings. The original meaning, purpose and value of the object has been lost, eroded, rusted out. But the object itself is still there. It can be filled with a new meaning. It can be adapted to a new purpose (by hammering, nailing, painting). It can be turned into a sculpture, or something of practical use, or both. Junk holds the past and the future. Junk lives on in a seamless balance with non-junk. The boundary is full of holes. Walking somewhere new, it allows us to discover an alternative language. Junk opens into mirrors and maps. Existential markers. Or just something to handy to collect the rain. All you have to do is go out, and look.
I think you need a blog. Like now.
“As junk is my witness”
Pete’s photographs and Andy’s philosophy give powerful voice to the human realities and imagined possibilities of junk. Junk as a human wilderness, a psychological jungle we all have to wander across, wade through, stand against. Junk is by no means unchartered terrain. As Andy says, it is what we have grown up with, used, reused, lost and tried to forget. But in junk lives the potential for resurrection. In accepting and displaying junk, we can re-emerge like butterflies from dark chrysalises of a locked-up, Ikea minimalism. Junk offers a Brave New World. At first glance, a fearful world full of tarnished metal, stained wood, distorted plastic and misshapen forms but, on second glance, a kaleidoscopic world, shimmering and unfixed, powerful enough to deny the repressive forces of reason and logic. Socially unacceptable, marginalised and culturally dismissed, junk is not a graveyard of our past but the gateway to our unconscious desires and imagined futures. As Andy argues, junk is testimony to human frailty, yes, but it is also a symbol for our hidden lives. If Hemingway is right and human stories are like an “iceberg” with nine tenths hidden, then junk offers a bridge so we can communicate across the divide. We can wail in the wind and our voices will be held as tremulous ghosts in the discarded remains. Fragments, small parts, brief windows, junk offers tiny constellations in the human cosmos. Junk writes our lives into being by becoming more than its material parts, straining against its definition as the detritus of existence. Junk is a spiritual elegy to survival, a testimony to a life lived and, for those whose mortgages fall apart, whose pensions never happen, whose families turn away, it is a proud way of life. Junk offers a dream world of new beginnings.
Junk is a touchstone, a clairvoyant, a gatekeeper and a guardian bearing witness to our unconscious lives.