Phil Smith: Notes from Cove Park

[As with Fountains Abbey, these notes are Phil’s – not mine. I’m just the poster boy. This time the photos are Phil’s too. SB]

when I am exploring Cove Park I find some appealing spaces – space under the pods, the (eternal) tree, the model under perspex in the main building, the hidden rubbish dump, the whole sight as a viewpoint, the nissen hut (with tales of explosives and its 2WW graffiti cartoon Hitler face) – but I can’t find anything in a single place, just as at Fountains Abbey I’m struck by the site as a machine, that it is working to some ‘end’, it is a producer… narratives seem to stream through the site like drovers herding missiles and tourists around a now ghostly resort, steamers full of rubbish, surveillance tugs chugging far off, the geological fault all the way to Wallace’s home and my workplace… the nineteenth century ghosts walking to see the Adam and Eve trees, carpet factory owners, distillery owners, steel factory owners… come here to carry on owning… and producing … I want to see those ghosts spaces… the empty resorts… the empty proms…

I notice the fallen owl, complementing the watchful one  (wisdom, Minerva) … imagine them aboard the 2WW bus with its blacked out windows… information, looking, surveillance, careless eyes…

the derelict castle  that was blown up.. the fragments… a caravan park in the ruins… in the spectre… the caravans in the spectre…

precariousness… but I can’t find it, the unstable materials, yes, the geological faultline that hasn’t shifted for aeons, the building upon a buried rubbish heap… a Zone… a space where the detritus of an alien picnic has infected the ground…

the social table… hovering above the buried waste..

I dreamed the performance, but I forgot the dream  – erosion – struggling now… the rock split… talking to try and make sense – not working… a figure running with cases full of spaces, full of rubbish and waste… fleeing the effects of accidents…

out of horrible uncertainty, on this strange site… unable to fit it to expectations of a lochside… raised up… too high… brain too misty, too forest-like in the mind … dead, dread floors… nothing moves… almost silent … dark green shadow

holding on desperately to the theoretical and abstract and generic ideas shared by others… the only things I am able to get a grip upon… losing grip of self and confidence… bouncing between giving in and over-imposing…

The Scenario

there are two cycles to the performance – one performed tightly and quickly, though it slows down – the second happening around the fringes of the first cycle…

the event occurs over a day

First Cycle: audience/participants arrive by van (in say 5 groups, up to 10 people per groups) – perhaps collected from viewing point above Faslane Base) – as their van pulls in a ‘white man’ (white face, white clothes, white hands) like the white figure in the model pulls up in a car and gets out, grabbing suitcases and runs past the main building and along the top path/road, followed by the audience van…

they get as far as the gate (which the white man vaults/climbs – the van stops and the audience are let out to follow the white man

at the nissen hut there is the sound of hammering and the lights are on… through a crack in the door hinge the audience can glimpse amateur technologists trying to attach a prosthesis to an animal-machine hybrid that thrashes and struggles

audience follow the path to where it drops down to the cubes and pods

in the cubes, on the balconies over the water, sit three visionaries designing sustainable societies for the tiny rock in the water

the audience is met by an owl woman (closer to the pods another owl woman lies face down in the grass) – a girl and a boy stand hand in hand under The Eternal Tree – the owl woman speaks of the horrors of the industrial and post-industrial world, of destruction of natural environments, of the pollution and omnipresence of manipulative images and of the purity of nature, of the innocence of children, of the co-operation and non-violence of animals, of the wonder and beauty of life without history, of the wisdom of trees – she calls to the girl and boy, and asks them leading questions, attempting to have them repeat her point of view, but they are obtuse, they say: “we know all this”

the white man emerges from the pods – still carrying the suitcases – speaks with desperation – something terrible has happened – tells the owl woman and the children to come with him, they must get to the car, helps the fallen owl woman to her feet…

the first owl woman and the man argue – they blame each other for compromises, for not doing enough, for selfishness, for complicity in the catastrophe, the man tells the owl woman that there is no time left, they fight over the suitcases… the owl woman gets hold of one of the suitcases, accusing the man of trying to steal something… the man frantically tries to persuade the owl woman not to open it… failing, panicked, the drags the second owl woman away, up the path…

the owl woman opens the suitcase and there is a blinding light from inside the case, extra lights flood the space, illuminating the children and the tree – electr-rock music – son et lumiere – nearby a bush bursts into flames…

the owl woman is blinded by the light and falls into the grass in the same place and position as the second owl woman had lain

a ‘Stalker’ guide emerges from the bird hide and beckons the audience away from the pods, past the second set of cubes and down to the down-sloping right hand path. the Stalker explains that they are taking the audience to the Zone – a magical place where the pollution and rubbish of mysterious nineteenth century visitors (or possibly a previous, Neolithic society) – no one knows quite who or what – has created a terrain in which everyone can find an answer to their questions and meet their needs…

‘Stalker’ leads the audience to the metal gates, ushering them through the small gap to the roadside, then locks the small gate and disappears off into the trees…

a 1940s bus draws up and picks up the audience – its windows are blacked out – the driver explains that the audience will now be driven to the Zone, but that they must not look out through the blacked out windows, that the Zone is always in danger of being exploited by enemies and sinister powers, that it would be disastrous for them if they knew too much, that they are in danger…

the bus drives the audience down the road towards the loch, but then turns right up the steep road and then right again into the Cove Park site and the cycle begins again… as they get of the bus in the car park a  car pulls up and out jumps a white man with suitcases and runs past the main building and along the top path, the audience follow on foot, through the gate, down towards the nissen hut…

and so on… over a day the audience might repeat this cycle 5 or 6 times, each time the cycle will take longer, each time the experience will be less theatrical than the previous cycle

more and more the audience will be drawn off to actions and processes adjacent to the cycle…so, during the second or third cycle, the audience will join a feast round the table in the main building – here there are various models on the table of a future Cove Park and the problems of Cove park – its place in the military industrial complex, its energy profligacy,  its hidden histories, its natural sheen over a landfill site – are discussed… as well as the merits and problems of the different models of the future… the discussion includes the local sourcing of materials, and when suppliers arrive with refreshments they are encouraged to join in the discussion… in the middle of the day this feast sets off along the route of the cycle and the various circulating audiences are encouraged to help carry the table, models, food, drink, etc. a short way along the route each time they pass, joining in the discussion at stopping points…

throughout the day nissen hut activity continues unchanged, the  technologies struggling to attach more and more the prostheses to the struggling hybrid

the audience visits the individual visionaries in the cubes to examine their plans

the owl women/children/white man sequence might become more melodramatic, or maybe less and less theatrical…

the Stalker/s lead the audiences off the path, to adjacent spaces – to find abandoned pipes, piles of building wood rotting, etc. – occasionally the owl woman’s voice can be heard speaking of the purity of nature, but she is never seen in the woods

eventually the moving feast and table enter the Zone (for the area around the down-sloping path IS the Zone, not the way to it) and the discussion moves on to how solutions for the site can answer the needs of the people around the table, meet their needs…

when the feast and table reach the metal gates the cycle is broken – all the audiences assemble there, the large metal gates are unlocked and opened and the old bus pulls up – the table and feast is loaded aboard and then the audience process with the bus down to the loch side… where the table and feast is reassembled at the large broken granite boulder that frames the weapons establishment at Coulport and makes a V that mirrors the inverted V of the mountains.

They feast.

fuzziness

increasingly spill into the site

tangential, adjacent

patterns of patterns

from apocalyptic instability to de-territorialising, de-composing, re-composing instability

the learning inanimate

the independent brain

nothingness

increasingly the audience carry the suitcase

the necessary dynamic of hypocrisy (proceeding by principles despite individual, empirical contradictions) – what does that look like?  (confession of individual indiscretions followed by forgiveness unhelpfully dis-arms everyone)

adjacent city (city as rubbish tip)

what is environmentalism’s Tahrir Square?

mobile table – tight associations – cells – spiralling organisation (but in what environmental space?)

base ethics on pleasure

(I was happy with nothing – so rather than a grandiose scheme I intended to propose that I chose nothing – but then, of course, that would mean I would leave a tantalising space, even more grandiose… trembling, ridiculous… uncomfortable… stayed up in the darkness, got up before the dawn and worked for another couple of hours – I was trying… at the end – would have been better to get everyone to watch film of the Bike-Bloc – activism… there’s nothing ‘better’ here… but I don’t leave it hovering between the options…

in my notebook there are some notes towards a paper…

we miss one train, but catch up at a connection…

+ + + +

[notes from the Friday symposium:]

art of living – what’s the point of making performance around these “issues” if they are not connected to larger ‘art of living’ (ie. an extended journey or social construction) – while avoiding the dangers of “milieu”

spectacular performance in the mountains… but no account of the journey there… painting with light, imposing a chiaroscuro over the rocks

the White Bikes – revolutionary capitalism

artist – depicting what is not

hackneyed forms of immersion – romantic-sublime, son et lumiere, Blackpool Illuminations, rock concerts

inattention – postmodernism’s distracted involvement – paying attention to not paying attention – intense attractiveness – “heightened” awareness and (exaggerated) behaviour… AGAINST “attending to play” (hyperawareness and tending) – these places don’t care about us – the significance of indifference

the significance of duration

specificity is not immobility, but about a particularity of attention (in relation to generic space)

what would really scary would be if there was “climate stasis”.

the enforcing monologue – “the world is going to end, you must do this”

the problem of apocalypse is that it is gratifying, it delivers such fabulous playgrounds – and it fits perfecting into a set of entertainment relations (disaster, credits, forget)

real-irreal

model – ‘the emergency services’…. model individuals who speak of climate change – geeks, garden sheds… undynamic, head roles…

what about death, why this wish for species immortality? (see Hans Jonas) why does it have to go on?

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