Site, Performance, and Environmental Change

With our second network meeting, in Glasgow & Cove Park, coming up very shortly (Feb 11th-13th),  I thought I’d take a moment to prepare by looking back over the flipchart-scrawled notes from our Fountains Abbey weekend last October. There are other forms of documentation from that event of course — including digital audio recordings of several of our discussions, which I can circulate to anyone who’s interested to review them — but the flipchart pages seem to have been afforded some kind of spurious authority as a summary of our deliberations so it may be useful to collate some points from them (though, looking back, they are horribly fragmentary, and capture only a sniff of what was discussed).

There’s a summary sheet here with a number of broad headings, which were arrived at as a kind of digest of other discussions. I’ve tried to make sense of the annotations through fleshing them out with a little more commentary. In their transferable abstraction, these headings may (or may not) also prove useful as a kind of template / guide to apply when thinking about Cove Park as a performative site:

1. TEMPORAL LAYERS. What does the site reveal (whether visibly or through narrative commentary on what is visible/invisible) about its own history of human intervention in the environment? What narrative continuities and/or discontinuities (i.e. past moments of rupture, crisis) are legible? Or indeed, in what ways has the site been ‘airbrushed’ to conceal or disguise the fractures of history; to introduce nostalgic or romantic views of the past?

At Fountains Abbey, of course, these temporal-historical issues are very much apparent to anyone paying attention: but how might they apply at Cove Park, set in a more ‘rugged’, ‘unspoiled’ location, and surrounded by a nature reserve in which the ‘wild’ has ostensibly been preserved/contained? And what of the present uses of Loch Long? (e.g. nuclear submarine base)

2. ACCESS AND INTERPRETATION. What routes through the site are suggested or invited by its existing layout and presentation? What kinds of response are invited by signage and available information? Who has access to the site, and at what price? What kinds of ‘privilege’ does such access suggest (and how does this relate to the histories of privilege associated with a site such as Fountains/Studley) ?

And what might all this say, in ecological terms, about the way the site is ‘normally’ conceived –e.g. in connection with or self-contained isolation from its surroundings?; e.g. as a ‘live’ location/stage for natural processes (migration, erosion, biodiversity etc.)?; or as an ’empty space’ referencing either the people currently being asked to make ourselves present in it, and/or the absent humans who have occupied this (museum) location in the past?; etc.

3. SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY: How do (or how have) people orientate(d) themselves in relation to the physical landscape of the site? How does the scale of the human figure relate to the macro- and/or micro- dimensions of the location? For example, at Fountains Abbey/Studley Royal, the individual is very much immersed within (subject to?) a shifting landscape that cannot be comprehended from a single perspective (except perhaps via the affected omniscience of the overhead map). Indeed, the ‘pictureseque’ landscaping of the Water Gardens would have aimed to evoke an awestruck sense of the Sublime in man’s confrontation with landscape and nature… And yet the site has also been made subservient to human control via the monumentality of additions to the landscape varying from the Cistercian Abbey itself to the sculpted figures and ‘eye-catchers’ of the 18th. C. garden designers (i.e. the landscape as extension, reflection and expression of human subjectivity and/or divine dominion [which arguably amounts to the same thing]).

Again, how will these reflections relate to the ostensibly ‘wilder’, but equally mythologised landscape of Scotland’s lochs and mountains, as visible at Cove Park?

4. CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS / STRESSES: In what ways does the site make apparent the factors threatening (or at least changing) it ecologically? And how are these threats being ‘managed’ on a daily basis? At Fountains, the estate has to be micro-managed to preserve its historic fabric, but ironically it is the history of the site’s management that creates some of the stress factors (e.g. over-planting of trees on the hillsides resulting in exhausted soils; e.g. re-routing of River Skell by monks adding to the Abbey’s vulnerability to flooding when the banks burst and the water resumes its ‘natural’ course). On the macro-scale, can (human-driven) “climate change” also be seen to be threatening the site? Again, at Fountains, persistently low average rainfall over the last decade has left soils dry and the river level low — and thus especially vulnerable to occasional torrential “weather events”  such as the 2007 floods.

5. DISSENSUS / AMBIVALENCE /RUINS. One of the key factors marking our discussions at the Fountains event was a degree of underlying disagreement — which perhaps needs to be discussed head-on in future meetings — about how best to address the ‘issues’ arising…  The ruins of the abbey, and its ghosts of Christian apocalypticism, made some wary of the contemporary tendency toward ‘apocalyptic’ judgements about the state of the environment: aren’t we rather too attracted towards ‘doomsday’ scenarios? (cf. Hollywood eco-blockbusters etc.)  Aren’t we better to express a sense of ecological relationships through circumspection, indirection, an embrace of complexity (or ‘mental biodiversity’?) ? There again, might such approaches not amount to an evasion or obfuscation of pressing questions?

Reviewing the flipchart sheets and my own notes from Fountains, it’s this unresolved sense of ambivalence that seems to loom largest — not least in relation to the site itself, which seems to have attracted appreciation/awe and suspicion/unease from us in almost equal measure. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves needing to confront such ambivalence more frankly at Cove Park. Or perhaps that site will retrospectively cast the whole Fountains discussion into a different kind of perspective…

With ambivalence very much in mind, I’m adding below some further flipchart-derived notes about Fountains, in various states of coherence (but perhaps with some value as memory-joggers). These are interspersed with some distinctly ambivalent photographs of vapour trails seen from the Abbey’s grounds at sunset, Saturday 16th October 2010.

After Barnett Newman...

SITE AS A SPECTACLE OF TEMPORAL/HISTORICAL LAYERS:

Layering of time made visible; site maps onto history of western ideas; human relations with environment … Religion / power / class / labour / leisure

The Abbey: Religious / technological / hospitality complex. Surrounded by philosophical/cosmological landscape…

Power ambiguities / genderings?

– Wild/rugged site (masculine?) vs. domestication of abbey (feminine?)

– Conversely: all-male abbey community dominating surrounding landscape and economy; sheepherding industry etc.; centre of wealth; architecture as expression of power; Abbey as the master brain in the landscape? (Who plays God?);

– and yet monks charged with reception of strangers/visitors (cf. reception of Christ amongst us?) … service and hospitality

Monks – theologically – masters or custodians of nature?

Aristocratic owners of estate… sculptors of landscape; very much the masters (see class structures; estate ownership; land enclosures); landscaping as expression of power and – initially – imposition of order/control

–  yet “picturesque” landscaping tradition rooted in (romantic construction of) human awe before nature / the sublime….

National Trust, currently – as owners or custodians of site? (see recent mission statements)

NT visitors / members – afforded sense of privilege (culture?) through their visits…? What of class profile of visitors (or indeed ethnic profile, gender profile…) ?

NT volunteers – new “lay brotherhood”?

Spectacle of (picture perfect) ruin:

Melancholia / nostalgia / romanticism / apocalypticism

Abbey as spectacle of ruin / traces of monastic dissolution / Doomsday

Crumbling monumentality (yet the missing parts emphasise the monumentality of the remains?): “Bits that fall off”; “trees that fall down”

“Ann Boleyn’s Seat” – vantage point for spectacle of dissolution… (linguistic joke on decapitation?)

Yet ecological dissolution visible in choked waterways; sliding topsoil and exposed tree roots; etc. … perfect picture rendered imperfect by forces beyond human custodians’ control (yet forces ultimately related to human climatic impact?)

Environmentalism as 21^st C. apocalypticism? (mania / melancholy)

Assorted Vapours

SITE AS GEOGRAPHIC (DIS)CONTINUUM

As with the “sweep of history”, the different physical elements of the site “flow” into each other; yet are also marked by points of crisis / breakage (cf. the remains of the precinct wall, dividing “Abbey” turf and “Studley” turf)

Migration through spaces –   the same elements and yet changing/different:

River corridor; flow of water table

People flowing in and out (once monks and visitors; now tourists)

Shifting soil / grass qualities / wildlife

Performative confusion of signposted routes through the site: “chaos” of layout / “incoherent” series of spaces? Strange signage; privileged access or denial of access to certain areas (go “off path”?); “access for wheelchair users”

Over-managed? “Packaged place.” Too neat / too clean ? “empty” of rough edges…  (sentimentalised? Dishonest?)  Stark contrast to the wild place of swamps and thorns described by original monkish settlers (but do we risk romanticising that too?)

Some areas left deliberately untended: weeds/flowers growing on ruins; wildflowers in pavement cracks… (part of the “picturesque”?)

Sculptures / anthropomorphic bodies placed in the landscape – embodiment — eye-catchers (“I”-catchers?)

Ambivalent responses: Attraction to the site’s beauty and theatricality, simultaneous with suspicion towards its micromanagement; eco implications.

Entirely artificial site, and yet a natural site (the topography, the river, the trees and soils….)

Nature and “Us” in dissensus

Micromanaging natural processes? – toad access ramps (cf. human/car access?)

Roots / routes

Theatrical ironies: Temple of Fame (stone “played by” wood); Faux hermitage (once with resident hermit / actor)

Questions of Scale:

Domestic and epic; Monumental/vertical and fluid/horizontal

Controlling perspectives (Ann Boleyn’s Seat?); “excessive vistas”…

… and yet also too big and diverse an estate to get a visual grasp on the whole; human body immersed in landscape, moves through it (no god-like omniscience except through mapping diagrams…) (moving through the Serpentine Tunnel; plunging into sculpted darkness / rectum)

POTENTIALS:

A defamiliarising or “alienating” landscape? Unnatural nature. Brechtian perspectives. Potential for demystification / de-“naturalisation” of “the environment”.

Site as document of historical moments? – “moments when people were making decisions”… choices made in site’s evolution

Stimulate relations of responsibility through highlighting such perspectives?  Reconnecting people with awareness of “human impact” on nature/landscape.

Temporality of landscape – remembering and forgetting?

“Forgetting the Abbey?”  Counter-balance dominant interpretation narratives (focused on anthropocentric history of human habitation) with attention to environmental features… historical ecological debt?   (There again, Abbey has arguably been little more than a giant “garden folly”, since 18^th C.)

How do different communities of people now connect to this site and its (fractured) history? Connectivity / disconnectivity

Potential of the ablative: working in the shadow of / in the vicinity of / in proximity to… approaching indirectly

Impossible performances / spectacles of the imagination: Neptune flown in by helicopter; Dancing grebes; Giant toads on rafts; Crossbow parties; “Rebuild the abbey!

Jet - Moon - Abbey

This caught my eye – the economic/scientific argument that parallels the call for ‘the wild’.

‘Nature’s gift: The economic benefits of preserving the natural world’ – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11606228

This is the bit of recording that includes the swans flying through the abbey.

While I was sitting silently with the recorder running a pair of swans flew the length of the abbey, through the windows at either end and about 10 to 12 feet up, over my head. It was bright morning sun and a blue sky and all very beautiful.

The recording was made in the tower of the abbey ruin with the microphone pointed into the rear wall to maximise the impact of the building on the ambient sound around it. Sounds are coming through the entrance, from above and through the stone walls, so it is intentionally a bit muffled and echoey.

8.00am on Sunday 17 October at Fountains Abbey, Ripon, North Yorkshire.

Fountains Abbey 17Oct10

Touching on many of the issues being discussed at the weekend this is an interview with Fiona Reynolds, the Director of the National Trust. It was on Radio 4 ‘You and Yours’ as a result of her celebrating ten years in the post.

National Trust Interview R4 18Oct10

I wanted to develop a bit further on my “comment” responding to Baz’s Local/Global post — specifically his emphasis on the inherent theatricality of our chosen sites. This is very apparent at the Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal estate especially, which is essentially a giant, eighteenth-century stage set, built with living materials. Take a look at this “Surprise View” of the Abbey down the Skell valley, specifically engineered as part of the estate’s picturesque landscaping.

Thinking about this as a very old stage set put me in mind of two extraordinary sites I visited while on holiday this summer in Italy (yes, I flew there). The first was the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, which is Europe’s oldest indoor theatre. Opened in 1585, it predates Shakespeare. It was designed by Palladio (originator of the “Palladian” style of neoclassicism, of course), but completed after his death under the guidance of his former student and rival Vincenzo Scamozzi, who placed an extraordinary wooden stage set of forced perspective scenery behind Palladio’s neoclassical facade:

I couldn’t help wondering how many other 425-year-old wooden stage sets there are left in the world — this one is apparently supposed to represent the Thebes of “Oedipus Rex” (the theatre’s first production), lovingly preserved in suspended animation. But the fragile scenery has been able to survive in part because it is so well-protected from exterior elements: the Teatro Olimpico was built within the so solid walls of Vicenza’s former city jail (there’s a pun here somewhere on ‘captive audiences’ that I’m not bright enough to figure out just now).

A few days later I saw Giotto’s extraordinary Chapel Scrovegni in Padua – commissioned by the Scrovegni family around 1300 to atone for the sins of their usurer patriarch (so bad he gets a namecheck in Dante’s Inferno). Giotto painted images from the lives of Mary and Jesus from floor to ceiling on every wall of the chapel, and added a star-studded sky across the vault that is still the most stunning azure blue after 700 years. (A theatrical space if ever there was one.) But some of the images have decayed somewhat, and not so long ago it was realised that this was because of external atmospheric pollution. After a major renovation a few years ago, visitors are now admitted to the chapel in groups at 20 minute intervals – having sat for the same period in a sort of air-lock space, watching a video about the chapel’s history. This zoning phase allows the exterior air that visitors have brought in with them to be filtered out, thereby protecting what they call the “micro-climate” of the chapel itself. An attempt precisely to *arrest* environmental change in a controlled, enclosed space.

Of course, the same cannot be done for the similarly aged Fountains Abbey. I’m reliably informed that bits of the over 800-year old masonry have just been falling off it this year — as the medieval mortar expands and contracts with the rapid temperature fluctuations that we’ve experienced during the spring and summer. Fountains exists in a “microclimate” of its own — a characteristically damp one, given the way that clouds come across the narrow Skell valley and drop their loads, and the rainwater then drains down the steep hillsides into the river itself. But even after the devastating flooding of 2007, the sheer dryness of this year has left no ground moisture to speak of. There’s little flow to the river, and the Georgian lakes are clogged with weed as a result. This microclimate, needless to say, cannot be regulated by airlocks, and so this ancient, very vulnerable “stage set” is increasingly being subjected to erratically destructive exterior forces.