Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man – a co-production with the National Theatre – is a massive, interactive spectacle taking place over four floors (though I think I only discovered three of them) of a disused building adjacent to Paddington Station. The place has been made over as a labyrinth of Hollywood-movie-themed spaces (producer’s offices, Western saloon, American high street, etc.), and there is an enormous cast of performers that you follow all over the building. It’s almost totally random motion – you make individual choices about where to go and what to see, who to tail, where to veer off… It’s a voyeur’s paradise, because every member of the audience is masked, so nobody can ‘see’ you, but you can get right in close to the action. Physically and viscerally it’s thrilling (some amazing close-up dance sequences, etc.), but plot-wise it’s pretty non-existent because you see the scenes – which are repeated in a looped sequence – in no particular order. And many of the scenes you don’t see at all. (At the curtain call, many of the performers taking their bows were completely new faces to me!) All of which means, in short, that it’s great fun but utterly without coherent narrative, content or any particular meaning beyond the thrill of the chase. One’s mind is not taxed in the least. 

OK I’ll come back to this… But back to Oil City, which does engage the mind as well as the body. It was also a piece of particular personal interest to me for two reasons: (1) the piece’s origins can be traced directly back to a walk along a similar route that was first devised by Platform’s James Marriott and Mel Evans for the London meeting of our performance footprint network back in May 2011 (for a full, illustrated account of which, click here). In the image below, for example, my tour group is pictured moving along the same corridor between Liverpool Street Station and London’s RBS offices that was also a key stage in the earlier walk… 

(The woman on the phone ahead of us is one of the performers – but the blend with the environment is such that everyone else who just happens to be there also becomes part of the mise en scene…)

(2) The second personal connection here is Mel herself, who very much ran with the idea of developing the earlier tour as a theatre piece. Mel was, back in the day, a student of mine at Glasgow University, and to direct the piece she also recruited a fellow former-student, freelance director Sam Rowe (the pair of them featured in a number of fondly-remembered shows I myself directed in Glasgow – e.g. they doubled as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in 2003). Leaving nostalgia aside, though, I want to focus here on the particulars of Oil City as a theatre piece… Because unlike the works focused on in the previous sections of this blog sequence (an audio tour and a conceptual art piece), Oil City draws quite openly on theatre conventions – and indeed on some of the conventions of participatory theatre established in recent years by companies such as Punchdrunk.  Where the 2011 tour had James and Mel playing narrators who were essentially versions of themselves (as in storytelling or performance art), Oil City used three professional actors to multi-role in several different character parts each — as journalists, campaigners, oil industry employees, political fixers, etc.

Here’s one of the actors (sorry – I can’t find any record of their names) leading us out of Liverpool Street Station towards an escalator up to that RBS corridor. At this moment she was, if I recall correctly, playing a whistleblower who was trying to provide us with evidence of corporate malpractice …

This is a game of intrigue, with the audience cast as players…  This engaging, entertaining format is used to introduce participants to some of the complex issues around the controversial attempts of oil corporations to drill in the Canadian tar sands (given the increasingly scarce resources elsewhere). This dangerous and environmentally destructive process also violates longstanding treaties over the territorial rights of First Nations peoples…. Hence, the actor pictured above later plays a First Nations activist who has come to London to bring the fight to the beating heart of the oil giants BP and Shell. (Incidentally, the choice of tar sands as topic marked another significant shift from the original 2011 tour, which was premised around the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.)

This doubling and trebling of roles by the actors no doubt arose in large part from budgetary limitations on the number of actors that could be hired… Unlike the resource-rich Punchdrunk, Platform’s is clearly a shoestring operation. And on the one hand, the multi-roling created a certain degree of confusion as to who exactly was playing what part when. But it also struck me that the the company made a playful virtue of necessity, by actively playing up these confusions as a way of highlighting the performance’s self-conscious theatricality. For example, during our initial car journey from the piece’s starting point at Toynbee Studios (HQ for the 2 Degrees festival) towards Liverpool Street, our audience group of four was informed by the driver – also the one male actor in the show – that we needed to keep an eye out for a certain untrustworthy oil executive… The actor was at this point playing a campaigning journalist who was enlisting our help in getting his ‘scoop’ – but the identifying photo that he showed us of this shady executive was a photograph of himself… The moment drew knowing smiles from his audience, and introduced a sense that the details of what was coming would — like all the best mystery plots — be somewhat blurry and confusing.

When I saw the same expositional device used in the Punchdrunk show (as we were escorted into the depths of the 4-storey building in a lift, the lift attendant showed us headshots of various stars and starlets we had to look out for), it occurred to me to wonder if Mel and Sam had drawn on Punchdrunk as an influence for Oil City… We are, after all, constantly being told by the press that Punchdrunk are influential… But where Punchdrunk used the photos simply as a signposting device, there was much more of a sense of knowing wit in the doubling-up used by Platform. And the overt, self-conscious theatricality thereby introduced also contrasted intriguingly with the concrete reality of the everyday London spaces we were moving through… (as opposed to the entirely fantastical, faked up sets used by Punchdrunk). Oil City pulled and pushed at the participant’s sense of what was “real” and what was “fictional”, in a way that the entirely hermetic Drowned Man never could.

This push-pull effect was also weirdly appropriate in relation to the issues being addressed by the “story”. My strongest memories of Oil City – as I finally write these reflections several months late – are of a kind of febrile confusion… a confusion that seemed to complement quite aptly the clearly very murky realities of Big Oil’s dealings with governments, lawyers, and community advocates. While I remember little of the fine detail recounted to us by the (fictive) characters, I did gain a clear and present sense that conversations being held, decisions being made, right here in the (real) City of London, were having very serious impacts in faraway Canadian territories…

Here is that same male actor I mentioned, playing the executive he had warned us about, at a cafe in the station complex… In this particular scene, the rules of the theatrical ‘game’ have suddenly changed: instead of being addressed and implicated as participants within the events themselves (“I need your help with this…”), we were suddenly treated as invisible flies on the wall – or rather invisible bums on the other seats around this table – as an off-the-record conversation occurred between these two execs.

This invisible audience premise is fundamental to Punchdrunk’s aesthetic, but again, they use it less interestingly…  In The Drowned Man, we all wear masks, we are clearly delineated from the non-masked performers, and we never cross the line from viewing to interacting… In effect, the masks operate just as would a proscenium arch or a film camera, separating us from those who are ‘acting’, even though we are mixed in among them. The categorical distinction between ‘stage’ and ‘auditorium’ is thus maintained and actively policed (as I discovered on a couple of occasions when stewards prevented me crossing parts of the performing spaces they did not want me to). By contrast, Oil City again creates a productive kind of blurring… Take a look at this shot below, for example, taken just before our man on the left – in the picture above – arrived for his meeting…

As we sat waiting for the scene to begin, all the other scenes at other tables formed part of our mise en scene, creating a strangely blurred sense that all those other people you can see were also actors, and that they too might be involved in shady dealings of some sort… And who knows, maybe some of them were! The show induced a weirdly unsettling, weirdly exciting kind of paranoia for participant spectators (and I know it wasn’t just me that felt this, because the people I was travelling with made the same point!).

And here we are, again in hot pursuit of the woman in black, like the Private Eyes that the show had cast us as. The spaces and landscape around us changes, but the pursuit keeps up… And where Punchdrunk had spent who knows how much (some of it public money) to facilitate our movement between artificial spaces, Platform simply used what was already available to them for free… The City becomes a strangely heightened, theatrical space (which it already is, of course, in many respects!), and everyone in it becomes part of the intrigue… Looking back now, I find myself wondering how much more extraordinary Oil City might have been if it had even a decent-sized fraction of The Drowned Man‘s budget to throw around — if they had a cast anywhere close to the same size so that you really never were sure who was an actor and who was just a bystander… Equally, what might happen if the audience numbers could be scaled up, to bring many more people into the conversation…?

Here is our First Nations activist, leading us into the looming maw of a public space underneath one of the financial buildings — where (in the shot below) she finally confronts yet another character played by our male actor with documents that he is suitably alarmed to realise have come into her possession…

He wheels round to confront us, the spectators, uttering a stream of convenient denials and excuses… It’s the kind of performance we’ve seen all too often from politicians and others who have been caught with their hands in the till, or their trousers round their ankles… Of course in this instance we know full well it’s just an actor, playing a part, who will shortly melt back into the London crowd as this largely invisible, ephemeral performance disappears into memory… But we also know that there is a reality to the artifice here – that things somewhat like the things that we’ve witnessed have happened, perhaps are happening right now, in the very spaces we’ve been moving through…

What I’m talking about here, I guess, is reality. The best theatre is utterly real precisely by virtue of its explicit artifice. Oil City achieved this, with very limited resources, in a way that The Drowned Man (with all its money, hype and glamour) signally failed to. If only we could arrange for a reallocation of funding… But then this is also the point of Oil City, in terms of its content: we need to ask questions about where the money is going, and why, and to whose benefit.

If anything, the number of different perspectives being presented demonstrated the lack of existing cohesion or agreement about what “ecological performance making” would even mean: for some, it’s about finding low-carbon solutions for traditional theatre practice (cue much discussion of LEDs as against tungsten bulbs), for some it’s about art as activism, for some its about using performance to cultivate a renewed attentiveness to the non-human environment, and so on… It’s a testament to Lisa and Tanja’s care and organisational skills that all these perspectives were brought together in one room for one day, so let’s hope the symposium prompts further productive discussion and collaboration.

At this moment in time, however, this gathering felt very marginal to the concerns of both theatre/performance studies at large, and indeed to the study of environment/ecology. In introducing the opening panel, as chair, Baz very generously described Wallace, Dee, Carl Lavery and myself as the “illumanati” of this emergent area of concern, but I felt strongly that the accolade was undeserved. Leaving aside the fact that it’s Baz himself, if anyone, who has earned it, there’s the more important point that we are not a secret society and we are certainly not the keepers of any special knowledge… Each one of us is simply scratching around the edges of something — Wallace from a primarily philosophical perspective, Dee as a walker and forest enthusiast, Carl as (it seems to me) a classical avant-gardist, and myself as someone with a vaguely Boy Scout-ish urge to do something useful by wandering up and down rivers.  And all of this pales into infinitesimal insignificance, though, when one considers the wider challenges that Baz also alluded to in his opening remarks.

This is, he observed, both a hot and a cool moment. A hot moment because the planet is still warming and the urgency to do something radical about the situation – on a concerted, global scale – is more pressing than ever. And a cool moment because — after a few years of felt concern, around and about the COP15 summit of 2009? — the whole topic of climate change has “cooled off” in the media and the public consciousness. There seems to be more of a determination than ever to bury heads in the sand, to deny the scientific consensus — as evidenced recently by the press coverage of the latest IPCC report (UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which spilled much ink over the report’s mention of a recent, unexpected slow-down in the rate of warming, but which merrily obscured the fact that climate scientists are more convinced than ever of the underlying trend — i.e. that human activity is driving potentially catastrophic changes in the climate.

For those of us working in higher education, these issues are given particular piquancy by a new report from Platform that points out the degree of collusion between British universities and the fossil fuel multinationals whose objective is to keep drilling for oil in ever-more-dangerous and sensitive environments. The report, Knowledge and Power, tells me for example that my own employer, the University of Manchester, last year took £64 million from BP in order to finance a new research centre — one explicitly directed to “help [BP’s] search for oil in deeper and more challenging environments.” This unholy alliance of BP and UoM, says the PR blurb, “enables BP to access the University’s world-class executive education, high-quality research facilities and its undergraduate talent pool” (quoted p.16).  And yet at the same time, the University has the gall to be inviting staff to join “green impact teams” to ensure more sustainable energy use in its buildings… One suspects, in this context, that “green impact” translates merely as “cost saving”, given that the institution’s commitment to saving the planet is, to say the least, equivocal.

I am angry about this. Actually. Seriously fucking angry. And not least with myself for not bothering to research my employer’s dirty fingerprints before now. Question is, now what?

Of course, in the cultural sector, there have been very active campaigns running now for some time to get BP and Shell sponsorship out of the arts. The most prominent such activism in the last few years has been Liberate Tate‘s interventions (often in collaboration with Platform) at London’s Tate Galleries. But if I needed further evidence of the “cooling climate” for such protest, it was provided by a visit — the day after the Central symposium — to Tate Britain. My intention was to once again tour the gallery with my iPod listening to Tate a Tate, the site-specific audio work created by Platform, Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil…

This work had quite an impact on me when I first experienced it in the spring of 2012, shortly after the tours were released online… The aesthetic dimensions of it intrigued me – a guerrilla audio guide providing alterative readings of the works in Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and linked by a musical protest song mash-up for listening to on the Tate Boat that links them. (In fact, I realised this year that I subconsciously lifted this walk-boat-walk structure for the Multi-Story Water performances we made in Shipley…) Admittedly I wasn’t that taken with the Tate Modern tour, which seemed to me to have little intrinsically to do with the building or its displays: instead, it simply directed you at certain pictures and then used various lateral connections to launch into diatribes which — though informative — lacked the conceptual or sensory allure of the best contemporary art, and thus somehow “fell short” of the site it had specified for itself. But the Tate Britain tour was, for me, far more compelling… more layered in its audio textures, more striking in its ideas.

Beginning in the front foyer of the building, and then guiding the listener to lock him or herself into a basement toilet cubicle, the tour begins with a history of the site itself — as what was once swampy, riverside marshland. Drained in the late 18th Century, it provided the site for Millbank Penitentiary — England’s first, large-scale modern prison, and still the only one to be built explicitly along the guidelines mapped out by Jeremy Bentham in his writings on the Panopticon (latterly beloved of Foucauldians the world over). Taking this fascinating titbit as its conceptual hinge, the soundwork then proposes that the listener is in the centre of a new “Panaudicon”. By locking down one’s spatial co-ordinates, one can extend one’s hearing range for thousands of miles in different directions from this central point. Guided to the Clore Gallery, housing the Tate’s unmatchable collection of Turner paintings, one is invited to sit down in front of this canvas…

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy exhibited 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851

… and to listen carefully as sounds come directly through it, magnified by the Panaudicon from their spatial source across the globe and, indeed, back in time. Thus, looking at the mysterious, single-tree landscape of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, we hear the haunting sounds of whales being hunted near to extinction for the oil their bodies contain. This brutal trade finally ended, we are informed, not because of any conservationist concern for the species, but simply because it became uneconomic. A new, more profitable source of oil had been identified… Turning through 90 degrees on the gallery bench, we are invited to look through this painting, towards a different point on the globe, the Caspian Sea…

Sir Brooke Boothby 1781 by Joseph Wright of Derby 1734-1797

Looking at — and listening through — this particularly smug-looking portrait of a wealthy 18th Century gentleman, reclining in a forested glade, we hear of the first, filthy, dangerous attempts to drill for fossil fuel oil. The juxtaposition of sound and image, at this moment on the tour in particular, haunted me for months after first experiencing it. But returning to Tate Britain this weekend, I discovered that the experience was unrecoverable. I had been expecting some changes to the “hang” in the gallery, and that the tour might therefore be tricky to negotiate some 18 months on from its inception. What I had not expected was to discover that the entire recording was redundant. Leaving aside the installation work going on in the central rotunda (which was masked off, making the various audio instructions to move through it difficult to negotiate…), there was the stark fact that every single painting referenced by the guide was not only absent from its anticipated spot… it was nowhere to be seen in the gallery at all. I hunted high and low for Childe Harold and Sir Brooke Boothby — all to no avail.

Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853)

The audio guide concludes with a tour de force encounter with this painting, Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience. Here, the sound effects of a glorious, birdsong-filled garden outside the window (the window into which the painting’s viewer is ostensibly peering) brought the canvas’s colours to life with an eerie, supra-natural vividness when I first encountered it. Something phenomenological happened for me, that I can’t quite articulate, even as the voice-over adopted the classic tone of an art critic — offering a disquisition on the content of the image, while also inviting metaphorial reflection on the theme of conscience… Just as the woman, stunned by the natural beauty of the garden outside, arises from the lap of the leering gentleman — apparently resisting the temptation to sin — so art (proposes the recording) needs to be the conscience of society, not merely a whore to corporate interests. (OK, the gender politics here are a little fuzzy, but leaving that aside…)  As the narration concludes, the birdsong continues for a sustained period, so that you are left uncertain when to pull away from the painting (“is it over now?”), held by the stare of the protagonist and the light in the garden…

Again, though, none of this was repeatable this weekend. The painting was not in its designated spot — nor indeed anywhere to be seen. Now, of course, this might all be perfectly innocent. The Tate’s permanent collection is enormous, far too extensive to all be on dislay at any given moment, and they do have a policy to periodically alter what is hung and what is stored away. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, and there was something about the fact that the audio tour’s potential effects had been so systematically destroyed — every painting referenced being so mysteriously absent — that persuaded me that something quite deliberate had occurred here. Tate has been well aware of Liberate Tate’s activities, after all (they’ve been discussed at board meetings) … and it wouldn’t have been hard for the gallery’s curators to listen to the recording and take the necessary action to destroy any potential impact it had as an artwork. The audio tour’s ambition to be a “permanent installation” has proved sadly temporary. The gallery’s conscience, rather than being awakened, has been decisely smothered.

More than that, though… For those of us who see conspiracies everywhere, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that, directly adjacent to the room that once housed Childe Harold and Sir Brooke Boothby, there’s currently an exhibition of Constable paintings titled “Nature and Nostalgia”. An exhibition prominently sponsored — you guessed it — by BP (a corporation who can afford to be nostalgic about nature, since they clearly don’t care much about its present or future). On this half-term weekend, moreover, BP’s interest in time has been manifested thus…

The Time Loop allows families to tour the gallery as if on a Doctor-Who-ish time travel journey, making unexpected connections between different periods…. (just as the audio tour had…?). As a consequence, the BP name and logo are dotted all over the building, linking different exhibits. It is difficult to imagine Tate having been quite so unashamedly celebratory of its links with the oil giant last year, or the year before… Deepwater Horizon, it would seeem, has faded from the public memory like a bad smell, wafted away by artistic air freshener.

And meanwhile, in Tate Britain’s temporary exhibition galleries, the current major exhibition is this:

I asked a docent what the exhibition was about. She told me that it was about the way that art has been vandalised over the centuries… but how sometimes the fact of the art having been vandalised makes it more memorable and more important.

There’s an irony here that I can’t quite put my finger on.

+++++++++

November 26th update to the above:

Unsurprisingly, Liberate Tate themselves have clearly had their eye on the developments within Tate Modern, re-BP’s sponsorship of the newly unveiled exhibits… They entered the gallery with characteristic brassiness very shortly after the re-opening, to perform Parts Per Million, a simple but rather brilliant intervention – which is also sobering and scary in its implications. See Youtube link below:

My walk in London was purposeful, although until I encountered the installation of beach huts, it was somewhat less playful than a Situationists’ derive. I was walking to learn how (or if) I remembered two performative walks I had undertaken as part of the AHRC network that had challenged me to reflect on environmental change through site-based performance. As the third in a trilogy of weekend events, London weekend was the accumulative effect of our time together and meant that network members had grown familiar with each other’s rhythms and patterns of thought, lending this weekend a particularly comfortable texture. Over the course of this weekend, we were led through the City of London and across the Thames to Tate Modern by Mel Evans and James Marriott, two membes of PLATFORM. Phil Smith, network member and a core member of Wrights and Sites, (mis)guided us around the area surrounding The Strand. As this blog has testifed, the two walks held contrasts of scale and rhythm: Mel and James took us to commercial sites associated with BP and in each setting they pieced together the narrative of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with cool detachment, often refusing eye contact as they read the chilling details from a script. Phil, by contrast, engaged his audience intimately and conversationally, weaving together the history layered on the streets with more personal memories, artefacts and images. The PLATFORM walk maintained the detached anonymity of the City, and Mel and James’ refusal to domesticate its spaces amplified my sense of alienation to the spatial order of the architecture.

The images on the blog show the security Guards were largely impassive, scarcely registering our presence as we stared through windows that would easily encase most homes. The empty foyer of the University Superannuation Scheme building perhaps presented the most challenging moment in the walk, where we were reminded that we were implicated the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as we sat on sofas to hear how our pension plans depend on investment in BP. This global ecological crisis feels contagious, conceded in the toxic space of my own body, my embodied practices and written on my pay cheque. Theron Schmitt, writing about another PLATFORM walk, describes this feeling of complicity as ‘a profoundly doubled moment, overlapping representation and relation’ (Schmitt 2010: 292). My ecological consciousness was similarly raised by PLATFORM’s walk, and my reading of the cityscape in the refuge of the beach hut was haunted by its memory and, perhaps, tainted by my environmental double-standards.

But when the walk was over, I felt that I had left no trace, no mark or imprint on the City. I had ingested it, but this space of urban capitalism remained abstract, in Lefebvre’s terms, and it had resisted me (1991: 53).
Phil’s walk invited us to embody the city’s stories, to theatricalise its dead spaces and re-imagine the stories of the dead. When I retraced my steps three months later, I was not surprised that my body remembered the walk around the Strand. Standing in the garden in which Phil had told us Dickens had set the melodramatic demise of the fictional Lady Dedlock, I was haunted not only by the imaginary of ghosts of the ‘real’ dead people beneath my feet, but also the live people I missed from the first walk – and the comingling of both hauntings, to borrow Steve Pile’s words, allowed me to attend to the relational space we had produced by disrupting ‘notions of linear time and space’ (1996: 164).

When I returned, in the City I got lost. I could remember few details. Perhaps it was part of the political effectiveness of PLATFORM’s walk that I still felt shrunken by the vast scale of the buildings, and confused by their impassive indifference.  Or perhaps I have a poor memory for facts. I found the USS building eventually with the aid of a map, and I looked through the window at the sofas, catching my reflection. The glimpse was fleeting, and in a moment I knew I would disappear again without leaving an impression. Precipitously, as this was just before the London riots, I understood why demonstrators and rioters sometimes want to smash windows. It’s one way to produce space.

No doubt I’ll be blogging about the outcomes next week, but this entry is to reflect on another element of follow-up to our London meeting in May… Last week I visited the offices of PLATFORM (who have apparently just dropped the capital letters and are now just Platform), to conduct an in-depth interview with James Marriott and Mel Evans, who presented their walk and talk to us in May. This conversation will be transcribed and either posted on this site or used in the forthcoming edition of Performance Research arising from the network project.

Oddly enough, it took me a while to find the offices. Platform are based, quite literally, underneath the approach to Tower Bridge – appropriately perhaps, like subversives burrowing into the foundations of the establishment… They’re just on the South side of the river, but technically still on land that’s part of the City of London, which is of course one of their main focuses of research and creative response. But their offices are so tucked away that I just couldn’t see the entrance at first despite the perfectly good directions. Apparently this is a common experience. I ended up calling Mel on her mobile, and she said she was looking right at me. I turned around and there she was, literally just across the road, standing in the doorway that I couldn’t see for looking. I suggested that they should rename themselves Platform 9 and 3/4.

Platform do make you look differently at the city, of course. Following a fascinating conversation with James and Mel, I set out to experience their 2007 audio walk and while london burns – which I’d been reading about in a couple of journal articles circulated by Helen Nicholson. Like the guided walk we experienced in May, this piece uses the City as its site and subject – and indeed covers some of the same ground that we did in May, both physically (Threadneedle Street and the 1 Poultry building) and thematically (and while london burns also focuses on BP’s influence, though it predates the Deepwater Horizon disaster). Even so, even as I felt myself criss-crossing the path we had walked collectively a few months ago, this was a very different walk and very different experience.

A large part of this difference lies in the formal distinctions between the two walks. In May, we were led on a ‘live’ guided tour by James and Mel, which observed the traditional structure for such events — walking between locations, stopping, talking, moving on. In between the presented sections of narrative, our engagement with the city streets was very much our own. By contrast, and while london burns is a continuous experience – billed as ‘operatic’ because of the interwoven musical soundtrack, but for me the analogy was more ‘cinematic’… The sounds and voices being heard only in my head as I moved through the city imposed a kind of screen or frame over what I was seeing — dramatising it and at times even melodramatising it (quite deliberately, it seems: the operatic form was chosen by Platform because of the ‘overheated’ subject matter of global warming). With instructional voices giving me particular directions to “Look up” or “Look through this window”, I felt as if my field of vision was operating as a kind of movie camera, twisting and dollying to find very particularly composed views. Early on in the piece, one is encouraged to walk around and around the circular entrance-way to the Bank tube station – an experience which, accompanied by music and apocalyptic predictions about +2 degrees global temperature rises this century – generates a sense of whirling, cinematic vertigo (until one then stops, abruptly, next to a cooling vent that blasts hellish hot air from underground up into your face… ‘stand as close as you dare’, invites the voice). Conversely, across the street from the Swiss Re building, for example (a.k.a. the Gherkin), I was encouraged to take a meditative moment of time-out, step under an unassuming copse of trees and – once again – “look up”. The sudden juxtaposition of Norman Foster’s uber-slick architecture with this simple canopy of leaves spoke volumes about the priorities of this place, the lack of green space visible elsewhere in the city…

The defamiliarising effect of the internal voice/narration, layered over the city and drawing curious attention to it, operated in a very different way to the much cooler, matter-of-fact ‘art tour’ narration in May. Indeed, this form combined with the narrative’s subject matter to create a weird sense of looking at London in the past rather than the present. A disillusioned city trader speaks melancholically of anticipated disaster – part personal (his partner has left him), part economic (this 2007 piece eerily anticipates the financial crash of the following year) and part environmental (catastrophic climate change is anticipated as imminent). The effect as I listened was to create a sense of looking back at London in a period (now!) of blind and blithe confidence about its own assumed continuation … back from a desperately less optimistic future… That effect is accentuated further by the periodic references to and sights of London’s historical past – at the outset we see the remains of the Roman temple of Mithras (now preserved amidst a building site); at the climax we climb to the peak of the Monument to the Great Fire of London, down Pudding Lane… Empires have fallen here before, we are reminded; disaster has struck and wiped out the present… This present is not forever.

This is powerful stuff, and all the more so because the piece exhorts us to take action so that the disaster might NOT happen. The listener is implicated as part of this place, and I imagine that it is particularly powerful if one actually works in the City, like the narrating trader character. The ideal audience member seems to be just such a trader — and as Financial Times review coverage of the piece suggests, this is a piece that has reached at least some of the financial community. Just as the May walk found its pivotal moment when we, as (mostly) academics, were implicated in the oil narrative in being reminded that our USS pensions depend on BP stock, so and while london burns seems to hinge around the moment when, circling the base of the Gherkin, the listener is invited to look into the glass cafe windows… to see those sitting within, but also to catch one’s own reflection.

What are those people in there doing to avert disaster? And how similar are those people in there to this person uncomfortably reflected? The City of London is a pumping engine of the global capital machine, a driver of climate change. How might it reassess its priorities? Platform are interested not only in pointing fingers at others, but at asking questions of those on the inside… As James put it in our interview, their role is in part to engage bankers and businessmen in conversation… to invite them away from their circular conference tables and invite them to look out of the window at what is happening outside….

The slight problem for and while london burns is that, four years on from being uploaded to the internet, it has not quite kept up with what is happening outside…

The rate of continuing change in the City, of buildings coming down and new ones going up, means that the smooth progression of Platform’s planned journey becomes – at times – entirely non-navigable. You have to abandon the printed-off map and instructions, pause the recording, and walk around whole blocks until you can get yourself back to where the piece wants you to be. That’s one problem.

The other one is our old friend apocalypse. The piece anticipates, seemingly quite confidently, that an irredeemable ‘tipping point’ towards runaway global warming will occur at some time in the next five years. But counting forward from 2007, that window will expire very soon, and there’s no irrefutable signs just yet of catastrophe. (Nor should we want there to be!) There’s a danger, as network discussions have reflected on in the past, that very urgent and serious concerns about climate change can be undermined by the tendency to warn darkly of things that don’t then happen on schedule. Of course, it may well be that we have passed a tipping point, and we just can’t quite see the effects yet (cheery thought). But equally, there might be reason, sometimes, to revise down the apocalyptic predictions. and while london burns reaches its conclusion as we step downhill towards the river, and are invited to imagine the floodwaters from the Thames rising around us (before climbing the Monument to reach virtual safety). The estimates for the flood line are based on Environment Agency estimates, the narration tells us. But if I recall correctly what our EA friend Michael Guthrie told me recently, the EA reappraised its expectations for the Thames Barrier only a year or two ago, and they are confident that it will actually survive for longer, and hold back more water, than previously estimated. If London is at threat from flooding, Michael suggested, it will be more because of groundwater (the underground tributary rivers coming up into the streets) than because the Thames bursts its banks. But that is not the narrative that and while london burns confidently informs us of… And that contradiction might allow sceptics to write the piece off as hysterical nonsense, when in fact its fundamental concerns are as pressing as they ever were. It IS a dangerous, suicidal nonsense for some in the City to be driving global emissions while others are charged with preparing to mop up the mess. The question is how to reflect on this contradiction, and encourage action on it, without falling into the trap of romanticised doom-mongering… a danger that this piece does flirt with it at times, for all its evident strengths and continuing relevance.

All of which brings us back to the Environment Agency, and flood threat, and Friday.

Watch this space.

The City from the top of the Monument, 7th September 2011.

Alan Read introduces PLATFORM’s James Marriott and Mel Evans

So here I am, weeks after the fact, finally finding the headspace to reflect on the discussions at our final network meeting in May. (See my previous ‘Part 1’ posting for commentary on performances that weekend.) To be fair, there was a lot to absorb those two days, and it took a lot of mental unpacking — but here are some reflections that also take in, en passant,  certain thoughts and experiences that have occurred since.

1. Local Power

The opposition of local/global  is one that plagues discussions of environment/ecology. It was also the driving construct behind this network project in this first place: i.e. the thought that we might somehow use the specifics of particular localities (sites) as a means of ‘reflecting’ on global questions of environmental change. At our first two meetings, I think, we struggled at times to get our heads around this task: it’s one thing to look at what’s immediately around us, and even to make performances within it, but quite another to meaningfully connect that with some abstracted ‘bigger picture’. At Cove Park, of course, the presence of nuclear submarines in the waters around us clearly had a ‘global’ dimension. Yet few us knew what to ‘do’ with that information, perhaps not least because the Cold War-era provenance of such weapons systems makes them feel (dangerously) obsolescent rather than intrinsically related to current questions about environmental and climatic change (nuclear power, after all, is now considered by some as part of the solution!).

In London, however, the sense of local and global being intrinsically inter-connected became much more palpably apparent. As Doreen Massey writes, with profound simplicity, in World City:

“Actions in one place affect other places. Places are not only the recipients of the effects of global forces, they are – in such places as London most certainly – the origin and propagator of them too, and this raises the question of responsibility, and specifically a responsibility beyond place. . . . [Thus we] need to build a ‘local’ politics that thinks beyond the local. What is developed here is an argument against localism but for a politics of place.” (p.15)

Too often, I think, site-specific performances function as a kind of ‘localism’ in the sense Doreen uses it here: parochially self-enclosed, and with little sense of a bigger picture. In this respect, the walking performance led by PLATFORM around the City of London provided a powerful counter-example: we were looking at local places, particularities of street layout and architecture, while listening periodically to a story about BP’s impacts in the Gulf of Mexico… PLATFORM’s subsequent discussion at Kings College, around the “Carbon Web”, further underlined this connectivity — as they mapped out the way that BP and Shell have tendrils reaching into every branch of the (London-based) British establishment (government, judiciary, media, cultural organisations, etc.) …. Doreen Massey’s subsequent reflections on PLATFORM’s presentations, and on her own research into London as world city, also contributed powerfully a sense of the immediate locality around us in London being the seat and nexus of corporate and institutional power vectors that really do stretch around the world. We can’t cop out and pretend that London simply ‘reflects’ these global dynamics: things said and done in London actively shape these dynamics (through performativity as much as material decisions – statements of confidence in credit ratings, etc.). Or put another way, those dynamics do not exist in some abstract, disembodied state regardless of individual or collective human intervention… As Doreen reminded us repeatedly (and we need to keep being reminded), the global ‘market’ is too often treated as a set of untouchable natural laws rather than a human invention which can be regulated and modified if we want it to be.

Who is ‘we’? That’s the crucial question, of course, because even when we appreciate that the local is productive of the global, it’s still tempting to assume that such productivity is somehow the property of somebody else. ‘Them’, not ‘us’. And to some extent, it must be said, we fell into that habit during our London meeting – of regarding the power-holders as being, well OK, proximate to us physically, but still another species of person. It would be easy enough (if not really fair on PLATFORM) to draw such an interpretation from our walk around the City: ‘who are all those people inside those glass skyscrapers?’  Similarly, one could misread it into Doreen’s discussion of the things she loves about London – of London as a very progressive city, socially speaking. There is her/our London (the London of multicultural diversity) and there is ‘their’ London (the London of multinational capitalism), and it’s all too tempting to see these as somehow being layered over each other but still quite separate – like different plateaus or ‘planes of consistency’.

It must be said that this sense of separateness is one that the barons of the City are themselves doing their utmost to entrench. In World City, Doreen deftly analyses the financial sector’s performative endeavours to paint themselves as a special case, the economy’s ‘golden goose’, and thus as an exception to the normal rules ‘on the ground’ — arguments that our politicians have for too long been entirely willing to embrace (just as they have, we are reminded this week, been entirely too willing to embrace certain media powers such as the Murdoch empire). I was struck forcefully by this, a couple of weeks after the Kings College event, when I was back in London for a round of REF panel meetings that were held out in Docklands, at a corporate conference venue at South Quays. Looking out from the cafeteria terrace, all I could see was water (the old docks), blue sky, and glass… the interchangeable glass boxes housing financial corporations that have sprung up on all sides of this liquid space. Straight ahead of me was the new Fitch building – so much bigger and more uncompromising than the company’s former home, the relatively human-scale location we had visited on the PLATFORM walk… The whole area felt like it was trying to rebuild itself as some entirely non-local non-place, supremely without identifying characteristics, a great glass mother-ship of Kapital, descended from above onto East London… ‘We are not you! We are other, and your mortal rules do not apply…’

And yet… What was I doing there myself? I was there to help determine assessment criteria for the Research Excellence Framework. To many in academia, that exercise feels like an imposition by ‘them’ on ‘us’. Of course, as a panellist, I don’t see myself as ‘them’: I’m helping to represent ‘us’ in a peer review process. But no doubt to some, I am complicit in a suspect process – I have become one of them. My point being that none of us ever thinks about ourselves as one of them. The other week I attended a seminar on ‘ethics in banking’ organised by the ethics specialists at Leeds University, which was led by two bankers in pin-striped trousers. Very nice men, it seemed – very approachable, very frank about their sector’s shortcomings – and very clear that people working in the financial sector don’t regard themselves as villains or gangsters, but as honest folk making an honest living. Yes, the financial rewards may have skewed their frames of judgement, but to some extent isn’ t that true of us all? The most striking element of the analysis at that seminar was in fact that banks tend to have so many different layers of corporate governance that one committee will simply pass on a crucial decision to another committee, and so on. So when the bubble burst in 2008, it was at least partly because nobody was taking responsibility for – well – taking responsibility.

I’m digressing slightly, but I may also have found my way back to Doreen:

“Conceptually, it is important to realise that the global is as much locally produced as vice versa, that an imaginary of big binaries of us and them (often aligned with local and global) is both politically disabling and exonerating of our own (and our own local place’s) implication, and that the very fact of specificity (that places vary) both opens up the space for debate and enjoins us to invent.” (World City, p.10)

Places vary. Sites are specific. But that variation and specificity is also about how we choose to do our looking. (In what ways do we choose to exonerate ourselves before we open our eyes in the morning?) The striking contrast in tone between the two walks we did that weekend in London (PLATFORM’s large-scale, impersonal, corporate landscape; Phil Smith’s friendly, potted-green, lived-in streets just off the Strand) underlined for me very clearly the sense that place is a product of how you look at it. And looking with a sense of responsibility is perhaps one of the hardest things to do. When we look at our places, not theirs, what should we be seeing that – most of the time – we don’t? (I’m thinking here, for example, of PLATFORM’s reminder that the USS pension scheme – and thus my own retirement income – is heavily reliant on oil investments.)

And so how exactly, re-Doreen’s words, are we (1) to apprehend our own implicatedness in these things, and (2) “enjoined to invent”? That is, how might performance provide a (politically enabling) tool or process to help with that process of seeing?

Something PLATFORM’s Mel Evans said at one point during our discussions stuck in my memory. She could take responsibility for her own bit of the world, she joked – by riding her bike and by eating vegan food, keeping down her personal carbon footprint – but in the big scheme of things such personal gestures make very little difference. There’s little point in getting sanctimonious about them. That’s why, for her, working and campaigning with PLATFORM is a way to take personal responsibility beyond her own immediate square of earth. To apprehend the global within the local.

Thanks Mel. But what can the rest of us do? Can we “fight the power”?

“Yes we can!” (thanks Barack)

Yes, maybe we can. Because we have more power – we, us, me, you – than we think we do.

On the subject of which…

2. Local Knowledge

On the second day of our London meeting, the network group was presented with a very particular kind of challenge by Michael Guthrie – Community and Stakeholder Relations Manager with the Environment Agency. Having given us an outline of the EA and its work, particularly with respect to flood risk and prevention (likely to become an ever-more-significant issue in the UK if climate change projections are accurate), Michael challenged us – working in small, breakout discussion groups – to come up with ways in which site-based performance might be used to engage urban communities, who haven’t flooded in the past, with the question of flood risk and the need to take adaptive / preventative measures.

I had scheduled this intervention and discussion to take place on our last afternoon, because I wondered if we could – collectively – try to summarise our network’s thinking over the 3 sessions in pursuit of a particular, concrete question. (Rather than just talking in general abstractions.) What I hadn’t quite anticipated – although I probably should have – was the extent to which Michael’s intervention from the outside would prove controversial. Some in the room felt quite strongly that an avowedly instrumentalist question of this sort, coming from a representative of a fundamentally instrumentalist Agency, needed to be questioned or even resisted. We were restaging in miniature, perhaps, the 2008 skirmish during which the UK government’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir David King, accused arts and humanities academics of “shirking the climate change fight”, of  “staying in their disciplinary ‘comfort zones’ and failing to engage with scientists on the problem of climate change” (THE, 24 Jan 2008). Yet as UEA’s ‘Professor of Climate Change’ Mike Hulme rightly notes, “this engagement must work both ways. It needs to be acknowledged that the role of arts and humanities is not simply to translate scientific knowledge into public meaning, as though science is the only source of primary knowledge” (Nature Climate Change, Vol. 1, July 2011).

Michael Guthrie, it turns out, is a performance-minded scientist, working ‘both ways’: he later confessed to having deliberately worded his challenge to us in quite a blunt, expecting way, because this was representative of a ‘typical’ Environment Agency approach. He wanted to ‘play that part’ to see how we’d react to it – and sure enough, some of us didn’t react very warmly. But from Michael’s point of view, this game strategy was important as a way for him to think through, personally, a question the EA itself is having to review – that is, how it addresses other groups and communities…

Traditionally, the EA has operated – like many other government agencies – in an essentially top-down manner: it brings its expertise to bear on a particular problem or locality, and then imposes its solutions. That approach is now becoming less feasible because of the sheer scale of government cut-backs following the recent financial crisis: the EA, with many thousands fewer staff, nationally, needs to engage more directly with communities to get things done ‘on the ground’. In a sense, this reality falls neatly into line with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ voluntarism agenda, but Michael was at pains to stress that this move was in line with what the EA itself had been concluding anyway… That the application of top-down measures has real limitations. ‘Expert knowledge’ is one thing, but when working with and in particular sites/communities, it needs to be married with ‘local knowledge’ in order to get things done effectively. There is never a ‘one size fits all’ solution, even to generic problems like flood risk. Since local people usually know a great deal more about their localities than external agencies do, that knowledge can (and should) significantly inform the EA’s own assumptions about what needs ‘doing’ on the ground… and by having both an input in dicsussions and a role in realising what then happens, local people are also able to take ownership (if you’ll excuse the BS phrase) of decisions being made about where they live.

That’s the ideal scenario – but the problem, as Michael explained to us, is that local communities are often mistrustful of the kind of governmental authority represented by a body like the EA. Moreover, his experience is that people don’t necessarily respond ‘logically’ when presented with rational, scientific arguments about action that might need to be taken to obviate risk. (That much is evident on the global scale, when it comes to climate change scenarios!) So other strategies for engagement – perhaps creative, affective ones – are also necessary, and that is not at all where EA expertise lies. Hence Michael’s challenge to us…

I wonder if we too, as a group of (mostly) theatre and performance academics, were responding to Michael like a ‘local community’, mistrustful of the kinds of ‘authority’ that he represented (as a scientist and EA representative). Did he pose a bit of a threat, even, to our ‘local customs’? Did we assume that he was imposing something on us, and thus somewhat miss the fact that he was appealing to us for help, for a two-way dialogue… We had knowledges that could be valuable to him, just as he had knowledge that we could make use of on our own terms.

I’m slightly over-stating the case here, of course: the small group discussions we had were constructive ones, and have opened up the possibility of a follow-up meeting in September, in Bristol, to further the possibilities of working with the EA towards developing a model for site- and community-based performance engagements. (As Dee pointedly remarked in the break-out group I was part of, ‘Let’s just imagine that we want to be doing what Michael’s asking…’ That proved a deft way to circumvent a lot of potential arguments, in order that we could, indeed, use our imaginations…)

But it does strike me, on reflection, that there are important, broader questions underlying our various constructive misfires that afternoon. To take the case of ‘climate change’ itself, for example, there is an ‘authorised’ or ‘common sense’ discourse at work in most discussions around the subject that this is a scientific issue to do with measurable physical factors and complex projection models… and therefore one that most non-scientists either (a) lack the expertise to engage in, and/or (b) feel intimidated by because the real experts are somewhere over there – them, not us. And yet, as the afore-mentioned Mike Hulme stresses in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change (CUP, 2009), climate change is now every bit as much a cultural idea as it is a set of physical measurements. (Too often – as we’ve noted before – that idea is drawn in crude terms, like a Hollywood disaster movie…) It is, moreover, only at the level of culture (discourse, politics, imagination) that societies will be able to address the global challenges that climate change presents. Cultural analysis and engagement is, in fact, entirely beyond the skill set of most scientists – which is why Hulme, despite being one of the single most respected experts on climate change on the planet, decided to undertake a part-time MA in History at UEA, in order to start to think through these cultural dimensions of the question.

To return to my point earlier in this posting: we all of us have more power than we think we do, and part of that power lies in the kinds of knowledge that we possess. It’s all too easy, living inside the bubble of one particular set of disciplinary reference points, to assume that our own ‘expert knowledge’ is really just ‘local knowledge’ (i.e. of little use or interest to anyone but ourselves, or those curious outsiders who might wander onto our ‘patch’). But as Michael Guthrie reminded us (and Mike Hulme, in a sense, confirms), local knowledge is a form of expert knowledge — and it can prove invaluable to other ‘experts’, who inevitably know less than we do about, for example, strategies for public performance.

On 14th June, I attended a day seminar at the Royal Geographic Society titled ‘Narrating Environmental Change’, in which Steve Daniels and the AHRC had drawn together the Principal Investigators from all the 2010-11 ‘environmental change’ networks – for a kind of meta-networking event. Mike Hulme was a guest speaker, invited to draw the threads together at the end of the day, and he did this by interlinking a number of points flagged up in the various network summaries that had been collated in a booklet for the day’s participants (to read my summary of our network, go to ‘Summary’ under ‘Network’ on the toolbar above).  It was striking to me, perhaps because I’m habitually paranoid that I never do anything of ‘substance’, that Hulme singled out as noteworthy various key points arising from our network — especially our resistance to apocalyptic ‘disaster movie’ narratives of climate change, and our insistence instead on ‘lived experience’ (and live performance as a mode by which to reflect on it). Performance people have an important contribution to make, if we can avoid ‘shrinkwrapping’ ourselves within our own frames of reference (alas, that was very much my experience of May’s PSi conference Utrecht, but that’s another story again…).

Perhaps I’m rambling again, but I want to close this posting by referring to two elements of our London network event that I haven’t mentioned yet. One was J.D. Dewsbury’s paper “Material Impositions and Immanent Inhabitations” — a complex meditation on (if you will) ‘lived experience’ in particular sites. J.D. drew on physical examples from each of the network’s three event locations to explore how material conditions impose demands on human behaviour within those sites, but also how those conditions are themselves the consequence of past inhabitation, and indeed of human habit. This is a fairly crass summary, from leaky memory, and I’m hoping J.D. will be making the paper available for us to read again, carefully – either on this site or in a prospective journal edition arising from the network. But my concern here is the closeness of J.D.’s geographic/theoretical eye in looking at details such as seating arrangements (whether in the USS building or in the ruins of Fountains Abbey). This was an attentiveness to the miniature that paradoxically rendered the possibility of expansive thinking… thinking which J.D. invited us all to participate in by beautifully structuring his presentation to incorporate periods of open discussion. His approach seems to me, with hindsight, exemplary of this notion of sharing ‘local knowledge’ (in both the spatial and disciplinary sense) in a way that facilitates constructive exchange beyond the confines of that locality.

In a similar, but also very different way, David Williams’s presentation the previous day – in his performance paper Plumbbob – struck me as a demonstration of ‘local knowledge’ rendered as ‘expert’ knowledge. David’s allusive text explored the particularities not of a geographic site but of a temporal moment — that of the week of his birth in 1958 (was it?). A copy of Time magazine from that week was used as a source of extraordinary, juxtaposed visuals that complemented David’s reflections — 1950s advertising imagery and celebrity smiles jumbled up against images of Nevada H-Bomb tests and the soldiers asked to stand in visual proximity of the test site.  This strangely potent mix of cultural memories, further enhanced by David’s occasional fragments of song, suggested a kind of affective temporal geography, a deep mapping of a passing moment whose implications continue to ripple out towards us over 50 years later.  In what ways, David seemed to be asking, are we shaped by the moments into which we are born? What forms of toxicity – whether cultural or actual – do we ingest with the air around us? And how might a re-examination of these forces that shape us prove necessary to our future survival?

Rigorous attentiveness to place and time – a sensitivity to affect as well as logic –

Yes we can.

Closing conversation on Friday 20th May, Anatomy Museum.

Day 1 – Friday 20th May

Network members met bright and early at 8.50am, Liverpool Street Station. We were met by Mel Evans and James Marriott (above), of the activist/performance collective PLATFORM, who proceeded to conduct us on a walking tour of the City of London’s backstreets. Aesthetically speaking, the walk was “cool” to the point of chill: Mel and James studiously avoided engaging us in chummy conversation as we walked, and for the most part avoided pointing out what was around us. It was for each of us, as pedestrians, to use our own eyes, draw our own narratives, from the spaces and architecture around us. Periodically we were stopped, arranged into neat lines of “audience”, and told the next chapter in the story of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — which began exactly one year and one month ago (20 April 2010). Our first port of call, pictured above, was along a corridor backing onto RBS’s central London offices – where we were reminded that the Chief Executive was probably just sitting down at his desk. RBS, mostly owned by us, the UK taxpayers, is a major investor in BP – and a key player in having kept it afloat during last year’s post-spill crisis of confidence. As we peered through two layers of glass (from very different historical periods) into Liverpool Street Station, we were informed that the Deepwater Horizon rig would have just about fit inside the main terminal building… A useful reminder of scale.

Looking through windows, and at our own reflections, became a bit of a theme on this walk. Here we are, outside the building occupied – until recently – by the credit ratings agency Fitch, a key player in BP’s financial survival last year. I was particularly struck by the utter impassivity of the security guard in that window, who didn’t blink or move a muscle the whole time we stood there. Even when I moved in for a close-up…

That kind of impervious indifference says something about the financial sector’s performance of rock-like inevitability (this system is here for all time!). Yet in their discourse on BP, James and Mel gave us a compelling summary of the ways in which confidence in a corporation and its stock can bleed away in moments. This entirely fictive, subjective commodity has to be managed, bolstered, through performative interventions by financiers and politicians. Walking around these streets, watching people coming and going to their places of work, was a powerful reminder that the seemingly transcendental mechanisms of international capital may in fact be more vulnerable than we often assume – managed by human beings who, in times of trouble, get by a little (well-staged) help from their friends…

Another aspect of this city landscape that I particularly noticed was the recurrence of corporate art. You can see it on the walls behind the security guard above, and all over the lobby walls of the next building we visited — which houses (among others) the Universities Superannuation Scheme. Mel and James informed the desk people here that we were a bunch of academics having a seminar, and we proceeded to sit around a peculiar goldfish bowl arrangement – to be told how deeply dependent our own USS pension plans are on BP stock. No surprise there, perhaps, but in this context the point served as an unnerving reminder of our own complicity in – and indirect responsibility for – that corporation’s global environmental impacts. And the banal corporate art has something to do with manufacturing that complicity. I was reminded strongly of Tim Crouch’s play for white-walled art galleries, ENGLAND, and its emphasis on “all those clean lines” in modernist architectural spaces. In some ways it doesn’t matter what the art on the gallery walls is; it’s the impression of light, space, airiness in spaces like this that seems reassuring, even uplifting. Later in the day, when reflecting on the walk – in dialogue with PLATFORM – geographer Doreen Massey reminded us that the financial cost of keeping a space this large and empty in a corporate building in central London would be huge. This setting has been very deliberately chosen and laid out to communicate particular impressions and information – like a highly expensive stage set. And it’s not just the corporate lobbies that adopt this strategy — the (quasi-) art was everywhere, even in this underground walkway with its sub-Dan Flavin flourescent tubes. This particular path led us to a food court, featuring Starbucks (naturally), and situated beneath the central offices of Aviva – another corporation heavily bound up with BP, (and the provider of life insurance for several of us present).

One of the most striking things about this whole walk was the sense of the City of London itself mutating and growing all around us. Yes, the corporations centered here are responsible for major ecological impacts around the world (as in the Gulf of Mexico), but “environmental change” was also happening all around us. Cranes everywhere, fresh tarmac being laid down beneath our feet almost as we walked, new buildings jostling for space with old. The City of London as breathing, sweating organism…It was inevitable, perhaps, that our path would inevitably lead us, past St. Pauls, and across the Thames, to Tate Modern — that paradigmatic instance of post-industrial cultural industry — which numbers BP among its most significant sponsors. Here, the City’s equation of “art dressing up corporations” is turned inside out to “corporations propping up art” — but at both ends of the spectrum the objective is essentially the same. As James later noted in our discussions at Kings College, corporations such as BP spend huge amounts of time, money and creativity on perpetually renewing their “social license to operate.” They keep doing what they’re doing (most recently digging in Canadian tar sands – the geological equivalent of “scraping the barrel” – while abjectly failing to commit any significant resource to developing renewable energy sources) because we let them…

… And the sponsorship of art is a powerful strand in that social license. Tobacco companies can’t get away with it anymore, because social attitudes have shifted sufficiently that we tend to see their product as “dirty” – something that stains other entities by association. But, PLATFORM’s argument runs, despite catastrophic incidents such as Deepwater Horizon, BP is still having its public image cleaned and laundered through association with popular cultural institutions such as the Tate. They get by with a little help from their friends – and Nicholas Serota has publicly declared himself as one of them.

Another friend of the Tate was proudly being hailed

from its windows. “Release Ai Weiwei”, the Chinese government is instructed. A laudable sentiment, but in the context of the day I couldn’t help but be reminded of Ai Weiwei’s recent installation in the Tate’s turbine hall, which was itself something of an environmental disaster. Millions of ceramic sunflower seeds, created as an interactive installation to be walked around on by visitors (scrunch scrunch scrunch)….

… but they ended up being roped off as a “do not touch” exhibit owing to the health hazard that was being generated by the ceramic dust (including particles of lead-based paint) rising from the floor, as the seeds were ground together underfoot. You’d think that somebody would have thought of this as a potential issue when the installation was being conceived, but it seems that the shit we breathe in daily – whether inside the Tate or outside on London’s streets, from petrol and diesel fumes – comes pretty low down on the list of corporate considerations…

Anatomical impacts became something of a theme once we were safely back at Kings College for the day’s “symposium” (also attended by a number of interested parties beyond the immediate network membership). Housed in the beautiful, white-walled confines of the college’s former Anatomy Museum (“all those clean lines”), we were presented by PLATFORM with an analysis of the Carbon Web — the anatomy, James suggested, of oil corporations such as BP and Shell. Their connections with everything from raw drilling activities through to government lobbying, media interface and cultural sponsorship were laid out in persuasive detail. But James was keen to stress, too, the actual anatomical impacts of what we breathe in with the urban air, daily… and that concern was brought home forcefully during our afternoon sessions, and the presentation by Illinois-based performance artist Julie Laffin.

Julie used to make performances like this, involving wearing huge gown sculptures – whether inside gallery or theatre spaces, or outside on city streets. Since 2004, though, she has developed a form of environmental illness known as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, which makes her exquisitely sensitive – and reactive – to trace levels of “everyday” chemicals found in soaps, shampoos, detergents, deodorants — and yes, to petrol and diesel fumes. As a result, Julie can no longer work – or indeed live – in public, and instead is all but housebound in her home in rural Illinois. She moved out of Chicago to find cleaner air in the country, but during the summer has to move out to the American Southwest (desert, high prairie) to get away from agrichemical crop-dusting. Her presentation for the network symposium consisted of two short films about her experiences in New Mexico last summer (as she sought to find viable shelter in an extraordinary natural landscape), which were intercut with sequences of live, online feed from a room in Julie’s home. These included a sequence of roaming webcam, like some miniaturised helicopter shot, and then – at the end – an extended Q&A discussion in which Julie spoke to her audience as a giant, projected presence on the Anatomy Theatre’s cinema screen. I find it hard to comment objectively on this experience, from a spectatorial point of view, because I was involved – myself – as the person lining up Julie’s DVDs and facilitating the Q&A. But the insight we were afforded into Julie’s isolated existence – as well as her resilience and good humour in spite of it all – served as a moving and salutary reminder that the mobility and freedom so many of us take for granted is entirely conditional upon our bodies continuing to tolerate the environmental / atmospheric conditions that humans are daily impacting upon. Julie’s very personal, even intimate narrative, operated as a striking contrast to the macro-scale concerns elucidated by PLATFORM, but in some ways both presentations were dealing with different ends of the same telescope.  Within the spaces of the Anatomy Theatre & Museum, we had moved from an anatomisation of the oil industry’s social and political reach, towards a close-up focus on one woman’s anatomy… literally so, in isolated skinscapes – a six-screen video installation that Julie had prepared for the Museum space, in which each screen presented a camera’s eye-view isolating her eyes, hands, mouth, navel, tongue… At the same time, the fact that this installation was conceived remotely, at thousands of miles’ distance from its execution, was a further reminder of the networked proximity that we all now share.

Day 2 – Saturday 21st May

Network members met bright and early once again, exactly 24 hours after the PLATFORM walk, to undertake a second and very different city walk with Phil Smith – network member, mythogeographer, Wrights and Sites mis-guider.  This began, for most of us, in the lobby of the Strand Palace Hotel – where we’d been staying for two nights – where Phil handed us various bits of ephemera to carry around on the walk, and then led us out and around the corner to the main entrance of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (not actually on Drury Lane), there to meet with non-hotel-residents Alan Read, Sally Mackey and (joining us for the day, the head of  the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment) Steve Daniels. I emphasise the domestic details here because – as was later noted by somebody or other – we had come in a couple of days to feel quite “at home” in this bustling part of central London, popping back and forth between the Strand Palace and Kings College, a couple of hundred yards away. This was, at least for those of us who have tended to hold the noise and scale of London at a safe distance from our daily lives, something of a surprise… But it was also this renewed sense of the human-scale and domestic that Phil very much emphasised on his walk. In striking contrast to the coolness of PLATFORM’s estranged (or, to grab another translation of Brecht’s verfremdung, literally alienated) approach to the intimidating monumentality of the City, Phil made us feel as if we’d just popped out round the corner for a bit of a chat with him. Which, indeed, we had.

Sally Mackey, Phil Smith, Dee Heddon, Helen Nicholson, Wallace Heim.. and a guest of Phil’s whose name escapes me… outside Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

The beauty of Phil’s approach is that, simply through the places in which he asks you to stand and the manner in which he addresses you, you start noticing the stranger and quirkier elements of the urban landscape around you… Look, behind Phil’s head in the picture above, for example, at this particularly grumpy looking cherub in a Masonic memorial…

On one level, this is a throwaway observation, but there were in fact a striking number of memorials and sculptures – of one sort or another – on the route Phil took us along. Again, contrasting with the contemporary art trail PLATFORM took us on in the City, we saw with Phil the outdated, the kitsch, and the downright weird. Around the corner from this masonic thingamabob, for example, at a stage door to the Theatre Royal, he pointed out the rather grandiose, golden royal crest high above – signalling that this is the route taken by Royals (as well as by the disabled) being ushered quietly in the back… We obediently created a little royal tableau by way of illustration…

Phil with his parents’ house, in front of visiting Emperor Steve Daniels, King Alan Read, Prince Aaron Franks, courtier Tim Nunn, and security knight Steve Bottoms.

The observant among you will note that the Theatre Royal is currently playing host to Hollywood, in the form of Shrek, The Musical (poor Tony Jackson was caught by Wallace Heim’s camera in this unflattering juxtaposition, right), but since at least one of the Shrek films features the Muffin Man, who of course lives on Drury Lane, then this may not be inappropriate… But OK, before I get off into a rather silly series of free-associations (Phil does this to you), let me jump-cut to another above-the-door golden portal design that Phil led us to slightly later on the walk. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of this one, since by then my camera was playing up, so anyone not on the walk will have to trust me when I say that this particular restaurant entrance featured a 3-D display of golden seraphs and cherubs engaged in what can only reasonably be described as an explicitly pornographic display (involving, as I recall, rear entry penetration and nipple stimulation). An interesting counterpoint, perhaps, to Shrek’s bum-scratching and the grumpy cherub pictured above (maybe he wasn’t getting any)…. And the reason I’m recounting all this is because, as the walk went on, an almost carnivalesque sense of the bodily – of the physical in all its variously joyous, grotesque and, yes, theatrical functions – began to push its way to the front of the jostling mental impressions that Phil was stirring up…  This was thanks, in particular, to the two most poignant stops on the tour.

The first of these, just around the corner from the Theatre Royal, was at a memoral garden which stands on the site of an old graveyard. Phil positioned himself at ground level (left) to emphasise the extent to which the garden has been built up from street level… A result, he claimed, of the fact that this burial site was once piled so high with the undifferentiated bodies of the urban poor that they began to block the views, and light, of the windows in the surrounding buildings. Eventually this was all capped – paved over with slabs to keep the dead down – but the raising of the floor level here literally represents “environmental change” brought about by the addition to the ground of human fertiliser. Towards the end of Phil’s tour, outside St. Clement-Danes’ Church (“oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s”), he pointed out the statue to Bomber Harris – architect of the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II – but also evoked a much older history of massacre by explaining that the “Danes” of the church’s title once referred to the bodies of Vikings that had been strung out across the walls of a previous sanctuary on this site — during the fearsome siege warfare between invading Danes and resident Anglo-Saxons that resulted in many of the local place names. Aldwych, for example, is “Auld wick” – the old town – the locality the Saxons lived until they were literally driven off it into a more fortified encampment, and which instead became the Vikings’ camp. (Phil, forgive me if I misremember any of these details, but I guess the Chinese Whispers version of history is one of the things that interests you anyway… so I’ll resist the temptation to scour Wikipedia in an attempt to check my facts.)  Phil’s narrative, throughout, came as a powerful reminder that the hugely built-up environment around us – man-made, with only a few trace glimpses of the ‘natural’ world – is nonetheless constantly ‘in process’; involved in its own (organic?) cycles of collapse and renewal; far from being merely fixed and inevitable. It’s an environment built by and on human bodies, and on the silted accumulation of history in this so-long-so-heavily populated of locations. These thoughts, perhaps, loop us back again to the fact of our location that weekend – Kings College’s former Anatomy Theatre & Museum…. and to the socially excluded body of Julie Laffin …. and to PLATFORM’s anatomisation of the oil industry, an industry which – for all the “clean lines” of its artistic and architectural investments – is also built upon squalor, degradation, and suffering in other, less visible parts of the world such as the Niger Delta…  (Network member Tim Nunn, who visited that area a few years ago as a photographer and activist, spoke powerfully during Friday’s symposium about his experiences of that environment – of leaking oil pipelines literally cutting through the middle of villages, polluting wells, posing extreme health and fire risks – and about how his own camera was confiscated by arresting police officers who were not, Shell insisted (though nobody had yet suggested it), acting at their behest…)

Hmm. I appear to have travelled some distance from the jollity of my opening reflections on Phil’s walk… He does that to you too. But I’d be doing him a disservice if I didn’t also mention that we finished on an upbeat note, parading in single file through the dancing fountains outside Somerset House, watched over by – yes – Ai Weiwei’s decapitated Zodiac Heads…

Thanks to my malfunctioning camera, I had to steal this image off the internet to illustrate… But Phil had us walking through the middle of this, a trail of motley individuals with J.D. Dewsbury bringing up the rear dragging his wheelie suitcase like a caboose. Collectively, a theatrical display of shining human promise in this palace of the arts… (Or something like that.) Almost immediately after we had performed our little show, other visitors began following suit – and having themselves photographed following suit… Human behaviour in process, a response to performed examples and physical affordances… (or just plain copying?). Some thoughts to return to – in my next posting perhaps…

And “reflecting on environmental change”…? Well, I hope I’ve done a little of that, but I’ll close this post (at long last, well done if you’ve got this far) with the last photo I was able to take with my camera before it went on the blink… A scene as seen just round the corner from the pornographic restaurant entrance… And illustrating Phil’s astute observation that all the greenery we were seeing on the streets in that area (and the foliage was not inconsiderable) was actually planted in pots, placed over paving, rather than rooted in the earth. Did we ever see any earth? At the same time, though, natural forces continue to operate even on the man-made environment, as neatly evidenced by the advanced decomposition of this hardboard table, which is gradually unfurling like the pages of a book…. As Phil might say, it’s all about the layers.