I had this idea. Where did I get it from? A conversation whilst walking around Shanghai? I have this image/memory of some sculptures of cranes or herons (birds) in somewhere like Peoples Square or Park, and the associated idea that the crane was a symbol of Shanghai. But I can't find any evidence for this now. Googling "symbol of Shanghai" produces a large number of references all based on the "English" grouping of these 3 words. Most of them refer to the Bund or the Pearl of the Orient or the Pu Dong skyline.
The English word for the large, long-legged and long-necked birds of the order Gruiformes, and family Gruidae is the Crane. The lifting machine called a crane takes its English name from the shape of the long-legged and long-necked bird.
Unlike the similar-looking but unrelated herons, cranes fly with necks outstretched, not pulled back. There are representatives of this group on all the continents except Antarctica and South America. Most species of cranes are at least threatened, if not critically endangered, within their range. The plight of the Whooping Cranes of North America inspired some of the first US legislation to protect endangered species. (Wikipedia)
The Crane has been the inspiration for mysterious ceremonies in cultures across the world, including dances based on their mating displays. The modern dance of the cranes is more likely to be found in the activity of construction. I seem to remember Stefan Szczelkun had some idea for a ballet of construction site cranes 20 or so years ago.
BEFORE
AFTER
In Liverpool city centre, 42 acres, in the zone where Liverpool built its first dock, have for the last few years been a building site with cranes everywhere. Now that the main Grosvenor House commercial development has been completed many of the cranes have gone. Around this central zone there are construction projects still in progress, but the credit crunch will hit hard. At the edge of the city centre neighbourhoods like Kensington and Toxteth are full of streets with houses all boarded up. Lots of money was promised in boom time for re-generation, but what was it spent on? Moving people out? Where have they gone? What is going to happen now?
The Liver bird has a history, a history of mistakes, takes that didn't quite translate or copy.
The Liver bird (pronounced /ˈlaɪvəbɜːd/) is the symbol of the city of Liverpool, England.
The pronunciation of liver in this word is not homophonous with the first two syllables of Liverpool; rather it rhymes with "driver".
What species?
The bird's species has long been the subject of confusion and controversy.
The earliest known use of a bird to represent the then town of Liverpool is on its corporate seal, dating from the 1350s, which is now in the British Museum. The bird shown is generic, but the wording of the seal contains references to King John, who granted the town’s charter in 1207. John, in honour of his patron saint, frequently used the device of an eagle - long associated with St. John. Further indication that the seal was an homage to King John is found in the sprig of broom initially shown in the bird’s beak, broom being a symbol of the royal family of Plantagenet.
By the 17th century, the origins of the bird had begun to be forgotten, with references to the bird as a cormorant, still a common bird in the coastal waters near Liverpool. The Earl of Derby in 1668 gifted the town council a mace "engraved with ...a leaver" - the first known reference to a liver bird by this name. A manual on heraldry from later in the century confuses matters further by assuming this term is related to the Dutch word lefler, meaning spoonbill - a bird rarely found in northern England.
When the College of Arms granted official arms to Liverpool in 1797, they refer to the bird as a cormorant, adding that the sprig in the mouth is of laver, a type of seaweed, thus implying that the bird's appellation comes from the sprig.
The bird thus appears to have originally been intended to be an eagle, but is now officially a cormorant. Many modern interpretations of the symbol are of a cormorant, although several - notably that on the emblem of Liverpool Football Club - distinctly show the short head and curved beak more readily associated with a bird of prey. (Wikipedia)
Mis-translations, mis-hearings, mis-understandings, are capable of generating new ideas, and this is an area of our work at e-space lab that we are especially aware of whilst there is a real exchange of ideas in an inter-cultural context.
The science of botany didn't take off until the woodblock illustration (15th century onwards) created a fixed visual reference that connected to the names and properties of plants. And in the screen capture image in the post of 16th November 2008, the Wikipedia Ornithology entry, comments on field work and the breakthrough of photography:
The study of birds in the field was helped enormously by improvements in optics. Photography made it possible to document birds in the field with great accuracy. High power spotting scopes today allow observers to detect minute morphological differences that were earlier possible only by examination of the specimen in the hand.
Tony Potts, the 'so-called' 5th member of the band Monochrome Set, worked on lyrics for a track on the Album Love Zombies, and called "The Weird, Wild and Wonderful World of Tony Potts" (Bid, Potts, Square) that included references to modern cinema, and were translated for a Japanese edition in a wonderful way. Rather than ask for a copy of the lyrics, somebody in Japan listened to the Album tracks and wrote down what was heard, and what was mis-heard! Fritz Lang becomes Bread Slam. The Bread Slam Theatre of Japanese Whispers was thus born in November 1990 at a "Raft" meeting at Tony's house on Dyers Hall Road!
A mythical bird, the Liver bird, has been at the centre of recent controversy in Liverpool.
Surrealism got it right, juxtaposition, not connection! In googleland the links create juxtapositions that may or may not be connections, but we connect anyway, it is our human programming clicking in. Perhaps we are all vulnerable to nonsense because we are pre-programmed to make sense and meaning out of things?
My favourite book, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), by Marshall McLuhan, collaborating with Canadian poet Wilfred Watson, approached the various implications of the verbal cliché and of the archetype .
One major facet in McLuhan's overall framework introduced in this book that is seldom noticed is the provision of a new term that actually succeeds the global village; the global theater. (Wikipedia - Marshall McLuhan)
In the chapter Archetype they write:
It is necessary to consider the incident of the cliché-archetype theme in its nonverbal forms. Language as gesture and cadence and rhythm, as metaphor and image, evokes innumerable objects and situations which are in themselves nonverbal. The extent to which the nonverbal world is shared by language is obscure but no more so than the effect of human artifacts and technological environments on language. We are taking for granted that there is at all times interplay between these worlds of percept and concept, verbal and nonverbal. Anything that can be observed about the behavior of linguistic cliché or archetype can be found plentifully in the nonlinguistic world.
Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. -W.B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion"
The human city in all its complexity of functions is thus "a center of paralysis," a waste land of abandoned images. The clue that Yeats offers to the relation between the verbal and the nonverbal cliché and archetype is, in a word, "complete." The most masterful images, when complete, are tossed aside and the process begins anew.
If the world of kettles and bottles and broken cans and the world of commerce and money in the till are fragmentary specialisms of man's powers, it becomes easier to see the bond that remains between verbal and nonverbal cliché or archetype. The specialist artifact form has the advantage over language of intensification and amplification far beyond the limits of word or phrase. The archetype is a retrieved awareness or consciousness. It is consequently a retrieved cliché - an old cliché retrieved by a new cliché. Since a cliché is a unit extension of man, an archetype is a quoted extension, medium, technology, or environment.
A flagpole flying a flag may become a complex retrieval system. The flag could be the Russian flag, with its hammer and sickle. As flagcloth, the flag could retrieve an entire textile industry. By virtue of the fact that the flag is a national flag, it can retrieve flags of other nations.
The cliché, in other words, is incompatible with other clichés, but the archetype is extremely cohesive: other archetypes' residues adhere to it. When we consciously set out to retrieve one archetype, we, unconsciously retrieve others; and this retrieval recurs in infinite regress. In fact whenever we "quote" one consciousness, we also "quote" the archetypes we exclude; and this quotation of excluded archetypes has been called by Freud, Jung, and others "the archetypal unconscious."
Liverbird as cliché! Liverbird as archetype? Googleland!
Googling in images for "birds in cages" about a month ago, I hit upon a fascinating trail. From adverts for birdcages to blogs, including one from a former resident of Shanghai, who posted images of the significant things and places she had known just as she was leaving to take up a new job in the Middle East. Another site had images and articles about ornithologists in Hong Kong, where their collective interest in wild bird-life was the impetus behind a campaign for the conservation of habitat. Ornithology is so obviously a positive human activity, including a dimension of rare "dis-interest" in the taking care of shared planetary resources in the interests of another species. This disinterested activity feeds back into self-interest too, as who knows what the long term benefits of the conservation of natural habitat will be for humanity?
Taking care is what curating is all about, hence the referencing earlier (10th October 2008) in a previous post of the Barnett Newman quote "aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is for birds". So what is the "natural habitat" of artists?
The Wikipedia page on conservation biology, or conservation ecology, the science of analyzing and protecting Earth's biological diversity has a section on the history of the use of the term conservation:
The term conservation came into use in the late 19th century and referred to the management, mainly for economic reasons, of such natural resources as timber, fish, game, topsoil, pastureland, and minerals, and also to the preservation of forests (see forestry), wildlife (see wildlife refuge), parkland, wilderness, and watersheds.
Western Europe was the source of much 19th century progress for conservation biology, particularly the British Empire with the Sea Birds Preservation Act 1869; however, the United States began making sizable contributions to this field starting with thinking of Thoreau and taking form in the United States Congress passing the Forest Act of 1891, John Muir's work and the founding of the Sierra Club in 1895, founding of the New York Zoological Society in 1895 and establishment of a series of national forests and preserves by Theodore Roosevelt from 1901 to 1909.
I've dredged up a memory from my early seventies London phase which I thought might be of interest. it was prompted by this 15 November 'black swan theory' posting. I'd gone to Battersea Power Station to make some reference photographs for an illustration I'd been commissioned to make for the Scientific Book Club and was suddenly confronted with a single black swan, there in the then filthy Thames. The presence of this exotic creature, which I'd only ever seen before on (triangular?) postage stamps, captivated my attention and seemed very aware of me as I tracked its passage along the embankment through the viewfinder of my Pentax camera. Later I was left with the distinct feeling that the incident had been a kind of 'visitation'. A few years on from this and I would read Colin Wilson's Mysteries and learn therein about the possible significance of the sudden (sometimes ominous) appearance of black dogs... but surely they're a different kettle of fish altogether... are they not?
Sean Halligan / 8 December 2008
A couple of days ago Shaw and I were talking on skype about the birds idea, where it came from and where it might be going. He sent me a press story about a black swan. Shaw was also talking about the black swan in a cultural and conceptual context. Googling "Black Swan" takes me back to Wikipedia:
The black swan theory refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. The theory was described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—"undirected" and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, the first world war, as well as the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.
The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass. Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the black swan narrative to discuss falsification.
Earlier in the week I had sent an e-mail to Shaw and Hangfeng about finding a reference to a Persian poem called the Conference of Birds.
The Conference of the Birds is a book of poems in Persian by Farid ud-Din Attar of approximately 4500 lines. The poem uses a journey by a group of 30 birds, led by a hoopoe as an allegory of a Sufi sheikh or master leading his pupils to enlightenment. Besides being one of the most beautiful examples of Persian poetry, this book relies on a clever word play between the words Simorgh — a mysterious bird in Iranian mythology which is a symbol often found in sufi literature, and similar to the phoenix bird — and "si morgh" — meaning "thirty birds" in Persian.Wikipedia
It was in China, late one moonless night, The Simorgh first appeared to human sight - He let a feather float down through the air, And rumours of its fame spread everywhere;
Public realm as a term is used in many ways, and so has, therefore, multiple meanings. In the Guide to the Liverpool Biennial there is a page (p. 14) that is headed Public Realm with some reflections by Sorcha Carey on the different contexts for art in the biennial. The gallery is;
a natural habitat for MADE UP, a space for dreams and make-believe. Visitors come fully expecting to leave 'real life' at the door, and to engage with the world through representation, invention and fiction. MADE UP in the public realm lets the genie out of the bottle, unleashing its themes, ideas and processes onto the streets to find their place amidst the everyday.
She goes on to say that:
Much of what we describe as 'public space' or 'the public realm' is rendered invisible by sheer force of habit.
Number 13. on the MADE UP route of the Liverpool Biennial is the 'public realm' commission by Diller Scofidio + Renfro called Arbores Laetae, Latin words associating trees with joyfulness rather than squirrels, dogs or birds, and it is a good bit of fun watching trees gyrate in a little bit of green space beneath the Anglican Cathedral.
But public space or public realm can be understood in quite a different way, and a way that could include the gallery rather than define how the gallery may have a specialized purpose that differentiates itself from other spaces of everyday life and cultural value.
An alternative proposal set out here is that public space could be defined, not by the relative accessibility of spaces but by the use of those spaces (and this could include all kinds of situations) to a public purpose.
Richard Sennett in his book The Fall of Public Man emphasizes how urban social practices and the use of spaces in the European context shifted from one where stranger spoke to stranger, to one where stranger surveyed stranger. In the 18th century the spontaneous exchange among strangers (often of differing classes too) was part of the life of the market, of haggling, and coming to an agreement as to value, an agreement in relation to the specific transaction of the "there and then". That is how Lloyds of London began, as a coffee house where business could be undertaken. The invention of the consumer and the department store in the 19th century put a stop to this, with fixed prices, printed matter, agendas, diaries, special offers on terms defined by the seller. No wonder that the modern museum is not far short of a parody of display and the fetishization of objects found in the Big Store. The 'quietism' of a gallery space suppresses the loud and energetic exchange of ideas. Trying to disturb this cultural economy is a risky ploy, but is worth it in the long run. The use of the Bluecoat hub for the e-space lab international, the Philosophy in Pubs debates and the "free thinking" debates recently held at FACT are symptomatic of the fact that those bored with the status quo want to use spaces, socially, intellectually and creatively! Art museums could become market places for ideas, not simply for the display of ideas, but for haggling over ideas, arguing for shared values, for purpose!
This post has no relation to the preceding post but does have a relation to the post of 29th October and the preceding discussion on the topic of cows, and animals in general as a subject in art, and, who knows, might have an afterlife as an ongoing theme? Things that do not follow are not necessarily a logical fallacy. There is the possibility that it's a matter of eccentric connections not being recognised in the context of a linear mind set.
What follows now in the e-space lab international is open. Here is a video of cattle in the foreground and an urban skyline in the distance;
The video is of cattle on the common at Basing (near where I live in Hampshire) with the skyline of Basingstoke in the background. The video is what it is, a record, a document of cattle in the landscape. Some are chewing the cud. It is natural, but, nevertheless, an effort, work undertaken for benefits that we share. The video is also a way of referencing and illustrating something about space and scale that I find fascinating, and relates to this space we use when we skype across the world to Shanghai.
One of the first things I want to point to is the fact that the cattle are grazing on a grassland that is something more than a field, it is a common.
A common (or common land) is a piece of land owned by one person, but over which other people can exercise certain traditional rights, such as allowing their livestock to graze upon it. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. (Wikipedia)
Using digital virtual spaces, using blogs and skype and so on, makes us commoners of this particular type of newly created common territory. Rights and privileges also apply, and so it becomes a political (with another small 'p') space.
The newness of spaces, perceptions and understandings is not new (especially in an industrial society), but when new dimensions burst on to the scene, then it is both exciting and alarming. Modernity, in a word. According to Svetlana Alpers, in her book on Dutch art in the 17th century called The Art of Describing, she connects the new lens based optical technologies of both microscope and telescope to a significant shift in an understanding of scale and measure when it comes to sight and seeing.
An immediate and devastating result of the possibility of bringing to men's eyes the minutest of living things (the organism viewed in the microscopic lens), or the farthest and largest (the heavenly bodies viewed through the telescopic lens), was the calling into question of any fixed sense of scale and proportion. (page 18)
She then comments on how:
To many it seemed a devastating dislocation of the previously understood measure of the world, or, in short, of man as its measure.
To illustrate this point she uses the example of the painting The Young Bull by Paulus Potter (see above) in her chapter called Constantijn Huygens and "The New World", for she uses Huygens take on these new perceptions and experiences to show how this dislocation could be embraced as heralding a new era of possibilities.
The juxtaposition of a tiny crevice and huge town gate, or the expansion of the degree into a panoramic view brings to mind characteristic features of Dutch art. Paulus Potter's famous Young Bull looms against a dwarfed church tower and sports a tiny fly on its extensive flank (pages 18-19).
The way I am seeing it these days is that;
the territory we inhabit on this blog, and our exchanges on skype, the thinking about elsewhere, and the thinking about the here and now, are part of a big shift in the species of consciousness that is the body electric.
The term Body Electric arrives in a poem by Walt Whitman from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass. Its original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line "I sing the body electric" was not added until the 1867 edition. At the time, "electric" was not yet a commonly used term, but the electric telegraph had already inaugurated the age of electric communication over the previous two decades.
The 1840's saw the philosopher Kierkegaard publish major works that include critiques of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and form a basis for existentialpsychology. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Stages on Life's Way include observations about existential choices and their consequences, and what religious life can mean for a modern individual. No wonder, when it was possible, due to the telegraph, to know, simultaneously, the barometric pressures at a number of geographical locations. The space that God's consciousness had inhabited had been substituted by the daily telegraph and the weather report.
This sense of dread is no longer with us. What we need to guard against is feeling too comfortable with the way things are at this relatively early phase of this new electric communication structure. The new commons will need to be established through occupation and use. This is why open source is so crucial.
The two videos we are showing today at the Bluecoat in Liverpool are already on the blog in a recent post, but Philip C. added some titles to introduce each video with some text to help set a context for thinking about how documentation shifts directly into making something up.
The image on the floor of the Bluecoat "hub" as you come in the front entrance advertises the Free Thinking Festival going on in Liverpool venues this weekend, including the Bluecoat and Liverpool FACT.
Today people in the "hub" at the Bluecoat had an opportunity to talk with Philip and Hangfeng about the two channel videowork they have made up during the e-space lab international exchange project so far. Hangfeng called us from his studio in Shanghai, showed us round his space, and the view of the nightscape of Shanghai through his window. In all of our exchanges the capacity for misinterpretation and misunderstanding is the default position. What is amazing is how the development of understanding can grow through trial, error and guesswork; the heuristic process.
The video of songbirds in a park in Shanghai is called; birds in cages are artworks, and the video of birds in an aviary in the UK (Basingstoke, where Philip C. lives) is called; birds in aviary are artists. Further work is being undertaken and will be shown later.
The e-space lab project is exploring how internet connections between people in diverse urban and international contexts can enable a dialogue that helps make more meaningful a reciprocal representation of what the conditions of actual everyday life in different places really are. Many of the ideas, illusions and misrepresentations that shape our understanding of where and how other people live in places different from our own can fall away in this kind of dialogue, and also be replaced by a live and ongoing pattern of multiple alternative representations. The forms that we use range from the human voice (by Skype or phone), text, text messages, and images produced by digital cameras and mobile phones, video of course, and even to web pages and podcasts. We like to engage with these forms in a process of dialogue and exchange, using whatever resources are available, and exploring the potential of new tools as they come on stream, especially streaming video. As artists we are especially interested in the role the arts play in valuing practices and the human qualities that shape everyday life in the different places we find ourselves.
