Vancouver Art Gallery (Emily Carr)

In November I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery. I was particularly drawn to the exhbition of the work of Emily Carr, a Canadian artist orignally from Victoria, British Columbia. Carr was particularly interested in the native Canadian landscape and its communities. She painted trees in brilliant shades of green, blue and brown and would apparently sit for hours alone in the forest to commune with nature and to observe the light changing as it passed through the forest canopy. Carr developed within a modernist paradigm, having been influenced by European artists in the 1920s. Some of the work, like the one pictured here, shows her acute sense of colour, almost like Gaugin andDerain and certainly fauvist in style. What was particularly intriguing was her use of a visual ethnographic method. She spent time amongst the First Nation communities, observing their lifestyles and rituals, and documenting the symbols of their community and ancestery - the totem pole. Indeed, many pictures in this exhibition were of Carr's depictions of totem poles, which captured the sense of majesty, character and tradition. But in many cases they were set alongside portrayals of declining communities, or were simply the main theme, to the absence of other objects. The totem to Carr seemed to be a marker of a lost world and a tearful reminder of the histories of the past. Very inspiring.

Berlin Neue Nationalgalerei (Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition)

In August, we visited the Neue Nationalgalerie and its Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin exhibition, which explored the historical and artistic connections between the cities, through their avant-garde movements, and artist exchange, in the twentieth century. The Upper Hall contained contemporary installations and paintings which explored urban space. One installation was an intriguing cloth labythrinth which, as the light shone through the cloth, revealed technicolour prints of small spaces in Tokyo. Downstairs contained some fine pen and ink work by Japanese illustrators, whose influence was seen in images by Berlin Dada artists. I particularly liked the Dada collage and work of Hannah Hoch.

Becoming X

Fresh. Buzz. Youthful. Playful. Daring. Difficult. Energising.
These are the words that are directing young creative practitioners in an English seaside town. I have just spent an afternoon with some twentysomething graphic designers at the Creative Media Centre in Hastings. They ditched careers in London and Brighton, unappealed by the lifestyle that designing for large corporate fashion and advertising houses could bring, in search for something more local. Their agenda was very much about being in the elevator at the ground floor. In a town undergoing heavy investment into its renaissance, these graphic designers, can see a horizon - a seachange occuring - in which the town develops a fresh, creative and distinctly cosmopolitan appeal. It is an alluring prospect. The Centre is a hive of a collective movement; each room a chamber for the realisation of graphic and digital dreams. If the town gets it right then such a space can be nurtured alongside more established enclaves of creative and artistic activity. But there are dangers. For the new breed coming out of the local college, it is abundant with opportunity in a market place that is distinctly absent from predators. Becoming X - having that special something that sets you apart and retains an authentic and youthful edge - might be enough for now, but won't last for ever. How long is it when your cultural referents (usually music, Kids TV, shopping, drinking) mature and you seem out of date. Becoming X and maintaining a place in the creative economy requires a negotiation of youth, and a retention of its spirit. In a town where a large majority have little esteem, or spirit of any sort, these creative hives take on a monastic presence - beacons for free expression and enrapturing design (one is even called The Beacon) - but at the margins of everyday life for the many. So we should add the following to the Becoming X agenda. Stratification. Exclusion. Minority. Refugee. Diaspora. White privilege. Monastery. (In)Tolerance. Understand and combat these with the energy and appeal of the terms above and the building blocks of local renaissance will fall into place.

My(work)Space

Detritus, debris and discarded cups of tea surround my desk when I enter a period of frenzied writing. Now is such a time. As the nights draw in for winter a similar pattern is repeated. It’s as if the sun and moon conspire to keep us indoors, chained to our PCs, or laptops, until we have completed a productive phase of work. November and December always feel that way. Last weekend I completed an essay on heroic leadership, mountain adventure and Englishness and now I am drawing toward the end of a piece which is a further development of my ideas on the totemic sporting hero. The weight will be lifted by Sunday, with any luck.

At other times, my work space, titled on the door (as is the norm with rooms in our flat) in the French – ‘bureau’ – is an ordered and inspiring retreat from the lures of Sky TV, PS2, artwork, my guitar and Sophie’s piano-playing. The desk looks out to the South Downs; a vista of rooftops, chimneys, and aerials framed with a rolling green backdrop of the hills and topped-off, certainly in the summer, with a spectacular evening dance of colour – from blue, to pink, to purple, to black – as the sun sets.

As is common with academics, My(work)Space contains a personal library. One low-level shelf is full of books covering every topic from political theories of the environment to biographies of Benito Mussolini. My PC desk holds a neatly-arranged collection of politics journals, and is large enough to take an assortment of junk. It is also home to some clippings of my hair – a reminder (I see it as a potential family heir/hairloom) of an accident I had a few years ago with a ball of Bluetac.

Buttressing the desk are two 6ft bookcases to the left of the study which contain our most cherished books. For Sophie it is language guides, dictionaries and the latest offerings on the National Curriculum. For me, it is an expensively-assembled personal library of climbing books. These were rescued from many a charity shop and second-hand bookshops spanning the length and breadth of the country (Durham, Cambridge, Norwich, Windsor, Brighton, and Manchester). They record the romance of adventure and the tragedy of death in equal measure.
Sophie’s desk is situated behind mine and we often work back-to-back. Luckily I have a good set of headphones which are often employed to listen to enervating music (Nirvana, Anthony and the Johnsons, PJ Harvey, Aphex Twin, Sneaker Pimps at the moment) that drowns out her sighs over the latest batch of work from her illiterate and unmotivated pupils. If only they could share our literary haven, I wonder, inspired by the works of Engels, Shakespeare and Bonington, then Sophie’s sighs may be a little quieter.

The room may not be a wooden floorboarded garret, nor is it a Bohemian hovel bejewelled with the finest faux-Moroccanware, but it is a creative refuge from the televisul syringe, nonetheless.

Dust and discovery

I’m not a well man. I’ve come down with something in the process of my doctoral research. The French philosopher Derrida identified it as the Mal d’archive [Archive Fever]. He uses this evocative phrase to denote, amongst other meanings, the feverous desire to possess and embody knowledge. But there is another type which most apprentice historians show symptoms of, identified by the social historian Carolyn Steedman in Dust - her irreverent book on history writing: the sheer boredom of the archival process. As she puts it, the historian might be energised by the delights to be unearthed through a good day’s graft amongst brittle parchments, but on entering the archive and settling down ‘the immediate ambition that excites you [is] to leave’. Fortunately for me the joys of discovery outweigh this feeling. But only just.

Beyond the instant gratification of finding unique material during the research process there is also a joy to be had in making conceptual links between the files of pencilled quotes you hand-achingly but lovingly reproduced. There are humble pleasures to be had as you behold poetry written by schoolchildren which has not seen the light of day for half a century. A sense of gravity, perhaps intrusion, is commonly felt as you sift through telegrams from monarchy, letters of condolence over someone’s death, or personal diaries which reveal intimate thoughts. The raw material entrusted to the archive – the primary source - invites a strong correspondence to objective truth, as the recently-departed historian Arthur Marwick posited in his The Nature of History. But most documents, one must remember, were never written with the historian in mind. So it is quite natural to feel privileged for access to the past and also responsible for eventually making sense of it all. Discovering documents and marshalling the fragments of the past into coherent prose is difficult and certainly requires discipline and constant reflection.

For me, however, the doors of perception are also flung open once you emerge from the archive into daylight. The Royal Geographical Society archives in Kensington, positioned as it is underneath the looming and imperious Albert Hall, makes you think about the energy of the Victorians and how they shaped the fabric – both physically and culturally – of British society. Uber-trendy Hoxton equally provides a setting for historical research and encounters with an alternate social fabric of London. Here the Alpine Club (which holds the world’s leading collection of books related to mountaineering) is nestled between DC Comics, The Prince’s Drawing School and Hoxton Square, home of the White Cube gallery. This space, populated with young creatives, is dynamic and motivational. The Square – site of many a lunchtime picnic – is a special retreat and a great place to write. That is, until you get interrupted by a bare-breasted Japanese girl interviewing for ‘Naked News’, but that’s another story.

The journey to the archives, both literally and metaphorically, has been a rite of passage and a voyage into the unknown. I’m not alone in experiencing the miseries of the Northern Line on the way to the British Newspaper Library at Colindale. My fellow travellers on the near-empty tube were either aeronautical buffs (The Royal Air Force Museum is close by) or hunchbacked grey-haired men in decaying tweed blazers, squinting as they pored over the THES. It was as if I was communing with my future. The territory beyond zone three should come with a health warning! The library itself is something of a shrine to historians. A pilgrimage must be made at least once during the doctoral apprenticeship, even though digitisation of national newspapers challenges the need to make this journey. It’s a shame in a way. Those of us who have ventured to Colindale have all experienced the antiquated delivery system, dark and secluded booths, the whirring of microfilm and the faint insect-like noises as the corner of newspapers are torn each time a page is turned. Mind you, you haven’t made it as a historian until you have donned the dainty white cotton gloves which the BBC Written Archive Centre in Reading always insists you wear. Post-doctoral research application number 1: the archival process and emasculation.