Footfall in Brand Warrington

by Trent Dunlop

Another weekend rail strike. A friend of mine, who I have not seen for nearly twenty years, recently started working with me at my workplace for the busy Christmas period, after losing her job at the Marks & Spencer warehouse on the Grange Industrial Estate near Birchwood. Originally from Manchester, she moved to Birchwood in 1979 telling me of her happy days spent living in the New Town which, in synchronicity, saw the reopening of the exhibition ‘Days of the New Town’ by Susan Fitzpatrick in the local art gallery.

A mix of deadpan photographs and local’s photographs the exhibition can be read as either art or peoples’ history, and with just a basic written overview leaves it up to the viewer. Built on the cusp of Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’, Birchwood seems the last of the Utopian Modernist dream. The Park Ranger Service encouraged locals to volunteer, but never provided any training skills or job opportunities. A deadpan photo of a Fine Fare garage catches my eye reminding me of Twenty Six Gasoline Stations by Ed Ruscha.

Leaving the exhibition I head to the Beehive car park remembering my walk from last year when I was standing in the same spot watching the last of the Market being demolished to make way for the Time Square project currently on track to open in 2020, at a rising cost of an estimated £139 million for the new stakeholder capital multiplex cinema complex and council offices. It is a strange feeling: with the empty run down shops of the past on one side and the steel frame of the future buildings on the other, it heightens the senses to the psychic rhizomes. ‘No Deal Brexit’, government cuts, increasing homeless. An online Short, Sharp, Shock, and the Black Friday curse, as shoppers demand heavy discounting causing heavy competition and lower profit margins. Shares in Asos plummet by 42%. In a week’s time a homeless person being cruelly taunted by a gang of youths as he lies outside a shop front is filmed on a mobile phone. A future built on the foundations of austerity.

Approaching the skittles in the centre of the town a pop-up market is underway. I get attacked by an armchair quarterback, a cybernetic cowboy preaching at me like he's written the golden rule. A sidewalk supervisor, a frustrated artist, he is trying to force his narrative onto me on social media: I must buy ‘local’, support the town, save the High Street: some businesses have been here for over 100 years he tells me. But I don't want to buy anything. After a three day thread of online comments he finally goes away. A man on stilts dressed as a tree wanders past, the City of Culture is on the back burner - this is Brand Warrington. Food, drink, fridge magnets and spiritual healing! It feels like a ghostly apparition of Tony Blair's Millennium Dome appearing in drizzly Warrington. Inside the Golden Square Shopping Mall Father Christmas arrives whilst shoppers drink coffee whilst Arcade Fire’s song ‘Everything Now’ plays through the speakers in stores as 'The Folk of Warrington' satire page vanishes from Facebook. £500,000 to restore the Golden Gates outside the Town Hall, whilst the homeless shelter is under threat of closure. Two weeks in the future funding is found for the shelter up until May.

Sat in the semi darkness of the workplace canteen, boxes full of donations for the local foodbank on the counter. We brace ourselves for another night of Christmas peak period parcel sorting.

Non-Representational Theory - Part 1: 'Entering the Space of Encounter'

Edited by Candice P. Boyd and Christian Edwardes, Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts will be published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2019.

About the book:

This book presents distinct perspectives from both geographically-oriented creative practices and geographers working with arts-based processes. In doing so, it fills a significant gap in the already sizeable body of non-representational discourse by bringing together images and reflections on performances, art practice, theatre, dance, and sound production alongside theoretical contributions and examples of creative writing. It considers how contemporary art making is being shaped by spatial enquiry and how geographical research has been influenced by artistic practice. It provides a clear and concise overview of the principles of non-representational theory for researchers and practitioners in the creative arts and, across its four sections, demonstrates the potential for non-representational theory to bring cultural geography and contemporary art closer than ever before.

This is what the endorsers are saying:

Weaving together tales by scholars and practitioners, Non-representational Theory and Creative Arts is an important and timely contribution to the ongoing dialogue between cultural geography and creative art practice. Ambitious in scope, varied in style and innovative in format, the collection takes the reader on a compelling journey through stitches and studios, trees and art installations, water streams and ruins, geothermal vapours and musical tunes. It pushes for new tropes and vocabularies to talk about familiar and unfamiliar atmospheres, places, gestures, and all that stirs and eludes the human senses and imagination.

Veronica Della Dora, Royal Holloway University of London

Over the past fifteen years, non-representational theories have become central to the social sciences and humanities, inaugurating new ways of conceptualising and approaching the world. Featuring a multidisciplinary range of contributors who have been at the forefront of non-representational styles of thought and research, Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts is unique for its sustained and experimental engagement with the practices, styles and techniques of research that non-representational theories invite and offer. As such, it will become an invaluable resource for researchers hoping to learn new ways of encountering and presenting the world.

Ben Anderson, Durham University, UK

How might we envision a geography in the making, in the moving? With thought-provoking contributions that activate the affective force of the geologic, Non-Representational Theory and the Creative Arts explores the thresholds that move geography beyond representation toward its creative force. Entering the space of encounter, this book tests the limits of writing in a field that has always explored what lurks at the interstice of line and fold.

Erin Manning, Concordia University, Montréal

Right Map Making

Here is a copy of Right Map Making: Five Ways to Make Maps for a Future to be Possible by Steven R. Holloway. It's a great 'manifesto' and I am posting it here as it is readily available online and I think he wouldn't mind it being on this blog. Dr. Holloway is an academic in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia in the US, specialising in urban geography and diversity.

Holloway says: "The problem for the makers of maps being that our maps are, in part, engaged in the wanton destruction of the world".

You will need to download the image, or zoom in on your screen, in order to read the manifesto itself.

Town & Gown: The Studentification of Urban Space

Note: This presentation was delivered at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography in 2016

Art History’s ‘Wriggle and Chiffon’ Fashion Movement

When I worked in Trafalgar Square in London, I loved to visit the National Portrait Gallery. In the 1990s I remember working my way through its floors. I did one floor per week. It was a walk through history in terms of portraiture. At the time my favourite portrait was Giovanni Boldini’s Gertrude Elizabeth (née Blood), Lady Colin Campbell (1894) (below). She was an art critic, journalist and socialite and had a troubled marriage, plus much scandal surrounding her (mostly of a misogynist nature, it seems). I like this portrait as I think there is something defiant in her gaze.

This short post is a quick look at the way the chiffon is represented in these paintings and the effect I think it has on the subject of the painting: the women in these portraits. It is a style coined by Walter Richard Sickert: ‘wriggle and chiffon’.

Boldini was also known as ‘the master of swish’ which clearly lends itself to the movement in the chiffon, the ‘wriggle’ side of it clearly making reference to the female body that resides within it, although I am guessing that Sickert isn’t using this term in a positive way at all. There is something of an ‘illustration’ style to Boldini’s portrait, which makes it somehow familiar to us. You might expect to see this in a magazine rather than on the wall of a stately home.

While the above image is from many years later (late 1930s), and is a design illustration rather than an oil painting, you can get a bit of a flavour of what I mean. In Boldini's painting the dress is a pretty important component of the image. One might say that is the subject of the painting. However, I see the dress rather more as a vehicle to help represent the subject of the painting (Lady Colin Campbell, herself).

Also, of the ‘wriggle and chiffon’ moment is John Singer Sargent. Below is his portrait Lady Speyer (1907). He was also put under scrutiny by critics, with Roger Fry stating that it was a surprise that his work had been “confused with that of an artist”.

I think these critics, in their disregard of this moment in the representation of women’s dress in portraiture, have missed the point entirely. The painterly way the brushstrokes free the chiffon - indeed its ‘wriggle’ when it comes to life when being worn by the subject of the portrait – is what gives life to the image and the wearer of the dress!

Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion!: 'What academics put on their office doors (and why)'

I read this article in Times Higher Education magazine - 'What academics put on their office doors (and why)':

"Lecturers who fancy themselves as creative types adorn their doors, any available pinboards and wall space with exhibition posters, their own artwork and a studio-standard black and white image of themselves. Or the very, very important scholars, who advertise their books, provide copies of their journal articles in a special door-pocket, and may find a moustache has been drawn on their impressive visage glowering full-size from a finely framed photo” 

...and I have created my first door notice (above) for when I start at the Manchester Fashion Institute on Monday 18th June!

Merlin Coverley’s ‘Psychogeography’ – Revised & Updated Edition

I have been reading Merlin Coverley’s revised edition of Psychogeography, first published in 2006. This new edition, with a lovely green cover (2018), has an updated information, a new preface and appendix, and a much updated ‘Psychogeography Today’ section, which also includes Nick Papadimitriou’s Deep Topography.

When I first got into psychogeography in 2009, this was ‘the bible’ of psychogeography and I think it still is. It was my first psychogeography book, followed swiftly by Will Self’s Psychogeography (2007). I always recommend Coverley’s books to my students as an intro to the subject (now alongside Walking Inside Out, of course, however that wasn’t available till 2015).

I think Coverley’s revised edition signals the current popularity of psychogeography, its latest phase, its contemporary resurgence, its newest incarnation/interpretation... Maybe this new edition also acknowledges the ‘New Psychogeography’ that I mooted in Walking Inside Out. Either way, I’ve really enjoyed revisiting it and would highly recommend it to anyone as an intro to the subject, or as a top-up if you haven’t read the original for a few years, like myself...