The Great Dominions [1]

 

Tony has asked me to write about the process of his making Boundary no Boundary, in which I have been involved in a curatorial role, and rather than describe each footstep taken, each brushstoke made and each encounter he had on the way – something I could not do anyway, as I was not there on his epic journey -  I think what I am describing is the psychical journey that he took in parallel to his physical journey around the edge of the district. Often this was a literary journey, one which led him through fictional and critical worlds, and into the psyches of Jorge Luis Borges [2], David Matless [3], Bill Drummond [4], Rebecca Solnit [5], Georges Perec [6], and many others. This was a journey, like Tony’s attempt to walk the boundary, which led us into many blind alleys - which Teardrop Explodes album is the better one, Kilimanjaro or Wilder? - but always into intriguing and convoluted conversations.

 

Tony told me a story which neatly (perhaps too neatly?) encapsulates the longer artistic journey he has been on, which could be described as one from Fine Artist to Community Artist, and with Boundary no Boundary back to Fine Artist again, inadvertently completing a circle - or maybe an ellipse - by returning to the starting point, much as he did on completing his anti-clockwise perambulation around Wakefield District. I can’t attest to the veracity of his story; for all I know he might have made up all or some of it, and I can’t say for certain that he has circumnavigated Wakefield either, much less explain why anyone would want to do such a thing in the first place, a question which must surely be in the mind of anyone seeing his exhibition. You may think I am being overly skeptical, but I will leave you to reach your own conclusions having seen with your own eyes the paintings and ephemera purporting to be evidence of the feat, presented in the form of an exhibition at The Art House.

 

But perhaps this lingering doubt in my mind just emphasises the unreliability of even the most apparently reliable sources - the Ordnance Survey’s aptly-named Explorer maps for example, which Tony used to plan his expedition. The OS uses a symbolic system of representation (with a handy key to help you interpret it) and their maps attempt - in an inevitably reductive way - to tell us what is out there, and of course fail miserably in the attempt. Having a map will not prevent you from getting lost, and topography is not landscape, after all. We talked a lot about maps and the impossibility of them representing places - acknowledging that Tony’s attempt at total representation is as futile and as partial as that of the Ordnance Survey. In Jorge Luis Borges’ parable Museum, on Exactitude in Science, he tells of an Empire in which,

 

“the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

 

Tony displays his similarly tattered ruins of maps, annotated with his locations for looking out of Wakefield into the world beyond, as evidence of his endeavours.

 

But I digress … To return to Tony’s story, the veracity of which – as I said previously - I cannot confirm; he told a tale of when he was a student in 1986 (or maybe 1985, he could not be certain of the date) at Bretton Hall College, which is now within Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where coincidentally Tony ran a workshop as part of Boundary no Boundary. He had been casting around without success for a suitable subject for his dissertation, when he came across a poster stuck up on the wall for an Arts Council touring exhibition titled, he thought, something like 20th Century Landscape Painting. The image in the poster was, Tony recalled, by the Scottish painter James McIntosh Patrick, and was - in his opinion - a surprisingly bland image, given that it was the one chosen from so many to represent the whole exhibition. Why was this painting, Autumn, Kinnordy (this is a country estate near Kirriemuir in Angus) which is admittedly picturesque and quite possibly topographically correct but otherwise not of any great interest, selected to stand for the whole of landscape in the 20th century? Puzzled by their choice, Tony wrote to the Arts Council asking whether they could photocopy any reviews of the exhibition, which he could then use as source material to help him write his dissertation. Some weeks later a reply came by letter (which sadly doesn’t survive) saying that there was too much material to photocopy, but he was welcome to come down to London and see any material they had.

 

Tony duly set off at 8am on the appointed day, hitch hiking to London, and miraculously (or so he tells me) arrived at the Arts Council’s offices at the appointed hour of 2pm, only to be told by a shamefaced Arts Council officer that they hadn’t got the reviews out of their archives for him, but by way of apology they would photocopy them and post the copies to him in Yorkshire. So, in a striking irony, Tony’s epic journey through the whole of England (to paraphrase Daniel Defoe’s A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain) was ultimately futile, as you may think the journey around Wakefield was.

 

When the photocopies arrived, Tony continued, every review, without exception, included this same image of James McIntosh Patrick’s painting, holding up what Tony thought of as a mediocre painting as the very archetype of landscape painting. In his dissertation Tony criticised the painting mercilessly for its nondescript-ness.

 

I have hunted for evidence that this exhibition existed, and have come up with nothing definitive; could it be the Arts Council Collection show The Experience of Landscape from 1987? I can’t escape the nagging doubt that Tony may, like Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [7], not be a reliable narrator, so it is possible that this was the exhibition Tony saw the poster for, or maybe he ‘misremembered’. When listening to my tape recording of Tony’s story, I couldn’t help thinking of the NBC news anchor Brian Williams, who became the subject of the news himself when his heroic tale of an incident which occurred while reporting from Iraq in 2003, in which his helicopter was forced to land by enemy fire, turned out to be fiction. When the falsehood was exposed he resigned in disgrace; after all, how could a proven fantasist be relied on to report the facts?

 

Tony concluded his narrative with a postscript; he had tracked down an image of James McIntosh Patrick’s painting, and to his surprise there was an uncanny similarity between it and his own paintings from the Boundary no Boundary project. So, like the journey around the district he has discovered that there are no endings, just new beginnings, and it has taken 30 years of travelling only to find himself back at the beginning of the journey.  

 

 

[1] This is the title of a song by The Teardrop Explodes from the album Wilder (1981), which I think is superior to Kilimanjaro (1980)

[2] Museum, on Exactitude in Science (1946), a short story about cartography

[3] The Regional Book (2015), in which cultural geographer David Matless taking his cue from Georges Perec looks flatly at 44 locations in the Norfolk Broads

[4] 45 (2000). Drummond, one half of the band KLF and formerly manager of Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, published this semi-fictional autobiography in his 45th year

[5] Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2012) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

[6] Species of Spaces and Other Places (1974) and Life: A User’s Manual (1978)

[7] Marlow is the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s epic novella Heart of Darkness (1899), in which, sitting on the wharf at Gravesend with London at his back, he tells the tale of his journey up the Congo in search of the near-mythic ivory trader Kurtz. When he finds Kurtz he is close to death, and expires with the enigmatic final words, “The horror! The horror!”