Harriet Hawkins

Geography and art. An expanding field: Site, the body and practice

Over the past two decades, geographers’ attentions to the ‘visual’ arts have broadened considerably. From a tightly focused study of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings this engagement now encompasses: a temporal reorientation towards 20th-century art practices; an opening out of concerns beyond the thematic frame of landscape; the embrace of a wider variety of artistic media beyond painting practices; and a shift in modes of engagement that sees geographers taking up a range of creative practices. In this paper I do not want to further expand the field, but rather to draw attention to how and with what effect these engagements have proceeded. Discussion is framed by Rosalind Krauss’ influential exploration of art’s ‘expanded field’, itself an attempt to rethink art as an analytic object in the face of a multiplication of artistic practices, materials, operations and sites. The body of the paper explores three analytics that mark intersections of art’s expanding field of theory and practice, and geography’s own expanding field of operations: these are, artists’ changing orientations towards ‘site’, a phenomenological critique of the ‘body’, and the ‘materialities’ and ‘practices’ of making (keywords that have usually been articulated as intrinsically geographic, and applied to the art world). Synthesizing these perspectives with current geographical engagements with art and broader disciplinary debates is, I suggest, to affirm the place and value of the study and practice of art within key disciplinary concerns.

‘The argument of the eye’? The cultural geographies of installation art:

In the mid 1980s Cosgrove described a geography based on the ‘Argument of the Eye’. Since then geography, like the humanities more broadly, has seen the decline of vision’s hegemony with embodied accounts of vision taking the place of the detached Cartesian observer. In this article I consider what the geographer’s argument of the eye looks like today. In contrast to many recent studies I return to art as a site from which to build my arguments about vision. Employing a mode of enquiry that uses my body as a ‘research instrument’ the article stages four encounters with a piece of installation art by Tomoko Takahashi. Such embodied enquiries place a series of demands upon the writer, so a part of this article is devoted to critical engagement with an embodied politics of writing, a form of writing which is responsive to the arguments made about the experience of installation art and therefore the argument of the eye the article develops.

Creative geographic methods: knowing, representing, intervening. On composing place and page

Creative Geographies, methods of experimental ‘art-full’ research that have creative practices at their heart, have become increasingly vibrant of late. These research strategies, which see geographers working as and in collaboration with a range of arts practitioners, re-cast geography’s interdisciplinary relationship with arts and humanities subjects and practices as well as its own intradisciplinary relations. Amidst the vibrancy of this creative ‘re-turn’, a series of important questions are cohering around how exactly, and for whom, these methods are creative and critical. If the potential of creative methods for both researching and living differently is to be achieved then it is important we spend time reflecting on these and other questions. To begin these reflections this article tells three stories of creative doings that concern knowing, representing and intervening in place. These creative doings came about in the course of ethnographic work with the participatory arts project Caravanserai led by artist Annie Lovejoy, and among other outputs resulted in the collaborative artists’ book insites (2010). From a focus on these three sets of creative doings come larger concerns, principally around how the materialities, technologies and aesthetics of different art forms might enable various ways of knowing and conceptual experiments, as well as concerns around skill and expertise. These latter query what it is that geographers do and what it is that visual artists do, seeking to appreciate the expert as well as the amateur and what might be gained through learning to practice – in other words, how our creative methods might not only focus on finished products but also what can be learned in the processes of creative doings. Drawing the article together is a concern to understand better the work creative methods can do in the world in terms of enabling us to research and to live differently.

Visions of Excess

exergue Walking down Oxford Street, London, in early February 2001 it would have looked like business as usual at number 499; the lights were on, activity was visible inside and people were coming in and out. But the ubiquitous plate glass windows did not present the passer-by with the material moments of an ideal life found in other Oxford Street windows. Instead, framed by Europe’s busiest high street, was a conveyor belt, on which the artist Michael Landy was destroying all 7,227 of his possessions as part of his art work Break Down. On entering the store the profusion of objects that greeted the viewer formed an unsettling vision of excess rather than the delights of commodity dreams awaiting purchase. For as well as his choice of site Landy had retained the trappings of the consumer environment; the escalators, mirrors and ‘‘please pay here’’ signs. However, he had ensured that the consumption experience these visitors were participating in was predominantly an immaterial one; consuming an art experience rather than material objects. Landy was most insistent that nothing, ‘‘not even a catalogue,’’ could be purchased at the site. During the two weeks of the installation, visitors to the exhibition space, as well as shoppers as ‘‘unwitting viewers’’ on Oxford Street, could watch the circulation and dismantling of all of Landy’s objects. Electrical equipment, books, furniture, all 398 items of Landy’s clothing, his Saab car, his father’s sheepskin coat and 397 art works by him and his friends (including pieces by Gillian Wearing, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Tracey Emin) were loaded into yellow trays and circulated around the conveyor belt’s 160 metre long figure-of-eight, before being removed and broken down to ‘‘as close to their raw materials as possible’’ (Landy, Break Down). The spectacle continued as these material remains were sorted and then put through the ‘‘granulator,’’ creating 5.75 tonnes of material which Landy later buried at a landfill site in Essex. Reviews of Break Down’s installation often understood it as a polemic on over-consumption (Cork; Cumming, ‘‘Going, Going, Gone’’; ‘‘Stuff and Nonsense’’). However, an analysis that understands Break Down as an act of conspicuous destruction aimed at the over-consuming heart of conspicuous consumption is an incomplete one. Such an understanding sits uneasily alongside Landy’s almost compulsive recounting of the personal meanings of many of his objects. Indeed, Landy’s material excess does not easily equate to material meaninglessness. A more nuanced harriet hawkins

Turn your trash into… Rubbish, art and politics. Richard Wentworth's geographical imagination

This paper analyses the photographs and installations of artist Richard Wentworth in order to examine his urban imagination and the cultural politics of rubbish that underlie it. In doing so this paper contributes more broadly to understandings of rubbish and material culture, and to geographys attention to artistic understandings and inhabitations of urban spaces. Central to this analysis are the geographies of Wentworths work, its production, consumption and circulation. The paper attends to three nested sets of practices: the ‘everyday’ practices of people which draw Wentworths eye, the potential of creative cultural practices for developing critiques of space and place, and the practices of the artist. As a result the paper pushes forward debates around the relationship between geography and art, reflecting on the analytical value of art practice to contemporary social-cultural geographies.

The Art of Socioecological Transformation

This article uses two artistic case studies, Bird Yarns (a knitting collective engaging questions of climate change) and SLOW Cleanup (an artist-driven environmental remediation project) to examine the “work” art can do with respect to socioecological transformations. We consider these cases in the context of geographys recent interest in “active experimentations and anticipatory interventions” in the face of the challenges posed by the environmental and social uncertainties of the Anthropocene. We propose two dimensions to the force of art with respect to these concerns. First, it provides a site and set of practices from which scientists, artists, and communities can come to recognize as well as transform relations between humans and nonhumans. Second, it encourages an accounting of the constitutive force of matter and things with implications for politics and knowledge production. Through these two dimensions, we explore how the arts can enable forms of socioecological transformation and, further, how things might be different in the future, enabling us to explore who and what might play a part in defining and moving toward such a future.

Wonder-full geomorphology Sublime aesthetics and the place of art

Though not yet readily apparent in articles and book chapters, there is a burgeoning series of ‘in the field’ collaborations between geomorphologists and artists focused around the mutual exploration of ‘inspirational landscapes’, and the harnessing of the emotive dimensions of such body/world encounters in the production and communication of geomorphological knowledge. Seemingly at odds with the discipline’s emphasis upon the production of fieldwork data (as opposed to sensed phenomena), as well as its disavowal of the subjective, this work nevertheless resonates with a complex and fascinating aesthetic tradition within geomorphology. Here, we ‘place’ these contemporary collaborations via: reference to Humboldtian science, and the crucial link between sensibility and precision; a reading of the Kantian sublime in the work of G.K. Gilbert; a sketching out of the evisceration of both the aesthetic and art in the second half of the 20th century; and, finally, a review of the current scope of art/geomorphology collaborations, and possible futures.

Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces

Abstract We are two feminist geographers working as practitioners and researchers in creative geographies and the discipline’s creative re/turn. Human geographers interested in new representational and non-representational methods and methodologies are, as we explore in this article, increasingly turning to artistic and creative modes of expression, including (amongst others) literary and visual arts, in which we are both involved. For some time now, we have been curious about what we experience as a lack of expressly politicized critical interrogations of the discipline’s creative re/turn and a shortage of expressly critical and politicized creative outputs. In this article, then, we explore geography’s embrace of creative practices as research methods and as means of developing outputs but, more specifically, we ask about where and how decolonizing, feminist, anti-racist, and/or queer voices, practices, and theorizations might fit within the creative re/turn. Using two different creative geographic works (one a book of poetry, the other a curation project), we trouble what we conclude may be ongoing (perhaps unconsciously) masculinist, often White and colonial, perhaps overly heteronormative, modes of geographic inquiry and practice within geography’s creative re/turn. In this context, we reflexively consider our own creative practices as ones that may offer examples to open new critical spaces and modes of representation for creative geographers.

Introduction: writing creatively – process, practice, and product

For most academic geographers writing remains the primary means through which we communicate our work. Typically, of course, in monographs and journal articles, but with ongoing creative efforts to engage geographical audiences through practices beyond academic publishing – something cultural geographies in practice has long featured – that writing sees a myriad of expressions. Nevertheless, the process and practice of our writing remains masked by its product, as the polished published work obscures the means of its production, and even the production of our most frequent output (a scholarly publication) is, with few exceptions, seldom spoken of, let alone written about. The aim of these papers is to open writing for discussion as an expression of cultural geographies in practice, as a way of revealing some of the engaged and embodied practices of cultural geography that lie behind the varied published expressions of our scholarship, and to explore some of the creative forms of expression such writing practices may lead to. Of course, all writing is creative – a monograph no less so than a monologue, a paper no less so than a poem. And even when we choose to reject, or work outside of, the conventions of scholarly prose, we open ourselves to the structures of other expressive forms. But just as each form has its restrictions, so can those restrictions be leveraged by a skilled writer to harness rather than hamper creativity – none, after all, has thought Shakespeare uncreative for his 154 sonnets, despite their fixed rhyme scheme and prescribed format of 14 lines. Still, some academics turn to forms of expression other than those most often accepted in the scholarly repertoire as creative means to forward their scholarship, while still others engage these outlets for work other than their scholarship. So while literary writing has long formed an empirical entry point for geographers, offering, among other things, a powerful repost to positivistic science, creative-writing practices have themselves, as Cresswell observes here, long been enrolled as part of the geographer’s ‘craft.’ Indeed, this relationship between geography and literary writing can,

Intradisciplinarity and Visual Politics

In the context of geographys heterogeneous engagements with the visual, we present an experiment in doing radical intradisciplinarity in which we make a case for the possibilities of visual politics. Conducting cross-readings of maps and artwork, we explore how radical intradisciplinarity might enable us to explore a visual politics committed to seeing what is and also what might be.