Simon Rycroft

Landscape and Identity at Ladybower Reservoir and Rutland Water

Large-scale water control projects have been a major component of environmental engineering and landscape transformation during the twentieth century, creating some of its most characteristic modernist forms. The discourses generated by their design and implementation articulate diverse and often opposing cultural identities. Those surrounding the design and construction of reservoirs at Ladybower (1935-45), in what is now the Peak District National Park, and Rutland Water (1968-76), in Englands smallest shire county, give insights into the role of landscape aesthetics and symbolism in the complex negotiations of local and national identity at different moments in the course of twentieth-century modernism in Britain.

The Nature of Op Art: Bridget Riley and the Art of Nonrepresentation

The monochrome paintings of the British Op artist Bridget Riley produced between 1960 and 1965, in common with a number of experimental arts and media practices of the 1960s, were characterised by a drift away from traditional representational techniques towards what are now described as nonrepresentational practices. The dynamics of the Op Art aesthetic and the critical writings that surround it bear striking similarities to much recent work on nonrepresentational thought. Based upon an engagement with Rileys early work, and specifically with the perception and understanding of nature it engendered, an argument can be made that suggests that, despite claims to the contrary, Riley was engaged in a form of representational practice that rendered a new and fashionable understanding of cosmic nature. The multidimensional nature evoked in her aesthetic was designed to be experienced by the viewer in a precognitive, embodied fashion. In this there are strong echoes with the call made by nonrepresentational theorists who operationalise the same kind of cosmology to develop an evocative, creative account of the world. Both Op Art and nonrepresentational thought seem to build upon a shift in the representational register that occurred during the immediate postwar period, one which prompted representational practices which attempted to subjectify rather than objectify, to evoke instability and multidimensionality, and to exercise not only visual, oral, and cognitive ways of knowing, but also the precognitive and the haptic. The complex corelations between representation and nonrepresentation are apparent here, suggesting that it is problematic to emphasise one side of the duality over the other.

Towards an historical geography of nonrepresentation: making the countercultural subject in the 1960s

It is in the experiments in the arts, media, culture, politics and everyday practices developed by the counterculture in the 1960s that many nonrepresentational perspectives emerge. Aspects and examples of those experiments are reviewed with a particular focus on the construction of the countercultural subject and on some performative practices developed to shape those subjects, including psychedelics and underground cinema. During the 1960s nonrepresentational practices emerged and thrived in some enclaves of countercultural living, but struggled to develop in others. Although many of the countercultures practices explored the nonrepresentational realm, they were still engaged in representational practices. The relative success of these practices in situ was closely tied to their representation. In 1960s Los Angeles they remained more represented than enacted and practised in the city. There is a danger in nonrepresentational work of rendering representation a stereotypical concept, one that is unchanging in its capacity to deaden, exclude and enframe. But representation as a practice is also subject to change. During the postwar period various representational practices, whose referent was a newly understood cosmos, attempted to evoke a range of sensory, experiential and subconscious responses in their consumers and performers, creating decidedly nonrepresentational representational moments.

Art and micro-cosmos: kinetic art and mid-20th-century cosmology

Recent work by cultural geographers on visual art has emphasized performative and participatory aspects focusing upon the embodied and multi-sensory experience of encountering and being part of a work of art. Research on non-figurative art has much to offer in elucidating the relationships and distinctions between representation, non-representation and abstraction. Non figurative artists were representing or enacting a new kind of materiality, one that was putative, in process and ever changing. That materiality was based upon the adoption of a mid-20th-century cosmology and inspired by recent advances in the understanding of matter and the universe. Kinetic art, which is characterized by a set of abstract aesthetics that represent or reproduce real or illusory movement, was, especially in the post-war period, inspired by this new cosmology. Mid-century kinetic artists created non-figurative abstract models of the latest understandings to bring their associated energies, forces and motions to the senses of the viewer-participant. The models that kinetic artists produced in a variety of media were designed to be experienced in an embodied manner rather than simply viewed. These and other models of a mid-century cosmology signify a period in which the practices of representation were shifting significantly and consequently demand our attention.

Mapping underground London: the cultural politics of nature, technology and humanity

An understanding of the geographies of resistance benefits from an exploration of alternative geographical imaginations. A focus on the London based counter-culture of the 1960s illustrates this point. The oppositional geographies of the counter-culture can be mapped using the London underground press as both source and object. In doing so, the underground’s peculiar constructions of the relationships between nature, technology and humanity can be traced. The (‘new’) leftist movements of the 1960s are not of primary interest here. Rather, the less conventional forms of cultural politicking from that period are the focus. Factions who were engaged in a range of activities, from the seemingly esoteric production of light-shows, through the ‘weekend hippy’ up from the home counties, to the editors of radical underground papers, attempted to operationalize a range of contemporaneous social, cultural and media theories in their project to redefine the discourse of dissent. In doing so, claims to primordial naturalness were made on the basis that new electronic technologies were extensions of the natural human self and could, if correctly utilized, reinsert nature into culture and consciousness. This same geographical imagination was used as a tool to avoid appropriation. By focusing upon the discursive aspects of resistance it is possible to draw a more nuanced account of the relationship between power and dissent that renders it less polarized and more symbiotic.

J.B. Priestley: Bradford and a provincial narrative of England, 1913–1933

J.B. Priestleys writing has been used to explore aspects of landscape and Englishness. Through an analysis of Priestleys early journalism in the Bradford Pioneer and the Yorkshire Observer, we argue that his critical disengagement to most of the landscapes of England was based on a connection to the landscapes of his youth in Bradford where he first developed his fictional and documentary narrative style. In his early journalism, Priestley articulated a sense of dwelling in Bradford that was rooted in the experience of two distinct local landscapes: the spaces of the city and the nature of the surrounding upland and moorland. Priestleys geographical ideal balanced the civility of the Edwardian city embedded in a landscape that offered escape to and commune with nature. The existential balance between the two was, we argue, central to the narrative geographies developed by Priestley in his fiction which is illustrated through an analysis of his two early novels: The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). We suggest that the ways in which Priestleys interwar writing expressed dwelling in local landscapes might be thought of as a critical provincialisation of London and England.

John Latham’s Cosmos and Mid-Century Representation

The conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006) is sometimes cast as disconnected from the currents of British visual culture. Latham’s idiosyncratic cosmology, based upon time and events and incorporating human creativity rather than matter and energy, is used to distinguish this disconnection. This article argues, however, that his work can be seen as closely related to that of other mid-century cultural producers who were engaged with alternative cosmic speculations, and part of a broader shift in the register of representation. Papers from the Latham digital archive help make this case.

Lightshows and the cultural politics of light: mid-century cosmologies

The practices of multimedia lightshows adopted by the British counterculture in London during the 1960s are related to aesthetic practices involving the use and manipulation of light in kinetic and op art. Both reflect a new sense of matter and energy that emerged from the adoption of post-Newtonian understandings of nature and the cosmos in the mid-twentieth century. The stereotypical cosmic mysticism with which the counterculture is associated was more techno-scientific than it is painted. The London underground press is a good source with which to elaborate this more nuanced reading. The counterculture’s cosmic speculation was as much earnest reflection on new vistas of nature and the universe as glib reflections on a Technicolor acid trip.

Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. x + 477pp. 30 figures. Biblography. £18.99.

Leif Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of Europes Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. x + 477pp. 30 figures. Biblography. £18.99.

Book Review: In place/out of place: geography, ideology and transgression

Any treatment of cultures of resistance is fraught with difficulties. Their study lends itself so easily to trite and uninspiring conclusions which merely affirm that ‘the kids are alright’ – perhaps because the outpourings of countercultures and subcultures are rarely profound. Happily, Tim Cresswell only occasionally falls into this trap in his account of Anglo-American transgressive movements. The book consists of three substantive empirical studies, on New York graffiti, the Stonehenge solstice disputes and the Greenham Common protests, sandwiched between theoretical chapters working through its main themes. I want first to discuss the empirical material and approach, moving on briefly to consider some of the issues raised in Cresswell’s theoretical chapters. The time-frame covered in the empirical studies runs from around 1970 to the present, but Cresswell does not focus upon the more obvious machinations of resistance such as the death-throes of 1960s counterculture, the emergence of punk or the contemporary rave scene. This is both a strength and a weakness. In its favour, it points to the variety of forms taken and geographies produced through resistance. But it also tends to overwrite some clear connections and similarities between contemporaneous cultures of resistance, and perhaps in the process loses something of the dynamics and traditions of resistance and transgression. Nothing, for instance, is made of the intimate connections between ‘new age’ travellers and the rave scene. Similarly, for New York of the 1970s where, if not the artists, then certainly the iconography of graffiti was variously appropriated by an emergent punk scene in the city, remains a silence in the account. In part this reflects Cresswell’s main sources, popular newspapers, and his reluctance to explore their limitations. Whilst the book works around hegemonic discourses of place and necessarily must engage with the messages of the dominant press, it is problematic to assume that they are singularly influential shapers of attitude or reflectors of opinion. But, more importantly, the generation of meanings in the media is complex. The theme of moral panic is familiar to scholars of subcultures and countercultures, and Cresswell implicitly builds upon this tradition which articulates the relationships between the media and the culture of resistance in terms of, for instance, the labelling process. But recent work on subcultures has further developed theories of the media, and suggests that there are many interlinked levels of mediation expressing a complex dialogue between the representation and the represented in which the direction of power is by no means one-way. Indeed, media studies and sociology, from which such work has emerged, is in such reworkings becoming more sensitized to the kind of geographical questions which Cresswell raises, namely, the various processes through which established space is appropriated and deployed by a subculture. Perhaps Cresswell relies too heavily upon his source material. There are sections of the empirical chapters which demand a greater sensitivity to context. In places one senses that important aspects of the more general socioeconomic environment have been gleaned from accounts in the newspaper sources themselves. At one Book reviews 111