Will Montgomery

Sounding the Heygate estate

The Heygate estate at Londons Elephant and Castle is a highly visible relic of Southwark Councils vigorous housing construction programme in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Now almost empty and facing demolition, it is to be replaced by a private development. The estate is a late example of the modernist style in British social housing: a style that is widely perceived to have failed and to have engendered numerous social problems. This paper draws an analogy between the radical impulse in modernist architecture and the aesthetics of sound art. One method of catching a momentary echo of the suggestion of alternative worlds hidden in the fabric of such buildings, it is argued, is through an investigation of the acoustic environment. The paper closes with a description of a sound art project undertaken by the author in and around the Heygate estate.

Susan Howe’s Renaissance

Two key texts, written concurrently, helped to cement Howe’s reputation in the early 1980s. These were Pythagorean Silence (1982) and Defenestration of Prague (1983), originally published separately but later collected alongside The Liberties in The Europe of Trusts (1990) in the Sun and Moon Classics series (subsequently republished by New Directions). Although Howe was by this point corresponding with both Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein, and in this sense loosely involved with language writing, it is immediately evident how different her work was from texts of the same period such as Hejinian’s My Life (1980), Ron Silliman’s Tjanting (1981) or the collaborative publication Legend (1980) coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery and Ron Silliman. Indeed, her correspondence shows that Howe was skeptical of, if not hostile to, much language writing from the outset.1