'Somewhere close by' David Crowley by Kettle's Yard

‘Somewhere close by’ DAVID CROWLEY The opening shot of ‘Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future’, Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope’s 2005 film, captures a group of British visitors walking through a tree-filled Czech cemetery on a sunny spring day. They are led by two hostesses in pink dresses and short red capes – Guthrie and Pope themselves. Pausing at the grave of Tomáš Baťa, the Czech industrialist who died in 1932, Guthrie reads his last will: ‘The first principle of the prosperity of our works is that you should not consider that the works are only for you or exist just for your sakes … ‘. His words continue on, a booming endorsement of the value of collective work. It is not surprising that Guthrie and Pope were fascinated by this character and drawn to his words. Collaboration has been central to their activities. They have worked as creative partners since the mid 1990s. Somewhere, a name they adopted in 2002, has also been a platform for collaboration with other artists, cinematographers and composers. In the case of their documentary films, this is hardly remarkable – the medium requires teamwork. But collaboration for Guthrie and Pope is much more than sheer pragmatism: it is close to an ethos or an animating principle. From their very earliest projects they have created structures to share and broadcast the creativity of others, some of whom would not claim the title artist. In March and April 1996, for instance, they created ‘A Hypertext Journal’, a live, on-line travelogue by retracing a journey to the Western Isles of Scotland taken by writers James Boswell and Samuel Johnson in 1773. Using laptops, modems and a digital camera, they relayed their daily experiences on a live blog. Not only could audiences on the Web – then only a tiny fraction of the number of users on-line today – read their daily journal, they could also comment on the day’s events, and make suggestions of places to visit. For instance, Guthrie and Pope danced in long tartan skirts at the top of the highest hill on the Isle of Raasay, after one of their interlocutors wrote: ‘It is said that Johnson, or was it Boswell?! danced a hornpipe on Raasay's flat-topped mountain Dun Caan. I hope you also plan to do this. I will look out for a report.’ One of the first artists’ projects on-line, ‘A Hypertext Journal’ was already different from much early Net Art, the majority of which took the mechanisms of the Internet – hardware, software, interconnectedness, search engines and their algorithms – as both its means and as a matter of concern. Turning inward, much of this art took the form of pranks, hacking existing sites or filling mailing lists with nonsensical ‘automatic’ texts. Conducted pseudonymously and remotely, early net artists sought the notoriety of the outsider – a rather romantic and traditional role for the artist. There was a lot of optimism – misplaced it seems – that this kind of disruptive art would hold back the commercialisation of the Internet.1 Far from investigating the virtual corners of cyberspace, ‘A Hypertext Journal’ was strongly preoccupied with actual places (another distinctive characteristic of almost all Somewhere projects). Moreover, it took interactivity seriously, with Guthrie and Pope

Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (New York: Abrams, 2003).

investing a lot of energy into promoting the project, effectively gathering contributors before embarking on their journey. Reflecting on the project soon after its completion in 1996, they wrote: ‘We began from the assumption that “interaction” is a meaningful two-way exchange between artist(s) and audience, and further to be an exchange that can in turn affect the course of the art work at the stage of creation rather than completion.’2 Reading their words today, they seem like a commonplace. But remember, Guthrie and Pope were testing the potential of interactivity long before ‘user generated content ‘, ’collective intelligence’ and other Web 2.0 fanfares. This was also before Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1998 term ‘Relational Aesthetics’ was adopted by critics and commentators as a way of describing the communal and processual nature of art making. Bourriaud’s claim that ‘Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum’ might well have been formulated to describe ‘A Hypertext Journal’.3 Guthrie and Pope were filmed by the BBC when making their Highlands tour. The television industry was becoming aware of the revolution which the Internet was likely to bring to broadcasting, and the commissioners of the BBC’s Horizon series of documentaries invited producer Andrew Chitty to investigate what the future of TV might be when available on demand or accompanied by hyperlinks to Web content. Chitty speculated about TV future by revisiting its past, the early experimental years of the 1930s before it settled into its familiar formats. Of Guthrie and Pope’s project, the programme’s narrator announced that ‘interviewing local people, visiting ancient sites and reinterpreting an historic journey are the classic elements of TV documentary. But, like the pioneers of early television, Nina and Karen are having to learn how to reinvent the form with the technologies of a new medium’.4 The qualities of liveness that were then associated with television were likely, Chitty speculated, to pass over to the Internet. In fact, a few years later in 2002 Somewhere initiated a project entitled ‘TV Swansong’ to explore the dislocation of television from its central place in British life and perhaps elsewhere in the world too. Acting as both curators and contributors, Somewhere commissioned eight new works from UK-based artists, which were webcast live on the Internet over the course of a day. Twenty-six public venues across the country screened the day’s fare to viewers unable to watch at home. The brief was to make art works that explored significant television sites and events. More than a simple commission, this was a technical and a social experiment. Meeting together monthly, the artists shared their ideas and, with Guthrie and Pope, shaped the event. This was to be a collaborative work combining the contributions of individual artists who took their ideas to local communities, often in the towns and villages where they had grown up. Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich explored the television programmes that resonated most strongly with their childhoods in the 1970s – ‘The Clangers’, an animation made by Oliver Postgate, in Walker’s case and, for Bromwich, ‘The Dukes of Hazard’, car-obsessed action serial set in the American south. Both artists merged

Nina Pope and Karen J Guthrie, ‘”A Hypertext Journal” - the WWW as Live Interface’ - http://www.somewhere.org.uk/hypertext/journal/proj.info/ - accessed 26/08/14. 3 Nicolas Bourriaud cited by David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) 66. 4 ‘TV is Dead. Long Live TV!’, a Horizon Special broadcast on 2 November 1996.

these TV set memories with those of the landscapes of their childhoods, rural Gartocharn, near Loch Lomond, in Scotland and the flatlands of Lincolnshire. Their video works – based on journeys – were webcast from Sutton on Sea, Bromwich’s hometown, which renamed itself ‘Sutton on TV’ for the day. Like Walker and Bromwich, many of the artists who contributed to ‘TV Swansong’ looked backwards into the medium’s real or imagined heyday of mass viewing when TV was at the heart of the common culture. The future utopia of free, unfettered communication promised by cyber-libertarians at the time was, it seems, of far less interest. As a framework for shared creativity and interactivity, the Internet may play a far smaller role in Somewhere’s subsequent projects, but Bourriaud’s idea of an artwork being a statement of the fact that we live in a shared world remains a good way of understanding the kind of collaborations and exchanges which are at the centre of many projects by Guthrie and Pope. In 2005, for instance, they made a remarkable film entitled ‘Bata-ville: we are not afraid of the future’ which, like ‘A Hypertext Journal’, is a documentary record, in this case of a journey by bus which they organised for two groups of former workers from shoe factories in Maryport in West Cumbria and East Tilbury on the Thames Estuary to Zlín in the Czech Republic. Their destination was the headquarters of the Bata Company, the world’s largest shoemaker between the world wars and the parent of the Maryport and East Tilbury outposts. The founder of the company Tomáš Baťa had been a visionary industrialist, commissioning leading Czech architects to design its striking shops and factories. The company provided high quality housing for its workers in Zlín and many of its other factory towns around the world. A charismatic and patrician figure, Bata was fond of slogans, and was, in fact, the author of the phrase that shapes the film, ‘We are not afraid of the future.’ The Bata factories in Britain have closed down (East Tilbury in 2005 during the making of the film) with predictably negative effects on the towns and shoe production has shifted to Kenya, India and elsewhere. Like a number of Somewhere’s projects, ‘Bata-ville’ began its life as an attempt to regenerate a declining part of the post-industrial world, in this case East Tilbury. As a film, ‘Bata-ville: we are not afraid of the future’ is both a scripted series of scenes which Guthrie and Pope orchestrate whilst dressed as retro-futurist hostesses from some kind of travel agency, and a record of the journey of these workers as they visit not only the heart of the Bata empire but also one of the company’s fully-automated shoefactories in the Netherlands. This episode provides one of the most touching moments in the film, when former workers in the two factories are confronted with the untiring robotic arms that have made them redundant. Tired from the journey perhaps, they still look stunned. During the day, Guthrie and Pope appear in matching costumes and occasionally deliver speeches. The camera often frames these scenes symmetrically as if to highlight their presence as doubles or perhaps even as products. Each evening, they step out of their red capes, pill box hats and pink shift dresses decorated with emblems of modernity, in a scene that is shown in split screen. These self-reflexive moments emphasise the performative aspects of this documentary film – there is no distinction between the film and the events it records. The role of the former Bata workers is rather more ambiguous – are they performers too? Some seem a little troubled, expressing disquiet about the way Guthrie and Pope dress

or uncertainty about what, in the end, the purpose of the project had been. Through the film, the question ‘Are you afraid of the future?’ is asked directly of all participants – including the travellers, the people they meet in the Netherlands and Zlín, and even the film crew. Combined with memories of East Tilbury or Maryport in their heydays, the answers – often given by elderly former employees – are genuinely affecting in a way that most artistic investigations into the rise and fall of modernist utopias are not. Guthrie and Pope ask the question of themselves and, in answering, express their own doubts about the uses of art in regeneration: ‘I am much more afraid for the future of places like Maryport than for my own future …’ says Guthrie, ‘tourist centres, heritage centres, nature trails, sculpture trails. I cannot join them up with the people we’ve just spent a week with. I cannot see where they are going to fit in.’ Regeneration projects often fail to serve the people who are most affected by decline. One inference to be drawn from this film is that such schemes also fail to ask these people for their views in meaningful ways. Guthrie and Pope also appear in costume in their 2007 film, ‘Living with the Tudors’. A study of people who spend three weeks each year living in the grounds of Kentwell Hall, a historic house in rural Suffolk, to recreate life in Tudor England. Forming a community of up to 400 people, they sleep, work and play as the residents of Kentwell manor might have done more than four centuries ago. This is also the setting for re-enactments of life in Britain in the Second World War, often performed by the same people. The public can visit, paying an entry fee to witness these spectacles (and converting the cash in their pockets into groats to spend on site). The re-enactors – all amateurs – maintain the illusion of historical distance. In the Tudor re-enactments they speak in archaic versions of English and assume what are taken to be the conventions of polite behavior in the sixteenth century. The product of their immersion over four years in what Guthrie and Pope call the ‘historical re-enactment scene’ in the UK, ‘Living with the Tudors’ has more in common with the social science method of ‘participant observation’ than of the re-enactments made by other artists at the time. Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have, for instance, remade events such as a notorious performance by The Cramps for the patients at Napa State Mental Institute in California in 1978 (‘File Under Sacred Music’, ICA, London, 2003). Perfect reproduction of this unruly moment in the history of rock music required meticulous planning and management of the facsimile performance. By contrast, Guthrie and Pope’s preoccupations seem to be much more with social relations. Traditionally, participant observation involves an extended period of time spent ‘in the field’ living with the social group being studied. In this way, unspoken practices and attitudes – like social taboos - can be scrutinised. To immerse themselves in the tight-knit community which forms each June at Kentwell, Guthrie and Pope had to assume historic roles too (as limners – painters of portraits miniatures), eating authentic vittles, adopting the argot, and wearing ruffs and bodices. Being a filmmaker at Kentwell is, of course, not the same as being an anthropologist. Guthrie and Pope had to direct their film crew ‘remotely’, to fulfill their duties as re-enactors. They also had to persuade their fellow re-enactors to allow filming to take place. Some felt strongly that the camera was an intrusion into ‘their’ private world (despite the fact that Kentwell is open to the public). This antipathy adds a twist of drama to the film’s narrative.

Whilst ‘Living with the Tudors’ is ostensibly a study of the principles and techniques of the re-enactments, it is the way in which this temporary community forms every year that is fascinating. Moreover, the re-enactors interviewed by Guthrie and Pope are thoughtful analysts of the social dynamics of forming a community which then performs the rigid ranks of class from another time. Often it is the similarities and continuities that stand out. Re-enactment tries to close the gap between past and present by attempting to capture how life was experienced in earlier times and places. It suggests that we can better understand how a Tudor person felt by wearing his or her clothes or what they tasted by eating their food. In other words, it uses affect to bend time. ‘Living with the Tudors’ does something similar with film. In the edit, re-enactors travel through time, appearing in their 1578, 1942 and 2005 guises. Guthrie and Pope switch between film and video and use different cameras to capture different temporal sensibilities. The sixteenth century is sometimes viewed through the hidden cameras in Guthrie and Pope’s clothes, the gauziness obscuring a modern audience watching the re-enactors dancing a Pavan outside the Hall. A 16mm Bolex camera captures the re-enactment of events in 1942 and, when this footage is used, ‘Living with the Tudors’ acquires the saturated colour and surface scratches which we associate with twentieth century film. For all of its artifice, ‘Living with the Tudors’ is a highly sympathetic, humorous and intimate portrait of re-enactment, a theme which could have been easily satirised. In fact, Somewhere’s projects display very little of the ironic distance which has characterised much of the art made by their contemporaries. Irony allows for the embrace and disavowal of a subject at the same time. It is two-faced. By contrast, Guthrie and Pope have a sincere interest in the lives of their subjects at Kentwell, Maryport or the Western Islands. As Grant Kester has claimed ‘there is some discomfort in the mainstream art world with projects that don’t incorporate a sufficient degree of ironic detachment, especially socially engaged or community-based practices.’5 Perhaps the only direct approach to emotion unfiltered by irony in art is when deep trauma is its theme. By contrast, Guthrie and Pope have, it seems, increasingly been interested in approaching sentiment and emotion in ordinary lives in typical places, often with commonplace problems. Like irony, ‘kitsch’ describes a distancing effect, one that passes judgment on the taste of others. To make an art work, which is called 'Titchy/Kitschy' (2007) might seem to belong to the lofty position claimed by those who have superior judgment. But the pair of diminutive ceramic homes which carry this name are part of an exploration by Somewhere into the deep attachment that people feel for the rural home in both England and Japan. The artwork has its origins in an invitation to undertake a residency in rural North West Japan supported by Grizedale Arts who are based in the Lake District. Guthrie and Pope’s time was to be spent in a way that would ‘be useful’ to the remote village of Toge where they were to stay. Knowing that the residents of the village were fretful about the demise of farming in the area and the haemorrhage of young people to the cities, the two artists wondered whether one of the industries which thrive in the Lake District (where

Grant Kester in Tom Finkelpearl, ed., What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013) 116

Guthrie lives) could provide a boost to the economy of Toge. They asked Lilliput Lane , the highly successful maker of collectable model cottages, to supply moulds with which the villagers could experiment. One of a number of activities which Guthrie and Pope shared with villagers during their three-week stay, it seems to have had an impact. When, six months later, a group from Toge came to the Lake District, they wanted to visit the Lilliput Lane factory. Somewhere also commissioned former Lilliput Lane sculptor, Mike Atkinson, to prepare two new designs – one based on Lawson Park, the home of Grizedale Arts, and the other on one of the oldest timber-framed and thatched Kayabuki houses in Toge. The moulds returned to Toge, along with ceramic examples of 'Titchy/Kitschy', works from a limited artist’s edition. These model houses are accompanied by ‘Little Deluxe Living’ (2007), a short narrative film which both records their interactions with the village and its inhabitants, as well as the strength of feeling which attaches to vernacular homes. David Tate, the owner of Lilliput Lane, turning the tiny model of Cottman Cottage in Essex in his hands, says ‘kitsch is just a word for unfashionable. But the people who buy them don’t think that they are unfashionable. It is just a matter of taste’. The sentiment, which is dubbed kitsch, is perhaps a resource that can be invested and tapped by the villagers in Toge too. Also concerned with the deep-seated appeal of home, ‘Jaywick Escapes’ (2012) is Somewhere’s third documentary film. It is also the least performative. Guthrie and Pope do not appear on screen. Instead, the film follows the lives of three residents of Jaywick who talk candidly about their reasons for coming to Jaywick, a town on the Essex coast, which during filming in 2010 was declared to be the most deprived place in the United Kingdom. Originally intended as an inexpensive holiday resort for Londoners, Jaywick’s housing stock was built quickly and cheaply, and much is dilapidated today. Yet, for at least some of its new residents – including Nick the Cap, one of the central figures in the film – the town holds happy memories of childhood. Shot over the course of two years, Guthrie and Pope filmed in phases; in the periods in between, the optimism of their subjects receded and relationships broke down. Occasionally, the listener can hear either Guthrie or Pope off camera asking a question, but this is not the acousmatic voice of omniscient narrator who knows what will happen. And, although tragedy seems to hover in the background, often in asides made by its residents, this is not a campaigning film. No disaster has befallen this coastal town since the North Sea Floods of 1953: it is simply experiencing a long and slow decline. And, in fact, very little happens on screen. Compared to their earlier works, ‘Jaywick Escapes’ is almost spartan. There is very little scripting of scenes, or playful filming (though the broad beach and wide skies over the sea draw the camera’s lens). One wonders whether the poverty of the place itself places some kind of limit on fancy, at least in the minds of Guthrie and Pope. It is striking that this ‘Jaywick Escapes’ – which has been screened at documentary film festivals and is being shown in ‘Past, Present, Somewhere’ at Kettle’s Yard – will probably never be broadcast on mainstream television. It belongs to a tradition of observational documentaries which were made by filmmakers like Paul Watson in the 1970s. His pioneering series ‘The Family’ (1974) was recorded in the home of the Wilkins, an

ordinary family in Reading, itself a very ordinary British town. Today this tradition has been largely replaced, at least on television, by what is called ‘Reality TV’, a form of spectacle which treats its subjects as freaks. Asked about how they found the central figures in ‘Jaywick Escapes’, Guthrie says ‘Once you’ve assured them that you’re not working for the BBC and doing an exposé, which they’re quite sceptical about, people have the time to talk to you.’ Perhaps it is a small irony that Guthrie and Pope began their careers as the subjects of a BBC documentary too. Viewing Somewhere’s works, one encounters lost worlds, which once offered the stability of life-long employment; a community which used to form around the television set; the tradition of social documentary; Japanese cottages and the English seaside. One might wonder whether what unites these projects is nostalgia. ‘Modern nostalgia’, claims Svetlana Boym, ‘is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values … the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history.’6 This is what gives nostalgia its melancholic character. And certainly some of Somewhere’s subjects, like Nick the Cap, are nostalgic. But for all their interest in the past, Somewhere’s projects are rather more preoccupied with the present. In fact, Guthrie and Pope seem to be particularly concerned with making Somewhere’s work act on the world. Nothing in the present is certain or resolved. Speculative and involving the unpredictable creativity of others, they are perhaps best understood as propositions: a journey, like that taken by the Bata workers, might be life-changing; kitsch souvenirs, usually the subjects of reverie, could be a resource against decline; and the fantasy of dressing and acting in the manner of the past can be a way of making community in the present.

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2008) 8.