Steven Bode
2008
Over the course of 2007, starting out before the first leaves began appearing on the trees and only ending after they were turning for autumn, artist Simon Pope made a series of seventeen walks in the company of seventeen different writers. These shared excursions, conducted, in fair weather and foul, across the flatlands and fenlands of East Anglia, were undertaken as part of a unique arts project called The Memorial Walks, for which this publication is both an adjunct and a memento. Continuing a long line of artists’ (and writers’) journeys through both actual and imaginative terrain, The Memorial Walks, as its title implies, tied its experience of the landscape to a series of exercises in memory. Before embarking on their respective walks, each of the participating writers (poets and novelists, geographers and travel writers, naturalists and ecologists) was given a different scene from a landscape painting to memorise, and ‘carry’ with them out into the open country where they would be required to recount it, in as much detail as they could muster, at a particular point en route. A test of their powers of recall as much as their powers of description, these writers’ recollections formed the core of a project which continued to proliferate from its original starting-point: into the gallery, over the internet, and, by highlighting walks that its audience might want to emulate, back into the landscape from whence it came.
These multiple forays into deepest Lincolnshire and Norfolk, extensively documented and photographed, and with each writer’s recollection recorded for posterity as a short audio file, followed on the heels of an earlier walk, carried out in the dying days of 2006. An artist who had already attracted considerable attention for a body of work in which a commitment to long-distance walking was allied to a more obviously conceptual preoccupation with the phenomenon of re-enactment and the representation of memory, Pope was one of the first names that Film and Video Umbrella had sought to include in a large-scale exhibition, to be staged in Norwich and Lincoln, that drew much of its inspiration from the writings of the novelist W.G. Sebald, whose digressive literary journeys (often through his adopted home of the east of England) and penchant for vivid yet elegiac observation had struck a chord with a growing number of contemporary artists. Whereas other contributors to the exhibition, entitled Waterlog, produced film, video or photographic works that traced familiar Sebaldian motifs or re-visited people or places first encountered in his magnum opus The Rings of Saturn, Pope homed in, unsurprisingly, on Sebald’s solitary trudges through Suffolk and Norfolk, and the extent to which the repetitive activity of walking functioned as a spur to memory and reflection. Finding common ground also in Sebald’s frequent visits to local museums, Pope extended his interest in the landscape paintings of the Norwich School (Britain’s first provincial art movement), whose signature works, by John Sell Cotman, John Crome, James Stark and others, are on permanent display at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery (the launch venue for Waterlog). Intrigued by the extent to which Sebald’s books are regularly embellished with personal/archival images (including facsimiles of paintings or other historical artefacts), Pope found himself returning, time and again, to one of the closing chapters of The Rings of Saturn, which laments the steady disappearance of trees from the East Anglian landscape, and which culminates, particularly hauntingly, in a faded photograph of a row of poplars that were decimated by the hurricane of 1987. With this image indelibly planted in his mind, Pope then resolved, on 14 December 2006, the fifth anniversary of the car crash that had claimed Sebald’s life, to walk the few miles out of Norwich towards the places where he lived and died. Once there, in memoriam, as if laying down a wreath of words, he would try and recall as much as he could of the trees in the photograph, as a mark of respect. In the depths of a season where absence and loss are most keenly felt, his gesture takes on the added poignancy of being performed in the teeth of a gale, every third or fourth syllable of the recording being lost to the wind.
A hesitant preliminary step in what soon would become a much larger undertaking, this first memorial walk nevertheless suggested an outline for others to follow. After a period of further research in the Norwich Castle archives, in which he was introduced to the many other Norwich School landscapes that were no longer on display to the public, Pope started to consider how these lesser-known paintings, for all the efforts to catalogue and preserve them, were fast disappearing from memory. As if to restore some of the close attention they had lacked in their time locked away in the storeroom, in an attempt to clear the layers of actual or metaphorical dust that had accumulated around them, Pope identified ten such works from the collection that he would ask well-known writers to hold in their minds; with each image, and its recollection, to be showcased on a weekly basis over the two-and-a-half-month run of the Waterlog show. Once this choice had been made, Pope, myself and my colleagues at Film and Video Umbrella set out to compile a shortlist of people, from different walks of literary life, who it would be interesting to involve in the project. This early wish-list was weighted towards writers with a connection to the locality (the poet George Szirtes, crime fiction authors Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, the art critic and former Castle Museum Director Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, naturalist Rex Hancy, author of Notable Trees of Norwich, as well as the critic and translator Amanda Hopkinson, who succeeded Sebald as the Head of The Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia) but later branched out to include other equally resonant choices, such as ecologist-activist Ken Worpole, and the writer and artist Tom McCarthy, whose recent cult novel Remainder was a study in re-enactment of quixotic, almost operatic proportions. Matched to one of the available paintings, but with no great advance information about it, or, indeed, of the route of the walk they would take with Pope, each writer, after being greeted at the gallery, was left alone with their appointed work, albeit with the instruction to concentrate specifically on a tree (or trees) at the centre of the scene; to detach it, almost uproot it, from the painting, and its wider art-historical context, and simply describe it, or embody it, in its detail and its simplicity, for someone who hadn’t seen it, so that they too could then picture it in the same way.
Entrusted to the agency of others, yet equally clearly directed by the hand of the artist, this surrogate, almost scattershot approach is both endearingly arbitrary and part of a larger unfolding design. Nowhere is this shaping influence more evident than in the manifestation of the project in the gallery. Laid out in orderly rows as an integral part of the Waterlog show, the ten paintings were grouped together as a series, with priority given to the canvas that was the subject of that week’s featured walk. It would be more accurate to say that that particular painting was the only one on public view, since its nine companions were completely shrouded in folds of black silk: a reminder perhaps of the hitherto mothballed invisibility of the image itself, but also an allusion to the ritual practice of covering paintings, or mirrors, in a house where a death had occurred. Pope’s injunction generated a minor frisson of controversy among several gallery-goers, who complained that a picture (which would otherwise have been out of circulation anyway) was deliberately, even willfully, withheld from view, and who, ignoring their normal reluctance to tamper with a work of art, often lifted the veil to see what lay beneath. Other visitors wondered why the writer’s audio recollection of the painting, confined to a listening post elsewhere in the gallery, or downloadable from the internet, was not in more direct proximity to the scene it described. Keen to exploit this tension between the image and its ghostly echo, Pope persisted with this method of display, deploying the same set-up in the venue in Lincoln to which Waterlog travelled later that year, in which a further seven paintings, drawn from local collections, were recounted by an equally distinguished line-up of authors such as Iain Sinclair, Sharon Morris and Geoff Dyer.
Pared back to this essential core, always adhering to the same strict formal template, the seventeen writers’ recollections, each of them centred on their individual adopted trees, also resemble their wider subjects in the way in which an apparently narrow and confining genus does not preclude an underlying diversity. Appearing as extracts over the following pages of this publication, but available in full on the project website (www.waterlog.fvu.co.uk), the edited highlights of these larger transcriptions, along with the equally brief snapshots from the walks themselves, nonetheless offer a unmistakable index of the project’s scope and complexity. As one would expect, given their facility and sensitivity for language, the participants are both formidably fluent and exceptionally considered in their choice of words. Starting out from an ingrained, professional obligation towards accurate, almost pinpoint depiction, several of the contributors go on to imbue the process of the recall with a considerable degree of nuance and self-reflexivity. Never unnecessarily florid, many of the writers are especially alert to the myriad interplay of form and content, aware that the images they are endeavouring to capture might not only be conveyed in words but also in the ramifying patterns of sentence structure, or in the material unravelling of parallel, yet interdependent, strands of thought. If the spread of human knowledge is traditionally likened to the growth of a tree, it is no surprise when these little stabs at elucidation repeat the analogy in miniature form.
Sharing little of the conceptual sleight-of-hand by which another artist famously conjured an oak tree from a set of step-by-step manoeuvres, The Memorial Walks, in its feeling for landscape, its emphasis on memory, its ambition to renew, and, at the end of the road, its embrace of fallibility, radiates a refreshing and appealing humanity. At one level, an abstruse and fanciful attempt to replenish the company of trees in a landscape now largely denuded of their presence, it is also a compelling reminder of a fundamental human imperative to both summon up and commemorate what has gone. Conceived in memoriam to Sebald, and played out in the shadow of a storm that, exactly twenty years before, had dealt another devastating blow to some of the last remaining woods and copses in East Anglia, The Memorial Walks is, despite this doleful backdrop, a beguilingly uplifting work — testimony to the power (and, of course, the limits) of the written and the spoken word, and their enduring ability to keep the past alive.