London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  The design of the building, a broad Y frontage, masking an hexagonal spread, was by Maxwell Ayrton. The man responsible for the now defunct Wembley Stadium. Monsters of the imperium lording it over North London’s gentle slopes. The twin-towered arena with its energy-sapping turf (democratic spectacle) and the forbidding cliff (brick-and-glass) of the Research Institute with its bright copper roof.

  From the Ridgeway, the Institute offered its public face; dark bricks weathered to a muddy red, narrow windows. The Institute was definitively institutional, government approved, government sponsored. From the rear, the fields: the Big House, the asylum of popular imagination. Where ugly things happen unseen.

  The sensitive nature of the research undertaken in the soft corridors, the cells of this building, explained the level of security. ALF, video libertarians, subversives: armies of unreason at the gates. Art is the palliative. Pick up the MRC brochure, Research Opportunities, and it promises: ‘visits to the theatre, ballet and concerts’. Pick up the Millennium Edition of MRC essays and the booklet concludes with a nightshot, a snoop-snap: gold windows, a deep blue sky worthy of Erne Paleologou.

  Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Brainmash on a glass slide. Up on the hill, gazing out of the restaurant over the fields and small farms – John Constable heathland floating to margin – you wonder if this is the site of incubation, foot-and-mouth, or the place where the virus will be snuffed. Hot cubicles, rooms with double-doors and security locks. Meshed windows. Browse the official literature and you fall into a J.G. Ballard reverie. Pieter Nieuwkoop ‘elegantly demonstrated that sandwiches of cells of two poles recreated equatorial-like tissue’. A Ballardian tropic, jungle flies fat with meat, housed in a secure compound. Infected quacks, pushing the limits of theory, experimenting on themselves. Tennis courts, easily available narcotics. An island of greenery, secluded mansions, cult centres, business parks, surrounded by fast-flowing arterial traffic.

  ‘It was the hippy era. Young men in the US forces, and students throughout the universities of the world were experimenting with drugs that changed their perceptions of the world. And in the rather splendidly placed new laboratories under the high roof of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, (Mike) Gaze used electrical recording to show that if impressions coming from the outer world become too disturbing, the brain can respond by modifying itself So wrote Geoff Raisman in his essay ‘Unravelling the Workings of the Brain’.

  The scientists Gaze and Keating established that ‘nerve fibres arising from the back of the eye form a pathway that sends an image of the world to the brain. The image fits with what we expect.’ But what happens if expectations are confounded? Gaze showed that the brain is capable of configuring chaos, re-establishing order. The community of scholars playing dice with reality can, with proper adjustment, reconvene that reality. The ratty trio out there, scuttling and jogging and sweating up the slope, can be made to appear as standard citizens; interested parties on their way to a lecture by a German artist.

  James Lovelock worked in Mill Hill for twenty years before writing The Gaia Hypothesis. Zhores Medvedev, exiled from the Soviet Union in 1973, studied the mechanism of ageing. ‘He was,’ according to a brief biographical sketch in one of the Institute’s publications, ‘the first to report a major nuclear disaster, and its cover up, that occurred in the Urals in 1957. Later he recorded the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident.’ Mill Hill absorbs traumatised intelligence, shock waves of what-if; solo artists and team players chasing endgame consequences.

  I sense X-ray spectres and affronted animal entities breaking away from Mill Hill’s determinist gravity. There’s too much stuff in the literature about dog distemper, pig farm viruses, snail vectors, ‘minced tissue of infected animals’, in vivo research, ‘transgenic’ experimentation. Too many flashbacks, memory shards: King George VI and his munificently hatted consort performing the official opening ceremony in 1950. George, the chainsmoker, was not by then much of a photo opportunity for things medical. Wasted, death-printed; white knuckles on a well-polished black top hat. Funeral wear. Queen Elizabeth, gracious, glacier-slow, accepts the flowers.

  Mill Hill is a memory device. Tom Bliss, the current head of the Division of Neuropathology, worked on methods of demonstrating how the brain’s network of nerve cells (the road map) stores memories. The building becomes a brain, nervous activity in the hippocampus, boosting the efficiency of our chemical transmitters. Using thesis research, drugs will be developed to enhance memory, to hold time.

  But there are other methods, walks, landscape meditations, looped journeys. We were there on the morning of 28 April, in a lather, panting through the formalities, reaching the lecture hall – where Erne is sitting one row behind us – in time for Gerz’s talk. Drummond’s account, should he give it, would sheer away from mine. Marc’s considered prints would contradict my snapshots. The memory of the memory slips. We invent. New memories, unaccountable to mundane documentation, are shaped. The dream anticipates the neurotic narrative.

  Gerz is relaxed. He’s done this before. Being foreign is a good scam. An English conceptualist couldn’t manage the gravitas, the heavyweight back story. Foreign lets you play for time in the Q & A session: Gerz answers questions, asked by another German, in English. He translates, retranslates. Like W.G. Sebald, he exploits the melancholy of not-belonging, making fabulous. White spaces, broad margins, grey photographs of empty libraries. He can do smooth English or indifferent English, claiming the benefit of a certain ambiguity of expression. He disagrees, so he says, with all polemic statements about public art. Discussion of practical issues – the wheeze, how you pull off a project – brings him to life.

  Antifascist monuments spearing the karma have given Gerz his fame. Names signed on a column in Harburg, which sank slowly into the earth. Doctored war memorials in France. Cobblestones lifted and inscribed with the names of vanished synagogues. Unappeased memories. Civic corruption exposed or ridiculed. There is always, if you concentrate, a solution. Something to be done. Gerz lives a long way from Hoxton (domestic trivia, personal distress, reconfigured trash). If you can sell it, if a sharp suit can sell it for you, it’s no good. Simple rule. The best of the English conceptualists aren’t conceptualists, they work with memory; work on memory, infection. The sculptor Brian Catling got it right: leave your show in a skip, let the audience walk away with whatever they want, the unfranchised version.

  Drummond is engaged by this performance. Gerz has got the look right: blue, buttoned to the neck, with (Beuys-copyright) poacher’s waistcoat, pockets for pens. He’s scholarly and fiercely quiet: ‘I’m not normally giving lectures. I’m not alone to talk.’ Thin spectacles. ‘The contemporary only is contemporary.’ He speaks of the object, the painting that qualifies for museum residence, as ‘baroque’. Mill Hill is imperialist baroque. It is fixed in time. Alongside Wembley Stadium. Prewar optimism. Post-war austerity. Football, science: the New Elizabethan World. Eagle comic, helmed by an ex-Revd, with its sliced-through sections of technological wonders. The hippie researcher blasting in the attic. Beagles in the basement. Off-duty technicians getting their culture hit in the lecture hall.

  A woman challenges Gerz. Drummond has his hand up, but she’s younger and prettier. She wants to know about monuments for other life forms, for animals. ‘What we call language,’ says the conceptualist, ‘is a one-way road.’ There have been poems to fruit trees but no fruit tree has ever written a poem to us. ‘Reality not ethics.’ Drummond likes the message, but Atkins (the vegan) is visibly annoyed.

  ‘It wasn’t any more fountains, fountains was the good thing,’ Gerz announces. ‘Parks – that’s a crazy place to put art.’ Drummond, who envisions (but does not always enact) subversive gestures in the street and alongside motorways (dead cows from pylons, lager distribution to vagrants, cash barbecues), can buy the antipastoral thesis. If they let you put it there, if they pay you for it, walk out. Dead fountains, erased obelisks, vandalised public statuary achieve m
eaning only when they are ignored, when they have become anonymous.

  The message, according to Gerz, never changes: ‘half makes sense, half is baroque’. There is memory and there is the object, the diary, the book of photographs, the video tape. Gerz, a polemicist, operates through the questionnaire (realising, I suspect, that the person who sets the questions sets the script). Democratic dialogue is revealed as a tool of the benevolent demagogue. ‘I’m looking for viewers, I’m looking for artists,’ he says. Which describes the fix very neatly. In a perfect world (a world that behaved according to the freaks of my imagination), I’d walk away. Atkins and Drummond, separately, would deliver their accounts of this excursion. I’d sit in the pub, read them over, edit them: twin voices, contrapuntal contradictions.

  A six-and-a-half-hour walk for one hour in the company of a German conceptualist, an account of acts undertaken in other countries to honour memory. ‘Even if they didn’t have dead people, they had an obelisk.’ The Research Institute is the right place to receive this message. ‘Photographs,’ Gerz concludes, ‘are always healing.’

  There were no more walks with Drummond. Mill Hill earthed all that, the hunger, the predatory attention. Atkins took part in several Drummond projects, recording signs, shooting portraits. Drummond is a collector of images. He spent the money left over from the glory days, the small change that he didn’t burn, on a print by Richard Long. He found it in a gallery at the end of a day’s psychogeographical hiking (the shape of his own name walked into the landscape). But photographs do not heal, they hurt. They hold time. They obstruct the flow of memory. Drummond put the Long print up for sale. He printed leaflets. The concept: burn the cash and bury it at the Icelandic location depicted in the artist’s print.

  One year after our attendance at the Gerz lecture, on 10 May 2000, a set of ‘specially commissioned photographs’, portraits of scientists, was exhibited at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. Fifty years of achievement: discoveries of the structure of viruses, antibodies; ‘mechanisms for the control of gene transcription; the gene for sex determination’. The photographer, the healer, had ‘exhibited extensively, including London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and New York’. His work was ‘published regularly in books and magazines worldwide’. Name? Marc Atkins.

  4

  We drove out of London, using a section of the M25 (Junction 15 to Junction 12) as a slowmoving travelator, for the culture-switch (M4 to M3). Sun going down behind Wraysbury Reservoir. Sword-shaped flashes from the windscreens of oncoming traffic. Gravel pits, lagoons, reservoirs: factored from aeroplanes climbing into the clouds, out of Heathrow. Grounded motors in fidgety lines; crawling like invalid carriages as they creep up on a supermarket check-out at Tesco’s, Mare Street.

  Anna doesn’t care. Just so long as she’s leaving London. Even if it’s only for a few hours, an art show in Selborne; a mile or two outside Alton, Hampshire. Gilbert White’s Selborne. Curate White (1720–93) was born in the village. He refused richer livings to remain in his birthplace. He kept a ‘Garden Kalendar’ and later a ‘Naturalist’s Diary’. In 1767 he published his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. That book, in various disguises, has been a staple of secondhand booktrade ever since.

  One of the first and most civilised customers of my dealing days, an elderly Jewish gentleman called Mark, who lived in Sandringham Road, Dalston (aka ‘The Front Line’), in a book-crammed flat, put me on to Gilbert White. He loved White and Jane Austen (house heritaged in an Alton suburb); Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey. Whenever he found one of their books on a stall, in Camden Passage or Farringdon Road, in Cecil Court, he would buy it. And, if possible, talk to the vendor about the author. If Mark got a day off work, he took a bus into the countryside. He would visit Austen’s house or walk through the fields around Selborne.

  I helped Mark clear his room when he moved into sheltered accommodation in Green Lanes, Finsbury Park. There must have been two dozen copies of White’s Selborne, in all shapes and conditions. Illustrated. Pocket-sized. Distressed. Uncut. Mark’s England, playing against the streets in which he lived, was conjured from these precious volumes. But now, at his daughter’s insistence, he was forced to choose: one copy per title.

  Selborne had a mystique. A connection with a set of multiple-occupation houses at the back of Ridley Road Market, Dalston. We drove into the village on a mild spring evening (25 April 1998), found somewhere to park, and set off to look for the Mouth & Foot Painting Artists’ Gallery.

  That title wasn’t an obvious crowd pleaser. Better then, pre-virus, but still capable of triggering unhappy associations. The gallery was easy to find, the crowd spilt out onto the village street. I recognised a few faces, old friends from Dublin and Hackney. The show we had come to see had been hung for one night only. ‘Michael & Mary Dreaming: 21 paintings celebrating a journey along the Michael ley-line from Norfolk to St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall.’ The artist was Laurence (‘Renchi’) Bicknell. Leaflets offered a selective CV. ‘Born 1946. Previous exhibitions include Combined Show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1974), One Man Show at the Amwell Gallery (1974), and the original 8 paintings from this series at the “Shamanism of Intent” exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham (1991). Renchi has been running The Little Green Dragon bookshop (with Vanessa) for the last 15 years and since selling the bookshop in October 1997 he and Vanessa are both working at Lord Mayor Treloar College as House-parents.’

  I knew most of this story. I’d met Renchi in Dublin, when I was (officially) a student and he was a transient, a presence, a painter. A runaway. There was a certain romance attached to this: Caporal-blue workman’s jacket, handpainted shoes. Hair combed with a fork. Youth. Enthusiasm. Talk. Connections, back in England, with the New Departures mob, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown. Adventures on the road which, in telling, grooved into myth. Restlessness, the quest. Petit mal seizures.

  Renchi laboured under an impossible burden. Laid on him by his peers. Be the painter. Americans with trust funds syphoned the production line. Public-school Englishmen with jobs in the City commissioned portraits. Be the Rimbaud genius. Burn out. Nominate your Abyssinia. Disappear.

  Into Hackney. Communal houses. Paintings that were endlessly revised, toshed over, abandoned. Sacred sites visited and recalled. Dissatisfaction. A plump ginger cat. An infant in dungarees. Window open on a wild garden. Paintbrush in mouth, cigarette. Unshaved. Multicolour cardigan. The romance wearing thin, overexposed in 8mm diary movies. Exploited.

  I’d been involved with the Whitechapel Show and the Shamanism jamboree at the Goldmark Gallery. But I hadn’t seen much of Renchi in the years between these events. He’d left London for Hampshire and we’d stayed put. Running a bookshop took most of his time and energy. I had also been peddling books, secondhand, used, rediscovered. A relentless circuit of dawn markets, days at the wheel, up and down the country, cleaning, pricing, stalling out. We both survived, by the skin of it. What Renchi and Vanessa had left over went, as I read it (from a distance), into the spiritual quest, communality, networks of likeminded associates. Earth magic. Ceremonies of appeasement and rapture. What I had in the tank was saved for operating a small press and scratching at road notes, quotations from obscure books, that might one day be shaped into a viable structure.

  I circled the Selborne gallery, following the drift of Renchi’s journey. The hang was chronological: ‘24 days of walking and further days of exploring a network of lines coming alive’. Yellows, golds, blues. The work was unshowy, without tricks or painterly effects; quiet ego. The sense was meditative, respectful of place, of geology: crumbs of chalk or flakes of stone were sometimes pressed into the margins. If you insisted on a genealogy you could think of Cecil Collins or Ken Kiff. But that might be a false note. There was, at one level, a real, blistery narrative to these walks; chorographic mappings attendant on the soar, the flash of revelation. The pull into light. And if Renchi steered, at times, towards a Glastonbury orthodoxy of angelic orders, stars, wells
(panels that might pass as New Age greetings cards), there were also plenty of hard miles and English downland weather.

  This was no stroll. Or mere record of snatched days, outings from the bookshop. Ivan, Renchi’s fit and chunky son, accompanied him on the final stages, through Somerset and Cornwall. When they took a break on Dartmoor, Ivan filled his dad’s rucksack with rocks.

  Chorography, not topography. Paul Devereux, in his book Re-Visioning the Earth, makes that distinction. The ancient Greeks, he tells us, ‘had two senses of place, chora and topos’. Quoting Eugene Victor Walter, Devereux sees spiritual tourism as ‘a complex but organic mode of active observation’. This was Renchi’s methodology, arrived at after many years of trial and error, false starts. The chorographer was hungry for place: ‘place as expressively potent, place as experience, place as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’.

  The feel of this Selborne event, the friendliness of the crowd, was resolutely non-metropolitan. Paintings that had been executed over a seven-year period, a journey of around 350 miles (as the crow flies), with backtracking, exhibited for one night only. In a specialist gallery in a Hampshire village. The opening was the event. The following morning the paintings would vanish (they would subsequently be shown at The Miracles Room, Isle of Avon Foundation, Glastonbury). You wait twenty-four years for a solo show from Renchi and then it’s gone in the blink of an eye.

  Leaving, as a prompt, a small blue book with tipped-in colour reductions, bright stamp-sized panels accompanied by a textual gloss. Picture and legend facing each other, so that the journey can be re-experienced. It’s a nice form.