Journey to the Lower World is a book, with DVD, documenting a shamanistic performance by the artist Marcus Coates, in a council flat in a condemned tower block on a housing estate in Liverpool. It seemed pretty offputting: was this some Beuys epigone with a community arts grant, patronising innocent citizens with a half-arsed orientalism, or was it a fatuous po-mo joke? The publicity postcard shows Coates draped in a deerskin (complete with head and hooves) standing in front of a lift with a small, slightly nonplussed-looking resident and a shopping trolley.
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The foreword, by Mark Wallinger, didn't help, with its casual dismissal of 'that symbol of man's folly, a tower block'. What's wrong with tower blocks is not the architecture, imo, but other kinds of structures. Drew Milne has a great sequence of tower-block-shaped poems that treats something of this subject (would't like to say what his precise opinions are though). I live on the top of a mid-rise council block, with views of the Lyons estate at World's End. I love it.
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Anyway, this book eschews conceptual formalism, with a large-ish landscape format allowing for the wide range of types of content inside: whole-page stills of the ritual in progress (blurry reaction shots of the audience of residents), prose, verse, screenlike or down-the-White-Rabbit's-hole images of animals like those Coates met on his trips into the Lower World, sequential frames of a demolition. As well as by Coates and Wallinger there are texts by the book's editor and publisher Alec Finlay, and extracts from anthropological accounts of shamanism. One of Coates's has been lineated into verse by Finlay. As art publishing goes, this is slightly out of the ordinary. If it seems a bit 'everything but the kitchen sink', that may be appropriate to the event, when large, unwieldy, potentially wild animals and possibilities enter small, domestic, contained lives, to activate, but perhaps also to discharge and convert their anxieties.
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After reading the whole book, and watching the video, I was won over. Marcus Coates was alive to all the possibilities for discomfort of his activities; he also cared (or appeared to) in an unpretentious and exploratory way, for ordinary people and for society. And the shaman thing didn't come from nowhere, or merely from the weekend course in Notting Hill(!): apparently he has been doing things with nature always. Learning to imitate animal cries, for instance. This mode of art practice came to seem a genuine if experimental attempt to contribute and discover, or uncover, something on behalf of a real world. The residents were about to be rehoused. They were looking for a comforting image, or omen perhaps; they were not deluded, but understood the nature of the avatar; and their paticipation, including embarrassment and defensive amusement, seemed really to be an observance of community, or of the desire for it, on the part of a self-consciously tiny minority of local inhabitants.
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Around the time of getting this book, in April, I attended a performance by the brilliant Chris Goode of his one-man show 'We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg', in the North London home of Sue F's friend Jonathan. This by no means purported to be a sacred ritual, and I am certain (I trust) Chris would run a mile from the word shaman, but there were solemnities, as well as sillinesses, and the gamut of stuff in between, and he is after something real. Chris presents with total theatrical command yet a resolutely 'normal' and even slightly diffident manner. And then he goes away, evading applause.
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Anyway, this conjunction left me musing a bit about, well, blokes doing strange things in other people's houses, I guess; and the potential social functions of performance ... But the aim here is to write about the book really. 'Bookscapes' is a new series of publications by Alec Finlay, under the 'Platform Projects' rubric, though his former press, Morning Star, is listed as co-publisher. I guess I first met Alec at small press fairs years ago, when he'd be hawking his exquisite little poetry publications, or you could say minimalist artists' books -- pamphlets and cards -- or sometimes minding the stall for Wild Hawthorn. Back then too I remember him giving a lecture at an art librarians' conference, about Little Sparta. With 'pocketbooks' though, Alec made a significant move into the trade press arena, and did some brilliant anthologies in particular, but also small classics by individuals, all working within an attractive unified 'brand'. Libraries of Thought and Imagination, about books and what they mean to people, and Helen Douglas's photo book Unravelling the Ripple, are my top favourites. 'Bookscapes' seem to be pushing the bounds of the bookshop book again by using a range of formats this time, and taking the multimedia further. I'll write about some more of them.
http://www.alecfinlay.com/bookscapes.html
(An account of the earlier pocketbooks: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr93-2/kelly.htm )
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This post is different from yesterday, because of wanting to write something potentially public about the bookscapes.
