CONCEPTS OUT OF THE ACT OF DOING: GARDEN AND BEYOND

1. Filling and emptying

2. Reciprocity as presence

3. Reciprocity not as social but as composition

Cascading panels.
Slight mis-match= Design
Context/ground for reciprocity : Culture

Too exact reciprocity= invisibility
Fallen through a hole into undergound burrow.

Unseen

Autism could be condition of too exact reciprocity.

Pedagogy for Autism
=training for mis-match

The art of sliding

Spaciousness between panels
=living space
Co-habitation

Responsiveness- emotion

Slightly skewed so as to hold open a shared frame of reference

Basis of memory is on this re-angling.

Creating different intervals
between acts of repetition.

Turned inside out
Truncated
extended
Slanted
One against another.

Consciousness is the activation
which comes between expectation of a repetition and
its scuppering or reapplication.

Any one sequence whether convention or not, functional or not is
insignificant on its own.

It is the angling upagainst other "takes"
held through other orientations of other
lived-out habits that creates the ground for a habitus.

That traction- pulling out and infolding back in, between the two or the many.
These points of tension and release give rise to all affects.
____

One can not speak of proximity/distance.
Only of a continuously evolving experimentation with different degrees
of tension and release.

That traction occurs at every level both within a single body and between bodies and in every aspect of evolving form-making and its continuing and simultaneous disintegration.

The two bearings of completion and dissipation occur simultaneously meshing through one another.

There is this Cat's Cradle traction between all states.

Revisit

Looked in at the Garden for first time in three, four months. Foliage moving in and winding its way through and over- wrapping up the garden. It doesn't take long. I was amazed. Actually impressed. Not that the garden or space has "gone" only that it has absorbed back into that free growth of unlimited extension until the extension winds back and forth on itself because it is kept out of another parallel tamed bit which is where the formal gardens of the charity are.
I went down through their area and past the disused tennis courts where people go for a smoke. Because of the low level naughtiness of what they are doing there- some kind of fall-out of school rituals, they take no notice of my tresspass- even kind of wink me on or am I imagining that? That I am in the cool gang for a while. The growth is like an etch-a-sketch scribbling over itself or a fly buzzing around a very particular scope of play. Density must surely come about. Maybe that is even how perspective was discovered. A kind of mistake that makes something of itself. And then all the winding theads lock one another in place.

A garden isn't plants. It's the cutting back of plants. The shaping of channels of vacumed space through those plants. It is negative enterprise or good hairdressing. The work is in hacking away violently because any gardener will know that every cut is an inspiration to the hormonal intelligence of plants, to grow some more. So you get low level dwarf bushinness with plenty of space around and above. The circuits are maintaned. The animals wander and birds fly without crashing into air nets. The chairs and the small red table I`d put out on the very last day in March are still there, grassses weaving around them so that if you were to sit down you would be half in camouflage. The cups and tea-pot would be completely drowned out unless you were standing right above them. A black cat nudges into me from the outside of the meshed wire fence where I am standing and through which individual escaped strands of foliage point. I nose up closer to that fence. There is something wonderful about what the place is making of itself without me lifting a finger. I feel drunkenly let off the hook. An escapee. A quirky get-away as if I hopped out on a whim just as the fence went up. And now the reversal that is taking place makes me want to thank my lucky stars that it is entirely unfeasable for me to now garden that space. I want to hug people as one back from the brink. To drink in the routines all around me. The comings and goings that scupper around the edges of that vacancy. And it is because it too was filled with details of comings and goings. Because it was made feasable by the removal of plant-life- by its continous day on day shaping like carving out a breathing chamber. Only to then find out that air exists on the other side of that special facility. The sick kid in the air tight ventilator room who suddenly goes out and doesn't infact die. Maybe that is what I expected and it didn't happen and it's a miracle and all the new foliage is a kind of intensity of lung that claws its way back into london. That's enough. That punched out hair style- incredulous, unmanageable that wraps around your ears and crawls down your neck. Embarassing but a sign of good health.
I saw a program on the Berlin Wall a few days ago because it went in 1989, twenty years ago. There was a piece in it about a border control man in Hungary where people from the east had gathered for a "picnic" and a group crossing. Conveniantly the officials were not there on the day and so it was left up to the border control man to make things lax and just let the people keep coming through. We used to bleed in and out of the garden like that over the course of years while the day to day running of the charity beside us went on somwhere collectively knowing about this haemorage but individually not quite rememering and so being shocked again on each new encounter. And it was only finally when the fence went up and time was set aside in the job remits of various employees at the charity to evict us that a crunch point came. We had a three day event that summer-last summer- in the garden inbetween various eviction notices; our own "picnic".
An article appeared in a local paper headed "Memory Gardens, Stay of Execution" The chief executive of the charity got angry about negative publicity and called us devious. The fence went up. A tangible differentiation occured. We got kicked out. I think that was necessary to happen because all this "Niceness" of charities only goes so far because at the end of the day they are a huge corporation. A businness. And in the plans for the new housing development on this piece of land that they are trying to sell and that, due to the recession has been pushed way off the radar, we do not even register. Look at google earth Legard Road, running alongside Bedford Works, Highbury and Islington, London. We are a vacant lot. So the issue of those weeks was interesting as a brief newsworthy piece. And now, thank god, the garden is being rubbed out and it isn't us or them who are doing the real rubbing out, it's the plant life itself. And it is mercifully more intelligent than any of us.

Passing the smokers on my way back through, they, like us before are simply going from here to there, following a workeable line, maybe cutting corners with work quotas to push out a little elbow room for a cigarette or too in a disused tennis court. So what. Didn't we do the same, pushing back some weeds to make room for a teapot and cups? Enough time to get away from the frenetic traffic of the road. But we are all on the job in one way or another. And the news item that a large Care Corporation has somehow sinned or at least unjustly failed to meet the needs or concerns of a bunch of autistic gardeners is neither here nor there. It will be swamped in the further features that are already enveloping it. Charities need autistic melt-down. They need to save people from themselves. The garden project- its coming and its going, reversed the order of need for ever. It will never feel the same. The garden disintegrating into itself is part of that reversal. And it is getting along just fine. We did our bit. Held back a tide so that it could come back again all the stronger.
We are free to roam now.

Terminal

I take a photograph of a man cutting a railway track with a chain-saw. I am drawn to the scene by the sparks flying, splaying out around the man who has a yellow reflector jacket on. His stance is braced in order to keep the position- in order to maintain the connection between the metal of the blade, whizzing on its rotary to become a cutter, and the metal of the track. Every ligament is pushed against another ligament creating an imoveable traction through man, machine and track. Otherwise the sheer force of the motorised blades would ricochet the man off from the surface of the ground where he has lodged his feet by angling them. He would be blown off the scene like a tumbler.

The picture has come out well. Digital camera means I can see it immediately. Though the man continues with his job and soon has cut his way through the bar. In my picture it is never-ending. Sparks are generated but never run their course. They will never die.

The heat that generates the sparks can not be given in its replication Yet that is where the energy to cut the bar comes from. The friction of surface on surface creates the heat. Like two flint-stones. The method is unchanging.

The track being cut is at new Cross Gate where an extension to the east London Line is underway in order to attach it to the Olympic Village of 2012 which is also being pulled into place as i write so that by the time the track reaches out to the stratford site, there will be a matching connection. A place for which it can reach. An exact fit between journey and destination.

At the moment people are working on small specific patches of ground to schedules and plans monitored by supervisors and sectioned time and space plans like fragments of a map- tufts of hair that must surgically be implanted one piece at a time in order to recover the congruity of the head. Perhaps the head is the final magic trick. Not really something that is ever really there from the onset but something found along the way.

People are in their localities- attending to the very real gravitational forces that allow for the temporary alignment of a high speed motor with a piece of steel track and of a hundred and one other logistic and mechanical puzzles of integration to be worked out there and then.Perhaps they are all after all the same thing made over in different ways but relying on a simmilar alignment of otherwise random elements. It`s how we bring things together that gives them their use.

Many bodies, many minds, many objects and many marked out enclosures are part of this rendering of a line. The line has no width but it describes an immense territory that over the years will take on a life of its own. That life will be known not only in the digging over and jointing of new track but in the cups of tea drunk along the way, the sandwiches consumed, the shifts and patterns of the workers who meet, create formations and dissipate. The aching limbs,new muscle formations, engagement with materials, order forms and bills. The hot and cold of interchanging seasons and their affect on mobility and ease. On outwardness and introversion. The periods of waiting for people and things to arrive. The individual journeys of each person pencilled in to that day`s work in what ever capacity- How they make it on to site and return home again. Whether a day has gone well or not and what exactly that comes to mean for each man or woman whose lives are in some way tallied to the rendering of this line. All these things could be seen as outside the scope of an investigation or could be factored in to the pattern which like the sparks flying from the motorised cutter, splay out into elaborate and never completely predictable patterns making each specific physical contact however transitory, an intersection or junction point to an intimate and yet hugely enlarging mesh. Maybe the line being built is incidental rather than central. A mere excuse for this elaborate dance of elements to take place. A marker on which to gage from where and to where all else must jostle and never keep still.

Mechanism

An autistic girl in the sensory room in an autistic resource base. She is operating a system. An upturned coconut shell over a plastic container with coloured marbles and empty coton reels now hidden, inside. The coconut shell becomes aligned to a switch on the side of a wall which operates alternately two small lights behind tiny coloured concave beads, one tinted red, the other green. When the switch is turned either the red comes on and the green goes out or the green comes on and the red goes out.
Depending on which is activated, the girl operates manually the coconut shell to correspond with that input signal so that it is manoevered either clockwise or anti-clockwise. Simmilarily there is a co-ordinate sound that is emmitted from the girl`s mouth to demarcate the difference in direction either one way or the other. The sound is low and gutteral and it literally played backwards when the signal changes indicates a change in direction. At a certain point of rotation the girl glances up to see if I am getting the optimal points of change-over where one part of the system reverses and is aligned with different signals. I am a necessary witness and not outside of the device that I witness. It is this witnessing back and forth that holds in place the procedures of the device, pacing it and staging its stops and starts between glances and further manipulations. We are running through the pacing of movement and pause at speeds which are monitored by the interpolation of the parts of the machine as they are being operated. This is a process in real time whereby any change in tempo would necessarily affect the pitch of the sound, the movement and integration of limbs and the point of interuption that puts on hold and reinvigorates the entire procedure. This system has nothing to do with cause and affect; with wether the hand initiates the switch or the switch initiatses the cocunut or the cocunut initates the voice. The girl is well aware of that. It is a staging mechanism for bringing together correspondences that create a given space for seizing alignments through time. It`s a meeting place. That being not the room, not the Autistic Resource Base, not the school, not Hackney , not London, but the device we have created together that is making itself known through all these various levels. An intersection through zones that it traverses without ever really knowing where it is going.

Emergence and Disapearance

Emergence and disapearance

An eight year project initiated by a group of autistic and dyslexic artists and gardeners who occupied a piece of land belonging to “Action For Children” in North London, the Central National Office of one of the largest Institutional Care providers in the UK.

This long-term arts project was an attempt to initiate care practices in order to test out attitudes between the management of such a Care Provider and a disabled self-organized group. The way to do that was to situate ourselves in the back-garden of such an organisation and to practice rituals of hospitality- such as drinking tea.

The project was in two parts:
The gradual establishment of a garden on disused land.
Its equally gradual erasure in a drawn out period of eviction.


Emergence and disappearance over time

What does it mean to be social? What does it mean to be non-social? To be contactable or non-contactable? These terms need to be played out beyond their determined boundaries so that the meanings emerge within the tempo of a particular organization, allowing at various intervals for one kind of flowering and another kind of foreshadowing. Where there are contradictions between differently combined organisations, tempos or agents, areas of interest emerge. That becomes an on-going spontaneous mapping that can’t be charted in advance.

The making and breaking of various sculptures in the garden seeks to mirror the even more gradual emergence and disappearance of the garden itself together with facets of memory, knowledge and conversation that come and go within the garden and in a wide network of associations triggered by the fact of there being a garden. Finally the garden as such becomes this constant playing out of appearances and disappearances and in itself ceases to matter.

Its final erasure is facilitated by the bureaucratic procedures of the Care provider who is employed to work for the garden to that end. This is how the garden becomes a space of interaction or transaction which for the purposes of its own end can hire the resources of a national organisation. It diverts practices of “high functionality” to the service of practices of “low functionality” in a parasitic way in order to question conditions of Use and nurture methods for a different kind of organisation of knowledge. This only unfolds in tangible, responsive and paired acts that are on-going. In that way the garden and the Care provider become associates.

From Here to There

I`ve lost my blue notebook. Probably somewhere on the train between Nottingham and London. Or maybe at my sister's in Nottingham. I was going to go through it and maybe lift something out of it onto this new blog. I begun it in Gottingin ,Germany at a Contact Dance festival and so lots of it is sketches of moving figures and certain distances between evolving contacts and then when they mesh together. Something in those figures troubled me. Either depicted apart or muddled up. It's more the thought-sense of merging before it occurs and the small lines and flurries that break out of demarcations, cross the space and make something of it - like the buzz of the generator, controlling air in the building which, in that room, especially on that first night when, having struggled to erect a tent in the dark with the rain coming down and only a single source of weak light from a torch, there in the woods on the edge of the university sports complex, I then entererd that building, empty, dark, with my torch still on and in the silence wandered around. Then I met a german woman who switched on the light and took me down corridors that were in the process of being taken apart or rebuilt- I don't know which- and then past an amazing wall panel of variously potruding coloured formations that after the weak light, the long journey on the train, the collapsing tent, dark of the woods, really took my breath away. It was a climbing wall which in the days to follow saw human attachments placed here and there even though they were making steady progress to some kind of summit- the ceiling of the building- because such was their slowness in needing to attach securely on a vertical surface that our sliding and spinning one over another inwards and outwards in that hinge of contact- a rotational core that genrated movements we could only prepare for, never anticipate- made those climbers appear static- like carbuncles clinging to favoured sites. Though if we were to enter and then leave the dance studio, even for the briefest of moments, all those sites would have been rearanged, the affinities shifted, the clinging intimacy reaportioned.
So on that first night, not far off midnight because I`d been faffing around with the tent for so long, I entered that room and with the buzz of the generator like the beginning of some momentous opus- the musician told me it was a clear and perfect G major that never slipped but just droned on- the dancers slid past, through and off of one another. I didn't move from my place on the floor with my back up against the wall and there was no compulsion to get up or do anything because my body was wrung out from the journey and I was in my jeans. Everythng set in a place there and the lack of compulsion somehow kept a balance and I was really able to see the dancers in a kind of mobile slow- motion which was both rapid and slow. It was a dream but where connections and reciprocity flow on and are tangible and viscous. Maybe a place where feeling plays out a drama and manifests in stops and starts for the participants and the passers-by. There were no hangers on because to eneter that captured space was to alter the shape and breath that flipped the beat of potential. Maybe that is contact dance- not trickery or special contortions, but this kind of flowing over and sensing out the feeling in these kind of elastic intervals. I`m not sayng it was all down hill after that, but a certain breathlessness of trying to get to the right place on time, to acknowledge or of being aware of somehow giving up the moment in the strangle of themes, of collectivities of turned-in voices or bodies or both and spasms of vacancy between bottled in drives and pre-empted explosions made the program at times too lax and at times too needy. Again stangely, right at the end, when half the particpants had gone and the last dance begun, I found agin the dance, maybe out of the many marks and routines already taken, coming through. That I think was emotion and it carried us through huge apartness and an affiliation of skin on skin each emoting the other until there was no seperation. Untill in face we were becoming the genrator buzz. I think, thinking about it now that that is not where the visilbe bodies are or where they can be depicted- it is another arangement of bodily intent that does not come from one side or another or from one place in time or another but spreads out from a central core and ammasses into a tensile field that holds attentiveness even as bodies slip through. It is a very still moment that a dance can conjur up and suddenly and unexpectedly release. I am socially awkward and stumble over words and movements when driven to express seperate and individuated themes coming from a certain directive that is understood to be "me". But that conjoint space where in fact we all of the time anyway reside is something that is compositional and so always interesting- it knows its bearings because habits, rituals, patterns, dressings and undressings, slurrs and slurries take it over, lending one body to another, completeing or cutting into new dimensions one utterance with another. It is as if the wind returns bigger and better; the home-made kite cobbled outof plastic bin bags and flown in my local park by a solitary boy too tall to fit his knees under his school desk, is given a new portioning. The focus shifts- high up above the park the kite is tethered and with small tugs pulled from below into further heights. And the boy is no longer over-sized or under-aged but is what he is- a necesary link between a respondant tensile apparatus- part of that apparatus. And the Jewish orthodox kids crowd around him and though he never looks down and seems to ignore them, they keep coming, drawing closer. And the mothers don't mind and don't try to seperate their clean kids from this tall black boy because they know something is happening- something is being held together in this park in Hackney and they are just as much a part of it in letting it happen as the boy with the kite. Smiling is of the same kind of operation- somewhere between holding in place and letting it go. And it is the act of smiling that makes us feel good. It is not a derivative of a feeling it is the engine of that feeling. How to begin it - that is a question since it never begins in only one place.

A r t I c u l a t I O N

Alien Support

What is articulation? This strange word that means the utterance of vocal sounds but also means the composite integrated movement of limbs. In architecture it is used to mean the different twists and turns of a building. The demarcations that are not caught up into a single gestalt but must in a sense be enacted or worked through each time the building is considered like the decoding of a movement pattern by the minutiae of bends and deformations that put off centre continuously any single bench-mark of up/down, left/right.

Maybe we only know such orientations according to a waywardness that tips the centre pole out of its literal rooting. Buildings like humans are systems of gravitational leanings. Otherwise they become so upright as to lose the quality of what it means to be a habitat or to inhabit.
A person, a building is an influx of tendencies that push and pull it out of shape. It is the risk of rain; the risk of falling that makes us understand a shelter and understand uprightness.
In a sense we are always working between a structure and our use of a structure. They do not tally although one informs and situates the other.

It is the piecemeal breaking down of structures into surfaces of use that is their articulation; their breathing configuration. Their on-going metamorphosis.