Start
00.00.00
00:00:50
“The last tram leaves the Town Hall at 11.05
p.m. They are peaceable. A little morose, they think about
Tomorrow, in other words simply about another today; towns only have
one day at their disposal which comes back exactly the same every
morning. They barely tidy it up a little on Sundays”
Jean Paul-Sartre, Nausea
00:01:40
A simple act. The simplest of the day. A door, cold and
clear in the morning light stands framed in a masonry wall. Brass
greets your hand with a metallic bite. Push the door open.
Enter.
00:01:54
Stop. Replay the scene. The simplest act of the day.
Go back and run the moment again.
Lefebvre said:
“Consider a door. Is it simply an aperture in the wall?
No. It is framed (in the broadest sense of the term) A door
without a frame would fulfil one function and one function only of
allowing passage. And it would fulfil that function poorly, for
something would be missing. Function calls for something other,
something more, something better than functionality alone. Its
surround makes a door into an object. In conjunction with their
frames, doors attain the status of works, works of a kind not far
removed from pictures and mirrors. Transitional, symbolic and
functional, the object ‘door’ serves to bring a space, the space of a
‘room’, say, or that of the street, to an end; and it heralds the
reception to be expected in the neighbouring room, or in the house or
interior that awaits..”
00:02:10
An arch, a gateway. Two parallel strips of granite lead to
granite sets. Marking an entrance. A transition.
Portland stone, carved into rigid, defined form. You walk under
this arch, and again stop. Retrace your steps. Back over
the granite sets. Between the parallel granite strips and
back. Start again.
00:03:10
An arch. A gateway. A transition. Two parallel strips
of granite and stone sets. A change in temperature. A
change in light. Darkness encroaches. A corner to be
turned. Or a vista beyond, to be engaged with the eye, not the
body. Merely framed at this time. A change in attitude -
psychological preparation for a difference, a shift in mental
space. An alteration in timescales. Physical properties
denying the dream-space. But emersion allows a freedom. The
totality of the town can be subverted. Re-imagined in the space
of our bodies, our thinking, feeling corporeal self, distant, for a
moment, from the visual; distinct from sight. Lefebvre said,
“Visual space in its specificity contains an immense crowd, veritable
hordes of objects, things, bodies. These differ by virtue of
their place and that place’s local peculiarities, as also by virtue of
their relationship with ‘subjects’. Everywhere there are
privileged objects which arouse a particular expectation or interest,
while others are treated with indifference. Some objects are
known, some unknown, and some misapprehended. Some serve as
relays: transitory or transitional in nature, they refer to other
objects.”
00:05:15
In its sense of function, the town serves to refer to other
objects. The transitory or transitional are constant referral
devices, exchanging the potential for the actual, the thought for the
action. An imagined, psychological space, constructed from past
experience and daydreams is replaced, overlaid, by the
experience. The movement, the muscles response to the step up,
the walk, the struggle with the over-heavy oak door; this is the
overlay. The actualisation of the potential. And here, the
act kills the dream, replaces the uncertain joy of possibility with a
dogmatic, repetitive, cyclical rhythm.
00:05:50
We move on too fast. Stumble, half seeing through the arch.
Our consciousness at times elevated, at times suppressed. Nausea
again;
“…I shall find myself at the bottom of the Coteau Vert, and if I raise
my head I shall be able to see the windows of these houses which are so
close to me now light up. In the distance. Above my head;
and this moment now, from which I cannot emerge, which shuts me in and
hems me in on every side, this moment of which I am made will be
nothing more than a confused dream.”
00:06:24
A confused dream. A collection of moments from which you cannot
exit. Stay still in this scene and take in the detail.
Collect the fragments of images upon which the urban has emerged.
The suppressed elements of the city collected and encrypted.
Hidden in the dark psyche of a controlled regime of signs. Of the
monumental claiming rights over ritual, as if it owned the ritualised
elements of city or town life. The dominant regime, but not the
isolated regime of Domes and Towers and other erections. A regime
of small, insignificant ritual moments. Moments of passage
between places, between other moments and events. Cities and
Towns of deep insignificant moments collaborating to form a totality, a
dominant system and structure, based on movement. From Jean-Paul
Sartre, we gather that;
“Movements never quite exist, they are transitions, intermediaries
between two existences, unaccented beasts.”
00:07:30
But stop, once again and reconsider the scene. A collection of
moments. Specific and varied. Collaborating, forming the
events of daily life.
00:07:42
We have yet to move beyond a daydream. A waking process of
thoughts linked to actions in the whole. Moving and walking,
stepping away in oblivion we continue. Collaborating with
ourselves and each other and with the thresholds, transitions, doors
and windows to create moments, moments we don’t recognise or
remember. Memories of moments that die in the warmth of our
homes, in places of safety and security. They die and leave only
their echoes in the slight tensions and pains of our muscles.
These traces of activity, the movements that never quite exist linger;
but we work to forget, sooth away with inactivity. With drugs and
sex and television. These moments linger. But die.
00:08:30
“The last tram leaves the Town Hall at 11.05 p.m. They are
peaceable. A little morose, they think about Tomorrow, in other
words simply about another today; towns only have one day at their
disposal which comes back exactly the same every morning. They
barely tidy it up a little on Sundays”
00:08:54
It is another day. A day to be disposed of, then recomposed from
the ashes and dust and dirt and grit of the previous encounter with
daylight. A city slumbers in the grey light of morning.
Stirs and returns to soothing the memory of moments from muscles.
00:09:10
Today, entropy amasses strength. An encounter with rabid entropic
activity unleashed on this small town. A day of lived and
understood ritual will leave its stale odour mingling with the vomit
stains and stagnant pools of bile.
00:09:48
People rushing through monumental gates into the stadium. From
empty volume, a space ready to be quantified, to a space of enclosed
anger, rage, ecstasy and death. The enclosure becomes the point
of change. It is here that the moment is enacted. This
space of crossing. This threshold. The town, the space of
the everyday is left behind. Its connotations of work, of the
life as lived in office or shop abandoned. The place of work
forsaken; turned into a space of hedonistic release. The pure
pleasure of violence unleashed against the self or the other.
00:10:36
Violence is ritualised. Internalised. The effects may be
seen, exposed in the street. Charge and counter charge.
Channelled. Vacuums of normalised behaviour pull in the energy,
the fear and hatred, manufactured for an occasion. Unleashed,
they rage against the dying of their light, and they, too are
formed. Readied by the location and arrangement of their battle
lines drawn in the chewing-gum spattered, blood stained tarmac. A
no-mans land, a barrier drives the tension to explosion point.
Hurling bottles against armoured police, these lines are
dramatized. Deliberately ritualised. An invisible force at
first, made manifest by authorities attempts at control. For this
day, the town belongs to them.
00:12:05
Lefebvre said,
“The night does not interrupt the diurnal rhythms but modifies them,
and above all slows them down. However, even at three or four
o’clock in the morning, there are always a few cars at the red
light. Sometimes one of them, whose driver is coming back from a
late night, goes straight through it. Other times, there is
no-one at the lights, with their alternating flashes (red, amber,
green), and the signal continues to function in the void, a despairing
social mechanism marching inexorably through the desert, before the
facades that dramatically proclaim their vocation as ruins.
Should a window suddenly light up, or on the contrary go dark, the
solitary dreamer might ask himself – in vain – if it concerns a scene
of illness or of love, if it is the movement of a child who gets up too
early or of an insomniac. Never does a head, a face appear in the
dozens and dozens of windows. Except if there is something going
on in the street, an explosion, a fire engine that hurtles without
stopping towards a call for help. In short, arrhythmia reigns,
except for rare moments and circumstances.”
00:13:15
The city is awake. Facing a new day. A nearly-new
day. The rhythms constructed through an interaction between
flesh, muscle, ligament, concrete, steel, glass. The ritual is
rhythmic. The repetition of moments, consecrated and clear.
A transparency of thought and action, supposedly. I can see you
again. Abstracted, abstract. Superimposed upon a clear,
singular field. Lines flickering, reviewing your actions, your
interactions with the solid.
00:14:29
A doorway, opening onto the street. A glass-glow. A window
stands staring into the Town scene. Glossy lips announce their
presence with a luminescence, a blood red desire. Staring.
You stare back. Hold its gaze. Between her lips and yours
lie a layer of toughened glass, a Perspex sheet, and an outer layer of
dirt. Smeared, but transparent – lips glowing, a signal to
stop. Imagine. Transpose yourself. A signal to
stop. To leave your life behind. The dank, dark cold
December day dies. A sublimation of the quotidian. A moment
that occurs, repeats ad infinitum. Ad-shell. Ritual,
enslaved. A process of connected relays. Mirrors.
Targeted, efficient. You live her life. Her smell is
yours. Her moist lips, her pneumatic body, her acceptance, is
yours. A brave new world.
00:15:33
But dissatisfaction falls heavily. Coldly. And an answer is
obvious. Necessary. Essential. A perfunctory
satisfaction. A euphoric joy. But empty.
00:16:24
The stone of the town sits quiet now. Privately enacting Greek
legend, static forms attempt an epic narrative, endlessly
repeated. Ritual battles, played out for drunks, the destitute
and insomniacs.
00:17:08
“The last tram leaves the Town Hall at 11.05 p.m. They are
peaceable. A little morose, they think about Tomorrow, in other
words simply about another today;”
End
00:18:06
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