Keith Tippett and Ellen Fullman at the Bristol New Music Festival

The first Bristol New Music Festival took place over the weekend of the 21st to the 23rd of February. Events were distributed across the Western part of the city in buildings which reflected something of its rich history and culture; Georgian churches, harbourside warehouses, Victorian concert halls, arts centre attics and University rooms. Some prominent names from the new music canon were to be found in an eclectic and wide-ranging programme. The music of Frank Zappa, John Cage, Christian Marclay and Harry Partch was played in various contexts and configurations, with Ensemble Musikfabrik performing on reproductions of Partch’s incredible microtonal musical sculptures. Experimental music and improv stalwarts John Butcher and David Toop were also present. Butcher played, under the guise of Tarab Cuts, in a duet with Mark Sanders, both of them in turn duetting with old 78s of Sufi traditional music, recordings on a fragile, sonically weathered medium which is inherently ingrained with time and history. Toop collaborated with Emptyset, a Bristolian electronic duo, and with the Turkish artist Cevdet Erek, who also created an installation for the gallery at Spike Island, the arts space fashioned from a monumental old redbrick cube of a warehouse.

I travelled up through the flooded Somerset levels (the train looping of on a picturesque diversion past Westbury and Bath) to see Keith Tippett and Ellen Fullman. As a Bristol boy, born and raised, this was home turf for Tippett. He’s part of a significant lineage of adventurous Westcountry jazz and improvising musicians; a lineage which includes the likes of John Surman, Don Rendell, Andy Sheppard, Keith Rowe, and long term residents Lewis Riley, Lou Gare, Mike Westbrook (who studied art in Plymouth), and Kate Westbrook (who attended the artistically progressive Dartington Hall School). The New Music Festival could be seen as an elaboration of the Rare Music Clubs which Tippett organised in Bristol in the 80s and 90s (and which made it down to Exeter on a couple of memorable occasions). Deliberately setting out to dissolve preconceived generic boundaries, these were triple bills juxtaposing artists from the worlds of jazz and improv, classical and experimental, and folk and world musics. The idea was partly to expose people who came along to hear a particular artist to sounds they might not otherwise have entertained, offering familiar flavours alongside others untasted.

There was a certain echo of such open-eared syntheses in the festival performance, too. Tippett was performing in The Lantern, a recently refurbished Victorian theatre space adjoining the more imposing Colston Hall. The latter venue is very familiar to him. In an interview in the May 2001 issue of The Wire, he recalled having heard the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands there, experiences which had a profound effect on the young Keith’s musical education.

He was leading an octet in this late afternoon performance, and there was a definite sense that this was a new generation of musicians which he was nurturing. Tippett has long been involved in musical education, having run a jazz and improvisation course alongside Lewis Riley at the Dartington Summer Music School for many years. He shared the stage in comfortably familiar partnership with drummer Peter Fairclough, a regular collaborator over the years. The young bass player Tom McCredie completed the rhythm section, and to the right of the stage sat a five piece brass ensemble.

It was the compositional side of Tippett’s multi-faceted musical personality which was on display on this occasion, something made visually apparent by the multiple sheets of manuscript paper progressively concertinaed out across his piano stand. The octet were playing his suite The Nine Dances of Patrick O’Gonogon, which draws inspiration from Irish traditional music, culture and landscape. It began with a chaotic weave of fragmentary, staccato voices crossing and swooping in abstract, arrhythmic fashion. They were emulating the darting patterns of the subjects of the first section, which was entitled ‘The Dance of the Return of the Swallows’. There has always been a distinctly elemental cast to Tippett’s music, perhaps expressing the rural environs of the Westcountry in which he grew up. His solo piano improvisations seem to summon up the sounds of the weather – wind, rain and sun-dappled haze – alongside the complex whirl and eddie of riverrine flow and the upper-register trilling of birdsong. This evocation of the natural world goes hand in hand with a strong spiritual dimension. Whilst remaining at a far remove from blissed-out new age self-narcosis, Tippett has always been clear about the sacred aspect of his music, its indivisibility from the spiritual dimension of being. Joy and love are words which he is unafraid to use to distil its essence, and in the Wire interview, he summed up his musical mission by simply stating ‘I’m interested in moving an audience. That’s my job’. It’s a refreshing change from the distancing abstractions and affectlessly academic approach offered by many involved with supposedly ‘difficult’ music, which can serve to put off all but a dedicated hardcore of bold listeners. Such an openly spiritual outlook is reflected in the titles for some of the suite’s nine sections, such as ‘The Dance of the Intangible Touching’, ‘The Dance of the Sheer Joy of It All’, and ‘The Dance of the Day of Observance’.

The suite shifted through moods of quiet reflection and soft melancholy, bursting out at regular intervals into joyful, unsuppressible exuberance. The fragementary dabs and darts of the opening gradually coalesced into one such outburst. Here and at various points throughout, there were definite echoes of the Ellington and Basie bands which Tippett had heard next door (where Colston Hall is currently being refurbished), as if he were picking up on reverberations which had never quite died out. It was the lush Ellington and Strayhorn sound inflected with British and Irish accents. Elsewhere, there were elements of plangent brass bands, of pastoral English chamber and orchestral music, and of folk tunes and limpid Irish airs. At some points, emphatically stabbing Bartokian chords (with a dash of Monk and Stan Tracy blended in) powered driving off-kilter rhythms. Tippett rose from the piano stool at key moments to co-ordinate unison brass shouts with dramatic gestural conduction.

It all ended with Tippett’s piano voicing solo, Messiaen-like chords with whispered spaciousness, the last one left to drift off into the air. A few moments of silence settled, and then the audience showed how much they had been moved in the time-honoured fashion. Tippett generously directed praise towards his young musicians from his position at the side of the stage. He thanked us in turn, and finished by requesting that we didn’t reveal the rugby scores. He may regard his music with the utmost seriousness, as a matter of sacred trust and spiritual calling, but he is evidently also a refreshingly down to earth man.

Down the wires - the long string instrument

Ellen Fullman is an American musician who plays an instrument of her own devising and construction, which she has dubbed the long string instrument. In common with Harry Partch’s unconventional, self-constructed orchestra, it can be regarded as much as a sound-producing sculpture as a musical instrument in the generally accepted sense. Although in this case, given its unwieldy dimensions, it might be more appropriate to think of it as a sculptural installation. It’s designed to expand sonic possibilities, to produce tones and timbres which would be beyond the reach of the common range of instruments. It is a resonating machine which can accumulate multiple microtonal intervals along its length, amassing dense, lingering clouds of drone.

The Thekla illuminated

Anticipating a magical, semi-ritualistic experience, it has to be said that the initial impression was a little disheartening. The long string instrument was rigged up on the top floor of an undistinguished office and apartment block adjoining the Arnolfini Gallery which still seemed to be in the final stages of construction. A narrow, bare concrete staircase, which bore the builders’ chalk mark measurements, led past what looked like the corridors of student halls of residence to a fifth floor attic which had all the atmosphere and warmth of an empty open-plan office (which a large, rather forlorn cheese plant in the corner suggested it might indeed lately have been). There were only one or two chairs randomly scattered about, and the sizeable audience, who filled the space, milled about looking a little lost, some electing to squat on the hard concrete floor. Through the windows at one end, the lights strung along the permanently moored ship the Thekla (now itself a concert venue) glowed green, whilst on the other side, the harbour venues and casino sign provided seductively twinkling illumination.

The long string instrument itself was fascinating, though, and well-worth elbowing you way through the milling throng to inspect at close quarters. It took up one half of the room, stretching like twinned clusters of power lines from one end to the other, wooden boxes marking the termini and serving as resonators for the vibrations gathered in their hollow interiors. Fullman ducked into the space between and wandered up and down between the two arrays of wires. She coaxed drones from various points along the strings, rubbing them with fingers given added friction by a patina of rosin. She appeared like a curious alien giant on a desert road, looking quizzically to either side and playing the telegraph wires over which she loomed, listening with rapturous attention to the eerie sounds they produced. Her slow progress up and down the aisle was almost like a form of Tai Chi. Her fingers flexed infinitesimally, stretching out into new configurations to caress fresh harmonies from the strings on either side. It was visually very arresting. At certain junctures, a sudden swift stride to another sector of the instrument signified a shift in the shape of the drone – physical movement precipitating a new musical movement.

The drones which the long string instrument produced were not soporific, and didn’t offer a new age blanket. They were astringent, with overtones piling up in justly intoned masses, shifting in dense fogs of billowing sound. Overlaid on this sonic cloud mass, German musician and artist Konrad Sprenger (aka Jörg Hiller) sprinkled pointillistic showers of percussive notes from his virtual guitar. They were scattered in semi-chaotic flurries but more widely spaced into a patterned continuum of sound. They sounded a little bit like a cimbalom’s loosely springy jangle, with a metallic reverberation conjuring cavernous underground spaces. A steady run-off of seeping water dripping into a subterranean pool, maybe. It’s a sound environment which has been explored for real by The Deep Listening Band, adding pattering percussion to the pervasive watery splashing, as recorded on their 1990 LP Troglodyte’s Delight.

It was an effective melding of soundworlds, particulate digital bits floating like illuminated dust over the warm currents of the resonantly vibrating strings. At some point, the virtual element started to blur into smeared portamento swooshing, veering into synth-like sounds which headed towards Tangerine Dream territory. Sprenger soon reverted to his previous mode after this brief spacey interlude, however. He brought the piece to a close by systematically shifting down in key and tempo, giving the impression of strings being tuned until slack and flapping with unmusical non-resonance. Fullman slowed down in accordance, moving back towards the home base of the far resonating box (like the upper terminus at the end of cable car lines). Finally, she raised her hands from the strings, leaving the last hovering overtones to dissipate and dwindle into silence. A moment of suspension, and a bow indicated it was all over. It was an entrancing performance which, in spite of the underwhelming setting, benefited hugely from the visual experience of witnessing this remarkable instrumental sculpture tremble into living, singing motion beneath its creators shaping hands.

Neverwhere bus-stop - Brunel's underworld

After this, it was off to Bristol Temple Meads for a rather surreal journey back home, which involved descending into the labyrinthine stone underworld beneath Brunel’s grand station and waiting for a replacement bus service by a tunnel entrance and beneath a distinctly gothic railway building, above which Jupiter shone brightly. It was an atmospheric end to the day. The healthily-sized crowds at both events I went to suggest that this inaugural New Music Weekend was a success. Hopefully it marks the beginning of a long and fruitful tradition.

Bristol Harbourside Festival and Adventureland Golf at the Arnolfini

Car free festival

The annual Bristol Harbourside Festival attracts hordes of people from near and far (some 250,000 this year, it’s estimated) to the wharves and waterfront cobbles around the dock basin which was once the city’s commercial heart. Stages are set up in naturally suitable nooks, squares and amphitheatres, and stalls line the paths, offering all manner of foods whose scents combine as you wander by, reflecting the historically diverse mix of people which this port town has always harboured. Numerous community and green organisations also have tents or sheds from which they promote their ideals and practical local schemes, all of which demonstrates what a centre for alternative ideas Bristol has become. One of the incidental pleasures of the festival comes from the closing down of surrounding roads, allowing the city to breathe, and creating a more relaxed atmosphere, free from the niggling tensions the constant, jostling presence of traffic creates. In fact, the blocking off of roads has become a regular occurrence in Bristol, once a semi-legal gesture towards reclaiming the streets from the choking tyranny of the car, and now given the official imprimatur of the mayor. No wonder Sustrans chose to set up their headquarters in the city.

Swindon Dance Urban Youth Dance Academy

There was a sense of urgency about proceedings this year. On Saturday, the weather forecast confidently predicted that the skies would open sometime in mid-afternoon, so the onus was on enjoying as much as possible outdoors before having to seek shelter or find indoor entertainment. The dance stage is always a highlight for me, with some fine local groups performing in a wide range of styles. There were some amazing young dancers, whose commitment, control and sheer energy was a joy to behold. The Bristol-based Hype Dance company spanned the age range (and comparative sizes) of the teens and their street dance (please excuse an old fogie his imprecise categorisation) was vital and full of sass. CVS, resplendent in electric blue, spun and kicked high with swinging jazz styles. The teenagers of the Swindon Dance Urban Youth Dance Academy had great fun with some Hindi pop routines, all crouched postures and angularly raised arms. The pleasure which all these groups evinced, their enjoyment of their first moments in the spotlight, was hugely infectious.

Alejandra Velasco making flamenco shapes

There was also some fine flamenco from Alejandra Velasco, the Madrid-born dancer who now lives in Cardiff, where she also teaches dance (as she does in the Tobacco Factory and Cotham School Dance Studios in Bristol, as well). She was accompanied by guitar, violin and wooden tea-chest beat box, along with the odd outburst of polyrhythmic handclapping. Dressed in pure white, she threw some exquisitely sensual shapes, arms raised elegantly above the head before being flung down to the sides with angry passion. Her stamping feet provided their own rhythmic counterpoint, thundering out imperiously commanding rolls on the wooden boards.

Plague in a more restrained moment

Providing a total contrast, the Plague street dance company brought their hip-hop styles to the stage for an explosive 15 minutes. Twice winners of the HHI (Hip Hop International) World Hip Hop Dance Championships, they displayed their effortless command of various forms in what amounted to a condensed history of modern street dancing, from breakdancing and robotic popping and locking through to contemporary styles. Some of their moves were astonishingly athletic, a kind of stunt dance which left you half wincing for fear of the damage which might be done, and then applauding when they pulled it off, cockily gesturing for due recognition. Other moves relied more on small and nuanced gestures, with co-ordinated group choreography rather than individual display. The whole was a breathless experience, and received a rapturous response.

The Thekla today

There was music outside the Thekla, the massive German-built ship which used to haul loads of timber around the Baltic. It now operates as a music venue, and I was particularly keen to look around due to its association with Vivian Stanshall, ex-Bonzo Dog Band member and wild eccentric in the classically affected English style. Indeed, it’s entirely down to Viv that it’s here at all. A friend found it laid up in Sunderland in 1983, and discovered that it the owner was looking to sell it for £21,000. With the support of Stanshall’s wife Ki, the boat was converted into what was intended to be a floating theatre, christened the Old Profanity Showboat. Viv was in the midst of one of his troubled periods at the time, living on his own boathouse, the Searchlight (an old Irish Navy patrol boat), which was moored near Shepperton. He didn’t have much to do with the initial arrangements, even though they were being made with the ultimate idea of providing a space for his work to be rehearsed and staged.

The Thekla as Old Profanity Showboat, circa 85 - Vivian Stanshall, family and friends

The ship set sail from Sunderland on 30th July 1983 and arrived in Bristol a few days later on 4th August. So this year marks its 30th anniversary as a fixture of the Bristol harbourside. Stanshall joined his wife and son on board in July 1984, having made something of a recovery, and also having lost his boat, which sank to the bottom of the Thames with most of his possessions (but thankfully not Viv) still on board. He set about writing a musical, Stinkfoot, which would launch the Showboat as a theatrical venture, and which was loosely based around children’s stories which Ki had written. Written specifically for the Thekla’s stage, and containing plenty of new songs, it was put on around Christmas 1985. Stanshall described it as ‘contemporary Gilbert and Sullivan; popular, optimistic, enormously visual’ (visuals which included giant prop lobsters, which were apt to break out into song). In the usual Stanshall manner, it was also gaudily surreal, cheerfully vulgar, nostalgic, occasionally revealingly personal, and delighted in wordplay and shameless punning. It ran from the 7th to the 21st of December 1985, and was a success with audiences and critics.

Forgetmeknot outside the Thekla, shortly before the rains came

Unfortunately, after that chaos descended, along with numerous hangers on who did nothing to help realise the Old Profanity Showboat as an ongoing venture. David Rappaport, the Time Bandits actor, came to stay as an uninvited co-inhabitant for a time. It was also during his time in Bristol that Stanshall first met Stephen Fry, who had come to see Stinkfoot, and would later become a great champion of his work. However, it soon became apparent that no-one was really in charge of the theatrical project or had any firm idea as to the direction it should take. The money ran out, and only a few months after Stinkfoot had brought in the first audiences, it lay abandoned once more. Happily, it’s now a thriving musical venue, and the old hold provides a natural place to house a stage, with a balcony to provide a more general overview. An upstairs bar includes a more intimate, acoustic stage, where local singer Aaron Douglas was playing his heartfelt and soulfully sung songs with dextrous guitar accompaniment and resounding foot stomp percussion. This leads out to the foredeck, where you can sit and sip your drink looking out over the harbour beyond. The ironclad sides give it a solid bulk which underlines its status as a permanent dockside resident. For the festival, a stage had been set up outside, where I heard Forgetmeknot playing. A largely female group (only the bass player and the drummer were men), they featured four part harmony vocals which harked back to the girl groups of the 60s, and had a similar feel of tunes tested and worked through on street corners or in successive living rooms.

Once the rains did come, it was time to head indoors to the Arnolfini Gallery to put around (or through) some ‘pieces’ on a crazy art golf course. Promoted as Adventureland Golf, this was the idea of Doug Fishbone, who invited a number of artists to create indoor crazy golf holes, using whatever theme they fancied. After all, there’s little sense of cohesion to be found in the typical crazy golf course, where you can find yourself facing Big Ben on one hole, a giant gorilla on the next. The emphasis here is on fun, but this being art, I feel compelled to wring some kind of symbolic meaning out of each of the six holes, and out of the experience as a whole.

Social decline in the model village

You begin in the standard way by getting your clubs, balls and scorecards from the kiosk. Some people have been taking this very seriously, we were told, and there had been some fierce competition, presumably involving competitive dads. You start off at Jonathan Allen’s hole, which is like a rundown corner on the edgelands of a model village. A post-war prefab building is boarded up, and graffiti tags have already started to patch its walls. Tiny skips on either side are filled with its ripped out guts. I had assumed that this was some small scale factory building, but the accompanying notes informed me that it was supposed to be a library. The name of the contractor hired to tear it apart and dispose of its contents is stencilled on the side: Camborne, a conflation which fixes the blame in no uncertain terms. There’s no way through this building, no means of access. It’s set in the corner of an l-shaped run to the hole, so you have to ricochet your ball against its barred doors, as if battering against them with impotent frustration. Once you’ve turned the corner and left the abandoned library behind, there’s really no turning back.

The impossible dream - going for the fluke shot

Brian Griffiths’ hole provides a seemingly sunny contrast to this scene of dereliction and spiritual decay, with a bright yellow, carpeted hump of a desert island, staked with a palm tree in the traditional manner. Around this, you put your ball around the calm, level surface of the deep blue sea, whose serenity is punctured by the ominous black sails of shark fins, which you occasionally bounce against. This paradise seems so close, so easy to attain, presented in such bright and enticing colours. But damn it if it’s not almost impossible to get that ball up on the golden mound. It just keeps rolling back down into the uncertain, shark-infested waters which surround it. The shorts hanging to dry on the palm tree mockingly attest to the fact that someone has already made it, and is revelling in the good life. But it’s going to take pure luck rather than skill or judgement to join them up there. The alluring images of an instantly attainable paradise, whether material, spiritual or a fusion of the two, are chimerae, shimmering mirages which recede the more desperately we reach out to grab them. The grass will always seem greener, or in this case, the sand a brighter yellow.

Circumventing tyranny - edging round the monument

Doug Fishbone’s hole is placed in the centre of the course, erecting a statue on a plinth as if in the central square of a town or city. The gesticulating, militaristic figure is continually taking a bowing fall, pulled down to earth from its elevated position like the statue of Saddam Hussein in the wake of the second Gulf War. It’s in the centre of the room in which the crazy golf course is housed, and also in the centre of this particular hole, the fake grass fairway parting around the plinth in a neat circle. You have to negotiate your way around this monumental embodiment of the dominant, tyrannous ideology, sneaking past and trying not to attract the attention of its enforcers. It’s a metaphor for the way people have always had to negotiate the tides of history in order to achieve the simple human goals of life (knocking the ball in the hole in this reductively symbolic version).

A forest of signs

David Shrigley litters his hole with an excess of signage, placards written with a deliberately amateurish, childlike scrawl, as if these were instant thoughts, just this moment occurring and immediately scribbled down. They are singularly unhelpful, confusing, misdirecting and generally distracting. Some are also philosophical playful, such as the Shanklyesque ‘This is not a game’; some are banal, aphoristic nuggets of cod-new age wisdom (‘the ball is your friend’); and some simple emotional directives (‘be nice’). In a light satire on the all-pervasive maze of notices and announcements we have to negotiate and do our best to ignore every day, these signs are the physical obstacles we have to get the ball around on this hole. The temptation is to simply pick them up and chuck them to one side with a triumphant ‘HAH!’

Hitler holed - promenade dictators

Jake and Dinos Chapman offer more comic dictator capers, with an oversized seaside bust of Hitler which you have to knock your ball under (altogether now, ‘Hitler has only got one ball…’). The oversized führer has a uniformed and swastika banded arm hanging limply by his side which loosely jointed at the shoulder, allowing you to swing it up in a swift salute if you so desire. When your ball does pass under his bisected torso, he emits a cry of ‘nein, nein’. It’s either a frustrated outburst at his inability to prevent your passage (through France? To Berlin?) or a mocking comment on the number of bungling attempts its taken you to make it through (nine! Nine!). All amusing enough, unless you happen to be a German tourist, or someone who remembers the genuine suffering of the war. It maintains the fundamentally adolescent tenor of the Chapmans’ work, which doesn’t really get much beyond the level of heavy metal album cover art. You can almost hear them sniggering and snorting in the corner.

This is the end - the final fairway

The final hole by Zatorski and Zatorski (sorry, Zatorski + Zatorski) strips away all the extraneous props and confronts us with the void. A smooth, speckled black surface provides a frictionless fairway which speeds the ball towards its final plummet into darkness. There are no obstacles to negotiate – the passage to the hole is all too easy. The polished basalt slab along which the ball glides could be the material for a gravestone. Or it could be some cosmic fairway, dark matter dimly scattered with weakly burning stars leading inescapably to the gravity well of a black hole. And once the bright white ball, which we have guided around so many of the obstacles on this crazy golf course we call life, goes down that hole, it disappears completely. Where does it go from here? Well, it makes its rolling Bardo journey through subterranean wormholes back to the booth, where you also go to return you clubs and pencils. And there they sit and wait, ready for the next time round.

Olivia Plender at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol

Olivia Plender’s exhibition Rise Early, Be Industrious, on at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol until September 9th, makes maximal use of every room available, each turned into a world with its own particular character, offering a series of alternatives or parallel possibilities. A common theme underpins the otherwise diverse experiences awaiting the visitor as they pass through these worlds. As the title suggests, this theme is the nature of work, the moral or philosophical framework within which it is placed, and perhaps most importantly, the question of who stands to benefit most from the industrious labour which is so often put forward as a means to personal and spiritual improvement. There is also a strain of utopianism throughout, an interest in althernative, less hierarchical approaches to education, religion and social organisation.

The first room features two tabletop models, one (Empire City – The World on One Street, 2009) reconstructing the layout of the exemplary buildings in the British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley in 1924, the other (The Truth Itself Speaks Through Me, 2012) giving form to the allegory of John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress. In the latter, a narrow stair winds around and up mountainous hills to the Celestial City on its crest. This shining, domed, white-walled vision of paradise looks like some of the larger buildings in the Empire exhibition, offering a parallel with its version of the perfect world. It’s crowned with a radiant golden aurora which could have been cut out of a William Blake print, the new Jerusalem realised. The whole tabletop landscape, with its winding paths, railway modellers shrubbery and dramatic contours looks like the set for a particularly abstruse and esoteric episode of Michael Bentine’s Potty Time. It’s indicative of the nature of the exhibition as a whole that it is both accessible, engaging and fun whilst at the same time embodying serious and thoroughly researched historical, social and political ideas. The hand-woven banner How Paul’s Penny Became a Pound takes its homily and its depiction of an earnest, bright-eyed ‘good boy’ from a nineteenth century children’s book which inculcated the idea of economic investment as a sure way to happiness and prosperity from an early age. The Victorian ethos of hard work, dogged piety and parsimony is promoted in all of these works as being both morally and materially improving. There is an ironic distancing or critical questioning implicit in the use of the kind of banner more commonly associated both with the Arts and Crafts movement, and with the socialist solidarity movements to which its leading figure William Morris and others such as Walter Crane allied themselves, to deliver a message proclaiming a moral foundation to capitalist accumulation. There’s also a marked atemporality and symbolic contrast in the juxtaposition of the Celestial City with the cluster of Manhattan-style skyscrapers which lie on the plains below. Bunyan’s city is a utopian destination rewarding spiritual aspiration and moral virtue, and it dwarfs the miniscule modern city below, hinting at an abandonment of the moral basis of the Victorian outlook on work, and of financial dealings in particular, in a world which no longer feels the need for myths and parables of the upstanding life. The relatively stunted stature of the towers of finance, in reality built to impress, and to outdo one another in an ongoing and deeply symbolic competition to see who can rise the highest, points to a diminution which Plender, critical though she is of the exploitative basis of Victorian business and financial expansion, perhaps regrets. The model’s comparisons of scale suggests that a void of purposeless and directionless wealth generation has replaced the certainties of the nineteenth century world.

Celestial and earthly cities - The Truth Itself Speaks Through Me

These certainties are represented by the buildings of the Empire Exhibition, which brings them into the more unstable environment of the early twentieth century, and the post-First World War era. It’s a period in which the foundations of empire were beginning to seem shaky, and the assertive monumentality of the buildings reflects an attempt to reassert the idea of a solid and unified global economic system drawing on a strong central authority. The pavilions laid out in this ideal city each stand for a different country, with the design shorthand for an instantly recognisable national style or defining agricultural product for export. It offers a utopian, one world vision of global unity, laid out according to a well-ordered plan. Numbers next to the buildings and an accompanying key show how systematised and ordered the condensed world of the Olympia site is. But all the buildings are a bleached out, bony white, with all differences and distinctions eradicated. It might be a utopia when viewed from a particular elevated perspective, but from others it is an imposed order, mere tyranny. The currency and power structure of this tyranny is revealed by the mobile of magnified cut-out engravings which hangs at the back of the hall, in which symbols of sovereignty slowly spin above and in front of dangling farm animals, peasant workers and seeds.

A game for losers - Set Sail for the Levant

Upstairs, the origins and future directions of such a world order are laid out in a room which has a floor plan outlined with lines suggesting the pattern of a formal garden. A model of enclosure in miniature. In the corner, stacked bales of hay point to a rural past which can be played out in a game which Plender invented in 2007: Set Sail for the Levant. It’s a standard ‘who can get to the end first’ board game, with various obstacles and set backs encountered along the way. But the odds are stacked against the peasant playing pieces, with indebtedness, exploitation, starvation and resultant enforced criminality, imprisonment and early death the more usual outcomes. Nuggets of gold are hidden inside the oversized dice, the rewards of rare fortune, and the cards are printed and written in the style of mid-17th century dissenters’ pamphlets of the sort produced and distributed by the Levellers, the Diggers and other groups proposing alternative systems of land ownership. The World Turned Upside Down card emulates the famous image of the spreadeagled figure stood on its head which served to sum up the radical aspirations of the age, the sense that a real realignment of power was possible. You can sit on the bales of hay and play the game, and see just how fast you sink into oblivion. The Levant (the Middle Eastern lands beyond the Mediterranean) once more holds out the shimmering, mirage-like prospect of a golden Jerusalem, a paradise of plenty beyond the next horizon. Here, it is an escape from rather than a reward for hard labour, however. A promised land which you may only get to beyond the veil of death.

Duck houses and hobby horses - Ignoble monuments

Set Sail for the Levant, which is a kind of anti-Monopoly exploring the roots of modern capitalism, points to the way in which games and toys can have a core of cultural programming embedded within them. A more positive way in which toys can be used as a means of educational programming is found in Friedrich Froebel’s ‘gifts’, wooden building blocks which offered a gradually unfolding developmental system allowing for the creation of increasingly complex shapes over a structured period of time. A similar opportunity is afforded the gallery visitor through the collection of wooden blocks created by Plender and called Social Construction, the underlying programmatic purpose of the toy exposed by the title rather than covertly disguised. Towers, gateways, buildings and city walls can be fitted together, but the different architectural elements are fairly limited and solidly classical in form, so the variants on the basic social patterns which you can create are strictly circumscribed. The form of the architecture also promotes traditional ideas of social order, along with the continuance of established hierarchies which classical styles imply. Clearly there’s a heavily metaphorical element at work in this constructive play. On the far wall, three objects sit on shelves just above head level (for the averagely sized person, that is), seemingly random and unrelated neighbours. Each has a double meaning which connects them to the room, to each other and to the exhibition as a whole, however. A wicker model of a beehive offers a craft-made symbol of agricultural labour, and stands as a symbol of industriousness, and of a strict and unquestioning hierarchical order, with queen at the apex. Next to it are two objects labelled with bronze plaques positioning them as sarky equivalents of the monuments erected by the great and powerful to honour themselves and their achievements. One is a Swedish duckhouse, the absurd emblem of the recent MP’s expenses scandal; the other is a battered model of a rocking horse, marking a similar semi-comical expose of power and preferment, David Cameron’s riding of a ‘retired’ police horse owned by the former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks. The latter two objects give the lie to the ethos of the former, which further expresses the sense of righteousness and god-given order propping up the Victorian age of industrialisation, and the extent to which its rigid and self-justifying moral order has withered along with its imperial hold on the world. All three are interesting objects in and of themselves, even when divested of symbolic meaning – odd ornamental knick-knacks scavenged from the rubbish dump of history and tarted up to make them presentable.

Chat space - the informal TV studio

The next room is dominated by a wide, raised platform which you can leap up onto if your feeling agile, or ascend to via the ramp at the rear if you’re not (I took the latter option). Having thus attained an elevated perspective, you find yourself in a blend of relaxed seventies pad and open plan TV studio. Brightly coloured square cushions are scattered around to sprawl on and there’s a central declivity in which you can sit, or on the edge of which you can perch, and discuss art or anything else which takes your fancy. The whole is designed to evoke the spirit of the Open University programmes of the 70s, which sought to bring cultural education to a wider reach of the populace, and use the televisual medium to encourage participation and interaction. TVs are place around the central well, one showing Kenneth Clark’s 1969 BBC series Civilisation, an attempt to deliver a definitive survey of canonical Western art. Sir Kenneth’s TV is propped up on a plinth-like box to emphasise his authoritative approach to presentation. Facing him are two smaller tellies showing Open University programmes involving children on modern housing estates engaged in various forms of play, and a young, long-haired lecturer in casual clothing, which in itself rejects the formal conservatism of Clarke’s tweed jackets, holding forth on various ideas about alternative social and cultural models. There’s obviously an opposition being set up here, similar to that between Civilisation and Marxist critic and author John Berger’s response to it in The Art of Seeing. Civilisation is fairly easy to criticise from a modern perspective, with Kenneth Clark’s patrician tones (why does he pronounce mythology ‘mai-thology’?) coming from the upper ranks of the art establishment and his view of art history tending to present a parade of great figures the value of whose work as an index of both genius and of the progress of western civilisation remains largely unquestioned. Actually, watching it here and from the copy I borrowed from the library a while back, it struck me how beautifully filmed it was, with slowly panning cameras lingering on the frescoes, sculptures or paintings being discussed, or sometimes keeping the frame still for long enough to contemplate the work in question. It’s also noticeable how little Clark imposes himself on the material, appearing relatively infrequently to talk directly to camera. Indeed, he often leaves significant periods of silence to allow the art to speak for itself. I’d certainly stick up for Civilisation. It does what it sets out to do very well, and presented a definitive outline of the standard view of Western art against which Berger and the Open University lecturers could offer alternative perspectives, paying more attention to the political, economic and historical contexts within which the art was produced. The presenter of the OU films presages elements of the modern documentary approach, with his informality, his walking towards the camera and the broad gesticulations which accompany his expostulations.

A gallery attendant was perched on the edge of the central ‘forum’ well, and his presence invited discussion and involvement in line with the OU ethos. He was effectively incorporated into the installation (and I wonder whether an attendant’s presence was a prescribed part of the set up) and the engagement of the visitor was encouraged. Behind the scenes of the ‘studio’ were small heaps of communications, recording and viewing technologies from the time. There was a reel to reel tape machine and a stack of bulky, wooden framed TVs which brought to mind the multi-channel wall set up by David Bowie’s alien visitor in Nic Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth to feed his addiction to American media. There was also an office desk with scattered rolls of Dictaphone tape, local business telephone directories from the 60s and 70s (one from the Bedfordshire area allowed Mrs W to look up her grandparents’ old numbers) and a couple of phones with the old circular dialling wheels. It was surprising how evocative the ratcheting wind and release sounds of the dials were – a particular sonic aspect of everyday life which has completely vanished. This and the other pieces of redundant technology were a reminder of how bulky, tactile and time-consuming the means and methods of communication were in comparison to the modern day.

An adjacent room offers a display of materials from a 1976 Open University course which Plender is particularly interested in, Art and Environment. These booklets and posters are strongly redolent of the preoccupations of modern ‘hauntological’ artists and musicians, and many have a distinct Ghost Box air about them. The guide book for Danebury Hill Fort; the flexidisc record of ‘Natural Sound’ attached to a page opposite a black and white picture of Stonehenge casting dramatic early morning shadows; the field of newly harvested corn with the presence of big science on the horizon in the form of ‘golf ball’ satellite tracking stations, the message ‘art is not yesterday’ written across the centre; the follow up picture of a dramatic storm cloud in front of which a crudely sketched figure descends below a pyramidal parachute, the second half of the slogan, ‘art is tomorrow…’ almost acting as another riposte to Civilisation; and the various striking posters on the wall – the one for electronic sound, with clouds accumulating around the concentric ripples of a speaker, and that for natural sound, with its sketch of an ear looking like the rocky entrance to a cave; the unit Our Conversation with Things and Places borrowing Heath Robinson’s satirical portrayal of 30s modernist flats and the reduction of the Englishman’s garden to the boundaries of his balcony, and the Empty Box unit’s sculptural close up of pencil shavings and graphite dust; and the Art and Political Action module using a Maoist poster of happy red book waving peasants gathering around a cringing Nixon caricature and menacing him with giant pens, brushes and spades whilst a comrade leads the revolutionary singing on his accordeon. All of them could be part of the booklet for a Belbury Poly or Focus Group CD, featuring as they do that blend of tradition, folk custom and modernist futurism which the good folk at Ghost Box find so fascinating (a fascination which I wholeheartedly share). The module on witchcraft is also in that line, and exemplifies the strong feminist perspective which is brought to many aspects of the course. An investigation of folk song is also promised in the radio programme ‘Oral Culture’. The introduction to this module reads like an explanation of some of the central ideas behind Plender’s exhibition, which is perhaps why it has been left open at this page in its glass display cabinet: ‘There are some areas of struggle which have been so drastically concealed and distorted that they appear only in reverse: witchcraft is an example of this. There are other areas of protest and creativity that do not pass as recognised art forms and are consequently not ‘art’ and not valued’.

In the small gallery on the third floor of the Arnolfini, Plender has created artefacts which derive from or give expression to social movements which, to a greater or lesser extent, also took on the mantle of religious organisations. She has made another banner in honour of the founders of the Spiritualist movement, Katie and Margaretta Fox. She points to the fact that Spiritualism was a belief system which emerged from the common populace. It attempted to approach supernatural manifestations with the rationalist, scientific frame of mind of the Victorian age, incorporated wider progressive ideals concerning social equality, and eventually won recognition as an established church in 1951. The banner is designed to be hoisted above the heads of marchers, but unlike the young person’s guide to capitalism offered on the wall of the first gallery, this one, unlikely as it might at first seem, wouldn’t be out of place in a dissenters’ rally. There are also some brightly coloured felt tunics, which look like they might gave emerged from the cleaner and more wholesome end of the communal 60s. In fact, they originate in the communal 20s and 30s, from the kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a proto-New Age group which drew on Native American cultures for its beliefs and outlook. They emphasised outdoor living and traditional crafts, had a covenant outlining their communally held ideals, and created their own iconography and symbology. Besides the costumes, Plender has made a model, smaller in scale to those in the first room, a landscape tableau in which a colourful Kibbo Kift encampment is contrasted with the grey figures and industrial buildings beyond its boundaries.

Having created a different environment in each gallery, Plender then expands her exhibition beyond the official spaces into the reading room and library on the top floor, turning it into what she describes as an Entrepreneurial Garden. Once more inviting active visitor participation, this is her take on the modern ‘creative’ workplace, which has absorbed 60s notions of serious play and leisure as an alternative to the traditional concept of the working life and incorporated them into an environment which gives space and time for innovative ideas to flourish. A hammock strung across the corner was occupied when I looked in, although no-one was playing on the bar football table at the time. A model on a side table depicted the Arnolfini itself as such an Entrepreneurial Garden. Again, there was a great deal of fun to be had here, but with an underlying seriousness of purpose (serious fun, then). Plender made the point that such workplaces were still, indeed, places of work with hierarchical management structures in position. The products of creative work and play engaged in within these bright, relaxed anti-offices were still owned by large companies, often in the form of ‘intellectual property’. The siting of this part of the exhibition in a public space beyond the ‘official’ galleries was a clever way of showing how this new model of work affected to blur the boundaries between work and leisure. As a natural endpoint to the circuit which had begun two floors below with the Imperial and Celestial Cities, it suggested an illuminating contrast with the initial promise of material and moral improvement achieved through hard labour. Here, play can also produce value, but the question of ownership remains. And if the Victorians promoted the idea that every waking hour should be filled with productive activity, then the optimistic modern view of leisure and work combining and co-existing in and ideal balance often devolves into a competitive struggle for personal progress in which the imperative to work becomes just as dominant and all-consuming. A modern day materialist Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps, to the moulded white plastic apex of the Dream Corp., the penthouse paradise of the CEO.

Social Construction

Plender has managed to combine an engaging and enjoyable visual (and tactile) experience of immediate appeal with philosophical exploration of real depth and breadth, of those who wish to investigate further. A couple of small boys in the first gallery seemed genuinely enchanted by the models, and a discussion was in full swing in the informal TV studio installation, which showed the exhibition could be enjoyed on many levels by people of all ages. A thick wodge of accompanying notes, offered as a glossary, gives background information on a number of the themes which run throughout the exhibition, including the OU Art and Environment course and the Dartington College of Art with which it was indirectly linked (a local connection for me, there), Google and the modern workplace, the political scandals, comical and serious at the same time, for which she has produced her amusing proposals for official monuments, the Kibbo Kift and Spiritualism movements, and cybernetic and systems theories (as recently explored in Adam Curtis’ documentary series All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, itself in line with Plender’s ideas about cultural TV programming). All of which further demonstrates the extent of the research which lies behind the exhibition, and the links and associations which Plender has forged between different cultural and historical ideas and movements. The kind of unconventional route through knowledge which the OU would have encouraged, in fact (and still does, of course). You can hear Olivia Plender explaining in clear and cogent terms the many ideas behind the different rooms in her exhibition over here. Rise Early, Be Industrious continues until 9th September, when it will be put to bed.

The Bristol Harbourside Festival, Danceroom Spectroscopy and Radio On

The Matthew sails again

The Bristol Harbourside Festival, which took place under sunny skies last weekend, has grown into one of the largest city festivals in the country over the last decade, and the waterside paths and bridges are always teeming with slowly circulating crowds. The harbour itself is packed with rows of moored boats both humble, flashy and more remarkable. The reconstructed three-masted ship The Matthew, the original of which sailed across the Atlantic under its captain John Cabot until it bumped into Newfoundland in 1497, glid through a short circuit, smaller modern boats puttering past and around it like fussing court attendants. Steam tugs, canal barges and fire-floats took their turns along the artificial channels and basins dug and engineered in the early 19th century to circumvent the widely fluctuating tidal levels of the river Avon. The pannier-tanked harbour steam railway engine chuntered up and down past the remaing dockside cranes. The whole place was full of the noise and bustling activity which would have been a daily reality when it was a busy working environment, but with historical eras overlaid and thrown into unlikely proximity. A Brunel lookalike is generally to be found wandering around with cheery civic pride near to his ship The Great Britain, identifiable by his towering stove-pipe hat and black frock-coat, if not these days by a fat cigar clamped in the corner of his maw, Edward G Robinson-style. Stages are scattered around the waterside, and in the neighbouring Georgian environs of Queen’s Square, showcasing some of the best established and up and coming local music, dance and circus acrobatics.

The Sailor and the Sea - the Mark Bruce Company

I always particularly enjoy the dance here, which takes place in the natural theatrical piazza of the Millenium Square, with its faceted and reflective ‘spaceship’ globe and watery pools and fountains, which the children were making full splashing and screaming use of on this hot day. The light-footed statue of local boy Cary Grant, or plain old Archie Leach as he was known in his Bristol days, provided an invisibly presiding presence from behind the stage. There was some energetic street dance from Keneish Dance and the Hype Dance Company. The latter, with t-shirts bearing a Nike-ified Hype logo, featured young dancers spanning a wide age range, all of whom got to show off their own special moves as passages of group unison fragmented into more individualistic or small group displays. The music stuttered through a swiftly edited collage of ever-changing styles, accompanying similarly sudden shifts in dance styles. There was a definite sense that they were going to fit everything they could into the short time available, and show us just how much they capable of. So, punchy Hip-Hop moves suddenly morphed into Michael Jackson-style routines, old-fashioned body-popping and R&B posing intercut with other sounds and steps which I’m far too uncool to know about. The smallest member, a girl with a naturally assured manner and attitude to spare who looked like she could be destined to go far, was swung up and spun around by the other dancers, soaring high, a dramatic move which provided an impressive demonstration of the absolute trust which must have developed within the troupe. They all looked like they were having a fabulous time, and there were obviously some proud family members or friends in the crowd. It seems like a brilliant way of getting young people together and developing their confidence and sense of themselves and their own physicality. Watching them, it was impossible not to smile.

Angular bodies - the Julia Thorneycroft Company

More classical dance styles were represented by Julia Thorneycroft and the Mark Bruce Company. The Julia Thorneycroft piece involved her and three male dancers both interacting as a group and breaking off into individual, isolated movement. The music was loud, amplified cello, developing from mournful, Elgar-like expressiveness to more strident, attacking passages, which prompted more energetic and animated activity from the dancers. Mark Bruce’s piece was a duet, with a Gene Kelly-esque sailor, thumbs slotted into pockets with devil-may-care nonchalance, strolling on and meeting a woman dressed in a shimmering, electric blue dress. They fell into a dance which wavered between passionate embrace and arms-length disdain and rejection. The sailor and the female embodiment of the sea crossed and circled the stage, acting out the oceanic love which bound them together through tempest and calm. All played out to the romantic, yearning strains of an orchestrated version of Debussy’s Clair de Lune.

The Arnolfini Gallery, situated in an old tea warehouse on the harbourside, paid host to a special interactive exhibition in their performance theatre in the afternoon. Danceroom Spectroscopy brought together the generally mutually exclusive worlds of art and science. People wandered in and mingled in front of a large screen. Their moving bodies were scanned by the 180° sweep of a 3D imaging camera, which sent its signal to a nearby computer. The Danceroom Spectroscopy computer programme, designed by theoretical chemist David Glowacki and artist Phill Tew, interpreted people’s movements and interactions with each other and the space in terms of molecular energy fields, which were then visualised as shifting patterns built up from modelled representations of the five most common elements in the universe. Hydrogen atoms were represented by swarms of blue, pin-prick particles, helium by caroming red particles, carbon by regal purple particles, iron by a more solid orange, and oxygen by the turquoise of the Earth’s atmosphere. These were all projected onto the screen, so that people could see the fed back output which they were creating, and alter and shape it further. As people moved in different ways, clustering together or drifting apart, the nature of what appeared on screen changed. You could generally recognise yourself by waving like a loon or jumping up and down. One boy brought in a balloon, which created an interesting new shape and dynamic, bouncing movement. Sometimes you would be composed of a vibrating, Brownian motion of hydrogen atoms contained within a spectral outline. At others, you would be a shivering purple waveform, approaching the state of those ‘being of pure energy’ which used to crop up in Star Trek every now and then. The burbling ambient sound backdrop was also subtly altered by people’s activities, which provided the input for the evolution of its generative musical patterns. People had a great deal of fun getting their molecular or waveform avatars to go through their transformations. It was an engaging and accessible installation which allowed people to see themselves in an entirely new light, as light.

There was also a dance piece, Hidden Fields, choreographed by Laura Kriefman using the spectroscopy system, featuring five female dancers. This followed a vague narrative scheme of birth, the exploration and discovery of the self and its connection with the world, interaction and connection with others, and eventual death and dissipation. It was fascinating and a little bedazzling to have to flicker the focus of your perceptions between the dancers and the motions they created on the screen. It must have been strange for the dancers to not be the sole object of attention during the performance, and indeed to have no following lights drawing the eye to their movements. But the essence of the piece lay in the interaction between the human element and its computer-projected analogue on the screen, and it was necessary somehow to be aware of both. The images on screen were often abstract and strikingly beautiful. Waves of colour would ripple across, or oscillating pulses of light would waver back and forth. Particulate clusters in roughly human form would merge with one another and then bifurcate with the appearance of fluid cellular division. Joseph Hyde provided electronic music which drew on the visuals, reacting to them in real time, and gave them sonic contours. He began with the hum and hiss of white noise, the aural analogue of the chaos of the untuned TV screen with which was what the projections initially resembled. As forms began to emerge, along with the dancers, the music too began to resolve into individual notes and tones. Thick, angular particle trails slowly drew lines across the screen before ricocheting off the edges, accompanied by oddly mammalian squeaks and cries of surprise. One of the dancers played a game of interrupting or evading these firefly atomic contrails, the first tentative exploration of how the self could affect the world through which it moved. Towards the end, the human shape became a container for shimmering colonies of pointillistic atoms. The dancers began to lose their energy, and their partners cradled their dying forms and lay them gently down onto the ground. Their atomic clusters lost coherence, and slowly dissipated out into the general particulate matter which drifted all around them. It was a mystical image of essential indivisibility, of a certain continuity of being, and of the connection of all things which was in keeping with the spiritual tenor of the piece as a whole. The projected visuals, with their semi-abstract and vibrantly coloured but still somehow recognisably human forms, gave the impression of a technologically-enabled emanation of some inherent essence of spirit, and iridescent imprint of the soul. It all ended with the music crackling and humming with the background noise of the universe. The screen was a frosty white, etched with the black craquelure of shattered safety glass. The last of the dancers slowly made her way to the wings, her movements creating a ghost which passed across the patterned screen like a watery shadow beneath thick ice. Life spiriting away in the face of the heat death of the universe. The whole was a fantastically beautiful and at times very moving meeting of science and art, human grace and technological ingenuity, rationalism and mysticism, dispassionate programming and emotional engagement. After the dancers had left, the floor was open once more, and the audience were free to project their own stories and selves onto the screen, to make sport and play in the Atomic World.

The Grosvenor today

From the flyover - Radio On, 1979

Beneath the flyover - Radio On, 1979

On the way back to Brunel and Francis Fox’s majestic Temple Meads station, I passed the sad remains of the Grosvenor Hotel. Apparently unloved by both the City Council and the people of Bristol, it’s boarded up, sports unruly sproutings of buddleia and is scheduled for demolition, to be replaced by yet more mixed-use office blocks and retail and restaurant outlets. This odd and distinctive building, which looks as if a modernist thirties frontage has been grafted onto a Victorian red-brick rear, featured in Chris Petit’s 1979 road movie Radio On. The protagonist Robert’s road journey begins in on the Westway in London and ends on the spindly little one way flyover which used to curl past the windows of the Grosvenor in a manner suggestive of a cut-price Metropolis set. Iain Sinclair, talking about the film in his book Lights Out For the Territory, described the Grosvenor as ‘a Bristol hotel and flyover unmatched in British cinema for their powers of displacement’. It provides a visual rhyme with the sixties retro-modernism of the Monsoon ‘battleship’ building which Robert passes on the elevated roadway out of London. He goes to the Grosvenor with a German woman called Ingrid, whom he meets in Bristol, who speaks little English and who provides a link with the Wim Wenders films which inspired Petit (the film was co-produced by Wenders’ Road Movies company). Lisa Kreuzer, who plays Ingrid, had appeared in all three of Wenders’ 70s road movie ‘trilogy’ of films (Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move and Kings of the Road), and she provides the impetus for a coda to Robert’s journey, as they go to Weston Super Mare to look for her son, and reach the farthest extent of the land, the end of the pier marking a faded and rather melancholy full stop. Robert’s car breaks down, and he starts his journey back by catching a shabby two-coach train from Blue Anchor station, near Minehead, helped on his homeward way by the propulsive strains of Kraftwerk’s Ohm Sweet Ohm. The Grosvenor provides the perfect locale for the pervasive atmosphere of anomie and alienation which permeates the film. When they sit listlessly in her hotel room, Robert and Ingrid are effectively speaking two different languages, although they do manage to make some sort of connection, perhaps as a result of the simpler and more direct level of communication which results. There is an effective moving shot taken from the flyover which captures them framed in separate windows, gazing blankly outwards, each in their separate world, the faint echoes of Robert Fripp’s dark piece of frippertronics Urban Landscape, from the Exposure album, just discernible in the background. Petit went back to the locales of Radio On in 1998 for his short video film Radio On (Remix). He was just in time to witness and film the dismantling of the flyover in the pouring rain on the 13th June 1998, an effective packing away and discrete disposal of modernist dreams.

Alienation framed - Radio On, 1979

The flyover dismantled - Radio On (Remix), 1989