Category: House of Trees

notes_30 An Art of the Forest, Lockdown May 2020 #HeygateLegacy

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Danh Vo, Photographs of Dr. Joseph M. Carrier 1962–1973, 2010
Installation view at the South London Gallery, 2019. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Nick Ash

London’s Urban Forest; an Art of the Ongoing

By Guy Mannes-Abbott 23 May 2020

It’s the third Urban Tree Festival in London and I’ve been asked to write about what it means to celebrate and make art from a tree or trees in the South London Gallery’s world [for* the SLG; thank you! LINK]. I take the latter territory to have been tagged by William Blake, long-term resident of Lambeth’s Hercules Road, between the dark satanic mills of endlessly churning capital at Blackfriars Bridge and trees on Peckham Rye which hosted the angels of his creative resilience.

What is a tree, though? It’s an ontological question I’d like to prune into handy shape so that we can attend to the intangible qualities which enliven and expand more recognisably concrete ones. The tree as a rooted object is a marvel, of course, but it is so much more than that on multiple ecological, political, and cultural registers; smells and ‘looks’, rhizomatic roots and crowns, as well as an embedded commons. London is now formally classified as a continuous urban forest, which adds another dimension to its ambient realms, remembrances of things past and unlikely future hopes.

My first association is with Danh Vo’s landmark survey exhibition at the SLG in September 2019, and the related show at Marian Goodman Gallery. Common to both was the timber from a plantation of Black Walnut trees gifted to Vo by Craig McNamara, son of Robert the gung-ho Defence Secretary during the Vietnam War. When Vo acquired some of the latter’s effects to work with, Craig made an approach which grew into one of Vo’s many miraculous friendships. Art critical responses to the work lingered on the woody odours in both galleries, and I remember a tangy encounter with a room dressed in walnut to display a collection of ambiguous photographs of Vietnamese men and boys.

Continue reading “notes_30 An Art of the Forest, Lockdown May 2020 #HeygateLegacy” →

note_16 #Rivering 2014-2019 (scraps, almost there…)

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Screenshot 2019-03-05 11.29.32

Rivering the Roding started in the mud above; September 2014, as you can see if you scroll to the bottom (this one of many* returns!). These tweets are obviously incidental scraps but they do suggest or ghost if not exactly tell a story (again; bottom up). It’s a story about London, thinking like a river, which requires articulation (#rivering) and for me to show what such ‘thinking’ might be. I am coming in to land (circling back and now very close to the muddy confluence), and yes, you can start to hold your breath. Please 😉 Continue reading “note_16 #Rivering 2014-2019 (scraps, almost there…)” →

new_notes_00

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pointing-fingers-emoji

Changes are afoot at the fruitstore! Bear with me as I re-jig and resettle? Websites, including my gma dot net website, feel to me like the cd of now, unless actively part of a working practice. Simultaneously, a narrowed, delimited (light) web has developed out there with trawlers at work using algorithms which, for example, erode precisions of context or framing or nuance. Some deliberate shaping seems worthwhile if only to minimise misrepresentation and the forcible moulded by that fail-sure mechanism; the hit.

I can’t stir myself to be critical of the top ten realms of life, but am stirring myself in all the more significant, valuable, urgent, opaque, aleatory and artful realms. Those include realms where I have been invited to take a position, or have taken one anyway! I go to sometimes crazy lengths to be exact -as you can read or hear in plenty of links/elements you will find here- but ‘enemies’ that include quantitive filtering can undo and even distort that care or view -in my experience. So, I’m ‘fighting’ forwards…

I started writing in this back-store form in 2010 I think purely as a stop gap. I found I enjoyed this informal, unpressed, hand-noted quality; basic, humble, capable of being reflective, not-a-project or even a draft, and semi-public. My 2012 website also got hacked recently and it reminded me that I prefer the simplicity and dimensions of this which can also negotiate more nimbly some of the kinds of issues I refer to above.

I intend to leave new notes periodically and indefinitely with no plan or strategy. Some might be long versions of shorter or reshaped published pieces. Some might be leavings or tangents from ongoing research or works-in-progress -on London and towards a new series of text-based works called Porting, for example. I’m collecting together ongoing publications, talks and so on, using qualitative rather than quantitive criteria -under the buttons above. I might add-to, elaborate, engage with some of those in the notes too…

In the main it will continue to be a slightly parallel universe of notes from a fruistore by the perpetually flowing Thames in the heart of London -global city despite the best efforts of the worst of ‘us’- with a door that is permanently, if slightly or symbolically, ajar…