Notes of Alignment. [on The Old Straight Track]

(first published as Collective Investigations: Wednesday Post)
 

This post is about Alfred Watkins’  The Old Straight Track, some ideas and legends behind it, its rebirth in 1960s and some of the influences.

Alfred Watkins published The Old Straight Track in 1925 on the back of his lecture to the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in Hereford, where he presented his idea of leys - lines of straight alignments (of stones, mounts, churches, etc) in the landscape, which are visible to this day as a record of the ancient trade routes used by our ancestors to travel across Britain.  Alfred Watkins had spent years photographing his native Hereforshire and mapping the walking routes (Daniels). Then, in 1920, as he was sitting in his car at a Blackwardine crossroads, he came up with the theory of leys.

(Watkins was no walker along ley-lines, at least for any distance; he favoured motor cars of various kinds, both steam and petrol powered vehicles, to get close to the key sites, to carry his camera and his assistant Mr McKaig, and to establish the scope of the system. (Daniels))

The book is an impressive, extensively researched effort to make sense of the landscape Watkins clearly loved.  The Old Straight Track is as elegant, as it is methodical.  When reading it, it is easy to get fascinated by his systematic account of mounts, stones, wells, ponds, histories and customs that surround them, links with the Bible narratives as well as straight lines in other countries, attempts at etymological explanations of toponyms and hydronyms. Then, there is a poetic quote at the start of each chapter and the book completes with a four-liner from Ruyard Kipling.  The Old Straight Track can appear romantic and far-fetched in places (some etymologies are incorrect, some alignments are rather imaginative), however Watkins constructed a vision of olde England, which defines the relationship of many English ramblers with their walking tracks today.

The Old Straight Track got forgotten a soon after Watkins’ death. Then, psychedelic 60s came. In 1961 Tony Weld - a former RAF pilot - suggested that there was a link between the leylines and UFO sightings, twisting the idea of ancient trackways into energy lines, thus giving birth to the subject of  “earth mysteries”. (Pennick, p.27)  Nothing illustrates better the leap from Watkins original archeology-based ideas to ancient astronauts and psychic channelling, than rewriting of the event at Blackwardine crossroads (see above). Now legend says, that

Alfred Watkins was riding around the Herefordshire hills in the early 1920s, when he pulled up his horse to gaze across the landscape, and he had a sudden revelation. In his vision, every landmark, whether natural or man-made, was linked by a network of straight lines, which he saw as glowing wires laid out over the surface of the land.  The lines passed through hill summits and cairns, linking church spires, prehistoric settlements and burial sites, old encampments and sacred monuments.   Following the route that they took were trackways, straight roads that had been ancient and well trodden long before the coming of the Romans, along which the first settlers of this country would have travelled by day and night, their eyes keenly aware of waymarkers. (Woolf)

New Age mystics highjacking the The Old Straight Track brought it to the forefront of discourse and visibility.  As Timpson says,

The attraction of cranks to leylines is naturally no encouragement to take them seriously: but neither it is a reason for the subject to be rejected (Timpson, p.8)

I found few direct references on how Watkins’ book influenced art. It is inevitable that it did so to some extent, considering that arrival of New Age magic coincided with the beginnings of “land art”  movement.  Looking at the land works of Richard Long and photography of Alfred Watkins it is easy to see visual similarities; however, they lie not in the mystical and the magical energies, but in the real and physical human presence on the land, such as human marks on the land made though walking.

Richard Long

Richard Long first found out about about ley-lines at the time of his solo exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery in 1971:
Someone came up; he saw my lines of walking across Exmoor, the line made by walking and said, have you heard of this man, an eccentric geographer who had a strange theory about invisible lines that connected prehistoric sites across England. That was the first time I had heard of these ley-lines. (Daniels)

Hamish Fulton

Hamish Fulton, on the other hand, was not only affected by the concept of leys, but also by the designs of Alfred Watkins’ books. 

His Straight Line Walk, 1969, relates to the artist’s fascination with the prehistoric ‘ley’ system of walking paths. Around the same time, Fulton made a special visit to the Hertford [sic] Public Library to see Watkins’s original books. Fulton acknowledges this as a very important visit, not only because of his interest in the concept of a walked line for navigational purposes, but also because of the artist’s admiration for the sheer visual and physical beauty of Watkins’s books. Fulton remains fascinated by the clarity and elegance of 1930s and 1940s book layouts, with clear geometric blocks of text, augmented by delicately tinted, tipped in photographs. (Daniels).

Watkins was indeed an competent photographer and his books offer not only skilled pictures, but accomplished and clever layouts and compositions: some pages contain sweeping landscapes with mistied background hills, while others sit as combined images, united as a journey sequence of a common alignment. Simple and clear, parts of The Old Straight Track are tremendously enjoyable as a photo book.

Like Hamish Fulton, we too are fascinated by Watkins' books and their aesthetics - not just The Old Straight Track, but also Early British Trackways with its collaged and overlapping images and simple clear lettering. Alignment project might be borrowing some of those designs. 

Conceptually, there are ideas too which we will be taking further. In particular, the idea that the major sacred landmarks can be aligned into a straight track: mystic or mundane the causes might be. If either for sheer randomness or divine intention some sites fall into one line, could we find alignments of our own?

[Egidija]

NEXT: about book as sacred object and book as part of the ritual

REFERENCES:

Daniels, Stephen (2006) Lines of Sight: Alfred Watkins, Photography and Topography in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.  Tate Papers Autumn. [Online]. Available at http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7394  (Accessed:  21 Ferbruary 2017)

Knight, Adam (2013) Ley-lines lead writer to wrong place in history. Hereford Times. 10 June.  [Online]. Available at http://www.herefordtimes.com/news/10465680.Ley_lines_lead_writer_to_wrong_place_in_history/?ref=rss  (Accessed:  21 Ferbruary 2017)

Neil, Alan (2015) Ley Lines of the South West. Launceston: Bossiney Books.

Mills, Billy (2015) The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins – walking through the past.  The Guardian. 8 August, [Online]. Available at  https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/aug/20/the-old-straight-track-by-alfred-watkins-walking-through-the-past. (Accessed:  21 Ferbruary 2017)

Pennick, Nigel (1997) Leylines. Mysteries of the Ancient World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Timpson, John (2002) Timpson’s Leylines. A Layman Tracking the Leys. London: Cassell Paperbacks

Watkins, Alfred (1974) The Straight Old Track. Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones. London: Abacus.

Woolf, Jo Book review: ‘The Old Straight Track’ by Alfred Watkins. The Hazel Tree.  14 July, 2014. [Online]. Available at https://the-hazel-tree.com/2014/07/14/book-review-the-old-straight-track-by-alfred-watkins/ (Accessed:  21 Ferbruary 2017)


Unless otherwise stated, all images are rephotographed from:
Watkins, Alfred (1974) The Straight Old Track. Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones. London: Abacus.

The Book of Books is a highly collectible, two volume book (limited to 250 copies) 216mm x 280mm (8 1/2in x 11in). 2302pp. 1000 Colour Illustrations. $2500.

Uncommon Places

Uncommon Places

Mose

Hudson Valley

Hudson Valley

In 2012 PHAIDON published Stephen Shore’s Book of Books -  a book that contains all 83 books of his print-on-demand projects since 2003. Stephen Shore spent seven years producing one day editions using Apple iPhoto service. It is a simple project, but the result is some truly remarkable sequences of truly remarkable photography.

There is big woo-hah! about Book of Books, with 250 signed and numbered copies available for $2500 to the lucky collectors (mind, it is highly collectible, Phaidon says). The original layouts, including blank pages, are reproduced at actual size and organised chronologically. In this way, the collector experiences each book and the entire book project as Stephen Shore originally intended.
However, I have some questions to Steven Shore and Phaidon.

I.

This book embraces brand new technology and brand new ways of making a book. We at Phaidon have made a true work of art in a pioneering way with one of the most important and influential photographers in the world.

I really do believe that this is a one off in book publishing and the way that it’s made and the way that this work is presented will change the way that books are made in the future. It is not only a landmark but also a benchmark against which other books will be measured. (Amanda Renshaw, Phaidon Editorial Director, on the Phaidon website)

This was not written in 2003. This was written in 2012.  Today, everybody is an author: online and off-line editions of e-books and i-books are produced by anyone who owns a computer, a phone or a tablet. What is so pioneering about Phaidon’s edition?

Few would disagree that Stephen Shore is one of the most important and influential photographers in the world and that - at just over a dollar per photograph - the book might be a good deal to get ones hands on the best contemporary American photography. The book is an anthology of his day projects and it is as great as the individual books are. I fail to see the pioneering side of this benchmark landmark publishing. In fact, print-on-demand technology is not that unpopular among the artist’s books (especially photobooks) - I have used it myself. Blurb and Lulu are packed with limited and unlimited editions by names unknown as well as the accomplished ones (see Sarah Bodman’s Closure from 2009). It is also not entirely unusual for a mainstream publisher to work with an author that was self-publishing before (see April Hamilton‘s The Indie Author Guide, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman‘s In the Lion’s Den, etc). It  is less common, however,  to have an artist of such recognition to be using print-on-demand technology consistently for such a long period of time, i.e.  sustaining the whole body of work on the idea of an immediate book.
But what is so pioneering about Phaidon’s edition?

II.

It is possible to make another book on his iPhoto books, but it would be very different in scope, style and extent, and it would no longer be an artist’s book. (Amanda Renshaw, Tate etc., 26)

This, I find very confusing. I suppose it raises the question of what IS an artist’s book  and  why should a reprint (or a second edition) not be an artist’s book. Ed Ruscha published 400 numbered copies in the first edition of  Twenty Six Gasoline Stations. The second edition contained 500 unnumbered copies and the third edition - 3000 unnumbered copies.  Ed Ruscha flooded the market, but the reprints never stopped being artist’s books.  
Book of Books contains day projects that were conceived as print-on-demand access-for-all publications. How does this Phaidon’s edition relate to the original concept? Why didn't they produce a boxed set of the original books? What was the intention?

Even though Amanda Renshaw is very explicit about the limited and signed nature of  Book of Books, I assume that sooner or later the $2500 edition will be followed by a trade edition of a more accessible kind.

Stevie Ronnie @ Goldsteins

The very technologies we expect to replace the paper book can be used to increase its possibilities and appeal. (Stevie Ronnie)

Goldsteins. A nice little place to host the Brass Book, a project by Stevie Ronnie about... - well... - the book. To be more specific - about the book as a technological masterpiece and it’s survival in the modern world defined by computerization, kindlization and tabletization.

Stevie Ronnie choreographed the project across the disciplines and communities to involve Easington Writers, Lanchester Brass Band, Deride Thompson (a traditional bookbinder) and Nick James (furniture designer). He took the dialogue away from librophiles and reintroduced it through the people that would not normally be part of the discussion. Public engagement, Arts Council would cheerfully exclaim.

With a background in computational engineering and an MA in Creative Writing Ronnie has the context to experience books creatively from outside the fine art frame of reference.
It is a beautiful collaboration with very unexpected results.

http://galleriesgoldstein.com/now/  

http://brassbook.wordpress.com/

http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2012/10/brass-book-%E2%80%93-books-as-technology/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester,_County_Durham

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easington,_County_Durham

 

BRASS BOOK created by:

Stevie Ronnie. A freelance writer, artist, tutor, researcher and digital consultant.

Lanchester Brass Band.  All are welcome; instruments and tuition can be provided.

Easington Writers. A group of local people of varying writing stages and styles with a shared common interest.

Nick James.  A designer maker of furniture.

Deride Thompson. Subversive, traditional, inflexible bookbinder and experimental letterpress printer

Harland Miller @ White Cube

... I have always seen books as ornaments, as objects in themselves, irrespective of the writing inside inside them, and so as such I'm going to have them on my shelves at home - the same way some people might have vases - and when I paint them it's kind of like painting still life, and the titles for the show I've done of those book jacket pictures come from the fly leaves of actual books I've found...(p.33, Harland Miller, ILG)

Words : SUIBOKUGA 水墨画‎

Hasegawa Tohaku 長谷川

Suibokuga (or suiboku; or sumi-e painting) refers to the Japanese tradition of ink drawings, that was introduced from China by Buddhist priest-artists in the late Kamakura period.

水 - water
墨 - ink
画‎ - picture


Suibokuga is "completely unconcerned with producing a literal representation. Its emphasis is completely upon the spirit. Japanese monochromes put no emphasis on scientific or rational realism. The Nanga school, especially, aims at the representation of the state of mind, using serenity as a keynote. (keyhole? - a Freudan slip?) Thus, the most prized masterpieces are those which are thought to display a noble soul rather than an exact reproduction. Suiboku is not photography or the copying of natural things, the shape and colour of which is seen with the eyes; it is the expression or the idea the artist received when he viewed the object."*(p.11, Ryukyu Saito Japanese Ink-Painting).

The artists use sumi-e ink (which is made of soot) and a soft animal hair brush. The drawings are all monochrome. The skill lies in the ability to control the balance of black and white through single brushstrokes to achieve minimalist drawings. The artist draws surfaces (no outlines); the ink runs and merges with the layer below. The strokes cannot be corrected or removed.

There seems to be some disagreement if suibokuga draws on the philosophy of Zen Buddhism (Ryuku Saito) or whether it has no relationship to it (Tsugako Shimada). From my very Christian seat here in London, it looks like suibokuga very much embraces Tao and Zen line of thought, especially the idea of intuitive understanding rather than rational representation of form. The minimal means of expression aim to capture the essence of the object.

Like a visual haiku.

Ike no Taiga 池大雅 Zhuang Zi dreaming of a butterfly

Josetsu 如拙 Catching a Catfish with a Gourd

P.S.

A Chinese painter was once commissioned to paint the Emperor's favorite goat. The artist asked for the goat, that he might study it. After two years the Emperor, growing impatient, asked for the return of the goat; the artist obliged. Then the Emperor asked about the painting. The artist confessed that he had not yet made one, and taking an ink brush he drew eight nonchalant strokes, creating the most perfect goat in the annals of Chinese painting.

* The quote comes as it is in the book. Amusing it may be, but poor wording is not my choice.

Three discoveries and a disappointment: Nekrošius vs. Holt vs. Higgs vs.Hirst

...

When preparing my notes for a talk last week I found myself returning into my blog more then once. How useful, I thought, it is to have a notebook, that can be consulted from any place in the world - of course, provided the place has a free WiFi.
So here I am back.

A few notes on the great discoveries and the great disappointment of the last four months and thirteen days (in no particular order):

DISCOVERY:  Eimuntas Nekrošius Hamlet (June 6th, 2012)

As part of the Shakespeare season Globe theater ran a program of international Shakespeare productions, including a Lithuanian one from Meno Fortas. For mere £5 one could buy the most breathtaking contemporary performance of Hamlet in the setting of Elizabethan theater. What a treat!

DISAPPOINTMENT:  Damien Hirst@ Tate (June 6th, 2012)

???
The world is ruled by symmetry. If you see something as magical and beautiful as Nekrošius Hamlet, you pretty much use up your credits for extraordinary experiences for that day. As a result, Damien Hirst show in Tate was a solid knock back to reality and below. The show is a song of praise for the marketing genius of that man. Anything else? Hm.



DISCOVERY:   Nancy Holt @ Haunch of Venison (June 10, 2012)

Photographs of Nancy Holt feature documentation of most of her landmark installations.
It's the sequentiality of images and how they function as a whole that took me by surprise. It looks like she naturally works in sets and most of them act as a time based recoding system. I would love to see them published as a book. Not a catalogue. A book.


THE DISCOVERY: Higgs boson (July 4, 2012)

The ultimate manifestation of creative application of brainpower.
Genius! To think out the theory and then to spend 50 years working out towards the experiment to prove it. The sublime beauty of mind at work.

Five iTunesU lectures later I am finally getting to grips with the quantum physics.
Above and below there are two remarkably simple explanations by Guardian of what Higgs boson is. Just in case.

By supposing that empty space is not empty at all, but rather it is crammed full of Higgs bosons, it becomes possible for particles to acquire mass. It is rather like the universe is pervaded with a kind of cosmic treacle through which the elementary particles wade. Imagine trying to pull a ping-pong ball through a vat of treacle – do it blindfolded and you might be tempted to suppose you are pulling something much heavier.

No Nobel prize this year, though. A Turner prize instead?

Victorian curiosities from Narnia: Lady Wilson's cabinet @ Wallington Hall

The very top floor of Wallington Hall. Lady Wilson's room of curiosities: stuffed birds, fish, documents, bits of china, fabric, etc. Like a very large scrapbook it houses an impressive array of objects and their labels.
Labels. I wondered about labels as I looked though them. I am assuming, the pseudoscientific nature of the curiosity cabinets allows me to pretend that the labels are all true, while I know, that they may well contain a number of errors or fakes among them. There is a make-believe air about it - if the room contained a pebble from Narnia, it would neither be out of place nor seem any less credible.