Archive for September 28th, 2007
Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — Ladybird of the Devil: Edward Summerton’s Territories of Silent Vision
Last year, Edward Summerton of Dundee university exhibited a series of paintings at the En Tangsogade 4 Udstilling Art Centre in Bovlingbjerg, Denmark, called Bird of the Devil, comprising gouache-altered images from Birds of Prey (1970), a Ladybird book. He’s previously used fairytale images from Ladybird books to represent the heritage-territorialising of the rural and of wider cultural-historical identity.
Summerton conceived of these reconfigured Ladybird avian images, which he’s described as ‘a kind of precious European Disney’, during a trip to the Summer Isles in 2004, which he says he undertook to research the genealogy of his surname. Having made the fabulous connection between his name and that of Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973), he introduces himself even further into the shaky mythology and prurient anti-ruralism of director Robin Hardy’s continuing narrative by prefabricating wildlife images found around the film’s ideal location.
The Bird of the Devil pictures are situated in what Summerton describes as “the strict nature reserve”, which is his visual-textual economy, presumably theoretically touching on Jacques Derrida’s “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve” and practically based on strict nature reserves created and maintained under the UNESCO world heritage scheme, which seek to integrate natural sites and sights, heavy industry and tourism. Both fictive territories are ambiguous enclosures negotiating complex textual ecologies.
In the Bird of the Devil pictures, the geospatial strict nature reserve in question is the contextual ecology of Dumfries and Galloway. The image-culture space Summerton intervenes in is the isolationist, even separationist, ruralism and paganist survivalism of The Wicker Man. Focusing not on Scottishness, nature, locality or nostalgia for childhood — he locates his work interstitially in “the small spare spaces that exist between the housing schemes and the landscape, between our culture and subculture, between reality and fiction” — he pointedly re-represents in gouache the artifice used in delimiting territories.
I disagree with Summerton’s assertion — albeit he jumps several logic steps for humour’s sake — that the nature pictures in Ladybird books are generationally dependent: “one look and you are transported to the halcyon days of childhood, nurturing in many a love of birds and a future life artistically driven and played out to a constant background soundtrack of birdsong”. His dependence is not mine.
The images, their gouache faerealism, seemed ancient to me even as I viewed and them as read to me in the mid to late 1960s and read them myself in the early 70s. I was fascinated and repelled by the brutishness and dissolution of the faery other: especially the paintings of Rumpelstiltskin’s facial rage and Dr Fell’s disapproving kiddie-fiddler stare, which remain with me to this day. As far as I knew, these were pictures of the past from the past. I was sure that my great-great-granddad, who was a cobbler and self-taught scholar in a remote Suffolk village, was the shoemaker in The Elves and The Shoemaker.
The pastness of the Ladybird books was part of their attraction. I knew they were olde because I was comparing Ladybird’s silent mythic dioramas with louder images from other imagistically delimited, enclosed ideal worlds on telly, for example, in the BBC’s supplementary rural territory, Trumptonshire and in the clubhouses of The Banana Splits and The Double Deckers that I watched in colour round Mark Fuller’s house. Maybe the intensity of the Ladybird illustrations seemed louder before colour TV.
It’s the territorial aspect of Summerton’s works — revisiting imaginary sites of past or future experience or imagining sites of textuality-visuality previously encountered or yet unheeded — that speeds their understanding to my brain. The spatiality of the Bird of the Devil pictures intervened on me just as I was researching Ladybird books, having re-bought a couple of titles that still cause me to resonate. Summerton’s altered illustrations stand proud on the surface of my understanding, causing the reflexive mirror to produce an image that is not looking-glass true.
The aural aspect is also becoming as clear to me as the clean gouache swashes of the Ladybird illustrators’ brushes. The presumed silence of illustrations of birds from the past is interrupted as we heed children’s voices doing bird noises over the top of them. Similarly, old war comics take life, too, as the sounds of death are mummed by thousands of intent voices.
The anthropogenic territory of Summerton’s strict nature reserve stills and grows quiet as he allows yet another set of industrial and cultural interventions to start and continue making it different. The sound of his voice, speaking with Christopher Lee’s Summerisle Scots accent, starts up and describes found gouache illustrations; it mendaciously annotates the truth of the coincidental conjunction he’s discovered between different products of a common era. His marketing taunts the collective ecology of the imagined Summer Isles as much as it does the other imaginary British isles. Summerton’s brand of hauntology makes him a tauntiquarian. His performance through pictures is an example of silent ventriloquism, which conjures and heeds the voices furtively.
Summerton is a first class hauntiquary. Unless he’s already aligned himself with my imaginary enemies, the hauntologists! Although I was, at first, a little sad that he choose to taunt my ghost other, rather than ask me how I felt, I’m reassured by his use of humour to pre-empt accusations of his works being explorations of ‘the uncanny’. I always feel rather drained when academics refer to fairytales and other fictive others as uncanny. Dorothy, like all children working with tales of fiction, knew the difference between home and Oz, between play and the thing being played. Playing jet planes, I knew the difference between the fictive air beneath my flying feet or my bike wheels and the tarmac. I like that his strict nature reserve stands for itself as a sort of homely territory for fictions.
As Derrida says at the end of Specters of Marx, scholars of the future should learn to live by learning how to give speech back to the ghosts of ourselves, not wait for immanent this or that to swoop like a bird of the devil out of history-beyond-experience. It’s not a matter of “re-” anything, but of knowing, whether through reflexion, affectivity when you see it. In fiction, scholars and intellectuals of the past must learn this, too. That’s what this mix-up hauntiquarianism thing is all about. That’s why, having always been no one — a hauntiquary lurking without place or identity — I must become everybody.
Happily coincidentally, Ray Bradbury’s recent novella, 50 years in the writing, Somewhere a Band is Playing (2007), is set in the imaginary town of Summerton, Arizona, conjured in a dream by one James Cardiff. I’ve not read this yet, but I’ll let you know when I have.
Honk for myths. With a sheet over your head.
Posted by Neil
on September 28, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Tags: Anthrogenic nature, Art, Ecology, Ladybird books, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
3 comments | Permalink