Week Two: The (Unofficial) CountrysideMusic: “Noon Hill Wood”

from Landings by Richard Skelton

Justin Hopper

• Our resources:– www.jackdawshivers.com– www.justin-hopper.com

• Contact me:– juddy.hopper@gmail.com– @oldweirdalbion (twitter)– Twitter hashtag: #ReadingRuins

Today

• Introductions and questions• Next week’s readings• Themes• Thoughts on the readings (and next week’s)• The Unofficial Countryside• Classroom discussion• Galleries

Hadleigh Castle, 2013

Next Week’s Readings

Iain Sinclair on Whiteread, from Lights Out for the Territory, as excerpted in Brian Dillon’s book Ruins

Rachel Lichtenstein, and excerpt of Sinclair, from Lichtenstein’s book, Rodinsky’s Room

Laura Oldfield Ford, from Savage Messiah.

Unofficial Countryside: Themes

• Two kinds of British landscape ruins:– Antiquarian – Edgelands

• Ruins mediate between ourselves and “time”• And between the human-made world and the

natural world

Readings

Readings

The (Unofficial) Countryside

British Antiquarian Ruins

British Antiquarian Ruins

“Last summer, I walked in a field near Avebury where two rough monoliths stand up, sixteen feet high, miraculously patterned with black and orange lichen, remnants of the avenue of

stones which led to the Great Circle. A mile away, a green pyramid casts a gigantic shadow. In the hedge, at hand, the white trumpet of a convolvulus turns from its spiral stem, following

the sun. In my art I would solve such an equation.”

Edgelands

On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory

- George Orwell, 1934.

As I stand at the lichened gateWith warring worlds on either hand –To left the black and budless trees,The empty sties, the barns that stand

Like tumbling skeletons – and to rightThe factory-towers, white and clearLike distant, glittering cities seenFrom a ship’s rail – as I stand here,

I feel, and with a sharper pang,My mortal sickness; how I giveMy heart to weak and stuffless ghosts,And with the living cannot live.

The acid smoke has soured the fields,And browned the few and windworn flowers;But there, where steel and concrete soarIn dizzy, geometric towers –

There, where the tapering cranes sweep round,And great wheels turn, and trains roar byLike strong, low-headed brutes of steel –There is my world, my home; yet why

So alien still? For I can neitherDwell in that world, nor turn againTo scythe and spade, but only loiterAmong the trees the smoke has slain.