The View From the Train (26 page)

If such moments of historical transition (however questionable their identification) open possibilities for creativity, for the moments to which, in Lefebvre's words, people have looked to transform existence (1910 was, among other things, the year in which Apollinaire invented the art of going for a walk
¹⁶
) it seemed strange that Surrealist and Situationist techniques –
flânerie
, the
dérive
and psychogeography – should have become the subject of so much attention (if they were not quite actually ‘revived') in London during the 1990s. At the time, I suggested that their purpose had been overlooked: the
dérive
and psychogeography were conceived, in a more politically ambitious period, as preliminaries to the production of new, revolutionary spaces; in the 1990s they seemed more likely to be preliminary to the production of literature and other works, and to gentrification, the discovery of previously overlooked value in dilapidated spaces and neighbourhoods.

In an essay on ‘contemporary London Gothic',
¹⁷
Roger Luckhurst suggested that the Gothic genre that he and others identified as characteristic of London in the 1990s was a response to ‘that curious mix of tyranny and farce that constitutes London governance', particularly the dominance of the City of London, with its medieval peculiarities and its untiring pursuit of an ever more unequal, damaged world. Among the writers Luckhurst identified with the contemporary London Gothic, several have invoked the techniques of Situationist urbanism, as if the power of the financial sector is such that subjective re-imagination offered the only possibility for change that had become unattainable in other ways.
In 2008, cycling along Harrow Road, I did not encounter any explosion of the ‘intense forces of “atmosphere” ' that are undoubtedly concealed there, but unexpected memories of earlier discoveries, at a time when it seemed possible that a dysfunctional economic orthodoxy was finally collapsing, suggested that such experiences still have some value.

I am very grateful to everyone who commissioned or asked me to write the essays in this book, including, in chronological order, Michael O'Pray, Joe Kerr, Sarah Wigglesworth, Jeremy Till, Ann Gallagher, Kester Rattenbury, Mohsen Mostafavi, Nick Barley, Giles Lane, François Penz, Jane Rendell, Matthew Beaumont, Michael Freeman and Greg Hart, and to everyone involved in the book's production, particularly Leo Hollis and Rowan Wilson at Verso, who suggested it. I would also like to express my gratitude to Middlesex University, the Royal College of Art, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Film Institute, for institutional support; Yehuda Safran, the late Ray Durgnat, Richard Wentworth, Jon Thompson, Barry Curtis, Ian Christie, Laura Mulvey, Michael Leaman, Al Rees, Mark Rappolt and Kitty Hauser, all involved in various ways; the late Cedric Price who, having been an inspiration to me since 1968, was such a generous interviewee and essay subject; and my partner, fellow-artist and sometime collaborator Julie Norris, whose contribution to these and other works of mine is very considerable.

A longer version of ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape' was published in
Undercut
3/4 (March 1982), pp. 42–8, reprinted in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds,
The Undercut Reader
(London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 75–83.

‘Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape' was published in
Undercut
7/8 (Spring 1983), pp. 125–9, reprinted in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds,
The Undercut Reader
(London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 204–8.

‘Port Statistics' was published in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro, eds,
The Unknown City
(Cambridge MA: MIT, 2001), pp. 442–58.

‘The Dilapidated Dwelling' was published in Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till, eds,
The Everyday and Architecture, Architectural Design Profile No. 134, Architectural Design
68: 7–8 (1998), pp. 22–7.

‘Popular Science' was first published in an exhibition catalogue
Landscape
, edited with an introduction by Ann Gallagher (London: British Council, 2000), pp. 60–7, reprinted in Anthony Kiendl, ed.,
Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Culture
(London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 32–7, and
Criticat
9, March 2012, pp. 114–123, and abridged in the
Independent
, 6 March 2000.

‘Architectural Cinematography' was published in Kester Rattenbury, ed.,
This Is Not Architecture
(London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 37–44.

‘London in the Early 1990s' was published in
AA Files 49: London, Post-Colonial City
(London: Architectural Association, 2003), pp. 20–4, and Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson, eds,
London from Punk to Blair
(London: Reaktion 2003), pp. 353–61.

‘London – Rochester – London' was published in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed.,
Re:CP
(Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003), pp. 168–185.

The Robinson Institute
is one of a series of Diffusion e-books,
Species of Spaces
(2002), available at
diffusion.org
.

‘The City of the Future' was published in
City
7: 3 (November 2003), pp. 376–86.

‘Film as Spatial Critique' was published in Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian, eds,
Critical Architecture
(London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 115–123.

‘Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film' was published in Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman, eds,
The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the Machine Ensemble
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 69–84.

‘Imaging' was first published in Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, eds,
Restless Cities
(London: Verso, 2010), pp. 139–154, and an extract reprinted in Brian Dillon, ed.,
Ruins
(London: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT, 2011), pp. 145–150.

  
1
  Roger Cardinal, ‘Soluble City: The Surrealist Perception of Paris', in Dalibor Vesely, ed.,
Surrealism and Architecture, Architectural Design Profile 11, Architectural Design
48: 2–3 (1978), pp. 143–9.

  
2
  Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia', in
One-Way Street and Other Writings
, transl. Edmund Jephcott, Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), pp. 225–39, at p. 229.

  
3
  
9H
was initiated in 1980 by a group including Wilfried Wang, later director of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, and Ricky Burdett, later founding director of the Architecture Foundation, Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics, director of LSE Cities, etc.

  
4
  There was an exhibition,
Czech Functionalism 1918–1938
, at the Architectural Association in 1987 (11 November–18 December); see Vladimír Šlapeta,
Czech Functionalism 1918–1938
(London: Architectural Association, 1987).

  
5
  Published as ‘Czech Perspective',
Building Design
, 13 March 1987.

  
6
  See Stephen Daniels, ‘Paris Envy: Patrick Keiller's
London', History Workshop Journal
40 (1995), pp. 220–2.

  
7
  ‘Port Statistics', in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr and Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro, eds,
The Unknown City
(Cambridge MA: MIT, 2001), pp. 442–58.

  
8
  Patrick Keiller,
Robinson in Space
(London: Reaktion, 1999).

  
9
  
The City of the Future
, FACT, Liverpool, 28 May–27 June 2004; as part of
Londres, Bombay
, Le Fresnoy: Studio national des arts contemporains,
Tourcoing, 12 October–24 December 2006; and
The City of the Future
, BFI Southbank Gallery, 23 November 2007–3 February 2008. For an account of
Londres, Bombay
, see
Vertigo
3: 6 (Summer 2007), pp. 42–3.

10
  See also Patrick Keiller,
The Possibility of Life's Survival on the Planet
(London: Tate Publishing, 2012).

  
1
  Louis Aragon, ‘On
Décor', Le Film
, September 1918, reprinted in Paul Hammond, ed.,
The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema
(London: British Film Institute, 1978), pp. 28–31.

  
2
  Edgar Allan Poe,
Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
, ed. with an introduction by David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 179–88, at pp. 188, 179.

  
3
  Charles Baudelaire,
Paris Spleen
, transl. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. x.

  
4
  Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The False Amphion, or The Stories and Adventures of Baron d'Ormesan', in
The Wandering Jew and Other Stories
, transl. Rémy Inglis Hall (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967).

  
5
  See Bernard Tschumi, ‘Architecture and Its Double', in Dalibor Vesely, ed.,
Surrealism and Architecture, Architectural Design Profile 11, Architectural Design
48: 2–3 (1978), pp. 111–16.

  
6
  
Ten Days That Shook the University: Of Student Poverty Considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual and, particularly, intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy
(London: BCM/Situationist International, n.d. [1967]), p. 18.

  
7
  Louis Aragon,
Paris Peasant
, transl. with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor (London: Picador, 1980), pp. 128, 130.

  
8
  Ibid., pp. 131–2.

  
9
  André Breton, quoted from a radio interview in Simon Watson Taylor's introduction to his translation of Louis Aragon's
Paris Peasant
(London: Picador, 1980), pp. 9-10.

10
  Georges Bataille,
Eroticism
, transl. Mary Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars, 1987), p. 22.

11
  See Tschumi, ‘Architecture and Its Double'.

12
  Reprinted in
One-Way Street
, pp. 209–14, 215–22.

13
  Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction',
in
Illuminations
, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 228; see also ‘A Small History of Photography' (1931), in
One-Way Street
, pp. 240–57.

14
  Tschumi, ‘Architecture and Its Double', p. 115.

15
  
Documents
, 1929, 6, p. 329. Bataille was
secrétaire générale
of
Documents
(1929, 1–7; 1930, 1–8), which usually included a section entitled either ‘Chronique' (1929, 1; 1930, 4), ‘Dictionnaire critique' (1929, 2), ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire critique' (1929, 3) or ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire' (1929, 4–7; 1930, 1, 2, 6, 7), with entries written by Bataille, Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos and others, many reprinted in
Encyclopædia Acephalica
, transl. Iain White and others, ed. with an introduction by Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press, 1995), pp. 29–84.

16
  From ‘Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation', in
Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International
, ed. and transl. Christopher Gray (London: Free Fall Publications, 1974), pp. 131–51, at p. 138 – a translation of Chapter 23 of Raoul Vaneigem's
Traité de savoir-faire à l'usage des jeunes générations
, known in English as
The Revolution of Everyday Life
. For a later translation, see p. 184.

17
  Poe,
Selected Writings
, pp. 138—–57, at p. 138.

18
  Ibid., p. 143.

19
  Baudelaire,
Paris Spleen
, ‘The Double Room', pp. 5–7, at p. 6.

20
  Vaneigem, ‘Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation', in
Leaving the Twentieth Century
, p. 138.

21
  Lewis Piaget Shanks,
Baudelaire: Flesh and Spirit
(London: Noel Douglas, 1930), p. 216, describing
Paris Spleen
.

22
  Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture', ‘Dictionnaire critique',
Documents
No. 2, May 1929, p. 117.

  
1
  Daniel Defoe,
A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, abridged, ed. and with an introduction by Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 395.

  
2
  Defoe,
A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, pp. 491–3.

  
3
  Thomas De Quincey,
The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, the revised version of 1856 (London: Folio Society, 1963), p. 90.

  
4
  Ibid.,
p. 73.

  
5
  Edgar Allan Poe,
The Domain of Arnheim
, in
Selected Tales
(London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 382–98, at pp. 386–7.

  
1
  
Nations for Sale
, a study of Britain's overseas image, was written by Anneke Elwes in 1994, for the international advertising network DDB Needham. Patrick Wright reported (‘Wrapped in tatters of the flag',
Guardian
, 31 December 1994) that she found Britain ‘a dated concept' difficult ‘to reconcile with reality'.

  
2
  The statement is part of Lord Henry Wotton's monologue to Dorian on their first meeting; see Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, in
Complete Works
, general ed. J. B. Foreman (London: Collins, 1984), p. 32.