Here Now, There Now

Departure and destination

For commuters the train journey is measured as the direct route between two points. Here now, there now. Aberdeen to Dundee: 70 minutes; Dundee to Edinburgh: 82 minutes; Edinburgh to Glasgow: 53 minutes. We get on the train; we get off the train to take up with our lives again. And yet what are the other ways we experience this space in between departure and destination?

Train journeys create headspace. The ideal space to think, to read, to concentrate, to daydream. The carriage is surely a public space yet intermittently it is a private space for conversation between fellow passengers, or through a remote connection to the outside world via mobile phone or computer. A bag on a chair or a laptop on a table is the silently understood signal for claiming personal territory. Travel can be an interrupted space. New people come on; mobile signals fail in tunnels. Caught in the wrong pre-booked seat then it is time to move on. The train journey contains the time for both stillness and frenetic movement.

Suspended in this space until we arrive, the train window provides an alternative world to the activity and noise of the train carriage. The landscapes and built spaces we pass through are as silent to us as the receiver at the other end of a one-way mobile conversation we cannot help but overhear. We look up from our activity momentarily to glimpse a landmark we recognise or even better something we could not have expected. A fox cuts across a field. The sea glints back at us (1). What a connection to a world of other possibilities!

For three days in June 2008, commuters on trains going from Aberdeen to Dundee, Dundee to Edinburgh and Edinburgh to Glasgow were the unsuspecting audience of an art project that took place alongside the tracks. There were people in business suits running alongside the trains; prone bodies arranged in formation on hillsides; lines of synchronized dancers going through mysterious paces and signs encouraging unusual thought. These sights interrupted the familiar vistas a traveller would normally expect from looking out of the train window. Here Now, There Now connected the commuter to other spaces and offered the potential to observe the unexpected.

In an early example of artists working with railways, artists were employed to make the land knowable. When the Canadian Pacific Railway was built, stretching from Atlantic to Pacific coasts, it covered vast swathes of unknown territory purchased by Scotsman Sir John A MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada, from the Hudson Bay Company. MacDonald knew that the railway stood for the growth of a new nation, of sprawling geographic size. To encourage people to move out in order to settle on and farm the empty land, he first had to give it a desirable identity. Free passes were given to artists to travel across this terra nullius, in order for them to paint the wilderness between the two points. Their resulting pictures appropriated this landscape into a Western Sublime, a utopia, which was quite different from the reality of the landscape. Whilst this example from the 19th Century shows artists making the unknown known, Here Now, There Now, works in reverse; rendering the familiar seen from the train window unknown again.

The invention of the railway signified progress and ‘a promise of an imminent Utopia’ (2). Since then all utopian societies and places have existed best in sci-fi and fantasy, rather than in reality. The fact that Utopia is a nowhere land, its ideals unachievable, is true to the original intention of Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, where an imaginary traveller Raphael Hythloday experiences an ideal island society harmonized through their need for order and discipline over liberty. Thomas More intended this construction as an allegorical device he could use to freely discuss the contemporary controversial matters and reality of his time. Utopia was never a place intended to exist.

Conversely, critics of the first railways referred to them as ‘an annihilation of space and time’ (3), with speed seen as the enemy to life as it had been known. Nowadays, the opposite has again occurred, with many commuters positively finding that time spent in the suspended bubble of travel as giving them back the time to think in this space between work and home. Here Now, There Now is concerned with the structure of space, time and movement.

In 1817 Scottish mill owner Robert Owen first defined the framework of a working day. Owen drew up the goal of the eight-hour day with the slogan ‘Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation and eight hours rest’ for his utopian socialist enterprise at New Lanark. In a loose echo to the relationship between regimented time and the worker, Here Now, There Now was devised to be seen along three train routes and consist of three different performances.

Raman Mundair’s signs along the railway track provided a different kind of slogan for commuters, in essence, cartography for thought and the imagination to traverse. She describes the signs as being ‘mediations for meditation’. Rather than being a train sign directing to a platform they directed the viewer back into themselves and an inner space for contemplation. The sign is normally used to quantify, name or fix something. Mundair’s signs operate in reverse, expanding the meaning and in doing so making how we think about movement, space and time, in relation to ourselves, more elastic. With an economy of language she has separated out phrases, onto separate signs to be viewed concurrently.

timeline deadline trainline lifeline

The separate units of these words begin to resemble railway carriages ready to be linked by the viewer. Situated on the Aberdeen to Dundee route was the sign:

Train
your eye
to sea

Its double meaning, to take in fully the sight of the sea at that very instant, and to see things afresh, highlights one of the main messages of Here Now, There Now, with its live performance and glimpses of something out of the ordinary, which is for us to consider our capacity for how we can fully inhabit the moment and the space we move through.

Pernille Spence, the lead artist, creator and producer of Here Now, There Now has long been concerned with creating artworks that keep the protagonist and audience suspended in the moment. An early video work I look up, I look down, (2001), the concept of time was suspended with a falling figure, a parachutist, appearing to be held in space, ‘weightless within the bubble of the hemisphere’ (4). Hovering between sky and earth, it appears for this moment of footage, that the artist can control time and space. Her live performance, ‘Kinaree’, (2003) explored the limits and constraints of the human body and movement. Taking place over the period of the day, the figure walked her short route back and forth in a glass house. The passage of time was only denoted by her body, which covered in goose fat and honey, slowly accumulating a new covering of feathers. It is therefore appropriate that the never-ending loop of our lives – commuting, work, sleep, and leisure – is an area Spence explores in Here Now, There Now.

Spence orchestrated two of the performances. For the first, groups of three to four people, lay on their backs, straight, with their hands by their sides. Grazing cows and sheep moved obliviously in random around many of the regimented formations, who lay in fields and hillsides, surrounded by pasture and gorse. The uniform space between each figure was as significant as the spacing between Mundair’s words and signs. Purposefully standardised in pose and structure, these people, apparently set to stay, were an oddity in the landscape. It seemed fitting that they lay in ‘resting’ land, the definition of non-crop land. The groups also echoed back to the trains how bodies naturally adopt the rigid configuration of railway carriage seating.

As a neat juxtaposition to the tension of commuter travel, dance, as an expression, encapsulates a physical and emotional release. For the second action, Spence worked with choreographer Litza Bixler, on a short routine of eight movements, taking the group in sequence to the left and then, repeating the moves in reverse to the right. The dance was designed to be reminiscent of popular non-elitist dance forms from early disco to line dancing, which allow for any amateur to learn the basics then let their enthusiasm guide their moves. Bixler was also influenced by all male LA band ‘Ok Go’ (5), with their unique brand of formation dancing for their music videos teetering on parody, passion and geek cool. The Here Now, There Now groups could be seen dancing at Doonies Farm, Lunan Bay, River Esk, Muchalls, Dalmeny, Lochmuir, Dairsie, Wormit, Philpstoun, Dullatur Marsh and Union Canal. Their stage became the natural theatre they inhabited - a field overlooking bay, the horizon line of a towpath on top of an embankment.

In a marked contrast to the stillness and ordered nature of these two performances, Anthony Schrag brought frenetic movement and futility to the third set of performers. Working with a group of runners, he asked them to ‘run’ at the trains, in an attempt to catch them up. The runners, mostly working alone, were dressed in business suits and appeared to explode out of the middle of nowhere. Schrag defines his work primarily as capturing a physical and active understanding of space through the instincts of the body. As a young child with poor eyesight he had to trust how his body became accustomed to the layout of the house. As a consequence as an artist, ‘when I see things that speak about the body in space and its own self-knowledge, that makes more sense to me..’ (6).

This has led to video works such as ‘The city is my playground’ (2007), where Schrag lets his body lead as he climbs and traverses urban architectural details. Running between walls, climbing lamps and swinging along the rafter of an awning, his athletic journey allows him to understand space in a different way; his movement free and unprescribed from expected behaviour. Schrag is also drawn to the absurd with many of his works subverting the natural order of things. For ‘Opening’ (2006) he had the audience use a trampette to reach the hospitality beer stacked on a high shelf. During ‘Mistake of Vision (III)-Floor’ (2007) the audience, by default, wrecked the artwork. Set loose in(to) a gallery that had an intricately taped pattern on the floor, the gallery goers soon found out it was a reverse Jim Lambie, with the tape placed sticky side up.

The runners for Here Now, There Now were inspired by the characters Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ 7, who chase after notions they often cannot quite remember, set in perpetuity for them never to achieve. Their vigil of waiting for outside circumstances to activate their course of action, is mirrored by the runners’ waiting, then running for a train they cannot hope to catch. For Schrag, the gesture of trying to attain is enough.

I decided that to write about Here Now, There Now, it was a necessity to be a participant as well as a viewer. On my first day, I was a dancer. Transported and dropped off at our location, Lunan Bay, the group nervously went through paces before the first trains arrived, getting used to the territory and adapting to our task. The most striking aspect was how we, as the performers, experienced time, space and movement as the day progressed. With instructions and allocated positions, we very early on became locked into our routine and stage. The coming and going of the trains punctuated our day as we sprung into choreographed action at the first train sighting or vibrating sound on the tracks. However, as the day drew on our doubts began to mirror the existential crisis in ‘Waiting for Godot’. Could we be sure that we truly existed? Had we been seen? We did not know what the audience on the train thought, so removed from us as they repeatedly passed through, in seconds, the section of landscape which was to be our home for the next nine hours.

We became part of a constant moment. Dancing in a field that curved around, dropping away into cliffs, overlooking the bay, over the course of the day we saw the tide come in and go out, to reveal once again the poles of the fishing nets stuck into the sand. We slowly flatten a large area of grass through our periods of action and repose. One participant, an artist, reckoned that Surrealism as an art form was alive and well in Scotland, and that the very nature of Here Now, There Now demonstrated this. The gaps between trains became our freedom from structure, filled with conversation that veered into surreal territory itself. Talk of old dance injuries led into favourite massages, varieties of suicide, general violence against others, Hilary Clinton’s ankles, ping pong shows not requiring bats and finally a lengthy discussion on pole-dancing. The fate of leaves, sheep, cows and people on tracks was discussed in minute detail. This bawdy talk seemed slightly at odds with the bucolic landscape. For a short period we also had our own ready-made audience. Five railway workers in fluorescent vests looked on as we rushed to hide our possessions in the long grass to begin our strange dance every time the train passed. They started to heckle us, in a good-natured way, copying parts of the ritual: arm up, arm down, lean back. However they soon became our allies, letting us know if a train was on its way.

The next day I was one of the people lying down. What links my two groups, from dancing at Lunan Bay to lying down at Dalgety Bay, is the eternal question: ‘How intelligent are cows?’ As the three of us lay down on a small hillside facing the train track, we got the opportunity to watch a herd working in formation as they slowly got themselves together in the same direction to migrate across the field. Nestled in the grass, we chatted a bit but spent most of our time in repose. Time slowed down and was halcyon. Lying down, my horizon line had shifted. I was up so close to the grass, every time I closed my eyes I could still see the shapes of their sharp blades. With my other two colleagues half-hidden, I could no longer see the full outline of their bodies as they connected in such a simple way with the land. Although we looked at the same scene for nine hours, every time I opened my eyes I could see something different. A bird and a plane shot away from each other, forming the arms of a ‘v’ shape. Birds surfed the air currents. There is a minutiae of detail in this space. We felt the momentary chill in the air when the sun went behind a cloud. The grass breathed under the heat of our bodies. There was condensation under the plastic sheets we lay on. At 4 o’clock I realised I had not looked properly at the clouds. The sun steadily moved around in an arc through the sky. Insects landed on our faces and bodies. Spiders and ants cut across us to get back into their grass habitat again.

There were three performers on the other side of the hill who were too hidden by the height of the grass so were instructed to sit up when a train passed. I saw them as I crossed the summit of the hill over to their side. They looked as if they have been ritually buried up to their waists in the hillside. Like Easter Island monoliths they stared fixedly ahead.

At the end of the performance it was with reluctance that we left. As Pernille phoned to tell us we had ten minutes to go, Emile remarked, ‘It’s like when the alarm goes off on the Monday morning and you don’t want to get up’.

As performers, we may have taken over these sites for three days but they took over us too. Many diverse experiences are reported back; of facial sunburn, intermittent boredom; and a group of dancers were sinisterly circled by a group of cows in a bovine stand off. However the universal response was that the groups, all made up from a diverse mixture of artists, dancers, students and interested parties, have all enjoyed spending time with people they did not know, united in this unusual ritual.

Although deceivingly simple in action, the performances and signs conjure up many more responses from the audience. On one train, the sightings became a game, with
those passengers at the top of the carriage letting the others know when to expect something. Police are phoned about a mad man running in a field. Off duty train drivers travelling back home on the train are convinced an advert is being shot, due to the film crew on board their trains. A dog walker, on seeing the ‘Imminent Utopia’ signpost being erected, asks if this is the site of a new housing project. A train, for the usual infuriating reason of lazy signals, stops directly in front of the sign that reads:

Mo(ve)ment for deliberation
Mo(ve)ment for procrastination

These moments of strange synchronicity make the project complete.

Within the project title is the conciliatory platitude, ‘there now’. Between departure and destination, whilst we are here now, we must get on with it. Here Now There Now, perhaps most honestly looks at the structure we need in our lives, the ongoing pursuit and desire of ideals and the importance of the occasional freedoms that can occur within it.

But after all, the special attraction of the journey lies not in our being able to alight at places on the way and to stop altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in its making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible…8

Jenny Brownrigg, August 2008

Footnotes
1 From conversation with Raman Mundair
2 p.8, ‘The Railway Journey, The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century’, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Berg Publishers Ltd, 1986
3 Ibid, p.33
4 Essay text by Victoria Lynn for Deep Space, Immersion and Sensation at ACMI, Melbourne, Australia 2003
5 Ok Go, formed 1998. Their first single ‘A Million Ways’ (2005) featuring a lo-fi video shoot of them dancing in their back yard, has been viewed over 37 million times on YouTube.
6 P. 53, ‘Its not Hard’, Anthony Schrag, 2008
7 Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’, first published 1956, Faber and Faber Ltd
8 P. 39/40 ‘The Railway Journey, The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century’,by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Berg Publishers Ltd, 1986. This book references the above quote from ‘Remembrance of Things Past, vol. II, Within a Budding Grove, I; transl. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York, 1934, p. 489-90)

4-6 June 2008

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