Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Psychogeographers announce that there is still beauty in urban decay*

 

Iain Sinclair divides people. To be honest, he divides me. I'm a big fan of some of his books, Downriver most specifically, but London Orbital and bits of Lights Out For The Territory too. His work undoubtedly has a degree of cultural importance. He has documented spaces and places, processes of urban change and renewal that might otherwise have gone ignored. He's also guilty though of self-aggrandisement, self-parody, cronyism (endless vainglorious cameos from tediously eccentric friends) and, worst of all perhaps, a certain fetishisation of urban decay. Like a modern day aristocrat on the Grand Tour, Sinclair seeks out poverty and destitution and turns it into some aesthetic tableau. Rusty factory units are his romantic ruins and tramps huddled below underpasses his ruddy faced yokels. 

Lately he's been popping up all over the place, proselytising against the London Olympics, or promoting his latest book Ghost Milk, depending on which side of the divide you're on. He was in The Observer on Sunday sparring with former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Tessa Jowell about the supposed 'legacy' of the games and last night he popped up on BBC2's Newsnight. The short film Sinclair made for the programme showed him at both his best and worst. There are many reasons to be sceptical and even downright hostile to the games - the ticket allocation farce, the treatment of river boat dwellers on the River Lea and the loss of allotments, natural habitats and open space amongst them. Sinclair is right to point these things out, but there are strong arguments to be made about the economic and political effect of the games and Sinclair isn't really making them.

Instead he offers an aestheticised vision of, for want of a better term, shittyness. At one point during his film he pointed to a breakers yard and declared it as good as a Joseph Beuys artwork. This is the urban hipster version of shabby chic, an effete observation that recalls the British painters of Saint Ives patronising (in every sense) Alfred Wallis. At other points he wanders around expressing exasperation at builder's hoardings causing him some minor inconvenience or rails at the cleaning up of the boating lake in Victoria Park. But these seem like the gripes of the terminal misanthrope, a Victor Meldrew-ish exasperation of life at its most petty and a hopeless railing against any form of change. It's hard when knocking Sinclair not to come across as some vapid boosterist and one can sympathise with his visceral dislike of the language (and the effects) of regeneration, but he also has that hopeless, miserable English disease of thinking the worst of everything. The Olympics will be a disaster, he seems to say, simply because everything is. Like Marvin the Paranoid Android wandering Hackney Marshes, he suggests that all new building is pointless, all attempts at planning doomed and any development always the product of base venality.

But buildings always replace other things. They are always about destruction as well as construction and we celebrate ones now that must have appeared insensitive behemoths when they were completed. As an architect it is impossible to share Sinclair's deep but affected cynicism about new building. Sure, much of it is shit but then again, most of the buildings in the Olympic Park emphatically aren't. A couple even look genuinely beautiful. And if you can't build a new urban park in a place like Stratford, where can you? And this is the point. Sinclair's vision ultimately suggests an ever tinier and more myopic introversion, a celebrating of the incidental, peripheral, neglected and marginal to the point where you can't see anything else or do anything else ever again. He's right to rail against the class cleansing inherent in regeneration projects (although other people like Patrick Wright and Owen Hatherley have done this much better and with less sentimentality), but it's hard to get away from his own bourgeoisie conceits and fusty contraryism. Whatever, his eyeor-ish traipsing around East London made me look forward much more to the 100 metres.

* This post's title is a reference to The Onion's recent and very funny headline, link here.

9 comments:

Sammy J said...

"But buildings always replace other things. They are always about destruction as well as construction and we celebrate ones now that must have appeared insensitive behemoths when they were completed."

Beautifully said. Thanks.

M@ said...

That's one brilliant summary of the man and his work. I was going to review Ghost Milk on Londonist, but you make all the points I'd have made much more eloquently. 'Endless vainglorious cameos from tediously eccentric friends' sums it up perfectly.

John Dee said...

I don't disagree with much of your post, however it was the writer Will Self who was sparring with Tessa Jowell.

Charles Holland said...

Thanks for comment John,

Yep....Iain Sinclair was in The Observer sparring with Tessa Jowell - http://bit.ly/nwfRSz - and made the short film that proceeded the debate between Will Self and Tessa Jowell. Will amend to make that clear....

Kosmograd said...

So good. I love Iain Sinclair's writing, especially Radon's Daughters, Lights Out and London Orbital, but he has become more curmudgeonly, and Eeyore-ish as you brilliantly put it, as time goes on. And then there's the awful film he made for Audi.

It was inevitable that Sinclair would hate the Olympics, only seeing the negative, with no outcomes other than greed and failure. As an eternal pessimist he is bound not be be disappointed.

But then the language of splenetic rage is always more lyrical than support or appreciation. As the saying goes: 'Happiness writes white'. At the end of day I read Sinclair for the word-imagery rather than the world view.

Anonymous said...

I know what you're saying, but I *think* you're missing the point of Ghost Milk: it's not new buildings per se that are the problem, it's the 'Grand Projects' that Sinclair is opposed to.

It's the basic difference between piecemeal projects which may or may not appeal to your own particular aesthetic taste, and the razing of entire neighbourhoods in the name of something that will be better *because* it is new and shiny and has the 'right' sort of people in it.

Sinclair's 'vision' (such as it seems to be to me) is not about "peripheral, neglected, and marginal" but the fortuitous, the coincidental, and the accidental -- the things that happen in the sixty years *after* the architect packs up and heads on to the next project while the people make a place their own. The Olympic Park will never 'belong' to Londoners in the happenstance, evolutionary way that what was there before did because it's too big, to controlled, and just too damned grand.

I had a very brief chat with him after a reading and was really pleasantly surprised by his cheerfulness and approachability. I asked him what *he* thought the Olympic Park should look like afterwards if we were to recover anything useful and his response was basically this: 'it's not for me to tell other people what Stratford or Hackney should look like, because then it would be my grand project, it's for you to get involved however you think best.' That's a rather good answer to my mind...

Charles Holland said...

Thanks for your comments anonymous. Some good points, although I'm not sure I understand the difference between the "peripheral, neglected etc." and the "fortuitous, coincidental etc."

You are right and so is Sinclair to raise the issues (class cleansing, destruction of housing, habitats, public open space etc.) often buried by regeneration boosterism. I agree and tried to highlight those things in the post and give Sinclair some due there. But I think in Sinclair's case (and not in the other writers who I cited) this too often spills over into sentimental, poverty tourism. It's a thin line maybe....

In my own work (if I could put it so pompously) I am very interested in issues of the circumstantial, piecemeal and how places change over time - hence the interest in DIY (see post below). Also at FAT we have developed ideas around "ad-hoc urbanism", which precisely tries to reconcile new planning with a nuanced understanding of the different social groups and divergent cultures of a place. On a number of projects we have tried to develop a kind of bottom-up urbanism that celebrates and accommodates exactly the things you mention.

Having said all that I don't agree that Londoner's will never feel a sense of ownership about the Olympic Park or make it their own. This seems to exhibit a lack of historical perspective. Victoria Park - a top down grand project if ever there was one - is also one of Sinclair's declared favourite spaces, the kind of public act of generosity that needs protecting. It's also an example of imposed Victorian Royal values and imperial power.

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