University of York

Route to Work. Part 1. Pershore Road Car Park

I find the car parks at the end of Bradford Street and the Pershore Road to me immensely beautiful structures in their pure no frills functionality. I’ve always admired dirty great concrete hulks and I reckon these are some of the best but after attending Oliver Beers Resonance project they have been transformed in my eyes into beautiful buildings. As Stafford seemed to claim when its new multi-storey carpark at the rail station would turn Stafford from a town into a city we can perhaps assume that a decent multi-storey is a modern day equivalent of a cathedral. The carpark on Pershore Road certainly has the acoustic qualities of a cathedral as I witnessed in the summer of 2010.

Oliver Beer and members of Ex Cathedra occupied one of the concrete and glass plank stairwells and sang in it, varying their pitch until they hit on resonant frequencies. The viewers or witnesses to this event walked up the stair way past the singers, squeezing right past them in what would have been an awkward proximity if I hadn’t been in such a transcendent state. When the singers found the resonant frequencies the whole stairwell began to throb, the atmosphere was thick with exciting sound and excited concrete. As I walked through a vivid 3dimensional panning of sound was warping round my head so that it felt my head might explode as I walked inbetween a singer and their resonant sweet spot, my ears literally inches away from the two sound sources.

The event came to an end when a bunch of young hoodlums tried to smash up all the recording equipment but I was in such a state of joy that I stuck around to talk to Oliver Beer who was good enough to walk me around the carpark and show me its sweet spots. Just by humming even at the right pitch at one of these sweets spots the whole area around us was transformed into a solid room of sound. The echoes and the source repeatedly overlaid each other and without amplification turned the whole stairwell into a massive instrument.

Beer has done a series of these Resonance Projects in buildings and spaces all over the place but I wouldn’t  have swapped the one I saw for any of the others as it had a transformative power, turning what is often perceived as a shit, even scary place occupied by the sorts of people who tried to smash the recording equipment up, into an instrument of absolute beauty.

Oliver Beer - Pay and Display, The Resonance Project (II) from FOM 2 on Vimeo.



Oliver Beer - Pay and Display, The Resonance Project from FOM 2 on Vimeo.

You can see a couple of videos of the project here and whilst they are cool they fall a long way short of the actual experience. Also, really glad I didn’t see the one with children because that is really quite terrifying. Also here are some photos I took of the event.

equipment

equipment

equipment

the usual motley crue Ikon crowd 

entrance

that Ikon curator (you know the one I mean)

singer

singer

singer

St. Louis via Meyerowitz

There are two things that have drawn me to the photography of Joel Meyerowitz. The first is the stunning rich deep layered colours and the lighting. I have only seen 4 or 5 of his images but the ones I have seen tend to be in the evening sunset and are beautiful. The colours remind me of my time in St. Louis this summer where the hazy vivid humid colours burned into my mind and made me fall in love with what really was a city well past its prime. These are a few of the photos I took in the setting sun in St. Louis one evening whilst I was there.

The other thing I like about Meyerowtiz's photography is the irreverence he pays to the iconic landmarks...or maybe its the reverence he does pay to the normal context that I like. Either way Meyerowitz is happy to find a great vantage point of a landmark such as the St.Louis arch or the Empire State building and then turn his back on it to photograph what is on the opposite side of the street. That normal scene represented is just as real and just as important to the city as a whole organism yet normally gets overlooked, it is from these places that we view the heroic icon, we don't normally view them for what they are themselves. This is partly what Lee and I were trying to achieve with our film of Bradford street for the SMIBE 2011 competition. By showing very frontal images of the normal buildings along Bradford Street we were giving no clues away as to where the film actually was, a slight change of camera angle or a pan would have revealed the Bullring, the Radison, the Cube or various other well known iconic landmarks. That would have instantly allowed the viewer to place the setting in Birmingham and taken the focus off Bradford Street and placed it instead on these icons. For some reason it reminds me of Guy de Maupassant who hated the Eiffel Tower so much he used to eat his lunch at the top of it everyday as it was the only spot in Paris from where he couldn't see it.

Joel Meyerowitz

Wapping Project

My second visit to the Wapping Project confirmed in my mind that it is rapidly becoming one of my favourite places in London. Situated in an old Hydraulic Power Station on the banks of the Thames this is a bit more than the usual post-derelict warehouse art gallery...the gallery space is dramatically dark and is accessed by a modern stairway which makes very light contact with the old building. The first time I came this entire space was flooded and the visitor had to paddled around in a boat, this time you could walk around and discover other rooms full of old machinery. This is a dramatic space which actually does allow the artist to respond to it, rather than being some old building that did have a dramatic space that has been stripped of its old features flooded with north light and sterilised with a polished concrete floor. The cast iron columns are corroding and the brick work is left in a condition far removed from polished off, any original features are kept, but not religiously, so Victorian tiles find themselves partially obscured from view by the machinery that came later and would perhaps have been removed by different preservationists/conservationists.

The presence of machinery in the main area which doubles as a swanky bistro is what makes this place really special though. The posh dining tables and chairs find themselves butt next to hulking great pieces of machinery that, whilst clean still reak of engine oil. Again the machines aren't treated reverently, candles dripping wax to light the tables are on top of them as well as massive old TVs showing video art as part of the exhibition play away. They aren't showcased but nor are they diminished to some sort of stage set background...they are part of the Project. Up above in the vast roof space old vines still creep their way into the building and if you follow the staircase up to the top you can see the vast old tanks of water. Really awesome...and bloody nice hot chocolate too! These are some photos from my last visit to Wapping on 3rd March 2012 where the photography of Edgar Martins was on show "This is not a House" 

http://www.thewappingproject.com/
http://dustmagazine.com/blog/?p=587