Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

A woman challenges Gerz. Drummond has his hand up, but she’s younger and prettier. She wants to know about monuments for other life forms, for animals. ‘What we call language,’ says the conceptualist, ‘is a one-way road.’ There have been poems to fruit trees but no fruit tree has ever written a poem to us. ‘Reality not ethics.’ Drummond likes the message, but Atkins (the vegan) is visibly annoyed.

‘It wasn’t any more fountains, fountains was the good thing,’ Gerz announces. ‘Parks — that’s a crazy place to put art.’ Drummond, who envisions (but does not always enact) subversive gestures in the street and alongside motorways (dead cows from pylons, lager distribution to vagrants, cash barbecues), can buy the antipastoral thesis. If they let you put it there, if they pay you for it, walk out. Dead fountains, erased obelisks, vandalised public statuary achieve meaning only when they are ignored, when they have become anonymous.

The message, according to Gerz, never changes: ‘half makes sense, half is baroque’. There is memory and there is the object, the diary, the book of photographs, the video tape. Gerz, a polemicist, operates through the questionnaire (realising, I suspect, that the person who sets the questions sets the script). Democratic dialogue is revealed as a tool of the benevolent demagogue. ‘I’m looking for viewers, I’m looking for artists,’ he says. Which describes the fix very neatly. In a perfect world (a world that behaved according to the freaks of my imagination), I’d walk away. Atkins and Drummond, separately, would deliver their accounts of this excursion. I’d sit in the pub, read them over, edit them: twin voices, contrapuntal contradictions.

A six-and-a-half-hour walk for one hour in the company of a German conceptualist, an account of acts undertaken in other countries to honour memory. ‘Even if they didn’t have dead people, they had an obelisk.’ The Research Institute is the right place to receive this message. ‘Photographs,’ Gerz concludes, ‘are always healing.’

There were no more walks with Drummond. Mill Hill earthed all that, the hunger, the predatory attention. Atkins took part in several Drummond projects, recording signs, shooting portraits. Drummond is a collector of images. He spent the money left over from the glory days, the small change that he didn’t burn, on a print by Richard Long. He found it in a gallery at the end of a day’s psychogeographical hiking (the shape of his own name walked into the landscape). But photographs do not heal, they hurt. They hold time. They obstruct the flow of memory. Drummond put the Long print up for sale. He printed leaflets. The concept: burn the cash and bury it at the Icelandic location depicted in the artist’s print.

One year after our attendance at the Gerz lecture, on 10 May 2000, a set of ‘specially commissioned photographs’, portraits of scientists, was exhibited at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. Fifty years of achievement: discoveries of the structure of viruses, antibodies; ‘mechanisms for the control of gene transcription; the gene for sex determination’. The photographer, the healer, had ‘exhibited extensively, including London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and New York’. His work was ‘published regularly in books and magazines worldwide’. Name? Marc Atkins.

We drove out of London, using a section of the M25 (Junction 15 to Junction 12) as a slowmoving travelator, for the culture-switch (M4 to M3). Sun going down behind Wraysbury Reservoir. Sword-shaped flashes from the windscreens of oncoming traffic. Gravel pits, lagoons, reservoirs: factored from aeroplanes climbing into the clouds, out of Heathrow. Grounded motors in fidgety lines; crawling like invalid carriages as they creep up on a supermarket check-out at Tesco’s, Mare Street.

Anna doesn’t care. Just so long as she’s leaving London. Even if it’s only for a few hours, an art show in Selborne; a mile or two outside Alton, Hampshire. Gilbert White’s Selborne. Curate White (1720–93) was born in the village. He refused richer livings to remain in his birthplace. He kept a ‘Garden Kalendar’ and later a ‘Naturalist’s Diary’. In 1767 he published his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne . That book, in various disguises, has been a staple of secondhand booktrade ever since.

One of the first and most civilised customers of my dealing days, an elderly Jewish gentleman called Mark, who lived in Sandringham Road, Dalston (aka ‘The Front Line’), in a book-crammed flat, put me on to Gilbert White. He loved White and Jane Austen (house heritaged in an Alton suburb); Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey. Whenever he found one of their books on a stall, in Camden Passage or Farringdon Road, in Cecil Court, he would buy it. And, if possible, talk to the vendor about the author. If Mark got a day off work, he took a bus into the countryside. He would visit Austen’s house or walk through the fields around Selborne.

I helped Mark clear his room when he moved into sheltered accommodation in Green Lanes, Finsbury Park. There must have been two dozen copies of White’s Selborne , in all shapes and conditions. Illustrated. Pocket-sized. Distressed. Uncut. Mark’s England, playing against the streets in which he lived, was conjured from these precious volumes. But now, at his daughter’s insistence, he was forced to choose: one copy per title.

Selborne had a mystique. A connection with a set of multiple-occupation houses at the back of Ridley Road Market, Dalston. We drove into the village on a mild spring evening (25 April 1998), found somewhere to park, and set off to look for the Mouth & Foot Painting Artists’ Gallery.

That title wasn’t an obvious crowd pleaser. Better then, pre-virus, but still capable of triggering unhappy associations. The gallery was easy to find, the crowd spilt out onto the village street. I recognised a few faces, old friends from Dublin and Hackney. The show we had come to see had been hung for one night only. ‘Michael & Mary Dreaming: 21 paintings celebrating a journey along the Michael ley-line from Norfolk to St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall.’ The artist was Laurence (‘Renchi’) Bicknell. Leaflets offered a selective CV. ‘Born 1946. Previous exhibitions include Combined Show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1974), One Man Show at the Amwell Gallery (1974), and the original 8 paintings from this series at the “Shamanism of Intent” exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham (1991). Renchi has been running The Little Green Dragon bookshop (with Vanessa) for the last 15 years and since selling the bookshop in October 1997 he and Vanessa are both working at Lord Mayor Treloar College as House-parents.’

I knew most of this story. I’d met Renchi in Dublin, when I was (officially) a student and he was a transient, a presence, a painter. A runaway. There was a certain romance attached to this: Caporal-blue workman’s jacket, handpainted shoes. Hair combed with a fork. Youth. Enthusiasm. Talk. Connections, back in England, with the New Departures mob, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown. Adventures on the road which, in telling, grooved into myth. Restlessness, the quest. Petit mal seizures.

Renchi laboured under an impossible burden. Laid on him by his peers. Be the painter. Americans with trust funds syphoned the production line. Public-school Englishmen with jobs in the City commissioned portraits. Be the Rimbaud genius. Burn out. Nominate your Abyssinia. Disappear.

Into Hackney. Communal houses. Paintings that were endlessly revised, toshed over, abandoned. Sacred sites visited and recalled. Dissatisfaction. A plump ginger cat. An infant in dungarees. Window open on a wild garden. Paintbrush in mouth, cigarette. Unshaved. Multicolour cardigan. The romance wearing thin, overexposed in 8mm diary movies. Exploited.