A Dance to the Music of Time

A PLAY IN TIME

SUSAN TRANGMAR A PLAY IN TIME

With texts by David Chandler, Rebecca Drew, David Alan Mellor, Claire MacDonald

Susan Trangmar A Play in Time

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PARK LIFEREBECCA DREW


Collaboration and communication are the basis of all Photoworks projects, and the Park Life commission has been particularly conversational. Evolving from discussions with Brighton & Hove City Council, initiated in 2005, the project grew from a shared enthusiasm for and commitment to the cultural life of Brighton & Hove and a common interest in exploring the significance of green spaces for the residents of our seaside city. Parks represent more than just flower beds, sports facilities and somewhere to walk the dog. They sustain the local community, in all its diversity, and foster a sense of belonging and civic pride away from the hubbub and transitory tourism of the sea front. One of the most democratic spaces available to us, free of charge, parks inspire daydreaming and play, social interaction and solitary reflection. As well as promoting health and well being, they nurture the imagination.

From these loquacious seeds a photographic commission was cultivated to explore the unique emotional landscape of one of the city’s parks. Susan Trangmar was selected from an open submission because she engaged most fully in this conversation. She wanted to listen to the park and spend time getting to know it. Having chosen St Ann’s Well Gardens as her location, Trangmar spent a year noticing its seasonal transformations, tracing its evolving moods and observing the different activities performed and practised by its visitors. The intimate study in moving image and recorded sound that has resulted from this careful attention, presented on the enclosed disk, is itself conversational – an exchange between the artist, the park’s inhabitants, its landscape and history; a dialogue between sound and image;

Susan Trangmar filming in the park.

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a duet performed by its double framing. The essays that follow extend these conversations further with personal responses to A Play in Time, and the book concludes with an interview of the artist in which she recounts her experience of working in this popular park.

St Ann’s Well Gardens in Hove, located at the centre of the city, is well frequented, with an active Friends group, a successful café, and a dedicated team of gardeners. It is a good example of the recent resurgence in green spaces, supported by lottery funds and increased governmental concern with the health of the nation, and not one of the neglected and vandalised parks found in many inner cities. Yet, with no perimeter fencing, it remains open to all. For a small space of just under five hectares, it has a complex layout, with different areas accommodating a host of activities, offering several conservation areas, informal woodland, mown lawns, formal flower beds and a playground. Its boasts a well-established bowling club and the tennis club is one of the oldest in the country.1 What particularly sets it apart from other parks in the city and made it such an appropriate site for this commission is the key role it played in the development of early cinema.

Given our national obsession with gardens and perfect lawns it is perhaps surprising that the development of municipal parks coincides chronologically with the invention of photography and film. It was not until 1835, the year that Henry Fox Talbot produced his first photographic image, that George IV, who had spent his regency revelling in Brighton,


finally opened Regent’s Park to the general public, following its redesign by the Royal Pavilion’s architect John Nash. The first municipal park founded by a local authority, Moor Park in Preston, was created in 1833, soon to be followed by the influential Birkenhead Park, Liverpool, designed by Joseph Paxton, of Crystal Palace fame. These early models were replicated around the country. Civic enthusiasm for green spaces was prompted by the rapid urban expansion demanded by industrialisation and an ever-increasing population. It had become imperative to protect open areas from property developers. There was also a fear of social unrest at the time, as the Chartist movement grew, and parks were considered a safety valve, a legitimate place for workers to let off steam. This received official endorsement from the government’s Select Committee on Public Walks in 1833 who found that ‘parks would provide fresh air and places for city dwellers to take exercise and so improve the physical health of the people. They would provide contact with nature and an alternative form of recreation to the tavern and so they would provide a civilising influence on those urban citizens most thought to be in need of improvement. They would provide a location where members of the different classes could meet and learn from each other and this would help to reduce social tensions.’2

With the recognition that the wealth of the country depended on the welfare of its growing workforce, social cohesion was promoted through such forms of social engineering and the provision of recreational facilities became a political necessity. Inevitably, tensions developed

The Pump House, 1904.Courtesy of Hove Library.

Gala opening, Empire Day, 1908.Courtesy of Step Back in Time, Brighton

Formal opening of croquet lawns, 1 May 1913.Courtesy of Hove Library

Tennis courts in the 1920s.Courtesy of Step Back in Time, Brighton

From 1892 to 1904 George Albert Smith leased St Ann’s Well & Wild Garden from the Goldsmids. Variously a hypnotist, an illusionist, an astrologer and a portrait photographer, he had grand plans for the gardens. Smith had witnessed the Lumière Brothers’ new moving pictures in 1896 and was instantly captivated. The entrance fees to the park were to fund his new film career. Having built his own film camera, he turned part of the Pump House into a film laboratory, going on to construct a film studio, only the second in the country, in 1900. He made as many as 31 films in 1897 alone. Highly experimental, Smith was one of the first to edit different film sequences together. Pursuing his interest in illusionism, he developed superimposition in order to portray ghosts, is credited with inventing the close-up, as seen in the film Man Drinking (1897) and producing the earliest known wipe in Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903). Now lost, The Corsican Brothers (1898) is thought to contain the first double exposure and the earliest known multi-shot scene appears in The Little Doctors. 5

Smith eventually went bankrupt after his experiments with colour film – Kinemacolor – failed, though you can still see a sign for it on a small building next to Hove station. He assigned the lease of the park over to his associate Archie H Tee in 1904, also a lanternist and photographer. Meanwhile Hove Corporation had been endeavouring to purchase the Gardens from the Goldsmid family and eventually secured eleven acres of land for a charitable sum – the family had been offered much more by the property developers. St Ann’s Well Gardens was opened to the public with a grand gala on Empire Day, 1908.

between proscribed norms of behaviour in parks and the transgressive activities that have always been enjoyed in green spaces. Disorderly conduct – swearing, drunkenness, fornication, gambling, even political rallying – was banned from the start but, like the ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs, these strictures have been persistently ignored.3

In seaside resorts the population grew just as rapidly as in the bigger industrial cities and parks were considered part of the attractions on offer to tourists as much as municipal improvements. Brighton had become a popular resort after Dr Richard Russell (1687–1759) recommended the sea water as a cure-all, and he is also thought to have promoted the benefits of the ancient chalybeate spring found on the Wick estate, that was to become St Ann’s Well Gardens. The Prince Regent’s unofficial wife, Mrs Fitzherbert, mentions taking the spring’s waters in a letter of 1830, the same year that the land was acquired by the Goldsmid family. A pump house was built to protect the spring and during the 1880s the land surrounding it turned into a private pleasure gardens, with illuminations, a monkey house, balloon flights, a resident hermit and musical and theatrical performances. In 1897 they were described as:

‘St Ann’s Well and Wild Gardens, Furze Hill. Six acres of refreshing foliage and shady walks. Afternoon tea under the trees/ plenty of free swings/ Mrs Lee, celebrated Gypsy fortune-teller/ chalybeate water free / ferns, flowers and grapes for sale from the glasshouses. Admission 3d on weekdays 6d on Sundays.’4


G A Smith’s studio in St Ann's Well Gardens.Courtesy BFI.

Film set for Mary Jane’s Mishap by G.A. Smith, 1903, St Ann’s Well Gardens. Courtesy BFI.

Still from Grandma’s Reading Glasses by G.A. Smith, 1900. Courtesy BFI.

Not long after, in September 1910, the Duke of York’s Picture Theatre, Brighton was launched, making it one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas in Britain. By this time, every city and town in England boasted its own public park.

A Play in Time is a fitting addition to this rich cultural history and marks the Garden’s centenary. Through her photographs, performances and installations, Susan Trangmar has sustained an interest in how spaces are experienced and represented. This new film acknowledges the complexity of a green space in the middle of a contemporary city. Trangmar bestows her informed gaze on the everyday activities that occur within this relatively safe enclosure, refreshing the ordinary through concise framing and non-chronological editing. A Play in Time is a collection of sequences, snippets of time, ‘captured inconsequences’, words floating on the breeze of a summer’s day. With this playful collaging, Trangmar represents the fragmentary nature of our experience of temporality. At times haunting or melancholy, at others lyrical and life-affirming, the film is a beautiful evocation of the freedom we still enjoy in parks. As Peter Ackroyd affirms ‘the English imagination is forever green’6.


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1] For further information and a map of the park see stannswellgardens.co.uk

2] Hazel Conway, Public Parks, Shire Garden History, 1996, p.5. See also Charles Quest-Ritson, The English Garden, A Social History, Godine, 2003.

3] See David Lambert’s essay in Performance and Appropriation: Profane Rituals in Gardens and Landscapes, edited by Michel Conan, Dumbarton Oaks, 2003.

4] Hove Echo, 19 June, 1897, quoted in Judy Middleton, St Ann’s Well Gardens, Hove, 2003, p. 3. This illustrated publication offers a comprehensive survey of the park’s history, from which I have liberally drawn, and also reproduces The Legend of St Ann’s Well.

5] See Judy Middleton and also ed. Frank Gray, Hove Pioneers and the Arrival of Cinema, University of Brighton, 1996, pp 27-31.

6] Peter Ackroyd, Albion, The Origins of the English Imagination, Vintage, London, 2004, p.418.


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Susan Trangmar’s video work of passing times, shifting light and sociable zones in the parkland of St Ann’s Well Gardens in Hove can be located within a particular tradition, that of rus in urbe – the countryside embedded in the town. This convention has been a component of pictorial Realism in this country for more than a century and a half, and it is evident in paintings such as Ford Madox Brown’s An English Autumn Afternoon (1852-5), with its setting up of a vista of tawny back gardens: the randomness of strollers in Malcolm Drummond’s In the Park (St. James’ Park) (1912) and the filigree day-dreamings of dress, face and clothing in paintings by Elinor Bellingham Smith. More precisely still, Trangmar is being caught up in wider citations – Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte, for example, with its self-enclosured micro-narratives of parkland recreation. All these artists have engaged with a particular urban ideal of depicting a world of leisure and petit faits in public spaces, predicated on a certain inwardness of gaze and contemplation of segments of ‘nature’ bordered on by the near presences of the town. This was one of Trangmar’s stated aims when she came to this project: ‘Our enjoyment of the ‘expanded spaces’ of the park release us from present concerns to idle and daydream and play…The work tries to capture something of the complex interrelationships between public performance and private introspection... .’1

Put otherwise, Trangmar has made a work about reveries that are generated rus in urbe. But this reverie – the video as a whole – is constructed with care. It is staged, it is A Play in Time. This

AN INCIDENTAL ARCADIA DAVID ALAN MELLOR

aspect of the filmed theatrical is consonant with the history of St Ann’s Well Gardens, which was the site of the first plein air film studio in this country in 1897, being set down in a leisure complex, leased and developed from 1892 by the impressario and motion-picture pioneer, G. A. Smith. A photograph of the open air stage of this studio, an ornamented, stranded, parkland proscenium, was owned by the painter Francis Bacon, testament to his fascination with the archaeology of film. So there is a latent sense, around the specific space she has chosen, of the genesis of cinema and a return by Trangmar to one of its original scenes with the making of another film, painstaking in its laying out of frame and fragment and its containing of the human body in minimal, overseen, action.

Taking public gardens as prime location for picture making can be seen in the paintings of Tom Phillips, around 1970-1, who used the haunted precedent of a previous photo-mechanical production, like Trangmar. Phillips utilised John Hinde’s colour picture-postcards of the old Steine Gardens in Brighton, Battersea Park Gardens, and Prospect Gardens at Harrogate. Cropping them, Phillips discovered contingent details of sitting, musing or distracted individuals lost in moments of leisure time. Phillips then enlarged these details and transcribed them into a painted language, but one which retained the grain and photo-screen structure of the postcard. The spectacle of Hinde’s colour-rendered leisure has been seductive for Martin Parr, with his own agendas of Realism and his own capacities to oversee and picture recreation. While Parr’s assembly of Hinde’s views of Butlins is undertaken with a retro-gaze, Trangmar’s

version of found events at St Ann’s Well Gardens – haunted as the space is by a previous film-maker’s presence – remains in the present.

Another point of reference to parkland residues of vision, film and photography is to be found in Michelangelo Antonioni’s representation of Maryon Park, in East London, in his direction of the film Blow-Up (1966). Here, a nature lyricism of wind, branches and leaves – one of the core elements of Trangmar’s film – is counterpoint to a fatal narrative, an enigma of an apparent murder, which bites into the spectacle of a late spring day in a park. In A Play in Time, there is a more settled diurnal and seasonal narrative: slow rhythms, which reflected her measured process of shooting across the year and meticulous editing. This is a more extended narrative which is composed of the run and turning of night, day and the seasons, emblematised by on-screen miniatures of leaves and vegetation which are hanging in transience, as the beech leaf spins from a spider’s thread towards the end of the video and time leaving its mark on the tree bark.

Trangmar has collected marginal incidents both within the park and at the edges of the park (her video opens and closes around night falling and nocturnal glimpses of illuminated rooms in houses and flats set around it). And they appear marginal on account of Trangmar’s particular technique of editing, one which elides the centred and substantive. What she instead presents are short, delimited scenes, to the left and right – cropped inconsequences; neglected glances; self-absorbed dog-fanciers and tumbling lads in lackadaisical athleticism – the casting


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Georges Pierre Seurat (1859-91) Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 1884-86 (oil on canvas) Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library

Tom PhillipsBenches 1971(acrylic on canvas, 125 x 275 cm), Courtesy the artist

roll of a certain English post-war pictorial documentary Realism – all making their exit and entrances surrounded by a black ground. Such embodied incidentalities reside alongside small sections, equally cropped and framed-up, of overlooked park décor – half metres of battered fencing and exposed picnic tables. Peripheral objects and people, they pop-up, sub-framed, on one side of the whole screen; then, sometimes, with a parallax view, on the other, too. That other is not just a shift in space, but it also extends across time. Time does frame the blink-eyed shuttering effect which establishes the restless flow of what we see on the screen.

By time we could say that there is immediate, local time – the time we see on the park clock, behind the hissing hose – which is documentary time, inextricable from the schema of the day’s progress and passing. This documentary time is the armature for so many representations: this could be, in Picture Post parlance, ‘24 Hours in the Life of A Park’. Beyond this there are the still larger temporal rhythms of the seasons and vegetal growth and it is here that a pastoral form also inserts itself – not the pastoral of aristocratic fantasy, of vast landed ownership patrolled by aetiolated shepherds, but a peculiarly delimited, social-democratic pastoral; a social-democratic idyll arising from nineteenth-century claims for leisure across the class spectrum in an urban, industrial culture. It is a perpetual Sunday, with spare time, like Seurat’s Grande Jatte and so Peter sits in the park, reflects and reads, is absorbed with his coffee and his dog on his lap.

At the heart of this video are versions of memories from Trangmar’s Brighton childhood, of configurations of sociability, of places and activities which existed, for her, under the sway of Welfareist British culture of the 50s, 60s and 70s – a world of dogs, allotments and hobbies. Trangmar has celebrated the vanishing vestiges of this world as a counter to the privatisation of public space: ‘The park is the last place that’s free, where we don’t have to be productive, where we can fall into a reverie… or roam and where we don’t feel guilty about looking at one another’2 So, in the sides, corners and edges of this contemporary parkland, Trangmar insists, the nondescript is denuded of abjection, so that small gestures and reflexes of that former, mutualist world endure and can still be traced, in what she has called her ‘…defence of recreation’.3


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1] From a statement by the artist, March 20072] Susan Trangmar in conversation with the author, 17 February 20083] Susan Trangmar in conversation with the author, 17 February 2008


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First imagine the seeing eye, turning smoothly, taking in the field of vision. Imagine its fluid corporeality.

A Play in Time begins with a short meditation on the gaze, a dreamy prequel set in the dusk of a late-spring day. In this extended visual phrase the world emerges in a series of occluded views – the setting sun behind slowly waving leaves; a room glimpsed through a gap in drawn curtains – followed by closely observed natural phenomena – leaves and flowers. Each short frame sets form and motion in play within a colour palette inflected by darkness – the richest night-tinged blue, the sensuous orange of the sun, the beige green serrated edges of leaves, the greyish pink of a chestnut flower-candle in the near dark. Nothing much happens. The camera lingers. In a few seconds the film will move on, opening the field of vision into the clear light of day, but this first brief sequence, suffused with reverie, sets up a sense of intimacy that inflects the rest of the work, as if, alongside the green grass, the bowling and tennis, the dogs and balls and walks, the faint echo of another strand of experience lies just beneath the surface. Later the film will return to this dark-light world, as if to an alternate point of departure. The green-tinged bark rings of slim twin birches will appear, elegantly sharp against a night background. The image is held a moment, repeated on two screens. Watching, we know that these trees must belong inside this urban park and not to some other place – a forest in a folk tale, a copse on the edge of a far off lake – and yet they seem to carry a faint noirish resonance, eerie and strange. Once, the branches of a tree in the near distance

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIMECLAIRE MACDONALD


12:07seem to frame a faintly lit space in the shadows below. The slightest glimpse of a path implicates us, suggests to us an entrance or an exit. The camera proposes the mise en scene and then the editing eye cuts away, refusing to go further.

Susan Trangmar’s finely detailed work activates a visual taxonomy that reveals equivalences between moments and images in the natural world and human gesture. In a process of fluid image making that evolves over the course of just over twenty-five minutes, she attends to the ways in which the world itself makes patterns and dissolves them. A Play in Time has no narrative arc, and yet it sets up the conditions in which narrative might take place, or from which it might take off. Again and again, events seem to assemble themselves into visual scenes within an ambient acoustic field, and then to dissolve, or to disassemble out of sight. Watching, we become aware of the artist’s intentionality – the way that sound, image and movement are stitched together through the abbreviating touch of her editing eye as she interrupts the constant flow of time, marking its eddies and currents, recording the velocity of thrown bodies, resting on the slower movement of trees in shadow, memorialising a practice of attentive looking, in this place, day and night, over the course of a year.

The work alerts the viewer to the visual dramaturgy of a town park – grassed, lit, benched, pathed and planted in rows, replete with clocks and tennis courts, hooped fences, swings and park buildings. It presents a sequence of cameos, casual flirtations and brief glances, glimpsed and passed over, slipping in and out of black. The camera’s viewpoint is level with the scale of human activity. Scenes are rarely framed in entirety, either spatially or temporally, but emerge in medias res. Something comes into view – arm, leg, hand, foot, elbow – and drops away, moving across the frame, caught in passing. It might be part of a boxer’s body, dipping in and out of sight, or just the knees of a boy whose football seems to roll smoothly onto his foot as if drawn there by static electricity, or the red flare of a man’s tee shirt as he rolls forward, rises and walks off camera, or the black shoe-clad, dangling, foot of a small girl coming down from a tree.

Mise en scene: the space is theatricalised, scenographic. Walkways and lawns imply open stages and shadowed wings. Trees and shrubs are architectural. Just as the ornate ceiling roses of Victorian public rooms – and the plaster oak leaves and acanthus fronds that topped Victorian wall columns – suggested the exterior in the interior, so the clipped hedges of


Victorian parks mirrored controlled domestic spaces in the outside world. ‘Space is compressed time,’ said Gaston Bachelard. The park is a space whose conventions we have inherited from a different moment of urban aesthetics. The Victorian park – like the Victorian department store, or like Walter Benjamin’s Parisian arcades – was a place in which to perform the distinction between work and leisure. Leisure was to work what park was to office or factory – a space where the repetitive gestures of production became looser and more fluid, but no less prescribed. In this installation we see the formal theatricality of the Victorian park re-animated in a movement vocabulary of rolling, lying, dashing, chasing and lazing – as if we continue to perform, and then to remake, prescribed historical gestures in an age where the clear distinctions of work and play, sex and class, have changed. Park play still retains traces of historic English pastimes – the camera returns again and again to the bowling-green – but in this park men play with children, women kick balls, girls climb trees. There is still, though, something distinctive about the way that men and women perform gesture, and the installation attends to this without comment or resolution. Men are both graceful and demonstrative. They josh and box and throw as if still enacting their release from the restricted physicality of work through public play – while women seem stiller, their gestures more economical and less expressive. They are more responsive, reflective, more aware, perhaps, of being seen.

Structurally, the pacing of A Play in Time resembles music, preferring to focus on tempo and phrasing rather than following conventions of documentary film and photography; but it is even more like dance, focusing on gestural phrases and repeated, minutely differentiated, visual moments. Imagine the work as a dance in time, with time itself as a fluid medium, as it reveals its subjects in performative phrases that intersect and punctuate one another – steps, jumps and rolls, the sweeping of dust, the clipping of hedges, the stretch of a foot, the flick of a wrist, the arc of a thrown ball. The figures that we watch might almost be taking part in a kind of vernacular choreography – turning from the waist, lifting arms and legs – here a slow kick, there a full-body rotation, hands held level to the cheeks, head lowered, face neutral. Imagining the work as dance also allows us to think about what dance tells us about the seeing body, as well as the seen body. Of all the contemporary arts it is dance – as a critical method as much as an expressive medium – that has re-positioned the eye inside the body, and dance that has re-imagined the surface of the body in performance as a changing map of

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impressions that reveals evidence of its psychic and physical interiority as it moves through space – its sinews, its systems of circulation and its energies – the body that shows its powers of memory in every local movement it makes. ‘The mind is a muscle,’ said the film-maker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer1. In the 1960s, Rainer and others (among them Steve Paxton, Simone Forti and Deborah Hay) re-imagined how to move, simply, through time, repeating minimal gestures and everyday steps, parsing movement into phrases, repeats and rests, outside the demands of narrative. Postmodern dance, like poetry, situated itself in the vocabulary of the everyday, as perfectly open and obvious as a glass of water, fluid and clear. The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has talked about ‘fluid corporeality’ to describe a condition of being that suggests the interconnection between the inside and outside of the body, the means through which subjectivity is always in the process of becoming and changing in ways that are inscribed in the body’s patterns and actions2. It is within these terms that A Play in Time attends to agency and identity, and to sexuality. Stepping away from narrative and character, it lights on patterned activity and the dynamics of relationality within a space.

Imagine this is dance not just because the flow of movement and gesture repeats, frames and echoes, but because the eye is a dancer too.

As we watch A Play in Time we become more and more aware that the camera itself is actively implicated in the scene: engaged in leisurely viewing, whether at play or at rest, watching. What we see as viewers – following the rhythmic shifts of intimacy and distance as moving frame follows moving frame – is the thinking presence of a particular female mind. We become aware of the pleasure of her gaze, watching men and women, girls and boys, behaving simply and unselfconsciously in front of the mechanised eye of this stranger and her camera. The everyday gestural vernacular of the early years of this century is caught on screen in mid-flight, stitched into time. A series of stitches, gathered, threaded and looped; a text – material, fabricated, inscribed, marked; a score; a playing out of unheard instructions – return, rest, fall, repeat, double turn, move, stop, cut; an abstract form; a list; a choreography.

Imagine the eye, turning smoothly, taking in the field of vision. Imagine its fluid corporeality. The eye too is a dancer.

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1] Rainer’s essay ‘The Mind is a Muscle’ in A Woman Who … Essays, Interviews, Scripts, PAJ Books, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

2] Discussed in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Allen & Unwin, 1994


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A few years ago during a holiday on the Isle of Wight, my partner and I were ambling across a broad, grassy cliff-top plateau, which seemed to stretch for miles along a particularly beautiful section of the island’s southern coast. It wasn’t a sunny day but it was extremely bright and fresh, one of those white-light days when it’s good to be out enjoying the open air. Although we felt pleasantly alone, as we walked we would occasionally pass families having picnics, spread out across blankets with children peeling off, chasing each other and tumbling about, woozy in their sense of freedom. Here and there games were breaking out, people chasing a football, an impromptu game of rounders collapsing into laughter, and elsewhere people just sitting staring out to sea, leaning back on their arms, learning to relax.

Then, as we walked further, stopping ourselves from time to time to take in the view and enjoy the breeze that blew seagulls into odd mechanical arcs of flight above our heads, the brightness began to fade, the air became heavier and the white clouds more densely packed across the lowering sky. And then the mist came down. At first there were blown patches, like passing skeins of smoke from a fire somewhere ahead. But as the mist thickened so the clear day disappeared into a haze: the view out to sea was gone and our sense of space quickly compressed, visibility shrinking to a hundred yards, then fifty, then twenty. It was gloomy and predictable, that old English stoicism returning, seeping back to stave off the disappointment of another perfect day cut short. But it was also oddly exciting, in the way that such abrupt and extreme changes of weather can be, as though we had been transported

SOUNDINGSDAVID CHANDLER


14:32to another place altogether, and to another time. From the light-headedness of wide-open space all around us, our day had drawn in, and the preoccupations of vision had begun to be replaced by the more internal stirrings of the imagination.

There was still stubbly grass underfoot, but with the cliffs somewhere off to our left now invisible we could have been anywhere. So in order to reinstate our bearings we moved, a little nervously, closer to where we thought the cliff edge should be. It was then that we heard, very faintly as first, the sound of voices, calling or chattering, the noise rising and falling in the atmosphere. The sound grew more distinct as we approached the cliff edge, which, as it came into view, appeared strangely as a kind of step down onto a flat, pure white sea of mist laying only a few yards below and which extended away from us into a vague nothingness. Rising out of this indeterminate space, as we could now clearly hear, were the sounds of children playing, still peaking and dipping, louder and then more quietly rolling on the wind. The voices seemed too close, and then far away as if they were moving out of range.

I had always found the disembodied sound of children’s voices tinged with sadness. A school playground hidden from view, a weekend park in full swing somewhere in the distance: hearing them is superficially charming and reassuring but then oddly unnerving too. To some degree this is because the sound appears to be drifting our way from the past, and from a place that is partly our own childhood, that still powerful, emotional lining of our memory. Standing there on the cliff edge staring into what now seemed like an abyss, the calls and cries of children stopped us in our tracks, the eerie, uncanny sound tapping into some deep vein of feeling that held us rigid. We rationalised that there must be a park or fairground somewhere below, maybe a hundred feet or so down by the seashore, but that idea could not break the spell of this real, ghostly presence. It was a fierce wrenching out of nowhere, an overwhelming sensation of loss. The children of the mist were everything that had been and would never be again. Their voices happily and obliviously lost to life.

After a few minutes we turned away from this edge, unsettled by the experience and by the strange spatial illusions that lingered as we walked inland and on into the clearing weather.


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A CONVERSATIONSUSAN TRANGMAR & REBECCA DREW

[RD][ST]

What interested you initially about this commission?I was interested to explore a public place of recreation. Previous works, such as A Question of Distance, considered personal and collective experiences of belonging and identity through place and landscape. The commission to make a work within St Ann’s Well Gardens was an opportunity to consider how the landscape frames and conditions the activities that happen there, how people ‘practice space’ in a public context. I am interested in the collision of the public and private in parks, the co-presence of garden and city and in the relationship between what is considered a ‘wilderness’ and the tamed park, or arcadia. Each of these concepts work off the other, all are the product of an urban imagination. I also have a personal connection with the parks of Brighton and Hove which goes back to my childhood.

You chose to work in St Ann’s Well Gardens. Were you already familiar with it?No, the parks I knew best were Stanmer Park; the ‘Wild Park’; the northern end of Preston Park. These were larger and had a different atmosphere. St Ann’s is very urban and contained whereas my playgrounds were the less organized parks on the edge of the countryside, spaces where the boundary between the urban and rural dissolves.

How did your relationship with the park evolve over the year you spent there?Well first of all, I visited the park like anyone else, even though I was visiting it as a place of work. So I walked, listened, observed and idled, approached it from all directions. There was


a feeling of absorption, of entering into a relationship with the place and not knowing what would come from this. Anything might happen. As an artist, it is also a question of orientation: what kind of presence will I contribute, will it be provocative and ‘noisy’ or more discreet?

As I spent more time, certain habits in my activity became apparent to me and I worked both with and against these - for example, becoming aware of the distance between the camera and the filmed subject, or returning to the same position in order to reflect upon change in the weather and seasons and how this affects activity in the park. In effect, the park became an open air studio.

The experience has strengthened my conviction that zones of free space and free time to do nothing in particular or to enjoy sport and other group activities are fundamental to our health. Parks as examples of civic pride and public ownership are incredibly important; they nurture a spirit of creativity which is not subsumed to commodification and consumption for economic profit. Parks are also one of the places in which diverse members of the public can co-exist together with those who manage and care for it, if only temporarily.

How did people respond to being filmed?Over the year of filming I became a relatively familiar presence as the park is quite small. Many people thought I was birdwatching. One thing I noticed – contrary to the scaremongering of the mainstream media – is how trusting most people are; so much paranoia and suspicion around filming in public seems to be attached to questions of ownership and commodification, as if oneself was a commodity to be exploited for profit. And increasing restrictions on filming in public places (in conjunction with increased use of surveillance cameras) can themselves encourage a sense of guilt and threat in both looking and being looked at. I found that my presence didn’t in general arouse suspicion and defensiveness.

Ascertaining the correct distance between camera and subject was key, as the camera was static, but I could use the zoom to a certain extent. In fact, I hardly used it as I preferred to get physically closer where possible. The presence of the camera undoubtedly affected the behaviour of the subjects although it would be difficult to say how exactly. If the camera shifted direction, this would be picked up on almost immediately by anyone nearby. Unspoken conversations are

taking place all the time in public places. But as I took care to be as visible as possible, it was clear that some park visitors chose to avoid the camera. Others for whatever reason, almost seemed to court the camera, or were entirely oblivious to me. There was no overt direction on my part.

There are points in A Play in Time where the watched acknowledge the watcher. This reflects our experience of being in a park, where we may wish for privacy but are intimitantly aware of being in a public space.

Acknowledgement of the camera is very important, whether explicit or implicit. All my past work has engaged with how our ‘field of vision’ is constructed by the recording devices we use and how visual representations of place and architectural space shape our practical experience. And here in the park, the camera is not an eye of surveillance; it is operated by a person who is both observing and being observed. There is something important about the freedom and pleasure in both looking and being looked at, which is not a predatory activity but one which connects us to one another. There is my engagement as an artist with people in the park, but there is also this other more elusive thing which is separate to this – the subject looking back at the eye of the camera itself. This doesn’t just mean that we are being watched, but also that we may perform for the camera, speak back to it. We all accept that we can make a private intimate space for ourselves in the park at the same time as we are on public view. The social space of the park is flexible enough to accommodate both these things at once. It also points to our love of performance, the fact that we are always performing different roles in life, depending upon context. The public performance of identity in a playful way is fundamental to our sense of self.

There is also another register of the observed and the observer. There are those episodes in the film in which the subject is not human, maybe animate, maybe not. These episodes contribute to a sense of ‘being for itself’ in which the park, emptied of humans, seems to look back at us. We stray into the realm of the imaginary.

The park is an important space for play, for daydreaming and fantasy.It goes back to the question of what is ‘productive’ time and the relation between sociality and solitude, how we are together. The fantasies engendered by the space of the park occur within a ‘safe’ place which is collectively shared – in which private imaginative space mingles with public space.

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Hopefully A Play in Time addresses itself to these questions too: artwork as productive play, as daydream and as spatial object collectively experienced as public event. Then there are all the other representations which explore the idea of the park and which we are familiar within literature, music, film or painting. For example the ‘stranger in the park’ has multiple connotations, ranging from the mysterious to the romantic or the menacing. Parks are one of the places in which we are very aware of the distance between ourselves and others and maybe this allows for a kind of expansion of oneself. Things become more porous.

Can you say a little about your decision to use digital video for this work and how your use of the static shot and double screen evolved? A Play in Time is all about movement and yet there is a sense of stillness and a formal composition that you have imposed on what is topographically a very complex and busy space.

I decided to work with a tripod and record with a single fixed frame in open areas which meant that my presence was static and visible. It also meant that movement and change operated across the field of a fixed frame, constructing a very formal ‘staging’ of vision. There are many reasons for this, but I was particularly interested in how our attention in a public space is relatively undirected; one of the chief pastimes in a park is the opportunity to pause and watch, reflect and allow our thoughts to drift. At such times our thoughts can roam in tandem with our vision. The long durational shots allow things to enter and leave the frame of their own accord. Things come and go. I didn’t want to direct vision in a narrative sense at this stage, other than through a framing of the scene which accentuates the park as a constructed space, a stage for performance.

I was filming with a single camera but editing for a double screen work. It was always clear to me from the beginning that this was to be my basic structure as it allowed me to continue my exploration of the relationship between what we see optically and what we imagine we see, or in other words, the interval between perception and recollection and the role fantasy plays in looking. There is play between the physiological fact that we have binocular vision but construct conventional single image representation. In practice our gaze is always flickering, scanning, shifting in and out of focus. And digital moving image technology has expanded our experience of the relationship between the so called still to the multiple changing image and extended possible durations of the image. The fixed frame composed as a double screen allows

us to be aware of the subjective and contingent nature of our seeing, the fact that we never see the same thing twice in exactly the same way and that other subconscious processes are colouring our perceptions.

At the same time there is something else which has emerged out of all the decisions I have made along the way which contribute to A Play in Time’s particular character. This could be described as having a pensive quality, which is maybe part of what you call ‘stillness’.

Yes, what David Mellor calls reverie.I hope that the viewer is aware of being very actively engaged as well as being in repose. There is a particular dynamic in the relationship of activity to passivity in recreational activity which perhaps is related to absorption while at the same time being responsive to the unexpected or contingent.

This is also evoked in the way the work has been edited. It was important for me to spend a year filming, to observe something of how the changes in season and weather affect the park. The film however, is not constructed on this basis as a chronological cycle, but jumps backwards and forwards in non-linear fashion. With such a long time frame and the park being such a dynamic place of public ownership, there is always the pressure to be inclusive, but I had to construct a piece of work which had its own internal rhythm and shape. As usual, a large amount of interesting material ended up on the cutting room floor. I started with certain sequences that seemed to be key in terms of human activity – as a way of exploring the double frame format – and from there felt my way into the material.

As I was using only one camera at any time, sequences had to be cut into, rather than starting with two separate sequences shot simultaneously. This constraint focuses one on thinking about questions of continuity in visual representation. Once I had edited a certain number of core episodes the business of ‘daisychaining’ or interweaving of the structure began. This is where things get very interesting, one starts to work on the overall shape of the piece and the micro duets that have been composed start to find their place within the whole duet in quite a musical way. One has to find a balance and rhythm between the intensity of a concentrated action and an apparently directionless movement or sensation of change. There are different


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registers of looking involved in this that have to be knitted together somehow to make some kind of flow.

The sound track is very important, it locates the park in an urban setting – the contrast between the bird song and the mechanical sounds of cranes and cars for example.

Yes, sound is image too. Working with sound is relatively new to me, so it was a very interesting experience. As with the visual recording, the microphone can pick up sound indiscriminately and I was recording ambient sound at the same time as filming, not separately. It is what we decide to subjectively acknowledge or filter out from the overall field that I worked with in the editing. In A Play in Time, the source of sound that we hear in the work is very often absent visually, it emanates from a source that we are not actually seeing on screen. What comes to the fore is the discrepancy between what we see and what we hear and the emotional resonance that very ordinary everyday sounds can arouse. The sounds of the surrounding city leak into the enclosed space of the park, construction, planes, traffic, intermingle with cries, the wind, a squeaking bicycle, birdsong or scraps of conversation. There is also something about the play between image and sound, in which we move between being both part of and apart from the scenes unfolding. I think this contributes to an experience of reverie, in which we are receptive to the flux of the world, an openness.

Sound is evocative of the past, it calls up childhood memories as David Chandler’s essay here suggests. A Play in Time celebrates the playfulness that the park invites, but is there, also a sense of melancholy, of nostalgia for the now lost freedom of childhood? Time today seems a precious commodity, and increasingly regimented. There is a general conception that children are no longer allowed to roam about like they used to.

Sound is strangely evocative I agree, perhaps because it is not rationalised in the way that vision has been historically connected with the intellect and understanding. Sound impresses itself upon us and we cannot close our ears in the way we can close our eyes. I am very interested in the emotional resonance of even slight sounds which can summon up forgotten memories and sensations.

With regard to nostalgia, I think of it as a psychic journeying, a fantasy of return to something that is a product of the imagination itself. It’s not a concrete thing, but a psychic process that

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hooks onto people, buildings, certain lights or sounds. The thing to which it refers is necessarily absent, perhaps was never there in the first place and that is maybe where the pain of nostalgia comes from. What’s powerful about creative activity is that in the act of making, what appears initially to be a return turns out to be a way forward.

As the title suggests, the passage of time is a central concern in your work. There is a play between chronological and non-chronological time, which goes back to early projection works such as Blue Skies.1 The title A Play in Time refers not only to time as experienced in the context of a park, but to solar, cyclical time, the return of the visitor over time. And chiefly, the title refers to the structure of the work itself. Time and space are inextricably interwoven, we can’t speak of one without engaging with the other. In visual representation whether maps, photographs, drawing or music we spatialise time and we temporalise space. The double screen juxtaposes two different sequences from the same recorded event simultaneously, or sometimes two different sequences from two different recorded events. As the binocular structure of the screens echoes our own binocular vision, we track backwards and forwards between the two edits, composing our own unique trajectory as the work unfolds. Chronology is subverted. The cutting and re-editing of the event confuses linear time; there is instead a sensation of rhythm and change. The sound edit echoes this, moving around the space we are in, coming from different directions, disappearing and returning later. This seems to me to be an example of one way in which we articulate memory in both space and time.

St Ann’s Wells Gardens is steeped in cinematic history. David Mellor mentions Antonioni, and his films have been an important reference for you. I wondered if you could talk a little about some of the influences you brought to this work? It doesn’t have the dark drama of Blow Up or the bittersweet quality of Patrick Keiller’s films. A Play in Time isn’t cynical and this is refreshing. It could be described as celebratory. In this sense it does seem to relate back to a socially engaged documentary tradition.

The identity of the park is as you say partly informed by its historical usage as an early film studio. Some early filming I did was of rehearsals of a stage play in the park which recalled the use of the park as a studio set for George Albert Smith’s films.

A Play in Time claims a space for a certain kind of reverie which is differently articulated to the two examples you have cited, although they both explore subjectivity in looking. In being ‘about’ place and people, A Play in Time doesn’t have plot driven character narrative as such and so may recall certain documentary films in which the camera seems to ‘point’ or ‘show’. Nor is it a film in the sense of large-scale single screening in an auditorium space, but is a moving image installation on a relatively small scale, giving it a certain intimacy.

My references come from many sources and I am interested in the intertwining of different media conventions – drawing with photography, writing with film, sound with architectural space. At the same time, I have long held a particular interest in photographic documentary traditions, not only with regard to their faith in powers of description, the kinds of stories they make and the identities they construct, but also in the ways that the construction of visual narrative is highly subjective and informed by unconscious desires. In every story there is the possibility of an alternative interpretation according to the subjectivity of the viewer. Utopias are anything but rational.

In a culture of misleading assumptions of empowerment which turn out to be quite the opposite, we are led to find agency in what appear to be the small things of daily life, the nondescript,2 and a reclaiming of shared visual pleasure. So if this is what you mean by celebratory, then yes.

1] Blue Skies 1989- 19922] I am indebted to David A. Mellor for alerting me to this

significant little word.


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This book is the culmination of the Photoworks project, Park Life, and as with all our projects, its development has been a collaborative process. Alaric Stride, former Parks Policy Officer, at Brighton & Hove City Council, planted the first seeds in 2005. Stride has a passionate commitment to the importance of green spaces and was keen to promote the parks in the city as cultural facilities. We thank him for his unrelenting enthusiasm, strategic vision and extensive knowledge of the city’s parks. We also acknowledge Pat Foster, former Assistant Director of Quality of Life and Green Spaces, for supporting his involvement in this project. Photoworks greatly appreciates the support of Paula Murray, Head of Arts and Creative Industries, and her colleagues, towards this project and financial assistance from Brighton & Hove Arts Commission. Thanks also to Ivan Clarke, for his commitment to the city’s ecological welfare. We are grateful to all the staff at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, particularly Suzanne Plumb and Helen Grundy, for exhibiting this local initiative, and to Dr Frank Gray, Director of Screen Archive South East for sharing his considerable knowledge of early cinema. Laura Thomas devised and delivered the education programme at Somerhill Junior School. We are indebted to her and to Suzanne Green and Vicky Norley, for their imaginative work with Year 3 pupils in the park.

Sincere thanks to all my colleagues at Photoworks for supporting and contributing to this project; to David Chandler, Professor David Alan Mellor and Dr Claire MacDonald for offering their extensive knowledge and poetic insight in writing for this book and to Dean Pavitt, who has, once again, brought his informed and delicate touch to this publication’s design.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS& ARTIST BIOGRAPHY


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SUSAN TRANGMAR’s photographs and light based installations have been widely exhibited internationally since the 1980s. She was Rome Scholar in Fine Art at the British School at Rome in 1996 and shortlisted for the European Photography Award in 1998. Since 2000 she has been Research Fellow in Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, and was Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Photographic Research, University of Wales at Newport in 2005.

Recent exhibitions include Exposures (Angel Row Gallery; Oriel, Cardiff and European Photography Awards, Frankfurt 1996-8); Ariadnes Dream (Newlyn Gallery, Penzance 2000); Double Duration (Estorick Foundation for Modern Italian Art and Artfutures at Bloomberg Space 2006-7); A Question of Distance (Waygood Gallery, Newcastle; Metropole Galleries, Folkestone; International Centre, Bethlehem; Kibbutz Gallery, Tel Aviv; Um Al Fahem Gallery, Israel; Kythera Photographic Encounters, Greece 2004-6); Conditions of Visibility (Box 38 Gallery, Ostend, Belgium and Peninsular Arts, Plymouth 2007-8).

She is currently working on a series of works entitled Shifting Terrains which explores the fluctuating border between the land and the sea along the South coast of Kent, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Geoff Beardsley and all the park’s gardeners welcomed, protected and assisted Susan in her work and their commitment to the park’s maintenance is much appreciated by all who use it. Natalie Hall and Juliette Parissi’s hospitality at the Garden Café in St Ann’s Well Gardens is always generously bestowed and saved Susan from the cold during the winter months of filming. Park Ranger Neil Doyle and the Friends of St Ann’s organised a centenary celebration that was enjoyed by thousands of people, highlighting the park’s rich history.

A Play in Time could not have been made without the gracious participation of the park’s visitors. Their care for St Ann’s makes it such an enjoyable place to spend time. Most importantly, our thanks to Susan Trangmar for her dedicated engagement with this extended conversation.


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The artist would like to thank the following:Rebecca Drew for her illuminating introduction, tireless commitment and skilful management at all levels; Professor David A. Mellor; Dr Claire MacDonald and David Chandler for their nuanced essays; Judy Price and Tim Harrison; Dean Pavitt; Brighton Museum & Art Gallery; Alaric Stride; Geoff Beardsley and his staff at St Ann’s Well Gardens, Frank Gray at Screen Archive South East, and all the visitors to St Ann’s Well Gardens who generously shared with me their playtime.

David Chandler is a writer, curator and Director of Photoworks.

Rebecca Drew is an art historian and Deputy Director of Photoworks.

Dr Claire MacDonald is an interdisciplinary writer and editor whose interests lie at the intersection of visual art, writing and performance. She is a founding editor of the Routledge journal Performance Research, and is Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research, University of the Arts London.

David Alan Mellor is a writer, curator and Professor of Art History at Sussex University. He has recently curated and authored No Such Thing as Society, a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition and publication.

For my parents and park lovers everywhere

First published in 2008 by Photoworks© PhotoworksImages © Susan TrangmarEssays © the authorsBritish Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.ISBN 978-1-903796-24-5All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical, or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publisher.

Editor: Rebecca DrewBook design: Dean Pavitt at LOUPPrinting: Graphicom, ItalyFilm editing: Judy Price at Sightlines and Tim Harrison

A Play in Time is funded by Photoworks; Arts Council England; Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London and Brighton & Hove Art Commission’s making a difference initiative funded with lottery money from the Millenium Commission and Arts Council England through the Urban Cultural Programme.

Photoworks commissions new photography, publishes books and a biannual magazine, and initiates research and education projects. Please visit our website for further information.

PhotoworksThe Depot100 North RoadBrighton, BN1 1YEEngland+44(0)1273 [email protected]

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A Play in Time is commissioned by Photoworks in partnership with Brighton & Hove City Council and Brighton & Hove Arts Commission.

A Dance to the Music of Time

Documents

Transcript of A Dance to the Music of Time