Hostings 10 - A Haunted Reproduction

GHost Presents Hostings 10 - A Haunted Reproduction

February 16^th, 5.30 – 7.00pm

DOMOBAAL

3 JOHN STREET  LONDON WC1N 2ES 

T +442072429604 M +447801703871

DOMOBAAL.COM  

Between 5.30-7.00pm, in response to Sharon Kivland's exhibition, Sarah Sparkes of GHost invites Birgitta Hosea, Peter Suchin and Sarah Wood to interrogate ideas pertaining to 'haunting' in both Kivland's work and the gallery space itself. This evening's Hosting will initiate an apocryphal archiving of Reproductions II – an immaterial revenant to haunt the invited guests.

Birgitta Hosea is a digital artist, and Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of M.A. Character Animation at CSM. Her current work investigates photographic manipulation and theatricality in Victorian Spirit Photography and mediumistic performances.

Peter Suchin is an artist and critic, contributing to Art Monthly, Frieze, The Guardian, and many other journals.

Sarah Sparkes is an artist, curator and researcher.  She leads the GHost project. Initiated in 2008, GHost provides a supporting platform enabling invited guests to visually and conceptually manifest and interrogate the idea of the ghost.

Sarah Wood is Senior Lecturer at The School of English, University of Kent. She is Managing Editor of The Oxford Literary Review and a founder of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

'GHost Hostings 10:  A Haunted Reproduction' will be part of a day of closing events on Saturday 16th February for Sharons Kivland's exhibition Reproductions II.  Places are limited and must be reserved in advance.  Please email the gallery if you wish to attend:  INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM

On the final afternoon of Sharon Kivland’s exhibition Reproductions II

We cordially invite you to an afternoon of select walking tours, discussions, book presentations and hauntings,

these events are all free however numbers are strictly limited and places must be reserved on a first come basis: 

please contact the gallery. INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM 

Review of Hostings 6

Thanks to Andy Sharp for this fantastic write-up about Hostings 6

Sarah Sparkes' highly stimulating creative research project GHost returned to Senate House on leap day for its 6^th event. The first of two complementary hostings to explore the relationship between landscape and manifestation, it featured contributions from Sharon Kivland, Laura Ellen Joyce, Hayley Lock, and the first outing for Eerie Anglia. Sharon's contribution was a set of imagined holiday photographs from Freud's brother's collection. Laura presented her work in progress – a discourse on the perverse collision of idyllic landscape and violence in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hayley's piece was a mixed media performance taking readings from the rather disturbing letters of a pathologically infantilised John Ruskin. Eerie Anglia (Mark Fisher and I) screened a documentary based on Mark's essay “Bleak and Solemn: the hauntological landscapes of M R James”.

Particularly interesting for me, as the event progressed, was the emergence of intriguing imaginal correspondences between each of the presentations. It's actually a testament to the intelligence and depth of the GHost project that the night was able to project this poetic layering of meaning. Also inspiring was the post presentation question and answer session - brimming with passionate discourse.

"Reisen - the Snow on Alpine Peaks" Sharon Kivland

Sharon's postcards were witty and ambiguous souvenirs of Freudian neurosis and the phantoms of false memories that plague regression therapy. We were told that Sigmund suffered an irrational fear of steam trains. Through analysis he was able to overcome this phobia, eventually able to enjoy railway holidays. Were the photos a fabricated remembrance of things that were not – I enjoyed the fantasy they were fictions. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman famously rebranded the careers of Jung, Freud and Adler as fiction writers in the genre of healing. Sharon's photographs were a testament to Hillman's assertion.

"Reisen - the Smoke of Steam Trains" Sharon Kivland

The steam train itself becomes a psychosexual ghost, emerging like a night demon from melodramatic plumes. But more than this, Sharon's slides elucidated the railway station as an archetype of haunted landscape. During the making our documentary and the construction of the essay Mark and I visited Sheringham railway station, which was used in Peter Clarke's version of a Warning To The Curious. The station is a heritage show station – lovingly preserved as a museum, a simulacra of a 1930s world, but also a dream station, one waiting to be inhabited by the alabaster succubi of a Delvaux painting. James' neurotic bedsheet spectres become classical statues.

Andy Sharp and Mark Fisher "reactivate haunted landscapes" of M.R. James

Indeed there was an interesting post-presentation discussion on artistic use of the fairground ghost train. The analogy that came to mind for me during these discussions is that our desire to revisit and in a sense reactivate haunted landscapes serves up the same wonky thrill as clattering through the creaking doors of the ghost train ride. It's not a flashy augmented reality, but one in which reality is deconstructed in an uncanny yet sobering way – such that we can at least glimpse the clapboard facades that make up our already augmented realities. It's a meditative ritual to strip away the thrills and actively experience loneliness.

This is particularly true when visiting film locations – we obtain an insight into the magic of the cinematic framing of a scene, and this gives us a very real temporal and spatial jolt. I suspect that jolt is one of recognition: that our reality is as artificially constructed as a film set – what the Buddhists term a Lila, a masque, or play. Visiting film locations has the same effect as hearing the original source of a sample after hearing the sampled song – time plays backwards, but also our cultural appropriations are laid bare.

"time plays backwards..." Andy Sharp and Mark Fisher  Bleak and Solemn

The abundance of web sites and DVD extras dedicated to documenting film and TV locations, often in near forensic detail – like crime scenes in reverse, they are abandoned by their former dramas – I hope is less a nerdish obsession than a pilgrimage. Paul Devereux, in Living Sacred Wisdom, discusses the magical intent of pilgrimage, that moving through various limen, or walking a labyrinth, is designed to induce an altered state of consciousness. I would like to think film location hunting is about a similar drive; drawing us closer to a pop culture Godhead – the projectionist at an inner cinema of our filmic memories. It's a religious impulse, a seeking thing. We want to know how these hyperreal yet false memories were constructed.

Laura Joyce "deliciously morbid investigation into the paradox of beauty and violence"

The crime scene featured heavily in Laura's deliciously morbid investigation into the paradox of beauty and violence. Through a series of provocative annotations her talk revealed the omen of the idyll as a sure sign that something terrible is about to happen. Her case study was Ovid's Metamorphoses – Prosperina is raped while collecting flowers, it's an eternal image and one salaciously put to effect by the mass media – the abandoned bicycle of Genette Tate on a quiet county lane in Devon still haunts the newspaper pages of my childhood memories. Tate as Prosperina, Robert Black her suspected killer, the Plutonic delivery man to the underworld. It struck me that Laura's delineation of Ovid's grim subversion of the locus amoenus was a very necessary and gothic reality check against the contrived naivety of rustic psychogeography. The gothic horror of the rural is a Jamesian trope and there was an interesting correspondence between James and Ovid thrown up by Laura's recounting of Myrrha's transformation into a tree - after having being made pregnant by her father. In James' The Ash Tree the vengeful spectre of an executed witch, Mrs Mothersole, inhabits a tree and wreaks havoc on the nearby hall. If you visit the village of Great Livermere, where James resided as a child, then you will find many Mothersole graves, including one beneath a large tree that leans onto the church roof. I can't help but feel that James' used this arrangement of tree, grave and building as the inspiration for the narrative structure of the story. The subversion of locus amoenus has its decadent counterpart in Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden. Beautifully manicured lawns become the venue for exquisitely fiendish executions. One prisoner is even tortured in the hollow of a tree.

The Pyramid Builders Hayley Lock 2012

Mark's essay discussed the recurring motif of inorganic demons and xenolithic artefacts in the stories of M R James. A fascinating counterpoint to James' inorganic demons was disturbingly presented by Hayley Lock in her performance of John Ruskin's letters to his cousin Joan. Interspersed with the deeply infantilised love letters of a clearly psychotic Ruskin, the performance also took excerpts from a series of lectures by Ruskin discussing morality - through the metaphor of crystals. In Ruskin's mind, young women and xenoliths fuse to render inorganic angels. I suspect Ruskin's fixation for his young cousin is an example, par excellence, of Stendhal's theory and experience of “crystallisation”. The term crystallisation has become codified in therapeutic parlance as the extreme end point of limerence. There is a wonderful description by Mark, of Parkin, the central character in Oh Whistle, as “a crumbling logical positivist”. Hearing Hayley's performance this would be equally apposite for the creepy Ruskin. His baby talk letters whilst queasy also have the dissociative quality of poltergeist speak. Where James' rural invaders are pursued by the spirits of inorganic demons, Ruskin's limerent Conniston is populated with inorganic angels.

The Valley of the Diamonds Hayley Lock, 2012

To illustrate Ruskin's lectures, Hayley had produced ten collages of landscape metamorphosed through a Claude Glass. Her collages show weird orb like intrusions, renaissance UFOs only seen through the prism of the scrying mirror. Mountain symbolism echoed through the talks. Sharon's holiday photographs showed an absent Freud vacationing in the Alps. Hayley\s performance was annotated by a video loop from Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, a girl by a mountain stream picking flowers. Ovid's crime scene idylls fuse with the romantic pederasty of Conniston's mystic. If the train is a steampunk demon then our destination is at the mountains of madness with John Ruskin.

The inspiration for Hayley's piece came from a residency at Ruskin's lakeside idyll, Brantwood. Staying over in one of the rooms, she was visited by the spectre of Ruskin. Brantwood looks over Conniston water, where Donald Campbell died when his jet powered boat Bluebird somersaulted and disintegrated during an attempt to break the water speed record. Bluebird is an inorganic demon, but also a creature of born of macho hubris against nature, epitomised by the likes of Jeremy Clarkson. I secretly hope Campbell's gelatinous ghost will rise one day from the lake like the false ending in Friday 13^th. Stone and man resonate through Ruskin's biography. Brantwood is haunted by the fell, Old Man Conniston, in local lore, a simulacra of Ruskin. The museum at Conniston exhibits a giant xlyophone constructed by the perverse polymath of Brantwood. It is called an harmonicum and is made from singing stone quarried in the fells. There would appear to be sirens in all Ruskin's mineral obsessions.

Brantwood "Ruskin's lakeside idyll" 

Hostings 6: Absence - Haunted Landscapes

GHost requests the pleasure of your company at:

Hostings 6: Absence – Haunted Landscapes
 February 29th 2012 (leap day), 6.30pm – 9.00pm



we are hanging by our teeth, Hayley Lock 2011,
digitally manipulated print, ink and glitter



An evening of interdisciplinary talks and presentations exploring the desire to materialise what is absent through the medium of haunted landscapes.

Venue: The Court Room, First Floor, Senate House South Block, University of London

(An apparition known as 'The Blue Lady' has been reported to haunt the adjoining

Senate room)

Sharon Kivland, Reisen: The limpid Waters of Mountain Lakes, The Snow on Alpine Peaks, The Smoke of Steam Trains”(three short films)

Mark Fisher and Andy Sharp, Bleak And Solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James

Laura Joyce, Haunted Idylls: Crime Scenes in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'

Hayley Lock, Spoiling my pussies love time


This event is free but places are limited - rsvp ghost.hostings@gmail.com to reserve your seat.

Up next: Hostings 7: Presence – Manifesting Ghosts
 March 14th 2012, 6.30pm – 9.00pm
With:  Hollington & Kyprianou, “Technology & the Uncanny”, Jack Hunter, “Expressions of Spirithood”, John Sabol, “The Forgotten Soldier: Manifestations of the Continuing Presence of Colonel William Holmes (1862-2011)”
e.mail ghost.hostings@gmail.com to reserve seats 


HAUNTED LANDSCAPES PROGRAMME:

Sharon Kivland - Reisen
Hostings 6: Absence – Haunted Landscapes, will commence with a screening of three very short films by Sharon Kivland titled, Reisen: The limped waters of mountain lakes, The snow on alpine peaks and The smoke of steam trains. The images in the films are photographs, from a series of works which the artist re-photographed from old postcards. The images also relate to two small pamphlets, entitled Reisen, which refer to the trains, train journeys, railway-lines, stations, station platforms, railway timetables, ticket collectors, and train compartments in the life and work of Sigmund Freud. Each film is subtitled ‘Every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday with his brother, Alexander’.
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer and 'occasional curator' working in London and France. She holds a Masters in History of art, Goldsmiths College, University of London and a
Doctorate from The History of Art Department, University of Reading. She is a researcher at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, and a Visiting Fellow at the IGRS, University of London. She has exhibited widely in Europe and North America and is represented by DomoBaal, London, Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf, and Galerie des petits carreaux, Paris. Publications include Freud on Holiday volume III. The Forgetting of a Proper Name
co-published by Cube Art Editions, Athens, and information as material, York 2011 and A Case of Hysteria, Book Works, London, 1999.


Mark Fisher and Andy Sharp - Bleak And Solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James
We present our short film "Bleak And Solemn... the hauntological landscapes of M.R. James" - in which we provide an annotated exploration of real and cinematic locations in two of the author's ghost stories. This will be followed by a short talk discussing the desire to explore horror and ghost film locations. Does exploring such places allow us to enter a ludic and augmented reality? Can this give us access to a forgotten arena of energised play and creative fear, akin to childhood experience. Can we use the intersection of film and location to subvert Williams Burroughs' magical formula: "cut-up reality and the past leaks through"?
By overlaying celluloid and concrete recollections of haunted landscapes, can we create new imaginary films, in which we are the main spectres?
Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism and the forthcoming Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. He teaches at the University of East London, Goldsmiths, University of London and the City Literary Institute. His writing regularly appears in Film Quarterly, The Wire, Sight&Sound and on his own weblog, k-punk.
Andy Sharp runs the English Heretic project - an organisation of the imaginative faculty, dedicated to unearthing, researching and speculating upon England's landscapes and tragic figures. Combining literary, audio and visual guides English Heretic have released numerous publications and recordings since 2003 including "The English Heretic Collection 1 and 2", "Wyrd Tales 1 and 2", "Tales Of The New Isis Lodge", "Your passport to the qliphoth" and "Plan for the assassination of Princess Anne". English Heretic also conduct public ceremonies, having recently appeared at "Past, Present and Future" festival at Wysing Arts Centre. Andy Sharp has also talked on a wide range of magical topics, most recently on "The Cult of Ku" at Treadwell's Bookshop. English Heretic have just published their latest book "Wyrd Tales 2", a 140 page illustrated anthology of speculative fiction.


Laura Joyce - Haunted Idylls: Crime Scenes in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'
Then he hastened with the frightened Philomela into most wild and silent solitudes of an old forest; where, concealed among deep thickets a forbidding old house stood…but even while her agonizing screams implored her sister's and her father's aid, and while she vainly called upon the Gods, he overmastered her with brutal force.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains several descriptions of sexual violence, torture, brutality and murder which take place in beautiful, idyllic settings. Often he introduces a sacred grotto, a lush spring, a secret grove, or a dark, impenetrable forest to set a scene. Within these sublime, numinous spaces, he contaminates the landscape with violence and degradation. The spaces continue to be haunted by the violence committed there, as the victims of the crimes do not disappear, but rather metamorphose into elements of the scene itself; from Myrrha’s agonising pregnancy trapped inside a tree, to the terrified Callisto, transformed into a bear, only to be hunted by her son. The quote above is taken from the episode of Tereus and Philomela, and describes the beginning of the brutal campaign of violence done to the girl, set in an ‘old forest’ among ‘deep thickets’, a sure sign that horror will ensue.
My paper will look briefly at the history of the locus amoenus or ‘pleasant place’ in classical poetry, and at the subversive use which Ovid makes of this trope. I will also be guided by Derrida’s essay ‘Hostipitality’ which looks at the etymological links between hostility and hospitality, and the ways in which this impacts on the disruption of the locus amoenus in Ovid. I will also look briefly at Henry Bond’s Lacanian work on crime scene photography, in order to delineate the psychotic nature of Ovid’s haunted spaces.
Laura Joyce is a DPhil student in Creative and Critical Writing at The University of Sussex. Her research is on body horror, necrophilia, murder and sado-masochistic violence, and the haunted spaces that these acts inhabit. Laura is writing a novella as part of her research, from the point of view of a group of murdered women, based on the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Her first novel, about the killing of six year old beauty queen Jonbenet Ramsey, will be published in June 2012.


Hayley Lock - Spoiling my pussies love time
The ten lectures contained within John Ruskin’s ‘The Ethics of the Dust’ written in 1875 frames a dialogue between the girls of Winnington Hall in Cheshire and an elderly lecturer who references crystallography and scientific knowledge through dreams as a medium for teaching. Referencing Sinbad’s adventures from the tale of a Thousand and one nights, Ruskin describes these haunted landscapes in an effort to educate the young ladies before him about the moralistic complexities embedded in human culture through scientific enquiry, structure and order.
Using the titles of each lecture, I propose to create ten pieces of work, each of which contain a landscape from each chapter. The chapters are: The Valley of Diamonds, The Pyramid Builders, The Crystal Life, The Crystal Orders, Crystal Virtues, Crystal Quarrels, Home Virtues, Crystal Caprice, Crystal Sorrows and The Crystal Rest. I propose to show these works as a Ruskin lecture.
Each landscape will be placed within a recreation of a Claude Glass, a tourist drawing tool or a black glass that Ruskin was said to loathe for its inaccuracies, favouring instead the magnifying glass for fine detailing.
These Claude Glass visions haunted Ruskin in his imaginings through a series of mental breakdowns that occurred firstly in 1871 at a time of great stress with his mother’s death and his close cousins marriage (Ruskin later apologises in a series of letters to his cousin Joan for spoiling his pussies love time) and they continue to his death in 1900. Ruskin’s illnesses have since been recognised to fall at a point of loss when these dark imaginings muddled truth and reality with confusion and sorrow.
Ruskin attempted to throw away these black glasses into Coniston Water and as well as on his travels to Europe but on each occasion they were returned by Joan.
Hayley Lock studied at Goldsmith’s College, London and currently lives and works in Suffolk and Cambridge. Her practice straddles fact and fiction, truth and the fake. Weaving new narratives of history and myth through a complicated and sometimes mysterious tale of heartache, lust and delusional thinking, Lock allows her practice to accumulate, take unfathomable journeys and elicit deceit to create part encrypted biography and part parallel histories through drawing, collage, sculpture and sound. Previous exhibitions include These Living Walls of Jet, Ceri hand Gallery, London; Future 50, Project Space Leeds and To Taste Molten Diamonds, Backlit Studios, Nottingham. In 2011 and 2012 Lock reinvented new histories in historic places with her project (Now that would be) Telling which travelled to Ickworth House, Suffolk, Brantwood House, Cumbria, Dr Johnsons House, London, A La Ronde, Devon and Caddington Hall in London.