Field Study's Man in E11 was temporarily lost for words on the mean streets of London.

Caledonian Road - 17th March 2014

Field Study's Man in E11 had pretensions to be on, or at, the cutting edge of experimental psycho-geography. There was, I assured him, little or no chance of that achievement in the dullard and dilettante mind field of Julian Beere. He, the field student, was unconvinced. He had been reading various seminal texts to try and develop 'psycho-' propensities. 'Downriver' is one of the 'texts' and I fear he may have been immersed to the point of total plot loss in its weighty textual darknesses. This morning our search party followed a trail left by the sliced remains of a sacrificially slaughtered wellington boot. We followed the meandering rubber line and found ourselves on Caledonian Road, overwhelmed in an elastic time bending force field. Writhing around, made worms of, our vermicular spasms would have appeared as comical street theatrics, buffoonery even, but for the fact they were invisible to the ordinary eyes of passers-by. To an ordinary eye we were just a bloke with a camera phone prosaically recording a spectacle of public art on the streets of London. We had managed to get our self together in the guise of an everyday pretence. What sort of art scene was this? Was this assemblage of body parts the remains of a field student? Was the field student a willing participant in this novel evisceration? 

   

Sculpture on Caledonian Road, March 2014.

The words on one side; are they a clue as to what should and can be read into the object as a whole? Is it a coincidence, circumstantial evidence, that the words are the same as those to be found in the lyrics of, 'Many Men' (50 Cent)? There's a grim and forbidding sub-text to the dirty diamond. 

We tried to follow Field Study International's 'scene investigation' guidance, but struggled with point 2 - determining the scene boundaries. As reported, there was a bendiness and elasticity to the encounter which rendered boundaries less than rigid, less than well defined. There was evidence of some bending in the vicinity which we attributed to mysterious energies generated and invoked by the sculpture. However, we were getting into fiction finding territory with that sort of conjecture. When we discovered the warped remains of other field expeditions, we realised we were ill equipped to deal with the scene. We had to move on as quickly as our buckling bicycle wheels would allow. 

While we had initiated some of the steps of a provisional scene investigation, including, '5. - photograph scene' (as far as we could determine the boundaries) there was also a narrative description to prepare (step 4). If the field student had donated his organs to street art we wanted a narrative, an account, with a vocabulary which would do justice to his excursions and colourful exenteration. While the sculptural assemblage might stand as a brightly coloured memorial to urban carnage on the grey streets of London, we wanted words equally as colourful - words which would extend the boundaries of our field studies. Here then are a few words, taken from the notebook of the field student, following his reading of 'Downriver' (Iain Sinclair)

shechita

cerulean

sophoclean

recondite

nabobs

costive

eolithic

gibbous

eidetic

aetheric

eidolon

thaumaturgic

paludal

squamous

incus

meatus

niblick

selenotropic

to the place at which we found this lurid and bloody trace, and this word:

inspissated 

on Camden High Street.