Field Study's Man in E11 reflects on the loss of local Utopian history repeating itself

Linked - Graeme Miller/Artsadmin (2003 ongoing)

 

Field Study’s Man in E11 goes in search of ongoing Utopian oral history repeating itself.

 

Linked is an audio art installation and walking trail situated alongside a section of the A12/M11 Link Road in Waltham Forest and Redbridge. It was created by Graeme Miller and launched in 2003 as a permanent public artwork. To 'do' Linked involves walking the trail and listening to site specific audio-transmissions. Access to the audio element of Linked requires the use of bespoke listening equipment. The equipment should be, according to various sources, freely available to borrow from local libraries and museums (in Waltham Forest and Redbridge) and from the commissioning organisations, Artsadmin and Museum of London. 

 

The building of the M11 Link Road was a profoundly significant event in the social history of the area. Linked consists of musically/sonically treated oral testimonies; witness statements about the building of the road and the anti-roadbuilding protests. Linked is a highly inventive response to a topographical cleaving of communities by that major transport infrastructure project. It occupies, and operates in, the public domain. It resists commoditisation. The listening equipment is loaned based on the trust that borrowers will return it and so participate in sharing of cultural property. The transmitters, to which the listening devices are tuned, occupy essential public utilities on public rights of way along the route of the trail. Linked involves collaboration between the disparate entities of innovative artistic practice and local governmental bureaucracy. The permanence and accessibility of it, as a public artwork, relies on consistent or sustained civic care for the area and for the people who live, and have lived, locally. How has Linked been cared for since the launch in 2003?

 

Missing Linked - 2009.

Five years ago, in 2009, I had difficulties obtaining the listening equipment from local libraries. Most of the library staff I spoke to did not know about the equipment or the artwork. They were quick to dismiss my requests as misguided. Eventually, after a protracted enquiry, I obtained a listening pack from Vestry House Museum. I was surprised that getting access to the Linked listening equipment was so difficult.  

I appreciate there are difficulties in maintaining public facilities and services given the vicissitudes of government and public sector funding. Perhaps the viability of the permanence of the public artwork had been eroded by the pragmatic forces of political and economic expedience. Were there issues of technical obsolescence?

 

 

Overlooking listening at the fringes of remembrance.

Recently, I attended Remembering the M11, a talk hosted by the Wanstead Tap and John Rodgers, for the Wanstead Fringe Festival. The discussion elicited strong feelings about how the anti-road protests should and can be remembered. John Rodgers cited Linked as a way people could get insights into the remembrance of that historical event. I asked John Rodgers if he had done Linked. I wondered how he had fared in obtaining the listening equipment and how the transmitters for the audio-experience were functioning. He replied he hadn't done the walk and, if I recall correctly, he said he would do Linked the next day. I advised him he might experience problems obtaining the listening gear locally. John Rodgers' website, the lost byway, features his book, This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City. Linked could be an apt subject for John Rodger's explorations of the overlooked in London. Linked challenges the hegemony of the visual ('overlooking' and 'insights') as a means of critical remembrance.

 

 

Missing Linked Again - October 2014.

This month I decided to do Linked again. I revisited the issue of how Linked is curated by the host authorities. Leytonstone Library told me they did not have the listening gear and had not done so for many years. Leyton Library responded similarly. They added that they doubted the project was still working. They tried and failed to contact Vestry House Museum. Instead, I went to Artsadmin, at Toynbee Studios (Commercial St), to get a listening pack. The receptionist was very helpful. We discussed how Linked functioned as an artwork 11 years on. 

Today (18^th October 2014) I started Linked at Queen Elizabeth Park and finished in Wanstead. Queen Elizabeth Park (the Olympic Park) did not exist in 2003 or 2009. I found 13 of the 20 mapped Linked transmitters/transmissions along the route. I enjoyed the auditory experience much more this time because I used my own (more contemporary) earphones with the receiver; thus, getting a more powerful auditory experience. 

 

I also visited Wanstead Library to ask if they had the Linked listening equipment. They didn’t. They told me, brusquely, Linked wasn’t working anymore and that they had not kept listening packs for at least 6 years. I did not correct the abrupt dismissal of the librarian. I decided against asking them to contact Redbridge Museum and headed to Vestry House Museum to continue with my enquiry into how Linked is being curated by the host authorities. 

 

Vestry House Museum was more helpful. Some of the staff’s helpfulness may have been a response to my determined assertion that Linked did exist. They were unfamiliar with Linked. I showed them a printed guide to Linked for its 2003 launch. I told the receptionist about theLinked listening equipment. The receptionist transferred me, via telephone, to the archivist. The archivist did not know about Linked either. 

I didn't disclose I had the equipment (from Artsadmin) with me. My concealment was for the sake of the enquiry into how Linked, as local history and public art, was being curated by relevant stakeholders. The archivist asked me to ask the receptionist to ask another member of staff to investigate the matter further. That member of staff arrived at reception. They did not know about the installation or if VHM had the listening equipment for Linked. They apologised. They had only recently started work at the museum. They contacted their 'boss' (by telephone) and were informed Linked listening packs were in a drawer by the photocopier in reception. The staff searched the drawers. There weren't any packs there. I had an appointment (for next week) to visit the VHM local history archive to research the M11 Link Road protests; I asked if they could find a Linked listening pack for my visit then.

 

There was a sense of absurdity and sur-reality about the situation at Vestry House Museum. Clearly, the staff, local civil servants, were doing their best to serve and humour the needs of someone who claimed to be able to hear the ghostly voices of lost and displaced East London communities.

 

It isn’t my intention to embarrass the VHM staff. Perhaps, as the staff suggested, the borough authorities of Redbridge and Waltham Forest had not made an open-ended/permanent commitment to the care and provision of the Linked listening packs – and that such a commitment could have been beyond their capability, or only on condition of a sustained ‘endowment’ provided from other sources or benefactors. 

 

Forgetting and remembering public art in Waltham Forest, 2003 ongoing

Local cultural/arts strategies, devised and published recently by the London Borough of Waltham Forest, include attracting artists/art of international standing to the borough. One artwork of international standing, Linked, is already in place in the borough, and is being neglected. This account is evidence of a loss of local Utopian history repeating itself - the institutional forgetting of communities who were otherwise bulldozed away by forces of 'progress'. The relationships between forgetting and remembering, through Linked, could be one of the key critical elements of it as a public artwork. There is an ironic twist in this story, in that the building of the M11 Link Road involved the destruction of the homes of a substantial community of artists, among them, Graeme Miller, Cornelia Parker, John Smith, Christine Binnie and Ian Bourn.