A six-and-a-half-hour walk for one hour in the company of a German conceptualist, an account of acts undertaken in other countries to honour memory. ‘Even if they didn’t have dead people, they had an obelisk.’ The Research Institute is the right place to receive this message. ‘Photographs,’ Gerz concludes, ‘are always healing.’
There were no more walks with Drummond. Mill Hill earthed all that, the hunger, the predatory attention. Atkins took part in several Drummond projects, recording signs, shooting portraits. Drummond is a collector of images. He spent the money left over from the glory days, the small change that he didn’t burn, on a print by Richard Long. He found it in a gallery at the end of a day’s psychogeographical hiking (the shape of his own name walked into the landscape). But photographs do not heal, they hurt. They hold time. They obstruct the flow of memory. Drummond put the Long print up for sale. He printed leaflets. The concept: burn the cash and bury it at the Icelandic location depicted in the artist’s print.
One year after our attendance at the Gerz lecture, on 10 May 2000, a set of ‘specially commissioned photographs’, portraits of scientists, was exhibited at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. Fifty years of achievement: discoveries of the structure of viruses, antibodies; ‘mechanisms for the control of gene transcription; the gene for sex determination’. The photographer, the healer, had ‘exhibited extensively, including London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and New York’. His work was ‘published regularly in books and magazines worldwide’. Name? Marc Atkins.
4
We drove out of London, using a section of the M25 (Junction 15 to Junction 12) as a slowmoving travelator, for the culture-switch (M4 to M3). Sun going down behind Wraysbury Reservoir. Sword-shaped flashes from the windscreens of oncoming traffic. Gravel pits, lagoons, reservoirs: factored from aeroplanes climbing into the clouds, out of Heathrow. Grounded motors in fidgety lines; crawling like invalid carriages as they creep up on a supermarket check-out at Tesco’s, Mare Street.
Anna doesn’t care. Just so long as she’s leaving London. Even if it’s only for a few hours, an art show in Selborne; a mile or two outside Alton, Hampshire. Gilbert White’s Selborne. Curate White (1720–93) was born in the village. He refused richer livings to remain in his birthplace. He kept a ‘Garden Kalendar’ and later a ‘Naturalist’s Diary’. In 1767 he published his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. That book, in various disguises, has been a staple of secondhand booktrade ever since.
One of the first and most civilised customers of my dealing days, an elderly Jewish gentleman called Mark, who lived in Sandringham Road, Dalston (aka ‘The Front Line’), in a book-crammed flat, put me on to Gilbert White. He loved White and Jane Austen (house heritaged in an Alton suburb); Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey. Whenever he found one of their books on a stall, in Camden Passage or Farringdon Road, in Cecil Court, he would buy it. And, if possible, talk to the vendor about the author. If Mark got a day off work, he took a bus into the countryside. He would visit Austen’s house or walk through the fields around Selborne.
I helped Mark clear his room when he moved into sheltered accommodation in Green Lanes, Finsbury Park. There must have been two dozen copies of White’s Selborne, in all shapes and conditions. Illustrated. Pocket-sized. Distressed. Uncut. Mark’s England, playing against the streets in which he lived, was conjured from these precious volumes. But now, at his daughter’s insistence, he was forced to choose: one copy per title.
Selborne had a mystique. A connection with a set of multiple-occupation houses at the back of Ridley Road Market, Dalston. We drove into the village on a mild spring evening (25 April 1998), found somewhere to park, and set off to look for the Mouth & Foot Painting Artists’ Gallery.
That title wasn’t an obvious crowd pleaser. Better then, pre-virus, but still capable of triggering unhappy associations. The gallery was easy to find, the crowd spilt out onto the village street. I recognised a few faces, old friends from Dublin and Hackney. The show we had come to see had been hung for one night only. ‘Michael & Mary Dreaming: 21 paintings celebrating a journey along the Michael ley-line from Norfolk to St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall.’ The artist was Laurence (‘Renchi’) Bicknell. Leaflets offered a selective CV. ‘Born 1946. Previous exhibitions include Combined Show at the Whitechapel Gallery (1974), One Man Show at the Amwell Gallery (1974), and the original 8 paintings from this series at the “Shamanism of Intent” exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham (1991). Renchi has been running The Little Green Dragon bookshop (with Vanessa) for the last 15 years and since selling the bookshop in October 1997 he and Vanessa are both working at Lord Mayor Treloar College as House-parents.’
I knew most of this story. I’d met Renchi in Dublin, when I was (officially) a student and he was a transient, a presence, a painter. A runaway. There was a certain romance attached to this: Caporal-blue workman’s jacket, handpainted shoes. Hair combed with a fork. Youth. Enthusiasm. Talk. Connections, back in England, with the New Departures mob, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown. Adventures on the road which, in telling, grooved into myth. Restlessness, the quest. Petit mal seizures.
Renchi laboured under an impossible burden. Laid on him by his peers. Be the painter. Americans with trust funds syphoned the production line. Public-school Englishmen with jobs in the City commissioned portraits. Be the Rimbaud genius. Burn out. Nominate your Abyssinia. Disappear.
Into Hackney. Communal houses. Paintings that were endlessly revised, toshed over, abandoned. Sacred sites visited and recalled. Dissatisfaction. A plump ginger cat. An infant in dungarees. Window open on a wild garden. Paintbrush in mouth, cigarette. Unshaved. Multicolour cardigan. The romance wearing thin, overexposed in 8mm diary movies. Exploited.
I’d been involved with the Whitechapel Show and the Shamanism jamboree at the Goldmark Gallery. But I hadn’t seen much of Renchi in the years between these events. He’d left London for Hampshire and we’d stayed put. Running a bookshop took most of his time and energy. I had also been peddling books, secondhand, used, rediscovered. A relentless circuit of dawn markets, days at the wheel, up and down the country, cleaning, pricing, stalling out. We both survived, by the skin of it. What Renchi and Vanessa had left over went, as I read it (from a distance), into the spiritual quest, communality, networks of likeminded associates. Earth magic. Ceremonies of appeasement and rapture. What I had in the tank was saved for operating a small press and scratching at road notes, quotations from obscure books, that might one day be shaped into a viable structure.
I circled the Selborne gallery, following the drift of Renchi’s journey. The hang was chronologicaclass="underline" ‘24 days of walking and further days of exploring a network of lines coming alive’. Yellows, golds, blues. The work was unshowy, without tricks or painterly effects; quiet ego. The sense was meditative, respectful of place, of geology: crumbs of chalk or flakes of stone were sometimes pressed into the margins. If you insisted on a genealogy you could think of Cecil Collins or Ken Kiff. But that might be a false note. There was, at one level, a real, blistery narrative to these walks; chorographic mappings attendant on the soar, the flash of revelation. The pull into light. And if Renchi steered, at times, towards a Glastonbury orthodoxy of angelic orders, stars, wells (panels that might pass as New Age greetings cards), there were also plenty of hard miles and English downland weather.