This weekend, STML and l’amant headed down to the South Coast to enjoy the balmy English summer (ha!). One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to Dungeness, the strange, other-worldy headland that juts out into the English channel from Romney marsh. Dungeness is Britain’s only desert, a shingle wasteland punctuated by strange plants and even stranger human interventions.

The twin Dungeness nuclear power stations are the most obvious of these: giant, humming boxes that divide the land and slice the sky into pyloned sections. But even they cannot subdue the landscape, and more impact is made by the two lighthouses erected to warn seafarers away from the treacherous, marshy point: rising out of the flat land, they signal at least some intention to transcend rather than subdue the flattened earth.

Scattered around these trig points are the homes of the small but diverse Dungeness community: a mix of fishermen and hermits, madmen and artists seeking the last areas of seclusion on the English coast. One of these is better known than many others: Prospect Cottage, the former home of artist, writer and filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Prospect Cottage is famous not only for its artistic associations and awe-inspiring setting, but for the garden that Jarman laid out in his later years, a exercise in natural sculpture that harmonises the bleak surroundings with the tenderness of home. In his journals, collected in Modern Nature, Jarman wrote:

Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea’s edge - one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door, threatening to swallow it… Now the sea has retreated, leaving bands of shingle. You can see these clearly from the air: they fan out from the lighthouse at the tip of the Ness like contours on a map.

Prospect faces the rising sun across a road sparkling silver with sea mist. One small clump of dark green broom breaks throught the flat ochre shingle. Beyond, at the sea’s edge, are silhouetted a jumble of huts and fishing boats, and a brick kutch, long abandoned, which has sunk like a pillbox at a crazy angle; in it, many years ago, the fishermen’s nets were boiled in amber preservative.

There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon. In this desolate landscape the silence is broken only by the wind, and the gulls squabbling around the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch.

There is more sunlight here than anywhere in Britain: this and the constant wind turn the shingle into a stony desert where only the toughest grasses take hold - paving the way for sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum.

The shingle is home to larks. In the spring I’ve counted as many as a dozen singing high above, lost in a blue sky. Flocks of greenfinches wheel past in spirals, caught in a scurrying breeze. At low tide the sea rolls back to reveal a wide sandbank, on which seabirds vanish like quicksilver as they fly close to the ground. Gulls feed alongside fishermen digging lug. When a winter storm blows up, cormorants skim the waves that roar along the Ness - throwing stones pell-mell along the steep bank.

The view from my kitchen at the back of the house is bounded to the left by the old Dungeness lighthouse, and the iron grey bulk of the nuclear reactor - in front of which dark green and gorse, bright with yellow flowers, have formed little islands in the shingle, ending in a scrubby copse of sallow and ash dwarfed and blasted by the gales.

In the middle of the copse is a barren pear tree that has struggled for a century to reach ten feet; underneath this is a carpet of violets. Gnarled dog roses guard this secret spot - where on a calm summer day meadow browns and blues congregate in their hundreds, floating past the spires of nettles thick with black tortoiseshell caterpillars.

High above a lone hawk hovers, while far away on the blue horizon the tall medieval tower of Lydd church, the cathedral of the marshes, comes and goes in the heat haze.

At the end of his last book before his death from AIDS, the polemical At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament, Jarman (who has just been canonised on the beach by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) writes:

I’m alone again. I sit watching the sun go down, peach as my grandmother’s table-cloth behind the nuclear power station. A great orange moon hangs over the sea and the winds die bringing in the night.

[…]

I am tired tonight. My eyes are out of focus, my body droops under the weight of the day, but as I leave you Queer lads let me leave you singing. I had to write of a sad time as a witness - not to cloud your smiles - please read the cares of the world that I have locked in these pages; and after, put this book aside and love. May you share of a better future, love without a care and remember we loved too. as the shadows closed in, the stars came out.

I am in love.

*

Apologies for the poor photographic skills, but you can see the full set of these photos of Dungeness at Flickr.

Wikipedia has lots more information on Derek Jarman and Dungeness.

For those interested in visiting Dungeness and Prospect Cottage, it should be noted that the house still belongs to Jarman’s long-term partner and discretion should be observed at all times. There was no one at home the day we visited.

Last week, I wrote to Mazen Kerbaj, an artist and musician living in Beirut, asking if I could reprint the drawings he has been posting to his blog since the start of the current Israel/Lebanon conflict. I wanted to produce a book to raise awareness of the realities of the war for ordinary people, with all profits going to charities that provide humanitarian aid: food, medicine, stuff that people actually need.

He replied that he does not want any charge to be made for his work at this time, or for the foreseeable period of the conflict, after which (and we all hope that’s not long), he will reassess his options. However, he did give permission for his drawings and music to be used for flyers, posters and any other material, providing no alterations are made and the address of his blog is given. So:

http://www.mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/

Please, go and visit his site, read his stories, and post links and his images if you can.

“A famous British chemist, Dr. Charles Henry Maye, tried to determine exactly what man is made of and what is man’s chemical worth. Here are the results of his scholarly research. The amount fat found in the body of an average human being would be enough to make seven pieces of soap. There is enough iron to make an average nail, enough sugar to sweeten a cup of coffee. The phosphorus would yield 2,200 matches; the magnesium would be enough to take a photograph. There is also some potassium and sulfur, but the amount is too small to be of any use. Those various materials, at the current rate, would be valued at around 25 francs”
The ‘Critical Dictionary’ Definition of Man, Documents, no. 4, 1929

And so to the Hayward for Undercover Surrealism, an exhibition that claims to recapture the subversive climate which surrounded Georges Bataille’s legendary Documents magazine. The Hayward’s on a bit of a roll at the moment, following the sublime glow of the Dan Flavin retrospective and last year’s Eyes, Lies & Illusions and Africa Remix, but Documents‘ blend of extensive essays with carefully chosen, wildly juxtaposed images is a hard one to capture in a gallery space. As the objects themselves take the place of the magazine’s illustrations, the theories which connected them are lost, and the exhibition feels more like a cabinet of curiosities than the theoretical exegeses of Documents. Lucky, then, that the original contributors to Documents were so wildly, deliriously curious.

Picasso’s Three Dancers stand contorted beneath the jiggling chorus girls of a Buster Keaton movie. Dali’s Baigneuses, blancmange-like structures embedded in the sand, hang next to a seventeenth-century anamorphic painting of St Anthony of Padua, as they did in Documents and at the seminal Surrealist arrival at MoMA in 1936, suggesting an art which must be approached from a new direction (Bataille said of Dali that the only appropriate response to his canvases was to “squeal like a pig”). An artfully-cut Brancusi head sits on a plinth beside a stone smoothed even further by natural processes. Giant enlargements of toes, plants and crustaceans adorn one gallery. Giacometti sculptures fuck in the corridors.

Documents was home to many Surrealists denounced by the autocratic Breton. They sought not to explain the movement, but to tease and feed it, and identify its pre-echoes in ethnography, musicology, and the natural world. Bataille himself worked in the Department of Coins and Medals at the Bibliotheque Nationale, many of his collaborators in other departments. Breton denounced him as a ’staid librarian’. Bataille responded by writing the first draft of Story of the Eye on the back of used library tickets.

One of the last and best parts of the exhibition is the film strand, a 30-minute cycle of scenes from films by Surrealists, or in which they found inspiration. So you get the still gasp-inducing eyeball-slice from Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, alongside early footage of tribal ceremonies from Benin and Marc Connelly and William Keighley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Green Pastures. The latter, made in 1936, dramatises bible stories from the perspective of an African-American child, and the scene included shows turbanned, angel-winged mammies chiding their cloud-riding offspring across the plains of Heaven, before paying homage to a black-suited, deep-voiced God apparently played by Morgan Freeman’s grandfather, providing a neat link back to one of the first exhibits: an Abyssinian church mural where a black Solomon recieves the Queen of Sheba. (The cycle is endless: elsewhere in Documents, an ethnographer describes the charcoal doodles left on the walls of the churches by Ethiopian children bored rigid by day-long services. In a comment that resonates strongly with all radical art practice, he notes that “even though the children are soundly beaten if discovered, the walls of the churches are nevertheless thick with their designs.”)

Another discovery, who pops up in various forms surrounding the exhibition, on film, in paintings (notably Magritte’s Le barbare), and in the writings and philosophy of the Surrealists, is Fantômas. Fantômas was a master criminal, master of disguise, the ‘Lord of Terror’, the ‘Genius of Evil’, and the anti-hero of a series of detective thrillers written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain which appeared in France in the 1910s. Endlessly pursued by the obsessed but helpless Inspector Juve, he appealed to the Surrealists and other avant-garde artists due to his smashing of safe society, including such tricks as releasing plague-infected rats into Paris, and his overturning of the conventions of genre fiction - unlike the known worlds of Wilkie Collins or Agatha Christie (who postdates Fantômas), Juve operated in a miasma, forever outwitted and confused. Guillaume Apollinaire said: “From the imaginative standpoint Fantômas is one of the richest works that exist.” We’ve got a copy on order.

A Humument is an ongoing work by British artist Tom Phillips. Begun in the 1960s, it was privately published by the Tetrad Press in 1970, and was subsequently picked up by Thames & Hudson in 1980, since when it has become a bit of an art cult.

A Humument is a ‘treated Victorian novel’. For forty years, Phillips has been sketching, painting, altering, slicing and dicing, page by page, W.H.Mallock’s A Human Document, a fairly uninspiring - but textually rich - novel published in 1892, which he found in a second hand bookshop in London.

The results are a series of poems and micro-narratives, startlingly evocative, often moving and frequently hilarious. They can be profound - “logical. maintain this - that man is only human because of his longing this - that life has lost all its hopes, and death none of its” (1970 ed., p. 25) - or frankly sexual, as above. They can be long or extremely brief - one of my favourite pages was created by blocking out all words except “the theatre: never again”, leaving only the full stops, which, ringed, become a hundred staring eyes.

While the style of the illustrations varies, a continuous voice soon arises from the text. The best example of this is the ongoing story of semi-hero Toge, a shaky pink figure who moves through the book, his tale spelt out in fits and starts: “only toge, alone. loneliness is. throb of my watch, long. shrivelled aspiration. I have something left. two things left. first- my viola. the other thing- your image. I cannot get rid of it” (1970 ed., p. 305).

Thames and Hudson recently published the fourth edition of the book. The artist’s stated goal is to gradually update and rework pages until the work has entirely replaced itself. This edition marks a particular watershed, as all the pages which could host a ‘toge’ story (i.e. all the pages which contain the word ‘together’, toge’s only possible source) have done so, and it remains only for his story to fade from the work.

You can view the original 1970 edition, and read more about the work, here, and I can’t recommend the print edition highly enough. And if you find an edition of A Human Document in some dusty bookshop, I suggest you send it to Tom. He needs more copies.

There’s also a thematic link with Zak Smith’s illustrations for every page of Gravity’s Rainbow, a similarly tortuous and enlightening undertaking.