Australians have a knack for eviscerating the more rarefied pretentions of psychography. While the Europeans drew upon an inherited mythology, the Americans self-mythologised. Meanwhile, the Australians remained reluctant to ascribe meaning to a landscape they understood only as alien, where there presence was never entirely legitimised, or even voluntary. Eventually, the outback was eulogised but the urban landscape remained void of significance, self-consciously imitative of both the UK and US while understanding it could never be accepted as either.
One of the finest cultural artefacts of the last century is Barry Humphries’ tape Sandy Agonistes, recorded in a basement flat in London in 1960. In a slow, somniloquent voice, his character Sandy Stone recreates the city of Melbourne in his mind, in a contextless, trance-like litany of street names, brand names, radio jingles, train stations and advertising slogans. The recitation loops back upon itself, nothing is added, nothing is learned. If Leopold Bloom’s jumble of half-finished thoughts made manifest the failure of the Enlightenment, then Sandy shows that a further half-century of commodity capitalism has delivered the coup de grâce. Far removed from the left bank of Paris, he relentlessly paces the city but never appropriates its space; instead, its spectacle appropriates his character, completely. He is the anti-flâneur.
Rather than praise or damn the metropolis, the Australian artist is more likely to treat it the same way as the natural landscape, inscrutable and indifferent. Given the vast majority of the population lives there, it’s hard to conceive living outside of it. When the differentiation does occur, the countryside becomes the “other” where the darker side of human nature is revealed, shorn of the civilising veneer that is assumed to be normal.
The opening sounds of MP Hopkins’ Aeroplanes & Puddles suggest the work is another one of those terribly earnest field recordings, all about faithful documentation of the soundscape of some very real place. The place is indeed real, a run-down industrial part of Sydney that has resisted redevelopment, not through struggle but through circumstance. Electronic sounds and treatments inflect the soundscape, reminding us that this is a work of artifice. There are the mildest disruptions, intruding just enough to stir the listener from complacency, throwing the shape and direction of the work into doubt.
Hopkins speaks, his voice low and close-miked. “A political fantasy…?” he ruminates. He does not elaborate. Further comments appear from time to time, in the same slow, thoughtful, faintly ironic tone. There are oblique fragments of wit, hinting at a satirical discourse that never reveals itself to the listener. Like the sounds of water and traffic, the words are also a collage, quotes from local politics, local economics. Throughout, the ubiquitous dull roar of the city weaves in and out, an undefinable mixture of distant aircraft, traffic and industry that echoes through the air.
Is it all a joke? In a way, but a joke of the highest seriousness. The collage is part survey, part critique, part elegy and part exorcism, a meditation on interior and exterior space and how one affects the other. The tone is personal, even intimate, but any hermeticism in the work is keenly aware of the external factors that condition it, whether the space itself or the circumstances of urban planning upon which it depends and by which it may soon disappear. Keeping this complex of motivations in play, Aeroplanes & Puddles simultaneously embraces and refutes the tenets of psychogeography.
When I mentioned Americans self-mythologising, I neglected to discuss Robert Ashley. His operas often deal with the issue of how mythology is created, or is allowed to create itself. Meaning becomes engendered in places simply through the act of occupying them, or avoiding them. As colonists, it’s an experience common to Australians. Having no mythology in the landscape, significance is nonetheless attributed to it, even though the nature of that significance is unknown. Ashley’s music often expounds on this process. Hopkins’ piece shares a similarity, in this respect. In both, the need for the listener to directly experience that process becomes paramount, with all narrative or explanation subverted, leaving the art as complex as the reality it illuminates.
This piece has been released by the small Slovakian cassette label, mappa. They send me their intriguing releases every now and then. It’s available as digital download but, unlike the previous releases I’ve reviewed, this one seems particularly suited to the cassette format, with its focus on the personal, the run-down and on technological mediation. There are also texts and photos included.
