The Spontaneous Combustion Tour

Spontaneous Combustion was conceived as a site-tour of Nanjing to prepare for a performance festival next year. In true Last Minute Live Art style, it turned into something else.

When we assembled at the famous Gulou roundabout we were asked to sign a declaration that stated LMLA was not responsible in the case of spontaneous human combustion and we were taking this tour entirely at our own personal risk. 

We then vacated the busy street for an elevated park tucked beside Gulou. The tour began with a rapid-fire manifesto reading of sorts: what Last Minute Live Art is and what it has done. That over, we each produced and showed one another objects as we'd all been requested to bring one with us.

We then set out towards our first destination, the supreme court of the Republic of China back in the 1930's, now a dilapidated ruin, a testament to being on the losing side of a civil war. At the back of it was a tennis court fallen into disrepair, thick with a carpet of leaves. Here we made improvised performances: walking, pushing, rearranging, looking, showing, balancing and so on. 

After a solid lunch of noodles we made our way to the second site, the River Yangtze or Chang Jiang as it is known here. With no particular agenda we just hung out by the river and started playing. Each of us did this in different ways, sometimes alone, sometimes together in groups. This slowly granted the group a sense of permission.

Somehow we ended up in a tug-of-war contest that began as Europe vis China, but when it was obvious that Europe was vastly outnumbered some Chinese came to our assistance, including this granny. There were jokes about Taiwan.

There was another more formal style of performance by Gao Shu Yi by the water's edge and this was followed by the burning of the papers we signed at the start, along with one or two things other things added to the fire, I remember a woolen hat ablaze.

There is some video of the tour along with some of the other Last Minute Live Art events from 2018 in this short round up. This Spontaneous Combustion Tour was a good start at making open-ended artist tour. It was very quickly put together and it strikes me that in order to make spontaneous combustion happen more effectively it can help to prepare the situation more in its favor. There will be more of these events in 2019 so lets see how far it can go in the direction of spontaneous participatory street performance!

The Tour of Republican Era Nanjing

The city of Nanjing is not as well-known outside of China as it perhaps deserves to be: a city of 10 million people and a former capital, it falls into the sizable ranks of the second-tier largely unknown cities. This tour of the Gulou district was given by a Scottish postgraduate student of Chinese art who lives in the area.

On a generously warm Monday morning in April, four of us assembled outside of Xuanwumen metro station and made our way from point to point. The locations we stopped at were generally buildings of historical importance. Surrounding these sites, however, was the usual clutter of Chinese city streets: advertising, infrastructure from a bygone age and the ubiquitous shared bikes. These historical buildings are not necessarily well preserved, indeed some are run down and slowly crumbling. We passed an old man peeing against the side of the the former foreign ministry.

The tour was focussed on early 20th century history and more specifically on the brief period of time between 1928 and 1937 when Nanjing was once again the capital of China. This could have been a real political can of worms but we were more flirting with the subject than giving a pointed critical perspective upon it.

And this was probably a wise choice since the vast majority of English speaking visitors simply require a Nanjing 101 introduction. Still, knowing what I do, I would have enjoyed a particular take upon the material rather than the presentation of the most consensual aspects of it. 

One of our group turned out to be a historian and long term resident of Nanjing. He was gracious enough not to turn this into a tour with two competing guides, something I witnessed in East London a few years ago. This was one of the many moments we were handed out cards with pictures of republican era politicians. 

When we stepped away from the important sites and looked at this wall, which sports pictures of the neighborhood's architecture, the tour took a different direction. This was the one moment we talked about how contemporary politics had a role to play in shaping an indifference bordering on neglect of the area's history. We were touring the former institutions of state of the KMT, the rivals to the communists, and this was a history that was not politically expedient. Indeed Nanjing remains the, in name only, capital of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and so this tour would never be given in this sort of form in Chinese. As small-scale tourism for foreigners it could be tolerated but if it were given in Chinese there would be too much political investment in its contents to allow it much freedom to deviate from the party line.

In the local tourism centre, basically a lonely room with a scale model of the neighborhood, it was possible to gaze over the district once again. The model looked so much more elegant than the actual streets, as often happens. Looking over this model of the Gulou district gives me the idea of a tour that utilises the Droste effect. I can imagine a tour that represents itself within the tour, and that representation in turn contains its own image of itself. Such a tour has a wicked potential for self-conscious commentary. Having met a VR specialist last week and heard about some of the current possibilities, this is not as fanciful a notion as it may seem. That would indeed be a tour of tours - a tour in which all of the tours would have to appear superficially identical while the commentary framing them would be free to roam wild.

100,000 page views for the Tourofalltours blog

The Tourofalltours blog has just recorded its 100,000th page view. That is some sort of milestone; when I started this I simply thought I was recording some thoughts about a show I was making in Stuttgart. Things have come a long way since then, the blog has grown in scope and volume, I have become immersed in the world of tours and have taken this work around the world. I want to say thank you to Art Tours who commissioned the very first Tour of All Tours back in Germany in 2013 and to all the people who have supported this work along the way, either by helping me make further tours or offering me a place on their tours so I could review them for the blog here. I'm looking forward to the next 100,000 and where that will take me. Hope to see you somewhere along the way and thanks for reading and for your comments!

Hyper Heritage: Hong Kong's Sham Shui Po and Shek Kip Mei from street to screen and back again

I had the opportunity to recently revisit Hyper-Heritage and give this performance tour once again. It's a walking tour that starts in Shek Kip Mei and leads a group into neighbouring Sham Shui Po in Kowloon. 

While it was at first conceived as a tour of the city's cinema heritage, over time it grew and became more specific. It narrowed down to be about the connections between the way the city is depicted in its movies and the reality itself. I wondered, for example, how a place can have such a prolific cinema industry and not start to become effected by the images of itself it creates. 

Many of the films I talked about were shot in the neighbourhood we walked through so we were, on the one hand, making a tour of film locations. We were also, however, visiting former cinemas that had become repurposed and their former life almost entirely erased.

By surveying the films shot in the area it became possible to see what the area represents. Because it is a poorer neighbourhood with a lot of public housing and a bustling street market, it is no surprise that it often plays the backdrop to crime movies. 

Because the films were not universally familiar I had to sometimes summarise their plots and even act out one or two scenes. This was quite fun as it gave the tour a more varied mode of engagement and this is a direction it could go further in: recreating scenes on their original filming locations. 

I made a point of including some older films as well as more contemporary ones. Indeed, I managed to go right the way back to the origin of Hong Kong's cinema, the 1909 silent comedy Stealing a Roast Duck.

One of the things that emerged for me was the fact that this part of the city, which is in some ways neglected and perceived as lacking in history, does have a heritage. Buried within its past and sometimes captured on the silver screen, are many contentious episodes that are not so well understood today.

This role of cinema as site of history education and contemporary political debate was made most strikingly evident in the 2015 movie Ten Years, which closed the Hyper-Heritage Tour. The tour, then, shows how there is a battle for control of the city's narrative and how this battle takes place in the contested space of popular entertainment. Researching and giving the tour has certainly helped me to better appreciate and read some of the many layers in Cantonese cinema and I'm very happy to have been able to do this in a less obvious part of the city rather than the media saturated HK Island. I have to thank CCCD and the Chinese University of Hong Kong for the invitation to make this work and my student collaborators for their help in researching it. Thank you!

The Sid Burn Tour of Byker, Newcastle

I happened to be in Newcastle and so decided to made a tour of Byker, the neighbourhood in east of the city where my grandfather, Sid Burn, was born. That's about the full extent of my knowledge of his connection to the city. He left the North East and followed work which eventually took him over the border to Scotland, where this picture was taken. Once there, he dropped his Geordie accent and acquired a standard issue Stranraer one: he became a Scot. Something I didn't know about him till I studied this photograph was that he smoked. What else might I learn on this tour?

I started with the nearly famous Byker Wall, the large 1970s public housing estate adjoining the metro station. I wanted to see how this family connection might change the way I looked at and made my way around this not so very glamorous suburb. 

All the brightly painted railings and shutters hanging off the blocks couldn't dispel the gloomy atmosphere that hung over the place. The area seemed turned in on itself. Most of my other experiences in Newcastle have been that people are very approachable but here it was about as open and welcoming as a teenager locked in their bedroom listening to Joy Division.

Not having a street address where he lived to head to made this a very speculative tour. I remember him as a committed Catholic, however, so this offered a geographic prompt: find the church he attended. This is the local Catholic church complete with a wonky Christ on the cross. This place is old enough that Sid would have known it, it might even have been his local church for all I know. As he was a builder and mason, my attention was drawn to the stone work. While this place probably didn't bear the trace of his hand, I figured that somewhere in Byker there must be some stonework that still does. 

Walking around the estate, it became clear that it was not just the architecture that was stuck in the seventies. I stumbled across this piece of fabric with a design that speaks of groovy health food shops and flared trousers. Thinking further about that time, I realised those were the years my grandfather and I shared: my earliest years and his last. That said, you'd never see him wearing flyaway collars or tie-dyed T-shirts, his tastes were set in the forties. It is interesting, all the same, the way an era seeps into your life regardless of your tastes. I suspect if, in thirty years, I am still alive and were to look at photos of me today, I'd see much more of 2017 in me than I am currently aware of.   

Walking down Shields Road, the main shopping thoroughfare, I heard this barnstorming  track by ELO. I was by now tuned to a seventies wavelength and Don't Bring Me Down did not disappoint. I had to hang around until the end of track to get a full fix of nostalgia.

I wanted to take away some sort of souvenir from the tour, something that could act as a reminder of Byker and this afternoon spent walking around in the footsteps of Sid Burn. Finally, it was this miniature curling stone that I took away with me. I chose it because my grandfather was a stone mason and settled close to the Ailsa Craig, an island famous for producing the top-quality curling stones and which does itself look a little like a giant curling stone rising our of the water. 

I also came away with a copy of North East History, which looks like a great read. Focussing upon the labour history of the North East, it chronicles the world he grew up in. Because my family is mixed in terms of where it has come from and where it has moved, I lack a strong connection to any single place. Looking at this closer, however, that is itself a condition of a significant portion of the the working class: they followed the work wherever it was offered. Seen as migrant labourers from North East England and Southern Scotland, a more distinct  identity to my family emerges and, while this tour of Byker did not reveal a specific genealogy, it did make clearer this broader affinity. Rather than being from a family with no history, then, I see there is great effort being made to describe and understand how they lived. To describe is to value, and to value is to give greater dignity to their lives. Keep up the good work!

The Veiled City and Hyper Heritage: new work in Hong Kong

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be giving some workshops and co-creating a performance next month in Hong Kong. 

The workshop, called The Veiled City, will take place on the 19th and 20th April and it is organised by CCCD. It will be a practical workshop on how to interact with the city to discover its hidden performative potential. It is called The Veiled City because I believe most of the city's potential escapes up most of the time. While it is not literally put under wraps like a Christo artwork, it is dormant most of the time and requires specific actions performed by the right people for it to be activated. We cannot completely change our identity but we can transform it and we can change our purpose very greatly. We'll find some ways to look more closely and interact with people and places in order to see a little more.

Hyper Heritage (Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Sunday 23rd April) is a performance I'm making with postgraduate students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong for the festival Saving The Past For The Future. We are looking at the surrounding neighbourhood and its representation within Hong Kong cinema. This is heritage in the sense that it is a collection of stories drawn from and projected onto the neighbourhood, the city and its people. These stories, told over the last century about intrigues stretching back into ancient times and events in a not yet seen future, are fictions that have not just reflected different realities but have also helped shape our sense of it. What are the sources of today's myths? How much is today's Shek Kip Mei a fiction with reality intruding into it? What would the film of films of the area look like? Join us for a Hyper Heritage tour and see.

Three Year's Tours in Review.

There is the rather wonderful looking 15th Urban Research Plaza's Forum taking place in Bangkok next month which I had hoped to attend but will be unable to make it to. In my stead there will be this short video outlining some of the creative tour output of the last three years. Putting it together made me realise what a lot of travelling I've been doing and recall all the people and institutions who've helped make it happen. Thank you all, and may it continue over the next three years.

The Wood Green Revisited Tour

Today's tour was of the stalwart North London neighbourhood Wood Green in the affable company of Hugh Chapman. I say stalwart because Wood Green is one of those areas that has the character of always being there but never being too obtrusive, like the waiters in the excellent Kervan Sofrasi Turkish Restaurant on the High Road. This is in complete contrast to attention seeking Dalston, for example. This can mean that the place gets taken for granted, which is a pity because changes, such as the imminent demolition of the gas holder, can just happen like weather: it lurches from grey to grey.

Our tour of Wood Green was not a rehearsed walk with a set script, but Hugh did have several locations in mind to take me to. That is what brought us to the Chocolate Factory, a former industrial building now housing creative businesses. It still bore traces of its history of sweetening the tooth of the British Empire but today it housed such things as overspill from Mountview Theatre Academy. As we were walking around this oversized shoebox and later waking beside some of the other refashioned industrial units in the area, I had a sense of familiarity that I now realise came from the old Middlesex University Fine Art School being based here on Western Road back in the 90s. I first visited it as an undergraduate student and then later as a judgemental life model; a cash-strapped 22-year-old performance artist who looked down on life drawing but had to keep his opinions to himself and humbly take the money. The school has long since moved elsewhere, the building changed its appearance and my attitudes to drawing softened.

Back out into the cool grey we ascended the multi-story car park in search of a view and this is the best we got. Whilst Wood Green's centre has some density, it is surrounded by rows of two-storey houses with cars parked out the front and little back gardens filled with patches of grass, bikes and children's plastic toys.

For an area whose name evokes a Robin Hood-like image of a clearing deep in the forest, the reality is resolutely urban with no wood to see and scarce little green either. The slither of greenery that we did come to was the New River, reached by walking under the train tracks, which neatly slice the urban fabric in two. To the south we arrived at Turnpike Lane Station where the slender Ducketts Common stretched before us but which marked the limit of our walk: we turned around and headed back up High Road. That park is another old haunt of mine: many moons ago I directed A Goat to Grind a performance for six cyclists that briefly interrupted the assembled Special Brew drinkers. Whilst I have been away too long, they looked as if they were still there, still putting the world to rights and peeing in the bushes. It is reassuring that some things don't change.

One of the purposes of the tour was to test out an idea of mine to explore an urban environment via the reproductions of art that can be found in it. This picture on the left, sitting in a charity shop, is an example. I wanted to first identify its origin and with this see if there was a way to connect this Rembrandt (right) to its contemporary environment. The first thing that I noticed doing this was how unevenly art is distributed: there are vast swathes of the city that art barely touches. What you do see everywhere, however, are the byproducts of art, namely design. Looking for both art and the traces of it through the etymology of images, proved to be a quite fascinating exercise that offered an original method of viewing the city. How the art reflects back upon the city remains to be seen but it can be so rich in content - Balthazar's Feast, Rembrandt's life and the painting's history - that these will, without the shadow of a doubt, include stories that could be reactivated in Wood Green.

Hugh is working for the social enterprise Green Rooms, a hotel catering for the arts sector which has its own arts programme. Naturally, they have an affinity with independent local businesses such as the Big Green Bookshop, a sympathetic place tucked away off the main street. Here we met the people running the place who were happy to chat and willing to be involved in some sort of artistic tour too. This is quite a contrast to another one of our stops, the frozen food store Iceland, where a security guard asked us to stop taking photographs, afraid we might be stealing their stellar design concepts. This division between local stores and national chains was predictable but is worth bearing in mind when making a tour. The temptation is to make tours on a personable and local level, bypassing the brightly lit mall, but that would give a very false impression of the neighbourhood. Somehow, it seems to me the resistance or impersonality that you can encounter in the larger places is interesting in itself and a tone not to be avoided altogether. 

All the time that we were looking around the neighbourhood as a form of artistic research, there was also a secondary very practical task of looking for a suitcase going on. This took us up and down High Road in and out of large and small stores alike. I did finally find a decent case in a sale in one of the smaller places and it was put to use immediately as I checked out of Green Rooms. I expect to see more of the area and, in the words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I will be back. Touch wood (Green). 

The Trinity College Dublin Tour

Trinity College Dublin is a university campus that has well and truly gone over to the other side and embraced tourism in a big way. Not only is the place crawling in tourist groups, there are also official tours. These tours are given by students and last just half an hour. Our guide gathered the twenty of us together and introduced herself as a Trinity politics and philosophy post-graduate who had just managed to spill coffee over herself.

The tour is essentially a walk around the historical architecture followed by a chance to view the centrepiece of the library's collection, The Book of Kells. It's all quite pretty and sort of historic, but it struck me that there was some serious overselling going on here.

The name of the company running the tour was Authenticity Tours. What a name! Not content with merely offering an authentic tour (as opposed to those rotten, fake tours) they are giving tours of authenticity itself, "Can't you just feel the authenticity dripping off this monument?" This issue of authenticity in the tourist experience is an interesting one and there has been quite some thinking and writing about it. A quick online survey brought me to an article by Marinus Gisolf, for example, which makes several distinctions in the types of authenticity with object related authenticity (subdivided into material, conceptual  contextual and functional authenticity), symbol related authenticity and experience related authenticity. In many ways, authenticity is the elephant in the holiday maker's hotel room with each tourist touching a different part of the quasi mythical beast. 

We stopped in front of one of the large maple trees that fill the lawn at the back of the first courtyard. and dutifully listened to a theory of there being many dead bodies buried underneath the trees and feeding their abnormal development. And here I have dutifully repeated it. A story good for the tourists.

The tour had a pervasive negative tone because the guide frequently placed herself above everything at Trinity, describing it all as a little bit crap. I'm all for criticality in a tour and breaking out of the tourist bubble in which, conversely, everything is wonderful, but the effect of this persistent cynical tone was to drain the tour of passion and, finally, purpose. I can easily imagine her complaining to her classmates about the stupid tours and tourists she has to put up with in order to be able to live in over-priced Dublin. While she had identified things to be against and to poke fun at, she had not replaced them with anything that actually interested her, nor did she find joy in the encounter with the public. I was a student once and recognise this state of mind, I could even say that this tour was an authentic cynical lefty student take on a large, historical institution. That does not excuse it, however, from the duty of engaging positively and treating the public as equals.

With the guided tour over we were then invited to take a look at The Book of Kells exhibition, also included in the ticket. Photography is not permitted within the exhibition rooms so this image from the book is one of the pages made available online. The exhibition is basically panels and videos that explain what the book is, how it was made, who made it, where it was found and so on. It reminded me of an exhibition I saw in Shanghai that was trying to authenticate a Mona Lisa style painting as an original Da Vinci and which was also 95% art history, building you up for the big event in the final room. The payback there was not enough and neither was it here in Dublin: the pages of the book are not much larger than a train timetable and just two of them are on display. Worse still, because it was near closing time and the guards wanted to get home, they abandoned the normal queuing system and let everyone pile forwards into a rugby scrum around the display case. Viewed up close, in the dim light, surrounded by an impatient, shoving tourist huddle, it was very far from a religious experience. If this original artefact was meant to be bestowed with an aura of authenticity, I'll be dammed if I could sense it in the ten seconds I was in front of it before being elbowed out the way by a family from Grimsby. There was just about enough time to compare the book with the images of it that I carried in my head, affirm that it was similar, if smaller, and then head on to the library.

The library was conspicuously old fashioned; preserved for photo ops and film shoots.

At the end of the article on authenticity and tourism there is a curious note on non-places and anti-authenticity. "It is enough to simply mention the existence of these black voids in the cultural universe." It does not go further but I rather feel non-places and tourism share a more intimate relationship. The gift shop that we were ushered into by world weary guards, must surely be just one of those non-spaces that so typically adorn and monetise cultural sites. The way tourism and consumerism are now near synonymous has led to a mushrooming of such spaces, along with the chain cafes and restaurants that are waiting just round the corner to soak up your euros. I think this phenomenon of tourism generating non-places, is something I should study a little more closely, it is always somewhat in the air but when travelling we usually focus on what is culturally specific rather than the frame which defines it.

The Stuck In The Middle With You Tour

I'm back at Allenheads Contemporary Arts for the final stage of my residency, which will conclude in a performance on August 13th. This is a specially commissioned piece that has developed out of a series of tours, conversations and much research. What also makes it rather interesting for me is how the work and its context have evolved from when I began thinking about it to now.

In November 2013 I was living in London and came up here and took an epic walk up on the fell with artist and curator, Alan Smith. That was when the idea of looking at the connectedness of the village of Allenheads to the rest of the world first really took shape. Since then much has changed. I have left the UK to spend most of my time in China and the UK has narrowly decided to leave the European Union. The issue of immigration was one of the central ones in the referendum campaign and I now find myself an immigrant, or ex-pat, as those travelling from richer to poorer countries are sometimes described. With this issue of immigration and the ascendency of the leave campaign, has come a rise in nationalistic sentiment, sometimes spilling over into violence, and the publication of maps such as the above (from The Daily Mail) which purports to show how truly British the DNA samples of British citizens really is. Looking at it I wonder what the unknown DNA could be: alien life forms coming down here and taking over our planet?

So, the theme I am working around is mobility and migration (human and animal) and more so than with my previous tour performances, this one has taken a distinctly personal turn. Not only has the context for this work become increasingly politicised and I have found myself placed in an unusual position, but I have also been told that one of my family actually lived and worked in the village as a miner many years ago. I have tried to pin this story down, without much success, but have seen plenty of records to the effect that one side of my family was dotted around Northumberland prior to moving north of the border to Scotland. Without dwelling on this, it has set me thinking about the differences between the personal and societal points of view on the matter of migration. Put simply, we are often quite uncritical and pragmatic when it comes to our own mobility and more prone to making judgements about others. I will therefore try to mix these two perspectives which will mean bringing a bit of China into the mix. The resulting work is going to be begin as a walking tour around the village and conclude as a gallery performance, a tour by other means. The programme as a whole is titled As Above So Below and my contribution is looking at the surface where the sky and earth meet. The performance is called Stuck in The Middle With You, the condition in which most of us live, and has no more relation to the Stealers Wheel song than that but since it is a nice song here it is anyway!