lancaster abstract + surreal

There are places where art fails. Places so weird no artist could invent them. Cities are too often purely man-made. At best this achieves a kind of abstraction. Nature of course is never natural. It is surreal however. And more surreal the more natural it is. But artists can manage either of these modes with no difficulty. In some other places they struggle. In some other places they need a helping hand. Thus where engineering meets water.

So at the coast, along tidal rivers, in fenland humans engineer to protect themselves from water. To prevent its encroachment. Nature can serve us but we seek to proscribe the terms on which it does so. So far and no further. Elsewhere water is diverted or transported or used for transport. By artificial means, through artificial channels. In this case too we seek to contain it.

In all these places the means to control water is by engineering. In all these places people work and live in close proximity. There is a juxtaposition of the natural and the unnatural - you can decide which is which - the functional and the decorative, the utile actions of water and the unwanted actions of water, the human and the inanimate, the practical and the recreational, and so forth. And where there are people there is litter.

Don't drop litter. Don't be a litter lout. Bin it. Pick it up. Keep Britain Tidy. Take it home. The exhortations are similar and unchanging, as though we aspire to leave no archaeological traces. The newer exhortations of recycle and reuse take this self-erasure closer to its logical end. Remake and the earlier forms might never have existed. Our next step is to cease to create anything. Is this human evolution? A circle from ooze back to ooze.

In The Book of Dave Will Self gets it right with the Daveworks:

plastic fragments deposited in the sea by Dave at the MadeinChina. Worn by Inglanders as charms and talismans, periodically proscribed by the PCO

Our plastic trash, this magnificently engineered, functional, brightly coloured stuff is a sign of how advanced our culture is. The ability to make this waste is unlike anything seen before. It is supremely useful and supremely useless. Supremely quotidian and supremely weird.

So there are two forms of engineering. The permanent - or at least the fixed - the engineering that is meant to be there. Then there is the accidental, the unwanted, the circumstantial engineering - or engineered. They meet, and meet the water. The water meets the land.

The water does not meet the land. The land does not meet the water. They are indivisible. There are zones where they are indistinguishable, or where they become something else not quite either. There is ambiguity. This is especially the case in places subject to tides. What seems like solid land firmly above the reach of the water may simply be an outer dominion of the riverbed.

This ambiguity, this miscegenation of land and water, of utility and trash, of the engineered and the natural, the destructive and the creative gives rise to a different art. An art that no human could invent, only imitate. A collision of the abstract and the surreal.