Edited by James Kelly.

Saturday 19 May

[001] Welcome by James Green and Teresa Gleadowe

–

Field trip reports

[002] Dr Robin Shail, Camborne School of Mines: Introduction to the geology of the Penwith peninsula and reports on field trips led by Camborne School of Mines

–

[003] Paul Chaney and Kenna Hernly: The Story of NPK: Agriculture as Extraction

–

[004] Andrew Lanyon: Extracting Creativity

–

[005] Hadrian Pigott: The Invisibles – Emanations and Extractions from Hot Rocks

Hadrian Pigott has kindly given permission for us to publish his contribution to this section of the conference here in PDF format.
‘The Invisibles – Radioactivity in Granite,’ by Hadrian Pigott.

–

[006] Billy Wynter: Coast to Coast

–

[007] Iain Boal: Newlyn Fishing Industry – Stories of Extraction

–

Extraction and its Complications

[008] Robin Mackay: Introduction – Underground Adventure – From Mines to Signs

Robin Mackay has kindly given permission for us to publish his contribution to this section of the conference here in PDF format. ‘Underground Adventure – From Mines to Signs’, by Robin Mackay.

–

[009] Allen Buckley: The Cornish Adventure – From Surface to Depths

–

[010] Shaun Lewin: Mining the Ocean – From Quota to Capitalism

–

[011] John Gerrard: Remote-Control Agriculture – From Duststorm to Grow Finish Unit

–

[012] Esther Leslie: The Black Spectrum – From Coal to Colour

Esther Leslie has kindly given permission for us to publish her contribution to this section of the conference here in PDF format.
‘The Black Spectrum – From Coal to Colour’, by Esther Leslie.

–

[013] Panel discussion chaired by Robin Mackay

–

[014] Sally Tallant, Artistic Director of the Liverpool Biennial: the role and value of a biennial in a shrinking city

–

[015] Audience discussion chaired by Teresa Gleadowe

–

Sunday 20th May

Art and Extraction: History and Site

[016] Andrea Schlieker: Folkestone Triennial

–

[017] Miroslaw Balka: 21° 15′ 00″ E 52° 06′ 17″ N

–

[018] Kasia Redzisz: Otwock

–

[019] Nils Norman: Utopia: it’s here if not now

–

[020] Panel discussion chaired by Teresa Gleadowe

Many thanks for the invitation to document the coast-to-coast walk yesterday. It was a wonderful day. I learned so much about our fascinating county and met some lovely people. Special thanks to Billy for organizing such an inspiring journey.
Jane Robinson, photographer

Just a short note to say how much me and Dom enjoyed the Keynote event, and we made it to last night’s event too at CAZ and at Newlyn. We met some great people and really, really had a great time. Looking forward to future events.
Andy Hughes and Dominica Williamson, artists

I just wanted to say thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to stage Lecture on Nesting at the Penzance Convention. It was a privilege to be part of such a tremendous event and my Dad was equally thrilled to be involved. I really enjoyed the trip down the tin mine and would really have liked to stay for the rest of the event, it was a shame we had to move on.
Andy Holden, artist and Peter Holden, ornithologist

Many congratulations on a hugely stimulating, ambitious, convivial and inspiring event. I’m only sorry to have had to miss the field trips, which sounded truly extraordinary.

I hope the Convention will have a lasting effect, constructively nurturing the clearly complex Cornish cultural landscape.
Andrea Schlieker

I enjoyed it all so much and look forward to digesting all my experiences – I already have some ideas/plans for new projects and research trips. And all our speakers were such lovely people!

I recently attended the PZ Convention and although I could only come to the Saturday morning / Sunday presentations I felt so enthused that I had to comment. Rather than fill out the form, here are a few points as feed back.

• The presentations from Robin Shail, Hadrian Pigott, Andrew Lanyon, Andrea Schlieker and Miroslaw Balka were excellent as they were informative, thought provoking, entertaining and clearly executed.
• The main venues of the Exchange (and Newlyn Art Gallery ) were great. All the staff involved were welcoming and it was inspiring to see the gallery spaces used and filled in such a way.
• The quantity and variety of the events that were run over the four days were outstanding and had something for everyone.
• A formal introduction at the Exchange, regarding the convention as a whole, before the keynote, would have been useful.

What I think has come out of this more than anything, is the idea that the PZ Convention, hosted by the Exchange and Newlyn Art Gallery, could so easily (with funding ) become a biennial / trienniel event. Looking at the models of the Folkstone Trienniel  (and the Munster Skulptur Projekte ) there is a real possibility to develop something along the same lines. To be able to include a whole community, primarily engaging in the arts, and to leave a legacy for generations to come would be fantastic. I really do feel that this could be the start of something .

I wanted to say thank you for bringing the Convention to Penzance and please keep me informed of any developments.
Jessica Cooper, artist

I wanted to thank you for the wonderful experience I had up (down?) in Cornwall this weekend: it is as beautiful of a place as I had imagined and I so much enjoyed my time there.

Billy Wynter’s walk from coast to coast was a treat and really gave me the opportunity to get a good glimpse of the landscape, geology and sociological aspects of the area. Hearing the other field trip reports then allowed me to gain a pretty comprehensive overview.

After the lectures on Saturday I took a little coastal hike in the Lamorna Cove area, which finally sold me on Cornwall. I will for sure be back!
Anna Felten, Associate Director, Outset Contemporary Art Fund

Thank you so much for inviting me along to The Convention – it was truly fantastic! And I can’t believe it’s been a week since we were there in Penzance. It was a completely transformative experience. Finishing up at Tremenheere Gardens, sitting contemplatively in James Turrell’s ‘Tank’, seems to me the perfect metaphor for the weekend. The image was always there and the eye could apparently see it. But it wasn’t until you relaxed, focused your senses and allowed your mind to receive the picture, that you could ’see’ the image – suddenly things were clear!
Nick Raven, Two

Many thanks for supporting my inclusion in the Penzance Convention.  I greatly greatly enjoyed the gathering, from deciphering Iron Age field sites from seemingly random boulders through to the array of extraordinary ideas from the many thinkers who contributed.

I was particularly dazzled by Esther Leslie and her work on the modernist prisms which leapt from the inky blackness of coal tar of all things …  More work must be done (as she is embarking on) on the beguiling LCD panel … whose ingredients are pulled toxically from the earth in the furthest reaches and who so seamlessly paper over that very same destruction through vivid depictions of all we have lost … often in the form of wildlife literally leaping from the ‘iris’ frames and inhabiting sterile urban sitting rooms. Mining the Cornish landscape proves rich indeed for looking anew at the present!
John Gerrard, artist

Early in the Penzance Convention I was walking with others in Zennor, Cornwall, a landscape inhabited since the Bronze Age, and found myself engaged in discussions that reached far beyond ones I might have had in an exhibition, museum or gallery setting. The sites of artistic research are more often than not far from the museum’s walls and the series of Conventions are a means of acknowledging this and fostering a unique exploration and appreciation of the cultural wealth of this region and its peoples. Still there is no disputing that the origins of the Cornwall Conventions lie in discussions about art, exhibitions and artists.
Kitty Scott

The Invisibles field trip was fascinating – not only the terrific guides (Hadrian, Marcus, Dom, Tony, and others) but also the variety and the locations – it really gave an overview of the importance of mining to Cornwall throughout history.  My favourite parts were the Geiger counter, the 3D model, and the mine tour – and the creative and interesting mixture of science and art.
Professor Lora Fleming, Director, European Centre for Environment and Human Health

Thank you very much indeed for convening such a stimulating Convention!  As I mentioned to you on the closing day of the Convention, I had some thoughts about the use of concepts and vocabulary associated with extraction in relation to art and curatorial practice.  There is much to say, but I have tried to stick to one or two points that are most important to me.  I think that probably everything that I mention below, was said at the Convention in one way or another, but I’ve drawn things together to make sense to where I am at the moment.

One of the main outcomes of the convention for me is to question whether/how this concept of ‘extraction’ usefully describes the processes by which, as an artist, I draw meaning from history and site.  The process of thinking through these questions is stimulating and productive in terms of helping me to articulate in a more nuanced way where my practice is situated.  These are just initial thoughts and I hope to develop them further over the next few months.

One of the stated aims of The Penzance Convention was to ‘reflect on the theme of extraction, with reference both to Cornwall’s extractive industries – mining and fishing  in particular – and to the processes by which artists draw meaning from  history and site’.

I have been considering what particular social relations are embedded in the historical concept of ‘extraction’.  For me, extraction is a concept that usually implies an imbalanced power relation between two or more entities: one entity has the means by which to take from the other (often that which it needs/desires), to expose, lay bare . When the supplementary concepts of ‘mining’ and ‘resources’ are considered alongside ‘extraction’ then, for me, notions of accumulation, commodification, colonisation and even conquest, come to the fore.  Unless these concepts are explicitly thought through another (non-capitalist) lens and set of social relations, they usually imply power of one over another.  In this sense, as an artist I would hope not to become a resource for another, nor would I want to encounter someone else as a resource. I don’t want to ‘mine’ or ‘excavate’ another person’s knowledge, experience, ways of thinking, nor would I like to be mined or excavated.  Rather I would prefer to encounter another person through processes of mutuality.  The relationship between ‘scarcity’, ‘profit’ and the amount labour necessary to extract ‘resources’ is also highly relevant here.

In terms of ‘extraction’ as a reference to the processes by which artists draw meaning from history and site, then, the concept is, for me, highly problematic.  However, that in itself in not a negative thing.  By problematising and politicising the concept of ‘extraction’ the possibility of a very real debate emerging around artistic and curatorial practice in Cornwall and beyond begins to emerge; not least because, for me, the antagonisms of capitalist relations are embedded within the very concept of ‘extraction’ itself.

I have been making work with plants and herbs for a number of years, trying to learn how to grow, harvest, preserve and work with them for potions, dyes, rituals etc.  I’ve also been trying to devise organisational forms/structure of production, distribution and encounter that challenge (not always successfully!) existing hierarchical and centralised forms.  These new forms however, are equally embedded within capitalist social relations and have to be problematised and critiqued just as rigorously!

In my existing practice I work with (at least) two approaches simultaneously –  (1) devising material forms that enact attempts to encounter the world without incorporating, assimilating, accumulating, colonising or rejecting the other and (2) devising material forms that expose intrinsic antagonisms and contradictions within capitalist social relations.   My engagement with the Convention has made me realise that perhaps I now need to give more attention to how these two approaches co-exist within a work. The Convention has turned my attention specifically to concepts such as ‘extraction’ that, for me, contain complex/capitalist social relations, as part of what they are.  I think it is useful to expose the social relations embedded within processes of extraction, at the same time as attempting to devise ways of encountering metals, minerals, plants, fish, people, without attempting to accumulate, assimilate, incorporate, colonise, conquer and/or reject them.

In thinking through how metaphors of extraction might influence the development of much-needed alternatives to existing curatorial models informing art fairs and biennials (and ways of making art), I believe that through the shared process of problematising and politicising the concept of extraction itself, considering a radical new form of art production, distribution and encounter might emerge.

The Penzance Convention has stimulated my thinking in (for me) very fruitful ways, and for that, I thank you sincerely.
Kate Southworth

I had a lovely and interesting time. Going underground was the highlight, although the thing I remember most clearly was the keynote speech, which wandered, but I liked it like that, the way he got lost and then got back on track and then got distracted by something interesting, and all with the light fading and the uncomfortable seating and the organist with a rear-view-mirror to check the congregation. The poems he read, he was good. I liked his hat. He was quite Van Morrison.

It was great to see the geology students from St Austell. Seeing them at the school of mines made me think of visiting the Tate and the Serpentine when I was their age.

Anyway, congratulations, I thought it was wonderful.
Jonty Lees

Once again thank you for wonderful and rich days in Penzance. The energy around the event was amazing. The discussions taking place in the forum and back-stage – inspiring and timely.

Speaking at the conference was a valuable experience and a unique opportunity to present the project to extraordinary public.  It also made me and Miroslaw think about the concept once again. I feel that the convention helped me to reach some new layers and dig out some hidden motives.
Kasia Redzisz

Thank you again for invitation to Penzance
Great experience
Penzance before was just a strange name - now it means a lot.
Miroslaw Balka

Thank you once again for a brilliant day. We all got so much from the session. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Gizela Daemi-Rashidi, St Ives School

The aim was to convey a sense that something is happening down there in Cornwall, and that the Convention was a catalytic moment in whatever that’s going to become. It’s always nice to feel one’s taking part in a moment – in the historical sense – and that was what the Convention felt like.
Mark Hudson

The close connections between the artist and the scientist seemed integral to the Convention and, as a volunteer, I found this particularly exciting to discover. I studied Fine Art at UCF and in this respect the contrast between the approach of the Convention and that of a University course was clear; at UCF there was no attempt to connect to courses and varying disciplines that lie outside of Fine Art. Perhaps this is particularly important to me, regarding my personal practice, but I think that art students as a whole would benefit greatly from learning at BA level how to work with and respond to people in other fields.

I can only speak from my own experiences at UCF, but it seems it is quite easy for BA Fine Art to become introverted and for it to exist within comfortable boundaries, without reference to its surroundings or context.  I find it hard to think that so many art students will study here and leave without ever connecting to the place in which they have lived. This seems a shame for both the students and the art community in Cornwall, as both could gain something from the other. Perhaps as the Convention is already aware of the educational role it could have within the community, some connection or conversation could somehow be made with UCF courses, both within and outside of the arts.
Kate Holford, graduate of University College Falmouth, BA Fine Art

Nom de Strip received a bursary through Plymouth Visual Arts Consortium to attend The Penzance Convention. We really enjoyed the three-day conference.

The main reason for attending generally was intrigue – we discovered The Falmouth Convention website a few months prior to the trip, and remember thinking ‘that’s something we would have loved to go to’. We had never been to Penzance before and wondered what life in the deep, deep South West was like. Our current location and its distance from the centre of ‘things’ (especially in the art world) is something we often think and worry about. We were interested in the idea of this seemingly remote and far flung place becoming a temporary centre for artists, thinkers and writers from all over the country. Following the convention that interest remains.
Pamela Peter-Agbia and William Hibberd, Nom de Strip, Plymouth

Thank you for an amazing weekend – it was so cool to see so many faces again and meet many new… to get to spend the day down a Tin Mine, engage in critical thinking, learn a huge amount and be thoroughly inspired and to end strolling the beautiful gardens, laying back and gazing at the sky/or exploring the camera obscura with Turrell was just fantastic. Thank you for all your work to bring us such a great convention.
Hannah Guy, Director of Education, Fotonow

Thank you for the conference, it bought lots up to sift through and re-energised ideas slightly put aside…
Becalelis Brodskis, artist filmmaker

I wondered whether the next convention could take place in St. Ives, and the focus be twofold: the minor & major transnational nature of St. Ives cultural history (past, present and future); the specific conditions out of which an avant-garde arises.

I am a PhD student looking at a particular aspect of the links between St. Ives and Vancouver, and I feel this would be an interesting case study re- minor transnationalism… A key note speaker could be the University of British Columbia’s Scott Watson or perhaps Dieter Roelstraete, who was a curator at MuHKA, Antwerp and who is now at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He curated an exhibition whilst at MuHKA entitled Intertidal that looked at the conditions out of which, despite its isolation and newness, Vancouver’s avant-garde arose…
Alex Lambley, Researcher, Leach Pottery

Art & Education’s release on The Penzance Convention was circulated on 20 April 2012.

Colin Perry’s review of The Penzance Convention appears in the Jul-Aug 2012 issue of Art Monthly (subscription or purchase required).

Camborne School of Mines covered The Penzance Convention on their website, 8 June 2012.

Mark Hudson’s response to The Penzance Convention was published by theartsdesk.com on 24 June 2012.

Professor Lora Fleming, Director of the European Centre for Environment and Human Health wrote about her participation in The Penzance Convention on the ECEHH website.

Simon Bayliss’s response to The Penzance Convention was published in Issue 5 of thepaintingimperative.com.

The Route:

Gurnards Head Hotel, Gurnards Head, Porthmeor Cove, Lower Porthmeor Farm, Bosporthennis, Treen, Porthmeor and Bosporthennis Commons, Mulfra Hill and Quoit, Bodrifty and hut circles, Tredinneck, Ding Dong Mine, Greenburrow Engine House, Trengwainton Carn, Polclose,  Trengwainton Farm, Boswednan, West Lodge, Rose Hill Farm, Polgoon,  David Lays, Love Lane, Penzance Boating Pool, Wherry Town Beach

Coast to Coast was a walk with two slightly opposing intentions. The first was to provide an experience in West Penwith’s varied landscape, an immersion in place. This is a personal process and often disturbed by too much talk and too many explanations. The second was to try to pass on a richer understanding of what underlies the landscape – the geology, the human history of land use and the ecology of now.

Gurnards Head. The north coast start of the walk. Composed of ancient sea-bed shales sandwiched between outcrops of volcanic lava and intruded dolerites. The site of an ancient cliff castle, hut circles and possibly an ancient trading centre for tin.

Jon Brookes and amiable companion Barnaby, Gurnards Head in the background. Jon talking about land use and resources at this north coast location: moor and cliff for rough grazing, fuel and animal bedding. The coastal strip of intense agriculture and the cove for access to the sea for fishing. Mining also evident from the old engine house below us.

Just west of Gurnards Head. Gathering to discuss the exposed geology of the coast.

Geoff Pooley and geological map. Geoff discussing the formation of the land from ancient ocean floor pushed up into mountain ranges by continental movement, the welling up of molten granite from below and the slow erosion of these rocks to the present day landscape

Porthmeor Cove, west of Gurnards Head. A classic geological site where the granite and country rock meet; the interface is clearly seen on the shore and cliff face.

Bosporthennis. An ancient inhabited moorland farm, up the valley from Porthmeor cove, at one time home to many families. The granite-hedged fields tracing different eras of enclosure and agriculture.

Jon Brookes discussing the subtle symbiotic life stories of large blue butterflies and ants and how managed grazing by cattle allows specialised habitats for species like the large blue to be maintained.

Ding Dong Mine, tapping into the granite moorland backbone of West Penwith in pursuit of tin.

Mulfra Quoit. Jon Brookes discussing competing theories of this Bronze Age site. Was it a burial chamber or was it a ceremonial or celebratory site? The jury is still out.

The lane from Bodrifty to Ding Dong; everyone at their own pace.

A closer view of Ding Dong Mine. This is the nineteenth-century engine house that would have powered pumps to clear the mine of water and probably a man engine to lift miners from the depths.

Trengwainton Carn.  Kath Hawkins provides hot tea and scones. Welcome refreshment before the descent to Penzance.

Approaching Rosehill.  A beautiful jungle-like experience of profuse green. But ultimately rather soggy. A few shoes overtopped.

Rosehill. The last real bit of countryside, the lane down from Rosehill to cross the A30 and enter Penzance’s leafy suburbs.

Penzance. The beach, west end of Penzance promenade. The outflow of a stream draining from the moors and passing Trengwainton Carn. The mixed pebbles mirroring the geology: light-coloured granite, darker country rock, greenstones and shales. The end of seven hours gentle walking.

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view Billy Wynter’s report (006).

In his presentation at the Convention Hadrian Pigott gave an account of the field trip and went on to talk about the history of uranium, pitchblende and radium, and the extraction of these substances in Cornwall. His text is published here, with the images included in his presentation.

This field trip set out to explain the radioactive legacy of the granite, the history of mining uranium ore in West Cornwall, the dangers posed by radon gas and the potential benefits of ‘hot rock’ geothermal energy for the future.

I would like to thank Dom Hudson & Marcus Perry of the St Just Mines Research Group, the staff at Geevor Mine and Tony Bennett, Mike Shipp and Adam Sharp of the Rosevale Historical Mining Society for their enthusiasm and generosity which made this field trip possible.

Also to thank Dr. Ben Williamson of Camborne School of Mines and Professor Lora Fleming and Dr. James Allen of the European Centre for Environmental and Human Health for bringing their knowledge and expertise to enrich the field trip.

The Crowns, Botallack

Wheal Owles & Wheal Edward. The uranium ore pitchblende was mined here in the 19th century, though the main production was copper and tin.

Mining consultant Dom Hudson explains the top side mine workings.

Walking down to Cargodna Shaft.

Cargodna Shaft.

Wheal Owles mining disaster 1893.

Dom explains uranium mineralogy with samples from Wheal Owles.

A lesson in mineralogy.

Then  over to Wheal Owles incline shaft.

An American mining team extracted two tons of uranium ore (pitchbende) for atomic research from here in 1950.

Marcus Perry – St Just Mines Research Group – on the dressing floor used by the American team.

There’s a surprisingly high background reading at this location on the Geiger counter- not a place to hang about.

Occasional samples give higher Geiger counter readings…

Wheal Owles spoil tips, with the Botallack Count House and Allen Shaft winding gear in the background.

Geevor Mine – Victory Shaft.

3D model of underground workings at Geevor Mine.

On the walk from Zennor to Rosevale Mine.

Briefing at Rosevale Mine.

Tony Bennett explains the layout of the mine workings.

The entrance to No. 2 Level at Rosevale Mine.

The beginning of the main stope.

Mike Shipp explains early mining techniques.

Adam Sharpe points out the drilling pattern for dynamite charges.

Dust after a small charge is set off much further up the adit.

A discussion about geothermal energy by candle light.

The main stope between Level 2 and Level 1.

Climbing fixed ladders up through the stope.

Chain link ladder.

Light and fresh air…

Coming to grass.

Coming to grass – Rosevale Mine Level 1.

The Invisibles crew.

Read Professor Lora Fleming’s account of her participation in The Invisibles field trip.

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view a recording of Hadrian Pigott’s presentation (005).

View a PDF of Hadrian Piggott’s presentation.

]]> http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/field-trip-3-the-invisibles-emanations-and-extractions-from-hot-rocks/feed 0 http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/field-trip-6-newlyn-fishing-industry http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/field-trip-6-newlyn-fishing-industry#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:46:35 +0000 jo http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/?p=2621 This field trip started with an early morning visit to the fish auction at Newlyn, led by Nick Howell, owner of The Pilchard Works, followed by breakfast in the Seamen’s Mission. The walk from Newlyn to Mousehole was led by Iain Boal, joined by a number of knowledgeable local residents along the way. Photographs by Chris Jones, captions by Hadrian Pigott.

Iain would like to thank Edward Iliffe and Professor Geoffrey Walton of MDL Ltd for making the Penlee Quarry site available for the group and for taking the time to carefully present their plans for the future.

Nick Howell of the Newlyn Pilchard Works gives a historical introduction to the area – outside the old fish auction building.

Inside the current fish auction sheds – 7.30am.

Nick Howell explains the myriad pressures on the present day fisherman and how the auction works.

Fishermen and wholesalers gather around the auctioneer.

Beautiful fresh fish and the name of the purchaser.

The last boxes of fish are sold off…

Breakfast in the Fishermen’s Mission café.

Iain Boal casts some bait…

Then and now – the old quay steps by Stanhope Forbes and how it looks today.

The Copper Works Newlyn: Michael Johnson, with Nick Howell holding up a recent commission.

Cornish Luggers – the Barnabas and the Ripple on Newlyn old quay.

John Lamborne of the Ripple explains the history of his boat.

John discusses ideas for sustainable fishing practice and the relevance of keeping old traditions alive.

Below decks on the restored and converted Ripple.

Nick Howell takes a break…

Newlyn Harbour from the Mousehole road.

The group arrives at Penlee Quarry for a Health & Safety briefing.

Penlee Quarry.

Professor Geoffrey Walton explains the local geology and the suitability of the metadolerite rock for ‘armourstone’ to be used in local coastal protection and breakwater works.

Recent rock falls have led to closure of a footpath and a local dispute.

Professor Walton answers questions on the history and future plans for the quarry site, which include a marina, maritime facilities and housing.

Current plan of Penlee Quarry.

Model of the proposed marina development and connection to the sea.

Standing above Penlee Lifeboat Station, writer and historian Mike Sagar Fenton describes events leading up to the 1981 Solomon Browne disaster, a maritime catastrophe that changed a community for ever.

On to Mousehole…

Mousehole itself is a pretty village, which until the 16th century was a principal port on Mounts Bay, and is renowned for its atmospheric harbour. But in the last few decades the village has seen a dramatic rise in second home ownership and a corresponding decline in its resident population and so forms a location for a discussion about the positive and negative impacts of tourism.

The field trip ended the day in the Pilchard Press café near the harbour discussing the impact of some of these issues with local residents over tea and scones…

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view Iain Boal’s report.

View John Hartley’s photos of the field trip.

]]> http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/field-trip-6-newlyn-fishing-industry/feed 0 http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/field-trip-5-extracting-creativity-with-andrew-lanyon http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/field-trip-5-extracting-creativity-with-andrew-lanyon#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:30:04 +0000 jo http://www.thepenzanceconvention.com/?p=2592 Described by Andrew Lanyon as an exercise in ‘streaming and open cast as opposed to deep mining of the imagination’, this workshop grew out of his continuing experimentation with ways of accessing inventiveness. The workshop was held in Alice Mumford’s studio-barn in Canonstown, near Hayle, and offered opportunities to make books and watch films. Amongst the participants were a group of seven Year 10 students from St Ives School, with their teacher Gizela Daemi-Rashidi.  Andrew Lanyon provided the following account of the workshop. Photographs by Maria Christoforidou and Gizela Daemi-Rashidi.

This was perhaps the fifteenth experiment with creating books, using as a starting point a pile of images from old encyclopaedias etc.  Around 23 people took part with ages ranging from twelve to 45.

The food supplied by Anne Haycock was so good it was lucky I had some films to show after lunch.  Normally I prefer people to work mornings only, since lunch can take an hour or two to recover from – seriously affecting inventiveness!

The long-term goal is to create a ‘formula’ for inventiveness.  Our related film-, music- and song-making days (42 so far) are proving more successful.  The main difference between the film/music workshops and the bookmaking is that on the latter people work alone.

The next one (at Redruth next week, with 8/9 year-olds) will be the first in which I will group the children in threes or fours.  I will also give them a choice of genres – eg murder/romance – so that they have a theme in mind as they sift through images.  I think these changes in tactic will improve the bookmaking, so it will become as exciting as the other workshops.

Since everyone keeps the books they make, I have nothing to show.  The books themselves are by-products – for me because it is a long-term study in inventiveness and for the participants because they discover a way to be inventive.  There were some surprises.  For instance someone who works with words – writing about art – produced two of the best visual pages, which surprised and delighted them. The 12 year-old clung to her book, too shy to bring it over to show me.  But I got to see it and it was so good we all looked at it.

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view Andrew Lanyon’s report (004).

What do you see when you look at a field full of cows or a sweeping valley of crops swaying gently in the breeze? Surely, these pastoral scenes are some of the most idyllic and unobtrusive the mind can summon. But as FIELDCLUB, our guides on this speculative tour of the history of agriculture, remind us farming is not a benign activity. It is one of the most extractive of all the industries that have enabled humans to survive and thrive on this planet.

The ‘N’, ‘P’ and ‘K’ that star in this story are the chemical symbols for nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium – the nutrients upon which all life relies. Plants extract these essential nutrients from the environment and they are passed on to us through the food we eat, enabling us to grow and function as living, breathing human beings. It’s the processes through which humans have sought to maximise the efficiency and output of this cycle that have driven agricultural developments over thousands and thousands of years.

To begin the story, FIELDCLUB take us to a field near Lanyon Quoit – the closest we can get on the West Penwith peninsula to unfarmed land. The plants on this native heath have strong and deep roots, bringing up minerals from the rock layer below and depositing them in the topsoil when they die, but this natural process is extremely slow.

There’s evidence here of burning back, which releases the nutrients from the plants into the soil much more quickly than just letting the plants die back naturally. Standing out on the open heath, conversation turns to discussing at what point in history people would have stopped just moving on to a new patch of land when the nutrients in the soil started to be depleted and affect productivity, and when and how they would have discovered ways to enrich the soil, such as adding manure.

It’s suggested that it had to do with population growth and therefore being less mobile. They would have had to find ways to cultivate more food for the growing population and so the cycle would have continued. Working out what seemed to have a positive effect on crop yields would have resulted from a combination of a slower pace of life – being able to notice things more – and the passing down of valuable information from generation to generation.

At Bosigran, just a few miles from Land’s End, we appear to be taken to just another ordinary field (albeit one with the very impressive backdrop of the Atlantic ocean!). But as landscape historian David Giddings reveals, we are in fact standing in one of the best preserved Bronze Age to late Medieval field systems in Europe, a prehistoric landscape that will never again be ploughed as it is now under the protection of the National Trust.

Here, David teaches us how to read the fields to spot the evidence that is all around us of the people who lived and worked here 2-3,000 years ago: terraces that show these steep fields, some of which practically tumble away into the sea, have been ploughed and cultivated over long periods; small stones piled up on huge boulders, or clearance cairns, evidence of stone picking to make the earth easier to plough; clusters of the remains of Romano-British houses that prove hundreds of people would once have been living in this seemingly inhospitable landscape.

We talk about ways in which these early farmers would have dealt with the problem common to all farmers across thousands of years – how to retain the nutrients that the very act of farming helps to deplete. Our FIELDCLUB guides explain their theory of ‘the economy of containment.’ That the people farming these fields at the edge of the country would have taken advantage of the way nature was already concentrating these precious nutrients – seaweed, sand, animal dung, blood and bones – thus exploiting nature’s very useful habit of recycling and containing.

But with the need to feed an ever-growing population, farming was always taking more from the soil than could ever be put back in. It was only after the Black Death, which lowered the population and took the pressure off agriculture, that more land could be left fallow, allowing nutrients to build back up and a much more efficient system of crop rotation to be developed.

Through everything we’re discovering about agricultural industry, there runs the thread of human ingenuity developing innovations which, in turn, increase production, which means populations rise to meet that output and further innovations are needed to keep up. As technologies developed in the nineteenth century, increased transport and travel possibilities led to one of the defining developments in the Story of NPK. The holy grail had always been finding a fixed, solid form of the elusive nutrient nitrogen and in 1809 a chain of islands off the coast of Bolivia were found to be made of tens of thousands of years’ worth of petrified bird droppings or ‘guano’. In other words, a massive natural supply of highly concentrated fertiliser that could be shipped all around the world.

And here’s where things get really interesting. The extraction of guano marks the first point in the history of agriculture when, as FIELDCLUB put it, humans enter into geological time. We started extracting things quicker than they could ever be renewed or replaced, using up resources that had been created by millions and millions of years of natural processes. From this point onwards, people were switched on to the possibilities of where resources could be found. Chemical and mineral hunters discovered what local people around the world had been using on a tiny scale and turned it into massive extractive industries. Agriculture moved from cyclicality to linearity.

The final chapter of the story, for today at least, is told at a modern, industrial agricultural facility. There are still fields involved – 2,500 acres between Land’s End and Truro – but we don’t stand in the fields to talk about how the processes here work. We don’t even look at the fields. We see giant tractors and huge concrete and corrugated iron warehouses, blast chillers and sorting machines.

As the farm manager tells us, “Technology is everywhere.” Everything and everybody has a bar code. Chemicals are absolutely key to this operation; for controlling pests, preventing the spread of diseases, preserving crops and maximising yield. Everything they produce here has a final customer and the spec, size and colour can be controlled to make sure the customer gets what they want. And they must be doing a good job because this is a very successful company employing 600 staff at peak times and supplying all the major UK supermarkets, as well as exporting to Europe and America.

All this energy, all this effort, all this extraction and transportation: the scale of what they’re doing here is immense. And the most surprising thing? It’s not even for food. It’s for cut flowers and bulbs.

With their expert hand, FIELDCLUB have guided us a very long way on our journey today. Within the space of about 30 miles we’ve dug down into geological time and also been given the tools to imagine the possibilities of the future. If the strongest thread in the Story of NPK continues to be human ingenuity, I am left wondering which way our next innovations will take us and what part we can play in writing the story.

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view the report by FIELDCLUB (003).

Field trip led by Sam Hughes of Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter.

Six weeks have passed since the Penzance Convention; I write this now in London.

Most journeys start before they have begun; this one was no exception. There was the anticipation of going down ‘The Mine’ and thinking generally about ‘Extraction’. Coincidently one of my students introduced me to the computer game Minecraft. Evidently there is a whole scene where gamers stream live footage and audio of their gaming onto the net. I watched his ‘found footage’ of a gamer hacking his way through rock / pixels revealing new passage ways, trying to avoid the lurking pitfalls and creatures, while casually chatting about his house, DIY, his relationships, with incredible intimacy and familiarity to not only his imagined anonymous audience of other gamers, but potentially the rest of the world. I found myself feeling claustrophobic, unsure if it was the image of the mine or the life he was describing.

The mining of tin brought the invention of the tin can and the storage of food, which in turn led to war no longer being seasonal.  The pragmatics of war rarely get spoken about, but war and the mining of metal seem to have always been intertwined. I pondered also on the word mine and why it should share its spelling with the possessive pronoun ‘mine’. In art terms I thought about Robert Smithson’s desire to screen a film deep inside a cave, which led me to think about Plato’s cave and the illusions encountered there.  I also stumbled across a reference to a work by the artist Joelle Tuerlinckx, which makes visible the distance miners travelled underground. So with all this in mind I set off to Cornwall and Field Trip 2.

What appeared to be an unsuspecting small corrugated iron shed was in fact the entrance to Great Condurrow Mine.

It felt counter-intuitive to trust the rusty handrail around the top of the hole, to say nothing of the vertical descent. Normally my visits to Cornwall involve being outside as much as possible – it was strange to willfully go into the darkness. Only one person could descend at a time. We were given practical advice – ‘look straight ahead and always have three points of contact with the ladder’. But I had already looked down. I had to steel myself before taking that initial step on the ladder, the first ladder being about 25 ft to a metal grill platform, to another ladder the same length, then two shorter 10 foot ladders, the first to a wooden platform and the last to what appeared to be solid ground, but we had already been informed that this in fact was compressed loose rock.

The ventilation system had been on for a couple of hours to clear any radon that would have accumulated there. We walked on, Tony and Sam interjected points of interest. Someone asked if there is anything living down there – surely the rock is living I thought. Sam pointed to the answer, bacteria growing on the wood. Radon, bacteria, no solid ground, this seemed like a dangerous place. I found myself diverted by the settings on my camera. It was darker than it appeared, we were all wearing hard hats with lamps attached that gave the illusion of light, but my camera was less easily fooled. We looked at the old equipment still down there for drilling and taking samples. The process of excavating the tunnels with explosives was explained. One imagined an incredibly slow process; a lot of time had been spent down here. The process of analyzing the rock mass for signs of ore was explained.  We saw a seam and the vivid leaching copper-sulfate was unmistakable. After an hour and a half we emerged and things seemed a bit different, the ground no longer solid and the grass a bit more springy – plus the doing of it had felt like a milestone.

Our next stop was King Edward Mine. The architecture caught my eye, a sort of utilitarian hamlet. One building was a working museum, a processing plant demonstrating methods used when mining in Cornwall was at its peak. We were shown the processes of crushing, water separation and gravity used to extract the metal out of the ore. The machines themselves showed evolutionary thinking, the gradual refinement of a primitive process. They were switched on.

One was like a vast slanted tabletop with ridges; it shook back and forth. The finely ground rock was dispersed with water, the movement caused the tin, as it is lighter, to rise up to the surface of the table and more water pushed it over the edge and into its own trough. Another part of this building was like a formal museum with vitrines. In one there was a mound of crushed rock, next to it was the approximate amount of tin that it would have produced, a tiny ingot. I asked what tin would have been used for at that time (1850s); the reply was ‘pewter’. Now, retrospectively, this seems like a lot of effort for a plate that wouldn’t break, but at the time it must have been phenomenal, and they must have had a hunch it was leading to greater things.

Someone commented on an early photograph showing an outdoor processing plant with women wearing Victorian dress standing next to vast water channels in the ground. Evidently women did work above ground in some plants, but a woman down a mine was considered bad luck.

Lunch in the local pub, with half a pint of Tinners and much discussion: radon, claustrophobia – Sam describing moving through a very confined space underground and having to remove his battery pack in order to get through – celebrity science and the Brian Cox phenomenon etc.

At Camborne School of Mines we were greeted by Professor Frances Wall – and a vast rock collection. Here we were introduced to Dr Gavyn Rollinson, an eminent geologist who manages Qemscan, their scanning electron microscope, the only one of its kind in a university in Europe and one of only a few in the world. In Gavyn’s office a computer screen displayed a Sun Newspaper article with the headline, ‘There’s indium in them thar hills’. Indium is an essential ingredient of any touch screen technology – ipads, phones etc. – and future technology depends on it. Its recent discovery in Cornwall could bring huge economic changes to the region. Gavyn analyses rock; he showed us a sample, powdered rock set in resin. When it scans, Qemscan gives visual quantitative information.

The result was like a colour-coded map of the different elements. He showed us another computer that gives information as a graph and another that gives data. He told us how companies use this facility at CSM and archaeologists have too. Ancient pottery scanned can help reveal where the clay came from and early trade routes etc. Blue-tacked to the wall next to lots of charts and data were a collection of small bits and pieces, a tiny spring, metal parts, plus two bits of plastic, one like a computer plug, both with burn marks on them. This was Qemscan’s predecessor, which Gavin discovered smouldering away, testimony to laboratory geology having risks of its own.

By this point facts were becoming fiction in my mind. Extraction, I was full to the brim. The tin shed had been the portal to a dark and thrilling place.  At CSM we’d been back and forth in time, ancient pottery to state of the art technology, and Cornish rock potentially facilitating the virtual world.

Read more about the partnership with Camborne School of Mines for The Penzance Convention.

www.kingedwardmine.co.uk

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view Robin Shail’s presentation (002).

Field trip led by Robin Shail of Camborne School of Mines, University of Exeter.

Field trips engage the brain through the senses, through a direct experience. Ours was a tripartite trip of subtle parallels.

We began by surveying the terrain from a hill top over Camborne, a lump of mineral in hand, clearly showing bandings of metal… the geology shaping the valley and hills entirely exploited for mining.

Descending amongst the mining wreckage of centuries, now curtailed, we first probed South Crofty mine. In the dead hulk of industrial machine sheds, a search for for rare and heavy metals is underway, in hope of new beginnings.

A gigantic three-dimensional map of the ground beneath our feet showed an extremely complex web of mines and adits, woven through one another, seeking the lodes.

Why it’s been built as a sculpture rather than remaining in the computer-generated form it was created in is a mystery. Perhaps a testament to an ex-miner’s need to manually shape rather than tap at a keyboard. If the mine were to start up again the whole works would be underground. Nothing of it would show on the surface.

The second site (incongruously just across the road) was ‘Heartlands’. This is an alternative revivification of an ex-industrial contaminated site. Here, rather than seek the future in alternative mineral deposits (e.g. indium, now in demand for touch-screens) the 1990s or Blairite approach to defunct heavy industry is displayed: reconfiguration as leisure. ‘Heartlands’ is an extremely strange place. One example of its strangeness is the name of the cafe: ‘Red River’. This a reference to the dreadful pollution that spewed from the mines when they were closed and flooded. The toxic deposits that washed into the river turned it red. An odd decision, to refer to evidence of toxic waste in the name of a cafe. Still, it felt very like now – or maybe like 10 years ago. A strange blend of infotainment and frank children’s play park.

We were there the day preceding the Olympic torch leaving Lands End. The place was filled with school groups busily practising … what? I watched for a long time from the tower that used to run the pumping engine but I could not at all work it out. The torch was not coming to Camborne.

The third site was the most extraordinary. Walking into the Camborne School of Mines test mine we conducted a subterranean explosion.

The physical experience of the mine gave me a glimpse of the miners’ passion; working underground, looking with a hunter’s eye at the geology, tracking down ore. The explosion itself, whooshing past and through me in the pitch black, the shock of it reverberating off the rock surrounding me, vanishing down tunnels then sucking back, somehow leaving a loud silence in my ears and chest. I emerged from the test-mine with a whiff in my nostrils of the chase, the craft of mining, the skill in reading the rocks – that the mine would be a kingdom as rich in interest as a rainforest to the biologist or stock prices to a city analyst.

Read more about the partnership with Camborne School of Mines for The Penzance Convention.

Read more about this field trip in the Programme listing and view Robin Shail’s presentation (002).

Given in the Methodist Church on Chapel Street in Penzance, Iain Boal’s keynote compared Cornwall and the northern California littoral as zones of extraction. It traced the legacies – environmental and social – of mining and fishing considered as industries tied into a globalised market, by drawing out the paradoxes of depletion and sustainability, of tourism and the heritage industry, of regional autonomy and centralised subsidy, of lived reality and the mythos of the far West.

Though it was never an ambition of mine, I admit, to address a congregation in a Methodist church, I am truly delighted to be standing before you in this handsome gathering place – built by the followers of John Wesley, hard rock, four square, with its resounding organ, fine galleries and marvellous acoustics. I am most grateful to Teresa Gleadowe and Hadrian Pigott for inviting me to deliver the keynote address this evening. I am very conscious of the honour in following Lucy Lippard in this role.

A successful keynote provides the fundamental tone for the proceedings and sets overtones resonating in productive ways. My intention is to triangulate the thematic keyword of the convention – ‘extraction’ – in relation to two others, ‘commodity’ and ‘commons’. My hope is that together the three terms will, through their interanimation and our collective explorations this weekend, help to open up fresh perspectives on Cornish history, on the traditions of representation, and on the relationship of this peninsula to global history and the dynamics of modernity.

The purpose of such a ‘keywords approach’, pioneered by a Welsh mentor of mine, Raymond Williams, is emphatically not to define terms or to patrol the perimeters of meaning. On the contrary, as Williams insisted, “it is the range of meanings that matter.” This is necessarily the case in a society and a world riven by savage inequalities; any claims to stable, univocal senses must be ideological.

When I first heard that the theme of the Convention was ‘extraction’, I at once recognized the power of this term as an organizing metaphor bringing together the histories of commodity production and the practices of representation, though to be sure it is much more than a metaphor, since it points to a material reality at the heart of life in Cornwall and in the Cornish diaspora. I knew too, as a historian based in northern California interested in the ancient commoning cultures who lived along the littoral with very different conceptions of nature from the European invaders, that I would find deep commonalities and connections between the two widely separated zones. And so it proved.

Conceptions of nature are constituted through a vocabulary that carries normative force. If you want to develop a wetland, call it a swamp; if you want to save a jungle, call it a rainforest. Very often, for example, human hierarchy is read unchallenged into nature – unchallenged because we are typically introduced to such terms when we are young and first learning to observe the world. Consider, for example, the implications of a scientific zoological nomenclature that incorporates royalty, as in the animal ‘kingdom’, of botanical displays that describe the sequoia as ‘monarch’ of the forest, of biological talk of ‘master’ genes, and so on. Innocent as these descriptors may seem, we can say that how the environment is conceived — whether as feudally ordered or sacred or animate or mechanical or gendered or benevolent, and so forth — facilitates the sanctioning of a whole range of human institutions and practices. Such as the private ownership of land, deforestation, the mining of the earth and the oceans, vivisection, taxidermy, gene-splicing. A certain anthropocentrism in relation to the rest of nature is no doubt unavoidable, and Gombrich dramatically illustrated the power of particular cultural lenses to inform representation in the case of Durer’s woodcut rhinoceros and its perceptual legacy across several centuries.

So it is important to ask what underlying conceptions of nature are informing our attempts to describe and represent the environmental crisis that is now undoubtedly upon us, both in Cornwall and California.

First of all, simply by using the vocabulary of crisis and catastrophe – natural enough given the frightening rate of extinctions around the globe – we risk falling into the discourse of apocalypticism, and even a return to Christian geology. It would at least be well to acknowledge that the brief interlude between 1750 and 1950 AD, the two hundred years between Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the atmospheric detonation of Teller’s thermonuclear weapon – when modernity’s clerisy declared that the future lay wide open under the sign of progress – is now over. Speeches at climate conventions are delivered over the corpse of Enlightenment optimism. Ironically, it is the scientists who, after waging a long war against Christian catastrophism in order to establish a deep secular past and by implication an open and contingent future, are now officiating as priests of doom.

Not that for those two centuries all talk of apocalypse was confined to the pulpit. Far from it. Even in the rosy dawn of enlightened optimism, reflected in William Godwin’s anarchist utopia – he was of the generation born in the 1750s – a counter-narrative was being forged in the halls of official knowledge. The Reverend Thomas Malthus, the world’s first paid economist – he taught at Haileybury College in the employ of the East India Company – launched a frontal attack on Godwin’s vision of an ample world adequate to human needs.

Economics, as defined by Malthus and taken as orthodoxy ever since, is the science of ‘choice under scarcity’. However, the primary cause of that scarcity – the clearances and enclosure of land (first described by Thomas More in ‘Utopia’) that dispossessed the commoners, including the indigenous inhabitants of this peninsula, and cut them off from their means of subsistence – was not a topic for polite discussion in 18th century drawing rooms any more than it is in today’s business schools.

Paradoxically, at the same time as it assumed scarcity, the science of economics also assumed infinitude, that is, the bottomlessness of nature as reservoir and resource. It is a striking fact that Thomas Huxley, a leading Victorian scientist, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and no stranger to the role of scarcity in the theory of natural selection that he advocated, could make the following statement, in a paper presented at The Great International Fishery Exhibition in London in 1884: “The cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea-fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently… to be useless.”

It is this fundamental contradiction that now threatens the equations of resource economists, not to mention life on earth. Endless growth may linger as an abstract ideal, but capitalism’s material waste – the ‘externalities’ dumped in land, ocean, and atmosphere – is a large turkey coming home.

In 1743, in the same decade that Diderot was compiling his Enlightenment compedium of craft skills and artisanal knowledge, John Wesley came to Land’s End. He found it “an awful site” and declared that it would “melt away when God ariseth in judgement.”

Yet by 1879 one Robert Carlyle pushed a wheelbarrow from Land’s End to John O’Groats, Scotland’s Ultima Thule. Why would this early ‘end-to-ender’ bother to do such a thing? Or why in the year 2012 would it be considered normal to inaugurate a peripatetic relay of torch-bearers at this British finisterre? What’s going on here? In an essay entitled ‘Why coasts are good to think with’, the historian of islands and coastality, John Gillis, notes: “They came [to Land's End] by train from the industrial cities of the north, and from the colonies, fulfilling a childhood dream. ‘I’ve always wanted to see Land’s End’ said one working man. Behavior that astonished the locals, for many of whom it was still a forbidding place. ‘I’ve never seen it, and never want to’, one of them told W. H. Hudson in the 1920s.”

To understand this (slow) cultural transvaluation of the landscape we must invoke two powerful and historically linked movements, nationalism and Romanticism, which entailed respectively a new conception of ‘the coast’ and the subliming of wild places, particularly oceans and mountains. This great shift in the cultural perception of landscapes by the educated classes of Europe, inaugurated between 1750 and 1800 and articulated ideologically by schoolmasters, poets and artists, took place at the same moment – no accident – that ‘civilization’ (and its others) was being theorized by Lowland philosophers in Edinburgh. Their own hinterland – and its unruly highland ‘tribes’ – were being simultaneously subdued and mythologized.

Coasts, along with romantic moors and mountains, are the product of the nation state, of what the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove called ‘the territorializing vision’. And vice versa. Nations are brought into existence by their edges. Land’s End became part of this nation’s sacred landscape, its mythic geography. Coasts, in other words, define the space of the nation, which itself, in the formulation of Benedict Anderson, is essentially an ‘imagined community’ invented by the European clerisy of the 18th and 19th centuries. Nationalism, argued Anderson, was a development within print culture and dependent on the mass readership of newspapers which in turn are a commodity made possible by the new technics of mechanical reproduction. (Here is not the place to explore the toxic legacies of the ‘nation’ as an ideal – toxic, in my view, because nationalism in the abstract tries per impossibile to align one folk, one language, and one territory, which is a prescription for ethnic cleansing and genocide).

Coasts ceased to be porous and have become, in the nation-state’s imaginary, fortified borders. In reality coasts are, as the marine biologist Rachel Carson put it, “an elusive and indefinable boundary”. Ecologically they are amphibious ecotones where two or several ecosystems merge – five, in the case of the Cornish peninsula. They are zones of maximum flow, exchange and biodiversity. Indeed, the tideline seems to have been the original home of our species, and the history of the last two hundred thousand years a story of co-creation on the human shore.

One terminus of the Romantic imagination is, then, the modern beach, cleared of all reminders of labour, and  permitting a pleasing ocean vista, an unspoiled view of the horizon. It is the emptiness of the beach and the sea that now lures homo modernus. The sea is no longer a place to be inhabited, but a space to be contemplated. It was in reaction to this condition that Allan Sekula embarked on Fish Story and his more recent films on occluded maritime labour. Working waterfronts are now in fact rare. In the state of Maine only 20 miles of the entire 5,300 mile fractal coast are open to conventional maritime activities. It would be interesting to know the figures for Cornwall and California.

Landlubbers were astonished to discover that historically those who inhabited the coast mostly turned their backs and their houses to the view. Second-homers have had to punch holes in the old stone walls in order to rename the cottage ‘Seaview’. Meanwhile, many fishermen and their families have been priced out of the waterfront and must commute from the hinterland, displaced by incomers, downshifters and holidaymakers. The fishing village has become a prime destination for nostalgia tourism. Nostalgia was first noted in the 17th century as a serious medical condition among Swiss mercenary soldiers, unfit for duty having been stricken by homesickness. Today, nostalgia is the foundation of the antiques and tourism industries, a free-floating condition directed at places and pasts typically not known personally, and with serious consequences for those places and people toward which it is directed.

The fishing village is itself a product of land clearances and the destruction of the commons which provided livelihood outside the commodity/cash nexus. It is no less a product of modernity than the factory or the freeway. Modern agriculture has in turn come to be modelled on factory production and actually represents the transfer back into the countryside of the abiotic production of commodities using mechanized tools.

In the Atlantic world, fishing began mostly as a freshwater occupation, and remained a seasonal occupation of farmers (‘one boot in the boat and the other on land’) who left their fields and plots when migrating fish came close inshore. Until the 18th century coastal villages were rare; the shore was associated with danger and death. Fishing villages began to appear in the 16th century as a result of land enclosures. Peasants were not so much drawn to the sea as driven to it. Often the motive was to earn cash to pay rents; in other words, it represented a shift from commoning to capitalist relations. And without inland or overseas markets for the catch, these communities could not have existed. Cornish fisherfolk, for example, were very conscious of their dependence on the edicts of the Vatican for their pilchard markets in Catholic Europe and, for a period, in the slave plantations of the Caribbean.

Likewise with the Puritans of Massachussets, cod was the international commodity that saved them. Samuel Morison put it bluntly: “God performed no miracle on New England soil. He gave the sea. Stark necessity made seamen of would-be planters.” Fishermen, in other words, were mostly not a ‘breed apart’ but remained jacks of all trades moving back and forth across the tide line. The word ‘maritime’ used to refer to the lands bordering the sea, not the sea itself. They had to be mobile, to be familiar with ‘a hundred ports’ – that is, far more cosmopolitan and innovative than their upcountry neighbours. Notwithstanding, in the same way that folklorists discovered the ‘folk’ just as it was being ushered into extinction, so artists and writers scoured the coasts for natural, original, denizens, untainted by industrialism.

The clearing of the coast, and the invention of the modern beach, has been a gradual process. A century ago the most desirable seascapes invariably included vessels and other marine activity, and we shall be exploring this tomorrow on the field trip. We shall be posing the questions: How is this process represented? What kinds of work are portrayed and figured? What attitude to extraction – from fishing ground and quarry – is being proposed by the artist or photographer? Is it reasonable to speak of art itself as a matter of extraction?

In this context the Cornish scenes of the English expressionist Edward Burra are interesting for their clear rejection of the picturesque tradition of Forbes and company. A native of the south Kent coast, “he blocked his window with hardboard in order to avoid seeing the view across Rye. A picturesque town of old rippling roofs and cobbled streets, a tea-shop place was the last thing he needed… Never liking it, it was typical that he should live in Rye all his life. He preferred the gravel pits and sheds on the road to the harbour. He liked the high view down on to the recreation ground, the fisty trees, the debris generated by the workshops and fishing boats on the winding estuary. He liked the way the slug of Stone Hill crept across the far side of the Marsh… In 1953 he moved into… a house built on the site of a Methodist chapel bombed during the war. From here, high up, he could look across the Marsh with its snaking river, razor-sharp dikes and flashes of lying water.”

The watery edges of the modern nation are viewed as peripheral in the eyes of landlubbers and centralizing state functionaries. In fact, thinking continentally has come to dominate the geopolitics of the contemporary world. Jonathan Raban noted that, “people who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey’s end, the full stop at the end of the trek.” Within a continental or mainland logic, ‘insular’ has become a term of abuse. And ‘peninsula’ a milder epithet.

Penwith is a peninsula on a peninsula on an island. Taking a mainland, and ever more a continental perspective, that makes Cornwall seem very ‘remote’. But in fact this view of the relationship is quite recent. There have been times when the reverse was the case – it was continents that were remote and isolated, the outposts of islands. Until the end of the 18th century, ‘insularity’ was associated with mainlands.

Islands are figures for paradise and hell, the locus of human projections – we are free there, and trapped there. They are places of solitude and cosmic connection. Islands and peninsulas (near-islands) are sites of pilgrimage, scientific exploration, and summer sojourn. In Western cosmogony water equals chaos and land means order. Islands and peninsulas are betwixt and between, partaking of earth and water; they are terraqueous, in the 18th century phrase, liminal spaces, thresholds, the location of rites of passage, where new worlds and a different life may be imagined or initiated.

Somewhere to the west, where the sky met the sea, heaven and earth were connected, and the natural gives way to the magical. Elysium or the Garden of Hesperides, home for dead heroes, in the Isles of the Blest, or the Fortunate Isles.

Cornwall and California, each occupying the ‘far west’ in their respective cultural myth-spaces, share more than just a hold on the utopian imagination. The histories of the Tin Isles (Herodotus’ Cassiterides) and the Golden State are connected through the accidents of crustal geology and the consequent blessing/curse of precious metals. The planetary business of extracting tin, gold and other hard-rock commodities, and the international labour market in miners and engineers, has meant that ‘Almaden’, ‘Sierra Nevada’, ‘Klondyke’, ‘Wallaroo’, ‘Kimberley’ became household words in Redruth and Camborne. Conversely the names Tresidder, Penrose and Kittoe are familiar in Palo Alto, Kalgoorlie and Valparaiso.

Zones of extraction become sites of extinction, geographies of sacrifice.

Presidio Point, San Francisco’s Land’s End, was chosen as the site of James Earle Fraser’s sculpture of the defeated Indian warrior, End of the Trail. It was the hit of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and marked what contemporaries saw – and welcomed – as the end of Native American civilization.

The campaigns of extermination, the extinction of fishstocks and languages, the heavy metal poisoning of aquifers, the siltation of waterways and rivers – these are all of a piece.

The state’s appetite for gold and silver – initially to pay soldiers (Alexander’s armies required half a ton of silver bullion a day in wages) – has given rise, across the globe, to brutal regimes of slave and coerced labour. When the early Ming dynasty abandoned paper money (which requires a high degree of social trust) and reverted to the silver standard in the wake of popular struggles, the sudden enormous demand for silver and precious metals reverberated around the world. Most of the loot from the New World and the metal extracted by the Spanish of the mines of Mexico and Bolivia – above all Potosi – ended up in China.

The process of extraction makes quarrying and mining even more dangerous occupations than deep sea fishing; it also accounts for the intense bonds of solidarity forged in the conditions experienced underground, in the shafts and at the rockface. Mineworkers led Britain’s first and only General Strike of 1926, and the prisoner-miners in the Siberian gulag launched the first effective challenge to Stalinism when they protested the appalling conditions around the Vorkuta pits. In What Work Is, the California poet Philip Levine, recalling his apprenticeship as a young knight of labour, describes the rituals of toil in the kingdom of Pluto, a kind of daily death and resurrection:

…I would descend
step by slow step into the dim world
of the pickling tank and there prepare
the new solutions from the great carboys
of acids lowered to me on ropes…
…A gallon of hydrochloric
steaming from the wide glass mouth, a dash
of pale nitric to bubble up, sulphuric to calm,
metals for sweeteners, cleansers for salts,
until I knew the burning stew was done.
Then to climb back, step by stately step, the adventurer
returned to the ordinary blinking lights
of the swingshift at Feinberg and Breslin’s
First-Rate Plumbing and Plating with a message
from the kingdom of fire…

In Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, Gray Brechin tells the history of California as a succession of devastating resource strikes, originating in the gold fields of the Sierra (making it in part, therefore, a Cornish story), then radiating out in a series of lethal pulses along the littoral, into the hinterland, and out into the Pacific.

The Monterey laboratory of  ’Doc’ Ricketts, author of Between Pacific Tides, a classic of marine biology, epitomised the teeming life that flourished and died along the northern California coast. John Steinbeck, who became Rickett’s friend and partner in the grandiosely named Pacific Biological Laboratories, said that Doc’s lab was, “as strange an operation as ever outraged the corporate laws of California,” a bewildering shambles of a place with its deep litter of specimen jars containing, “the lovely animals of the sea, the sponges, the tunicates, anemones, the stars and buttlestars, and sunstars, the bivalves, barnacles, the worms and shells, the fabulous and multiform little brothers, the living moving flowers of the sea”, not to mention dozens of cages of rattlesnakes and mice awaiting onward shipment to labs across the country, holding-tanks for squid and octopi, embalming equipment, dissecting trays, microscopes…..all the tackle of a working marine biologist.

A few doors along Cannery Row from Doc Ricketts’ laboratory, Knut Hovden, graduate of Norway’s National Fisheries College, was devising the mechanization of the small, and sustainable, sardine industry. He immediately (in the twenties) went about inventing new purse-bottomed nets, impounding pens, automatic cookers and can-soldering machines. In what amounted to marine strip-mining, the new extractive techniques caused, within Hovden’s own working lifetime, a holocaust of Sardinops caeruleus, the silver harvest that thrived on the plankton upwelling off Monterey Bay, whose underwater canyon walls plunge 10,000 feet. The protein-rich sardines, mass-produced in Fordist style in the early forties, went to feed the huge American armada in the Pacific theatre, and their reduced entrails were trucked north to fuel the emerging poultry factories of Petaluma.

The story of Cannery Row — its birth, its mythification by Steinbeck, its death by grotesque overfishing within a couple of years of the novella’s publication, and later its rebirth as a theme park — is a sad epitome of Californian environmental history. We are only now beginning to comprehend the full dimensions of the ecological and human catastrophe that followed 1849 and the invasion of the goldfields; its effects were felt — are yet being felt — not just in the immediate hinterland of the Bay Area, but all along the Pacific littoral, home to many peoples, and as far away as Hawaii, where the sugar industry, headquartered in San Francisco, shattered the island ecosystems.

Yet out of the shambles of such ecological disasters, not to mention failed states and IMF shock therapies, a movement of movements in opposition to neoliberalism’s new round of global enclosures is slowly coming into being. The sites and modes of resistance are – have to be – as motley and protean as the sites and modes of the new enclosures. The time of nostalgia for the factory gate and the pit head, for fetishizing the point of production, is long gone. The urgent and necessary task is to connect the struggles at all points, north and south, in the circuits of the commodity form – at the points of dispossession, production, reproduction, and consumption. That means, for example, perceiving and then articulating the interests linking the landless commoners of the Movimento Sem Terra in South America, the Norwegian biologists trying to insert genes not into other lifeforms but into their ecological context at different scales, and the small but growing movement in the San Francisco Bay Area that sees the Creative Commons license as conceding too much, and is challenging the very category of ‘intellectual property’ as a form of enclosure, the kind that is driving GM agribusiness and the biofuels fiasco. And there are lessons to be learnt from the lobster commoners of Maine, that can inform the local attempts here in West Cornwall to move beyond, on the one hand, a trawling free-for-all and, on the the other, an abstract centralized quota system.

Quite apart from the practical problems on the ground and along the shore, there is hard conceptual work to be done. If the commodity form has its metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, then what might be called the ‘common form’ also has its philosophical conundrums, which urgently demand our attention. We need to enlist the help of anthropologists and historians of commoning, usufruct and coincident use-rights; we need to mobilize local knowledges around the planet, and to put commoners in connection. Cousin Jack and Cousin Jenny in new/old conversations with Jacques and Juanita.

One encouraging example, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported in the New Scientist of 7th October 2009, should be placed in the folders of all the World Bank and IMF cadres and the Brussels Eurocrats, who are still bent on commodifying the world’s woods, airs and waters. It turns out that the commoners of the earth do a better job of managing the earth’s forests than either state control or privatization. In the first study of its kind, which “tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide in 10 countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, over 15 years and under differing models of ownership and management”, Chhatre and Agrawal, two researchers at the University of Michigan, conclude that, “locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies”. They further suggest that, “carbon storage potential is especially improved when community organisations and their institutions incorporate local knowledge and decentralized decision making” to “restrict their consumption of forest products”. This finding is a direct rebuttal of Hardin’s 1968 ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ credo that remains the fact-free, ideological cornerstone of IMF and World Bank policies.

Tropical forest under local management stores more carbon than government-owned forest because the local commoners have a long-term interest in ensuring the forest’s survival. This will perhaps be less than surprising to those unschooled in Hardin-style assumptions.

In reaction to neoliberal dogma, commons-talk has become widespread in recent years, and that should not be surprising. Indeed a system that produces such staggering amounts of waste requires its own perverse variety of commons, to act as a sink and sewer. The chief economist of the World Bank, Larry Summers, in a notorious (leaked) internal memo, asked – with real honesty – whether, on a standard actuarial cost-benefit analysis, the Third World wasn’t seriously underpolluted? The assumption here is that the early death of a Southern peasant is preferable to that of a Northern worker because it’s cheaper, calculated in terms of expectable lifetime income forgone. The territory and the bodies of the planetary poor become, in other words, commons of a sort. On the side of extraction, it is a reasonable bet that soon enough powerful states will deploy the language of common property to declare strategic minerals ‘global commons’ (inconveniently under the feet of Peruvians or Congolese), which are to be administered by the United Nations.

Yet suspicion of ‘globe-speak’ and its dissimulation of class and gender oppression, not to say its finessing of centuries of reparations now owed the South by northern extractive industries, should not throw us uncritically into the embrace of ‘the local’, whatever the beauties of farmers’ markets and foodsheds. For one thing, who better than the transnational corporation at thinking globally, acting locally? More importantly, the very notion of ‘local’, when it comes to, say, the atmosphere, may be just as problematic as the abstraction of the ‘global’. The airborne particulates in my town of Berkeley now include measurably higher levels of coal dust from the new plants coming online in China. Is the level of production in China not a ‘local’ concern, especially for the lungs of young children in the Bay Area, many of whom are already victims of the race/class nexus that dictates a cascade of inequities.

Talk of coal dust and the planetary atmosphere returns us to the central theme of our gathering: extraction, here and across the world, in Cornwall and California, two favoured spots on our terraqueous globe.

I would like to propose as inspiration and rubric for our exchanges over the next three days, the words of two unacknowledged legislators – one an Edwardian poet, art editor and the son of a coal merchant, the other a radical Romantic looking back ‘in that blessed dawn’ on the events of 1789.

First, Ralph Hodgson’s The Bells of Heaven:

‘Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.

and, to close, this from Wordsworth’s The French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement:

‘When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress–to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.

Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart’s desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,–the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!’

Image captions:

1. Albrecht Dürer, Rhinoceros, 1515
2. James Heath, engraving, Rhinoceros of Africa, 1789, in James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1790
3. Map of Cornwall, in Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 1783
4. Stanhope Forbes, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1885
5. Stanhope Forbes, The Quarry Team, 1894
6. Rock of Ages #15, Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, Ed Burtynsky, 1991.
7. Edward Burra, Landscape, Cornwall with Figures, 1976
8. Edward Burra, Picking a Quarrel, 1968-9
9. America Septentrionalis Mappa, Hondius/Jansson, 1640
10. Serra Pelada Goldmine, Brazil, Sebastião Salgado, 1986
11. Serra Pelada, Hand, Sebastião Salgado, 1986
12. The End of the Trail, James Earle Fraser (sculptor), 1915
13. Flaring in the Delta, Ed Kashi, in Michael Watts (ed.), Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years Of Oil In The Niger Delta, Powerhouse Books, 2008
14. Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, Ed Burtynsky, 1996
15. Potosi, inset, Map of South America, Hermann Moll, 1720
16. The Potosi Mines. Engraving by Theodor de Bry. In: Girolamo Benzoni, Historia Americae Sive Novi Orbis, pars sesta, 1596.
17. Goldmining in the Dutch Flat District,1860s, Placer County Archives, California
18. Fallen Giant (Redwood Empire), courtesy of C. Winslow, Mendocino, CA
19. Newport Chute in the 1870s (Redwood Empire), courtesy of C. Winslow, Mendocino, CA
20. Man and Mule (Redwood Empire), collection of C. Winslow, Mendocino, CA

For further details about Iain Boal’s Keynote see Programme.