I greatly enjoyed, and felt that my project was enriched by, Graeme Miller’s lecture centred around his interest in life and place, being a “useful member of the village”.
Intriguingly, Miller proposes through works like Listening Ground, Lost Acres (1994-2024) that walking is an artistic practice. Negotiating space in new ways, but also ancient ways. I am very much enamoured with the idea that an a seven hour walk could be the enabling element of an artwork. In connection with my observation of land art works with my construction-themed project, Miller places his sound compositions in the land, in context. I also very much enjoyed his definition of “place is the present, desire is the future and memory is the past”, a succinct and agreeable position to take, in relation to the mutable nature of developing land. He characterised it as erasure.
Miller’s first-hand, personal experience of this kind of erasure of our place in the landscape came to his “doorstep”, embodied in the form of LINKED (2003-present). A semi-permanent sound work installed along the M11 Link Road, construction of which resulted in the much-protested demolition of 400 houses, along with the artist’s home. Radio transmitters fixed to lampposts along the 3-mile walking route, accessible to the listener with a unique receiver, play individual 8 minute compositions, playing the voices of those displaced by the construction project. It is a work seeking the restoration or preservation of the narratives of the place, creating a historical reference point. Miller stated, “my revenge plan was to rebuild those houses in sound”, while referring to the work as a ‘social sculpture’. I admire the resolute commitment to encouraging the longevity of the narrative by placing it on site, honouring the lost past and the voices of those who have been displaced by the dispassionate, irresponsible and sometimes cruel efforts of the developing authorities. Do we need more transitory roads? Is it a justified replacement for the lives and homes irrevocably changed and lost by the building of one?
An aspect I found provocatively interesting was Miller’s observation of the factional, tribalist distinction drawn between the workers and the residents and protestors. In many ways this is a reality of life, yet that unknowable boundary of understanding that separates the worker from the resident is often impermeable. There are many situations where both tribes agitate each other, and both tribes see themselves as essentially innocent, or fulfilling a duty. This contrasting distinction is a key contradiction in my spatial project that I am epistemologically exploring. An interesting dichotomy I observed was his grief over the building of Victorian houses in Leytonstone, and his anger at the dismantling of houses in LINKED. Building is surrounded by difficulty, high emotion, compromise, loss and gain.
Strikingly, syrupy string music accompanies some of the recordings, clearly tugging the listener into a state of empathetic sympathy and a remorse. As he put it, Miller is “selling it to the listener, I don’t want to lose them for a second” and characterising himself as a “manipulator of audience experience”. It’s very effective, I found myself angered and saddened by the piece as Miller intended. Yet, it’s hard to ignore the controversial reputation emotionally manipulative music holds in this detached, intellectual-forward, sometimes standoffish art sphere. It is something that’s been nearly downright discouraged in our creative works, or something to be wary of. I appreciate the intentionality with which Miller deploys it.
It’s a very personal artwork, so I don’t feel it appropriate to judge the ethics of using emotion in that way, but in my work I think I want to provide more room for subtext and various readings without the listener feeling my inherent biases guiding them too linearly. Emotion and response are so hard to talk about and quantify, so delicate and so easily suplexed or inverted in this institutional realm.
Miller also said that “once a word has left your mouth, it’s not a solemn contract of authenticity… it’s art, it’s not fully representing someone’s entire humanity or lived experience”. I admire this perspective, as I often feel concerned about the myopia that the study of art is often imbued with, a need for it to be watertight and a true, unproblematic reflection of our current reality. Art and reality can be conflated, can intertwine, can oppose one another, can inform and parallel each other.