We were at the ICA recently, hoping for more of the widescreen, Little England Writ Large, almost autistically densely researched "London Orbital". Or at least some of the vivid observational and psychogeographic travelogues that Ian Sinclair dies so well. When his schtick works, it challenges you to see your own neighbourhood with the intensity of the foreign traveller or the manic anthropologist.
However, what we got was a high point of Sinclair reading from 'The Rose Red Empire', a beautiful passage drawing his own history as a flaneur, his partner's life alongside him, the research threads sewn into him by his friends, and the ever-present ghosts of Hackney's history.
After that, things went downhill rather drastically. Stewart Home could not get through a sentence without reference to his True Punk roots, or get away from a camp, stagey, verbose lecturing style. We all write texts essentially telling our own story louder than our subjects, but we do try to keep the Walter Mittyisms and name-dropping to a minimum, if only so that our audiences don't get the overwhelming impression that we are trapped in 1977 with a pocketful of SWP pamphlets and a Crass LP for interpretive tools. To hear Home talk, anybody would think he was a motormouth standup with no jokes and trapped in an orbit around a couple of memories of gigs at the Clarendon.
Ian Sinclair, sadly, was barely better. There was a dreadful encroachment of glistening-eyed memorophilia, beamoaning of practically every effect of the last 25 years. His riff on the Ballardesque fate of the Athens Olympic site absolutely honked.
Surely the task here in London is to generate the tools and language to capture the torrential and n-dimensional flux of developments, and to identify the flow of events around the built environment, be it fragile, irresistible or vanishing.
London's ghosts are going to be living in a louder world; they haunt cultures and traditions all over the world, so whining about the vanishing of the pub where someone's mum met someone who wrote teenaged Trotskyist manifestos is only ever going to come over as the most parochial backward-looking nostalgia.
The reason that "London Orbital" works so beautifully is that there is a powerful sense of the history of place being acted out, the making-itself-felt of the past, without the sepia-tint sense of a wish to return to it. London has a terrifying and unique ability to remind you of yourself, to cut you down to size, to confront you with episodes and scenes that you might have forgotten, or wanted to; to re-cast itself as a constant character in your life.
As place becomes contested and congested, as locality becomes overshadowed or emptied by the virtual and viral, as public space is redefined and colonised by commercial requirements, a psychogeography of London must resist the temptation to become inward-looking and nostalgic.
There's a luminous kind of writing, which creates a memory as if from one of your own dreams. It's troublesome to read, though, because I now think I have been to Venice during a Biennale, and Varanasi in the off season. Dyer seems to be writing about either someone else's story that he's convinced is his own; or about a dream he is yet to have.
