On 29 October I took the train to Cosham which is a town about 50 miles from Brighton. My intention was to meet my friend at the train station and ride our bikes back to Brighton. I had done a similar trip earlier in the summer that saw me travel from London to Brighton and came to be the project called South (hopefully that publication will be made soon).
As with South I wanted to create some sort of record of this trip. But unlike South I did not want to take photographs. I had found this quite an interruption to the process of cycling and not particularly enjoyable. Also while the images were quite interesting that only felt loosely associated with the process by which they were taken. In other words they bore little evidence of bike ride that led to me being in that position at that time.
There is nothing wrong with this but I wanted to create something that actually articulated something of the process of travelling. So I decided in advance that the record of this trip would only exist in the form of a very minimal publication. I would record the time we left Cosham and the time we arrived at Brighton. In-between would be two arrows pointing right. These relate to the fact that two of us undertook this journey and that we travelled east.
The main influence on this project was Richard Long. I had been studying his work in the months leading up to the ride and was getting an idea of how he chose to represent his walks. One of the ways he does this is with text:
This text relates to a significant physical act. Long has literally walked miles but all we have of this experience is this text. What I really liked about this is that it gives the viewer plenty of space to imagine what took place. We have these brief, enigmatic pieces of text that indicate nothing off the effort, or even locations, that Long went to. We have to fill these gaps in for ourselves and imagine would took place outside of this basic info.
Long seems to recognise that trying to recreate his walk for the viewer is futile. As it takes place in reality whatever means of representation Long chooses will never come close to the experience of walking. So instead Long focuses on the act itself and this is what is at the act heart of this work: the basic process of doing.
This minimal approach to representing his work is something that occurs repeatedly in Long’s work. Another specific example that influenced my own project is his publication The North Woods. This coincided with a show Long had at the Whitechapel gallery in 1977. The book only has about 4 pages and these contain a brief amount of text and one photograph. So again Long has sought to engage the viewers imagination and ask them to recreate the work rather than present a resolved account.
I wanted to produce a similarly minimal type of publication for my own trip. I think I certainly achieved that and the information given to the viewer is pretty slender. However I think it does give enough to provide an evocative starting point for viewer. It raises questions about what happened in-between the two times and the arrows seem to indicate something but what exactly is unclear. My one problem with it is that it might be too evocative. Possibly the viewers would need a little more information to get them interested. In any case the final result can be seen here courtesy of the marevelous and highly recommended ISSU
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