Paul Good and Kirsty Wood

In and Out of Ruin:

Paul Good and Kirsty Wood’s Rest Your Palms Against The Skin

Peter Suchin

“Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past.”

T S Eliot

“Temple of time, within a brief sigh bounded, To this rare height inured I climb, surrounded.”

Paul Valery

“Levi-Strauss had a good insight, he suggested we change the study of anthropology into “entropology.” It would be a study that devotes itself to the process of disintegration in highly developed structures. After all, wreckage is often more interesting than structure.”

Robert Smithson [1]

In Paul Good and Kirsty Wood’s new video, Rest your palms against the skin, the viewer is given a bird’s-eye-view of broken boats abandoned on the mudbanks of the Isle of Grain in Kent, just south of Southend-on Sea. It is, at 8 minutes 26 seconds in length, a short work, but an unusual and intriguing one. With the “footage” having been rendered in black and white, shot from a carefully-controlled drone, we are taken above and around the peculiar landscape of a graveyard of boats. Soon after the piece begins we can see, as we approach the cluster of vessels at a fairly low level of flight, that some of the boats – there are quite a number of them – have burst apart, fallen to pieces in such a way that the central ribs of the craft are clearly visible, the curved planking projecting skyward like the skeleton of a whale or another large and rotting sea creature. This is one of the very few “signs of life” within the video, even if in fact it is a misreading, the remains of a human vehicle or machine now at the mercy of the mud, salt and sea breezes, and not at all a once-living creature. Above and below the drone occasional birds flit by, their appearance emphasising the actual moment of the recording of the boats. One may think of the birds as superfluous, irrelevant to the task of visually capturing these rotting hulks, but what their presence serves to do is emphasise the lost and abandoned nature of the craft, which were once filled with fishermen and pilots, navigators and haulers, hobbyists and day-trippers, amateur explorers and even, in one case at least, rescued British soldiers trapped in Dunkirk. [2] One briefly sees, a minute or two into the mix, a startled scrap of curtain, flapping about in a boat’s window as if it had been scared into life by the approaching drone. Most of the boats are devoid of direct traces of human occupation, the furnishings and fittings having been long ago stripped away, or destroyed by the uncontrolled forces of weather and waste. Nor do many markings remain easily apparent so as to aid classification or identification – there are a few names visible hither and thither, recalling one to thoughts of half-decrepit human cemeteries holding only vaguely marked graves, almost as though the identity of each boat had vanished as part of its practical demise. [3]

Steeped in thick mud, the sundry vessels assert inaccessibility rather than efficient travel, exploration, labour or escape, all attributes of their former use. Observing the graveyard via a drone seems as much a necessity as an “artistic” concern, since the heavy mud would surely entrap anyone who tried to walk across this wasteland in which the boats lie broken and distraught. The high-tech camera and even the very existence of the drone itself heightens one’s recognition of the passing of time, the ancient form of the scrapped little ships sharply contrasting with the age-old fantasy of human flight. Many if not all of the boats were, apparently, deliberately ditched to order, “suicided” as one might say. It’s costly to properly decommission a boat by having it broken up – leaving it to rot among other wrecks is a far less expensive option. The video’s melancholy mood, a “silent sorrow in empty boats” [4] is partly a consequence of this deliberate devastation, for many of the vessels give the impression that they could be restored, their general structure being visibly intact. To the outsider, this mass scrapping may seem outrageous, even incomprehensible. A variety of kinds and sizes of craft have been taken to this location and either sunk or beached. Over time, through the action of shifting water and sand, some of the boats have come to rest on top of others, the smaller ones being pressed down into the sand, or have ended up enclosed within the structure of a larger boat. Some vessels have been practically reduced to “drawings” or impressions in the mud, mere spectres of what they once had been.

The soundtrack for Rest your palms against the skin, made by the artists specifically for the work, is dominated by a wavering synthetic pulse, reminiscent, for the present viewer at any rate, of the kind of sounds used in circa-1970s Science Fiction films and TV to suggest that the protagonist has arrived at an ominous location such the site of a power-plant in meltdown or of, perhaps, the landing-site of an alien spacecraft (see Note 6). Travelling above the cemetery of boats, we have crossed into an anomalous zone, a location where normal rules no longer apply. Just after the first video edit, when the view is no longer framed at the level of the boats, but above them, a male voice can be heard instructing the listener, whoever that may be, to “Get closer. Get closer to me”. If we listen carefully we can also hear the noise of the gate to the cemetery path being opened or closed, mixed into the audio track as a kind of proof that we have crossed the first threshold and are almost inside. A little later the mysterious, sparsely speaking voice confesses to what is perhaps a state of distress: ”I felt unstable where I stood. I felt like the earth was going to give way”.

Is the utterance about getting closer a companionable remark or a warning, an address to the viewer, or all these things at once? Who is speaking here? Is it a visitor recognising that once inside the circumscribed “zone” one must be constantly on one’s guard, or a voice emanating from the cemetery itself, calling the outsider towards them? Is it the graveyard itself distressingly addressing whoever has entered its realm? In Robert Wise’s intelligent yet deeply chilling film The Haunting, Eleanor, the story’s central character, believes that Hill House, the notoriously spooky mansion to which she has been invited to partake in an experiment in paranormal research, is directly communicating with her. It is the spirit of the house which “speaks”, not an individual connected with it. [5] The cemetery investigated in Rest your palms against the skin may have its own identity and voice, a “persona” that is coherent, sentient, aware of its own existence and extent. This theme of a “zonal consciousness” is present in a number of other films which Good and Wood have cited as important influences, notably two works by Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979). [6]

In the former film, the distant planet “Solaris”, above which floats a space-station manned by a team of scientists from Earth, has been found to be not so much populated by its own particular “life forms” but is, rather, itself a living thing. The film’s main character leaves the orbiting station and flies low over the surface of the planet, but as with Rest your palms against the skin, actual physical contact with what is being observed from above is never made. In Stalker, the title of which refers to people who illicitly travel into a massive fenced-off area in which an unspecified anomalous incident has occurred, the forbidden zone is in fact penetrated mostly on foot. The resulting consequences are complicated, neither entirely positive, nor wholly negative, but those who enter into this space are certainly deeply affected, to a life-changing degree. Is the ship’s graveyard in Good and Wood’s video off limits simply because of the physical danger inherent in being caught in deep mud and rising tides (or in clambering onto rotting wooden hulks), or is there something about this place that is forbidding in a deeper, psychological, personal and “existential” sense?

To observe something dangerous and distressful from a safe distance has long been framed within the category of the sublime, a complicated concatenation of elements in which pleasure and pain, attraction and fear are intimately mixed. [7] In the present case, there is a double act of distancing or removal: that of the authors’ act of observation being made through the medium of a digital camera mounted on a drone, and the time and space of the audience’s viewing of the video. The broken ships and their strange, heaped-up state, are both fascinating and repelling. One experiences, in watching the piece, a strange beauty that is also inexplicably threatening; but what is “sublime” about this is that despite one’s sense of having an encounter with danger, and perhaps feeling an undefined despair over what one is seeing, one is of course safely ensconced in an art gallery watching a projection of another place and time, not at all as close to “the abyss” as one might think. There is, at any rate, no actual danger. As Rose Macauley observed in 1953, “Whatever its complex elements, the pleasure felt by most of us in good ruins is great.” [8]

Alongside the cultural category of the sublime one may add, in relation to Good and Wood’s work, a second experiential theme, that of the uncanny. This may be succinctly described as a disturbing encounter with something or someone that is acutely out of place. For example, the apparent living presence of a person of whom it is known that he or she has passed away is an experience of the uncanny. The concomitant level of disturbance of the perceiving individual in such cases is high. According to Nicholas Royle, “The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced…it entails a critical disturbance of what is proper…It is a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was “part of nature”: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world. But the uncanny is not simply an experience of strangeness or alienation. More specifically, it is a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar. It can take the form of something unexpectedly arising in a strange and familiar context.” [9]

The boat graveyard, then, is accurately described as uncanny in that such an “object” exists at all.  The stacked, crushed vessels should not be, according to one’s conventional understanding, collected together in this way, not even on an obscure and quiet island in southern England. A single boat dumped on dry land is acceptable and understandable, but a whole field of abandoned vessels lumped together as seen in Rest your palms against the skin is something of a surprise or shock. Where would the right place for these boats be? On the seabed beneath the site of a battle? – but they’re the wrong kind of craft for that. Stockpiled in a breaker’s yard? But so many at once, and in such a weathered state? – this too is extremely unlikely. Quite apart from the fascination of whatever is the explanation as to why these craft have accumulated here, one also recognises that the situation tips over into a disturbing state of anomaly, irrationality and fear. Would one really want to touch these objects at all, as one interpretation of the title of the work seems to imply? Feeling the skin of these sullen structures, or of that another human being – who indeed is the recipient of this  and what exactly are they being asked to do? The precise meaning of what the voice in the video is saying is unclear. This openness leaves a space for the viewer’s participation in unravelling the strangeness of what they are being shown on the screen and hearing as they watch.

Three sculptural works, operating in effect as a single integrated form, are also a part of the broader project of the exhibition that is Rest your palms against the skin. As with all their previous works (the artists have worked together now for ten years), the approach is one of collaboration, not individual expression, with the various specialisms possessed by each party being applied when and where required. Their subject matter frequently develops from the experiences they share in their daily lives, which in any case is often research for projected videos, sculptures, installations, music or combinations of several media so as to form from them a greater whole.     

The present sculptural works, made from the start as a part of something more comprehensive in ambition and scope than a series of discrete “unique works” are formed from a combination of cast ammonite fossils that are perhaps some 200 million years old, scraggy sections of fallen oak trees found in Epping Forest, and the mediums of epoxy resin and acrylic paint. The very choice of these natural sources, combined with current artistic materials brings into play the question of several distinct chronologies consciously placed in parallel, while once again the trope of the uncanny is never far away. The actual and implied “timeline” is convoluted, stupendous, impossible to hold in mind Fossils are themselves merely traces of living creatures that existed at time long before the fossils themselves were formed, and this process of “natural manufacture” itself involves immense periods of time. The specific pictorial reference is to scrambling ammonite forms moving towards or away from some unidentified predator or source of food, the artists having in a sense returned these creatures to life, while aspects of the sculptures echo the carcass-like remains of the video’s broken boats. What has happened to cause this scattering or attraction? The depicted “snapshot” (if we read it as a trace of a potential reality) shows the instant immediately following that when something disastrous, or even cataclysmic, has taken place. This pointing to the aftermath of a momentous event is a constant theme within Good and Wood’s work, which also involves a persistent preoccupation with, as Wood herself has observed, “harnessing…time” and focusing on “echoes trapped within a void”. [10] But alongside the strong thread of realistic references to be found within the artists’ works – ammonites, it should be emphasised, really did exist millions of years in the past – a powerful line of invention runs through Good and Wood’s retinue of forms. One allusion here may be to the kind of creatures described in the stories of H P Lovecraft, anomalous beings never before encountered in the modern world but which have, either accidentally or by design, intruded upon it. The monstrous is often a metaphor for a reality that is more powerfully evident than commonsensical opinion either accepts or allows. [11]

A careful viewing of the video element of Rest your palms against the skin reveals that within this work one is taken towards, around and across the beached boats in a loose spiralling motion, through a combination of the directing of the drone and the way in which the video is edited. Not only does this movement mirror the basic spiral form of the ammonite fossils deployed by the artists in their sculptures, but the spiral motif is found in a number of Modernist and Postmodernist literary and visual works. [12] Rest your palms against the skin brings the ancient past right up to the tradition of the present, but there is a chimera lurking in the bushes, just a little too close to home.

Notes

1. T S Eliot, “Four Quartets”, (1935-1942), included in T S Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, Faber, 1974, reprinted 1980, p. 189.

Paul Valery, “The Graveyard by the Sea” (1922), included in Paul Valery, Selected Writings, New Directions, 1964, p. 41

Robert Smithson (interview with Gregoire Muller), “”…The Earth, Subject to Cruel Cataclysms, is a Cruel Master.””, in Nancy Holt (Ed.), The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York University Press, 1979, p. 181.

In this conversation Smithson also discusses viewing large-scale objects from the vantage point of a helicopter or plane. His remarks are worth quoting in relation to Rest your palms against the skin. In response to various points made by Muller, Smithson says: “I think you are actually talking about multiple ways of locating a thing, and one way to locate a thing is to circumscribe it with a photograph. If you are flying over a piece you can see its whole configuration in a sense contracted down to a photographic scale. I think that is what we are discussing, how we apprehend scale. Now let’s say there are three different kinds of scale that one can apprehend, and that they are constantly trading places with each other. The area that you seem interested in is the dedifferentiated area – between differentiation and undifferentiated. That is less a matter of looking and more a matter of touching, or what you could call “Tactile Space.” (Smithson, ibid., p. 180). Proximity and distance are themes embedded within the present exhibition.

The surveying of large tracts of mysterious or unmapped landscape from the safe enclosure of an aircraft may seem a trivial “theme”, but it is found in a number of works which may be cited as influences upon the present artists. Among these are H P Lovecraft’s story “At the Mountains of Madness” (1935) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972), discussed in the present essay.

Mentioning Smithson recalls the notion of entropy, which is a term much used in the literature around his work, as well as by Smithson himself. There is something “entropic” about Good and Wood’s video, attending as it does to what is implied as the eventual disintegration of the (currently largely intact) boats. Over a very long period of time these craft will doubtless dissolve into the surrounding water, sand and soil, to a point at which no visible trace of them will remain. The order of their current cohesion will, in time, become disorder, chaos, “nothing”, the boats as cultural objects will be entirely transformed, returned to nature, or at least pass through this “category” on the way to their complete annihilation. In Rudolf Arnheim’s words, “the material world moves from orderly states to an ever-increasing disorder…the final situation of the universe will be one of maximal disorder.” See his Entropy and Art: An Essay on Order and Disorder, University of California Press, 1971, p. 7.

Two highly informative books concerned with changes in time with respect to the transmission of natural and cultural artefacts and the traces these leave throughout prehistory/history are David Wilson, Atoms of Time Past, The Scientific Book Club, 1976, and George Kubler, The Shape of Time, Yale University Press,1963.

2. One of the boats in the cemetery, whose name – Ena – is still visible, took part in the mass evacuation of British soldiers from Dunkirk in 1940, during World War 2.

3. Within the mythology surrounding Joseph Beuys much is made of his having been pulled alive from the wreckage of his crashed fighter plane in 1944.Other references to wreckage in relation to art include the paintings of John Piper and Paul Nash, the sculptures of John Chamberlain, and Andy Warhol’s car crash paintings of the 1960s. Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) involved the deliberate destruction of a large wooden shed by tipping twenty truckloads of soil onto its roof. Gustav Metzger’s concept and practice of “Auto-Destructive Art” is an important instance of this “genre” – see his Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art, Coracle, 1996. Actual wrecked cars were exhibited by J G Ballard at London’s ICA in 1970 – see Simon Ford, “A Psychopathic Hymn: J G Ballard’s “Crashed Cars” Exhibition of 1970” in the online journal /seconds, No 1, 2005. Ballard’s novel Crash (Vintage, 1995, first published in 1973) is also of relevance re the “sensuality” of wreckage and ruins. In his song “Orpheus” David Sylvian sings: “Down below on the wreck of the ship/Are a stronghold of pleasures I couldn’t regret” – presumably a reference to a sunken vessel though it could almost be read as a description of Good and Wood’s video, Sylvian’s “creative” grammar notwithstanding. The song is included on Sylvian’s album Secrets of the Beehive, Virgin Records, 1987. Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, 1969 (Obscure Records, 1975) is based on the musical and ambient sounds associated with the 1912 disaster, as reported by the survivors of this most famous of shipwrecks.

Most wrecked boats and ships are, one presumes, the product of horrendous weather conditions, or crew incompetence, though naval warfare and the deliberate sinking of cargo vessels for plunder are obvious sources of destruction. The attraction and interest in shipwrecks is generally recognised, as indicated by publications of photographs of wrecked boats. See, for example the booklet by Cyril Noall and Graham Farr, Cornish Shipwrecks, Tor Mark Press, no date.   

4. This phrase is very slightly adapted from a line written by Peter Gabriel as part of the the song “The Lamia”, by the band Genesis, who also employed it as the title of an instrumental piece from the same recording sessions. The relevant section reads: “Each empty snakelike body floats/Silent sorrow in empty boats.” Another phrase from “The Lamia”, “Struck by beauty, gripped in fright”, is in fact a serviceable, if somewhat compacted, definition of “the Sublime”, a concept also very pertinent to the present context. The track is included on Genesis’ album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, issued by Charisma Records in 1974.

5. The Haunting was directed by Robert Wise, and released in 1963. It is closely based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, Robinson, 1999, first published in 1959.

6. Stalker and Solaris are both largely derived from novels. These are, respectively, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, 1972, English translation: Gollancz, 2012; and Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, 1961, English translation: Faber, 1970. The former film and related novel concerns an individual – the “stalker” – who repeatedly breaks into a large forbidden area sealed-off by the authorities following the landing there of an alien spacecraft, the occupants of which left behind numerous pieces of alien technology.      

7. The literature on the Sublime is vast. For a range of essays dealing with the concept as used throughout the arts see the journal New Literary History, Volume XVI, Number 2, Winter 1985, a special issue of the publication entitled “The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations”.   

8. Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,1953, p. xvi. The engagement with, and the aesthetics of ruins is a complicated matter. For a wide-ranging discussion of this theme, including the so-called Grand Tour, follies, and gothic architecture generally, see Macaulay, and also Christopher Woodward, In Ruins, Chatto and Windus, 2001. For Walter Benjamin, the ruin and its relation to history and the passing of time was of central importance for his critique of Capitalist culture. See especially the vast accumulation of quotations, notes and images assembled by Benjamin between 1927 and 1940, published in English as The Arcades Project, Belknap/Harvard, 1999 (published in German in 1982). According to Susan Buck-Morss, Benjamin regarded “the image of the “ruin,” as an emblem of the transitoriness and fragility of capitalist culture”. He saw it as “the form in which the wish images of the past century appear, as rubble, in the present.” For Benjamin, ruins are also “the loosened building blocks (both semantic and material) out of which a new order can be constructed…the figures of the collector, the ragpicker, and the detective wander through the fields of the fossil and ruin”. These remarks are relevant to the present text in that Good and Wood’s working methods include extensive, highly informed research in and around unusual and isolated locations, the boat cemetery being a case in point, as well as the collecting and redeployment of fossils and other naturally occurring forms. Benjamin’s idea that ruins can be reconfigured so as to produce something genuinely new is exemplified by Rest your palms against the skin. Buck-Morss also notes that “Benjamin viewed the world of industrial objects as fossils, as the trace of living history that can be read from the surfaces of the surviving objects”. Good and Wood utilise actual fossils, partly as a way of referring to immense passages of time, and to the overlapping of disparate chronological formations, and also to the notion of photograph-like traces of a now-vanished past. In Benjamin’s account it is present-day Capitalist culture which is fossilised, static and unproductive. Time itself has been forced to pause, replaced by the apparently endless circulation of pointless commodities. Nature has been transformed into nothing more than a resource for further profit. Rest your palms against the skin reinstates a consciousness of history as history, not as a commercial “resource”, a regaining of memory and lost time paralleling that of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, published in serial form during the early years of the twentieth century, currently available in English translation as Remembrance of Things Past, Penguin, 1983 (three volumes). Buck-Morss is quoted above from her The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press, 1989, pp. 164, 212, and 56 respectively.

9. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 1.

10. Kirsty Wood, personal email to the author, Friday, 6/10/2023.

11. The standard non-fiction account of speculative animals purported to exist outside of established knowledge and classification is Bernard Heuvelmans’ On the Track of Unknown Animals, Paladin, 1970, first published in French in 1955.   

12. These include Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841), Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970).