Berlin and That : An exhibition by Oliver East
Exhibition Dates: Sat 1st May – Sat 5th June 2010
Exhibition Opening Times: Wednesday – Saturday 12pm – 5pm

Contributing Artists: Scott Alexander, Gareth Brookes, Chris Butler, Stanley Chow, David Cochrane, Rachael Davies, Joe Devlin, Jenny Discombe, Malcy Duff, Nick Dunn, Clare East, Stuart Edmundson, Dave Garner, Andrew Gannon, Guy Garvey, Annie Gibson, Pete Gilfellon, Tony Gilfellon, Andy Glynn, Liam Guy, Andy Hargreaves, Matthew Houlding, Dean Hughes, Steve Hunt, Emma Jay, Pete Jobson, Karen Jupp, Mia Kiuru, Stuart Kolakovic, Laurence Lane, Gavin Macdonald, David Mackintosh, Steve Manford, Jim Medway, Miquel Navarro, Darren Newman, James O'Hara, Natalie O'Hara,
Lee Patterson, Katie Popperwell, David Price, Magnus Quaife, Maeve Rendle, Jarek Salata, Katel Sevellec, Richard Shields, Sarah Thompson, Chris Thorpe, Steven Tillotson, Daniella Watson, Graham Watson, Jo-anne Wright, Emma Unsworth.

Berlin and That is the second exhibition at The International 3 to feature the work of Manchester based artist Oliver East.

East has made the act of walking the starting point for a practice that ends as a comic book.

Berlin and That is his third book in the series Trains Are…Mint, it sees the artist walking from Berlin’s Alexanderplatz to Frankfurt (Oder) on the Polish border, keeping as close to the train line as he can without trespassing.  From memory the journey is then documented with each A3 page being exquisitely rendered in ink and watercolour, recording the mundane and ordinary, the beautiful and extraordinary. For this project Oliver then gave one page each to his friends, artists and non-artists, musicians and pro-drinkers alike, to alter as they please.  52 people collaborated on the book and these 52 pages (a third of the finished book) will be on show.

Each book starts with psychogeography, attempts some social commentary before the inevitable autobiographical elements creep in.  

Oliver East started self publishing in 2004 with Looking For Kinder Scout, a guide book, before making his first comic in ’05, The House Of Fire To Black Hill.  This was distributed informally, giving them to friends for free in pubs ‘’and such like’’.  In ’06 with added colour, the first publication in the Trains Are…Mint Series was born.  

Berlin and That is published by Blank Slate Books and will be available form The International 3 at a special exhibition price.

For further information and images please contact Laurence Lane on 07960 038 063.

 PRESS

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/15/exhibitions-picks-of-the-week

www.citylife.co.uk/arts/news/15211_exhibition__oliver_east___international_3

The loneliness of the long distance pedestrian, and 52 remedies: Oliver East’s Berlin And That. 

By Gavin MacDonald

In her ‘history of walking’ Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit identifies the 18th century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s life and writing as the originary moment for pedestrian activity “as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end,” in the history of European culture at least.  She describes how Rousseau upheld the basic activity of solitary walking as a motif of a simple life: anti-urban, anti-authoritarian, a revolutionary position at the time. But Rousseau also had a practical attachment to the practice of putting one foot in front of the other: as he put it, “When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”  The last book he wrote, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, is a series of short meditations which, according to Solnit, resemble “the sequence of thoughts or preoccupations one might entertain on a walk”, even if there is no evidence that they relate to actual walks.  Some things we have to take on faith.

But if walking can be a solitary business, so can art. Without wanting to plug into any romantic notions of the artist as loner or outsider, it’s true to say that that the day-to-day lives of many self-employed creative workers by necessity involve a good deal of time spent with only their own thoughts for company. Especially so when, as in the case of Oliver East, they have developed a practice specifically involving largely solitary activities and unwitnessed performances of considerable duration, whether they are measured in hours or in footsteps.

Oliver East produces comics, though it would be an over-simplification to call him a comic artist. Rather he produces comics in the context of a larger art practice that pre-dates his involvement with the form. He was drawn to text initially as an expedient means of documenting a failed experiment – he’d tried to convert a two-man tent into a pinhole camera, and two days before he was due to exhibit photographs from the project he realised his invention didn’t work, so he exhibited the tent and an account of his efforts written on the walls of the gallery instead.  Gallery-bound documentation soon led to stand-alone publications, including Allemansretten, a text-only book describing a performance in Norway where he tested the practical application of a quaint law permitting camping anywhere 150m away from the nearest dwelling, and most significantly, a work involving walking: Looking For Kinder Scout.  In that work East plotted a compass bearing from eight different Manchester and Salford art institutions to a spot in Ancoats from which the crest of Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Peak District, is visible. He then walked those straight bearings as best he could through the two city centres, and here another signature element of East’s practice first becomes evident – his walks are programmatic, decisions made beforehand as to how the route will be structured absolving him, as he sees it, of any responsibilities during the walk other than tactical decisions as to how to negotiate obstacles or best cleave to his predetermined path.  Walking, of course, was also the subject matter of Looking for Kinder Scout due to that hill’s specific cultural and historical associations: the working classes of the industrialised urban centres of the early 20th century denied access to the wild places on their doorstep, the Ramblers Movement and the Mass Trespass of 1932.

So a taste for putting one foot in front of another met with a new-found facility for putting one word in front of another, and the pre-conditions of his current practice were in place – with one last addition. Kinder Scout had also contained some small sketches, and although he’d completed his formal art education without any training in drawing, East’s next efforts – small, self-published pamphlets documenting a walk from legendary Stretford mantelpiece shop House of Fires to Black Hill in the Peaks – would see him blending narrative with illustrations in a sequential fashion.  The author of this essay takes some responsibility for suggesting to East that the things he was producing might in fact be comics. Struck by the suggestion, East threw himself into the self-published comics scene with some vigour, and before long his self-published title Trains Are ... Mint had found both critical admirers among supporters of left-field comics and a publisher, Blank Slate, who has republished the early Trains Are ... Mint issues in book form.

Berlin And That, from which the pages in this exhibition are taken, is the third volume from Blank Slate and is the concluding part of a trilogy in which East has taken railway lines as the structuring device for programmatic walking performances and the narratives that documents them. Just as with the compass bearings of the Kinder Scout pamphlet, he tries to cleave to the line of the railway track as best as he can within legal limits, negotiating obstacles as he does and making tactical decisions as to how best to achieve his aims. Whilst railway lines might not be straight in the sense of a compass bearing, East argues that they might as well be: they are ‘constants’, as he puts it.

Performances of walking have parallel traditions in art and literature, and East’s practice and publications can be seen as contributions to both. His attempt to ‘walk the line’ certainly suggests links to the work of artists such as Richard Long, in both its linearity and its reliance on largely unseen pedestrian performances that are documented in text (for East, as with both Long and Rousseau, some things we have to take on faith). And of course, as travelogues his books can be seen as contributions to that strand of largely urban and peri-urban literary pedestrianism commonly called psychogeography, as exemplified by the works of Iain Sinclair.  But whilst the first artistic tradition does seem relevant, I would argue that psychogeography – in both the sense it was originally deployed by the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals in the 1950s and in Sinclair and his peers’ adaptation of the concept – has a clumsy fit with East’s practice. As they described it, the Parisian avant-gardists’ technique of ‘the drift’ was a way of letting the latent affective qualities of the urban environment influence the routes they took through the city, and their pedestrianism has its roots in earlier surrealist automatism and explorations of the city.  In contrast, East’s programmatic practice is about a decision already made, and the problem-solving required to see it through as best he can; it’s not random, nor does it seek to reveal the run of a latent strata in the city’s fabric. Sinclair’s strand of psychogeography, on the other hand, seems at least as much about a kind of arcane local-history writing as much as it does with the business of walking – what he knows, rather than what he does. That kind of local knowledge doesn’t play a role in East’s work, which is far more about the details of East’s own working processes. We learn nothing much about Berlin beyond how it impressed itself on East’s feet, eyes, and ears: his book is silent on that city’s histories and secrets.

East takes only written notes while in the field, and he reconstructs the route from these notes and his memory after the fact of his walking. This lends his drawing something of a linguistic quality, his use of certain stylised devices mean there are times you can almost see the notes through the images: shapes like fans of corrugated iron edged by flame denote that here he walked into a shaft of sunlight; teardrop corrals of v-shapes denote that there he encountered a flock of birds, trees become a texture. While his practice is by its nature comprised of solitary performances, the loneliness of this long-distance pedestrian is more than ever at the fore in Berlin and That, underlined by the way he denotes the snatches of speech overheard from passers-by: East can’t speak German, so he renders it using speech bubbles of found text collaged with no thought for its sense (or indeed, the integrity of sentences or letterforms). Berlin and That is also marked by a less chatty presence from East as a walking companion – long stretches of the book are silent, reflecting the changing rhythm of his surroundings as he moves from the clamouring city to the quiet and functional spaces on its periphery. Unlike the predecessor volume, Proper Go Well High, East has resisted the temptation to fill these stretches with the comfort of narrative detail, autobiographical monologues and musings for the sake of it.  The narrative arc is one from noise to silence, the ending subdued. This was a conscious decision to strip his book of some of the writerliness that he felt he had developed, to emphasise the book’s function as a documentation of a performance.

But one representational decision of East’s has influenced the shape of Berlin And That more than any other: noting the significant part that graffiti and street art have in creating that city’s distinctive sense of place, he decided he would relinquish some control over the book by turning over sections of the finished artwork to his friends, artists and non-artists alike, for them to populate the city’s walls with whatever marks or interventions they chose to make. Fifty two individuals have contributed pages – fifty two distinct quartiers defined by a tag or a style. They run the full gamut of graffiti and exceed it: from scribble to stencils to paste-ups to the physical addition of a light switch and bulb to a surviving fragment of the Berlin Wall. Some don’t stay within the lines: one even treats a shaft of sunlight as a scribable surface (East is quite cheerful about any such ‘mistakes’). As with their counterparts in the real world, the tone of the contributions ranges from the delightful and whimsical to the scabrous and scatological, and sometimes manages to be all of those things at the same time. Some play with the German language, most don’t. Some play with German culture and history (or a strangely filtered version of it), grainy mugshots of Red Army Faction members rubbing shoulders with David Hasselhoff. Funny, interesting, daft, considered or scrawled off-the-cuff by a drunken hand, these fifty-two other distinct voices join East in the retelling of his Berlin walk, interrupting without any consideration for the flow of his narrative, offering irreverent commentary and idle distraction. Good company indeed.

A note on the author
Gavin MacDonald is a doctoral researcher at MIRIAD, MMU, investigating mapping and walking as related artistic practices. He is a contributor to Berlin And That. gavin@gumshoetourist.org.uk

Written to accompany the exhibition, Berlin And That : Oliver East at
The International 3, 1st May – 5th June 2010.

  i Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Verso, 2001), p14.
 ii Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, cited in Solnit, p14.
International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog Publishing 2005). Psychogeography was defined by an anonymous Situationist in the first issue of the S.I’s journal, Internationale Situationniste, as “The study of the specific effects of the environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”: ‘Definitions,’ in Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb. Berkeley, California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981 [1958] 45-46.
 iii Oliver East, Proper Go Well High, (London: Blank Slate, 2009).  Solnit, pp20-21.
 iv Hygge (2001).
 v Oliver East, Allemansretten, (Manchester: i3 Publications, 2003); Oliver East, Looking For Kinder Scout, Rolling Stock Press: Manchester, 2004.
vi  All attributions to East in this essay are taken from an interview between the artist and the author conducted on the 5th April 2010.
vii  Oliver East, The House Of Fire To Black Hill, three issues of self published pamphlet publication, 2006
 viii Trains are ... Mint is the title of East’s self-published comic, which has seen six issues at the time of writing. The first three issues (2006-2007), which describe East’s journey to Blackpool, have subsequently been collated and reissued in book form as Trains are ... Mint (London: Blank Slate Books, 2008). The fourth issue (2007) was a hand-illustrated copy of Allemansretten (see note v) in an edition of one copy, and the fifth issue was re-issued as the first section of East’s second book with Blank Slate, Proper Go Well High (2009). Issue six of Trains are ... Mint is a web-comic available from East’s website (http://www.rollingstockpress.co.uk/).
ix  For an account of British psychogeography, see Alastair Bonnet, ‘The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography’ in Theory, Culture & Society, 26:1 (2009), pp45-70.
 x The literature on the Situationist International is immense. For an accessible overview, see Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog Publishing 2005). Psychogeography was