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Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall – article by Des Hannigan.

ANDREW LANYON’S CORNISH JOURNEY THROUGH THE ART OF WRITING.

You are waiting for a bus by the side of a road somewhere in Cornwall. Or you might call it a coach, when, miraculously, a proper coach, vintage 1790s, comes rocking and rolling round the corner the coachman coaxing on a pair of horse. The coach stops, the ornate door opens and out step famous authors Miguel de Cervantes and François Rabelais – in Devon and Cornwall, on the loose, in their youth, before literary fame engulfs them.

    This is the basic premise of writer and artist Andrew Lanyon’s new book Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall, in which both authors are lifted out of their respective time ‘zones’ – both belonged to the world of 16th century Renaissance literature, but Cervantes was aged six when Rabelais died aged sixty-three. Yet, here they are as young contemporaries in late 18th century Devon and Cornwall, on a tour of the region’s tin mines but discovering, more importantly, that they are writers. Hold on to your hats…This is Andrew Lanyon at his creative best.

ORIGINALITY  

In Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall Lanyon proves yet again that he is one of very few writers to whom the overused word ‘originality’ belongs utterly. He writes beyond originality. There is no end to the deployment of Lanyon’s wildly creative and always questing mind. Writer, photographer, film-maker, artist, surrealist, humourist, and, above all, a ‘bookmaker’, Andrew Lanyon has written and published a galaxy of unique books as works of art in themselves. Over 170 books – a lifetime’s work.    Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall stitches together all of Lanyon’s formidable talents in a story as rattling as the coach in which the two writers travel throughout a Cornish journey cradled in humour, hugely informed and at times merrily erotic. There is hardly a single tavern or inn where barmaid or landlord’s daughter is not paid due homage by the Rabelaisian Rabelais and his tilting second-in-command, all distilled into a particular ‘landlord’s daughter’ who captivates both young authors. (One outrageous Rabelaisian sequence wrings out every possible innuendo of seduction characterised as exploration of a Cornish mine.)

CROSSFIRE

Above all, the book is freighted with a dazzling crossfire of ideas, word games,   detours, diversions, and literary references and tricks. Even the simple opening sentence piques the reader’s interest via the classic device of romantic-historical novels about Cornwall in which ‘It is a late spring morning in1790. A bank of fog is moving slowly over Bodmin Moor just behind a covered ox-cart which tilts from side to side in the irregular ruts…

    So far, so classic swashbuckle… But then, the Lanyon magic begins. Aboard the ox cart are two playwrights who have conceived the idea of Rabelais and Cervantes on their tour of mineral mines. Soon the main action transfers to the coach-bound authors, debating classic Lanyon ideas on writing and how different types of quill pen may influence a writer’s style and genre depending on which bird the quill comes from. This is the first of a multitude of entertaining sidesteps as the pair travel through richly observed locations.

SECOND GLANCE

Soon, other passengers join the coach, the first being a blind man and his niece, whose eyes, as ‘dark as dragonflies’ immediately entrance Cervantes’ eyes, ‘pale bees alighting here and there’. From here on the book roars ahead leaving a fabulous trail of Lanyonesque reflections on almost every cultural hook imaginable, each one catching the eye and always, always, demanding a second glance.  In the middle of the book Lanyon signs off at the end of his protagonists’ adventure and sets off on his own journey examining the work’s ‘middle’ where the point of writing the story is revealed and where Lanyon’s own multi-layered understanding of writing emerges.

    Is Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall a Lanyon magnum opus? It is certainly a ‘great work’ that took several years to complete, but the intellectual energy it displays, the unique humour, wit and verbal mischievousness, indicates that Lanyon is not finished with us yet. The ‘great’ part of the book certainly fits its physique of 302 pages and its generous addition of Lanyonesque illustrations.

A hefty book indeed, at a hefty price for the soft back edition. But this is more than a book. As with much of Andrew Lanyon’s ‘bookmaker’s’ art, Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall  is as cherishable as a painting might be, except that Lanyon paints with words, each one of which is collectable in itself. Enough to persuade you onto that coach with Rabelais and Cervantes and their masterful manipulator, Andrew Lanyon himself.

Article by Des Hannigan, published in the St. Ives Times & Echo, October 2023

Copies of Rabelais And Cervantes On The Road To Cornwall can be bought at Barton Books, 46 Causewayhead, Penzance, open 10-4, Tue-Fri. Tel 01736 363300 Or can be ordered through timkcbooks.com

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Von Ribbentrop in St Ives – review by PAUL NEWMAN

It is easy to work up a smile while writing about Andrew Lanyon. To anyone vaguely familiar with his work, he invokes predecessors that invite the offhand and maybe patronising classification of ‘artist-eccentric’. One thinks of Lewis Carroll with his madcap humour, verbal ingenuity, interest in photography and the absurd; Heath Robinson with his stupendously complicated mechanical monsters; Glen Baxter with his poker-faced hilarity and, more austerely and significantly, Lanyon’s father, Peter Lanyon, who single-handedly re-defined landscape painting in Cornwall, dynamically evolving a vocabulary of abstraction.

But what tradition does he follow? Let us say the tradition of the educated polymath who can write and draw and shows an interest in kinetics and scientific exploration. As tradition often accompanies inheritance, it would be relevant to note the important archival resource Andrew has been entrusted with, relating to Lionel Miskin, Sydney Graham and Man Ray.

He was born in 1947 and from 1966 to 1968 studied at the London School of Film Technique, co-organised the Durham Surrealist Festival for which he produced a catalogue. After that, he worked as a freelance photographer as well as assistant editor to Ambit, a literary quarterly associated with J. G. Ballard and avant-garde artists and writers. This combination of the visual and literary is evident in many of his paintings which ‘snap’ into meaning by way of a caption or title.

 A clue to his outlook is his membership of the London Institute of Pataphysics, a society that honours the legacy of Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), a Parisian intellectual with an ebullient personality who single-handedly re-defined dramatic technique by presenting on stage the comic monster, Ubu, who was ruthlessly devoid of any likeable characteristic. Pioneer absurdist, storyteller and playwright, Jarry devised the law that applied to exceptions and made the nihilistic observation: “We won’t have destroyed anything unless we destroy the ruins too.” Rebelling against society and bourgeois convention, he drank, wrote skits, art essays, stories and poems and devised spectacular, self-demeaning antics to draw attention to himself. His posthumously published Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician (Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien) has as its hero an ‘antiphilosopher’ who was born at the age of 63 and explores Paris in a sieve. Dr Faustroll holds to the tenets of pataphysics that strive to “explain the universe supplementary to this one”. It is not easy to speak confidently of pataphysics, but it is a great leveller, finding everything equally nonsensical and inviting everyone to make up their own nonology. Certainly Jarry, whose last words were a request for a toothpick, had the courage of his anti-convictions.

Devising alternative realities was a preoccupation of both Alfred Jarry and many who followed him. Lanyon is not obviously attracted to the solemn predictive mechanics of science fiction, but pays lip-service to fantasy, taking forward the fairy legacy of Richard Dadd and Cornish folklore, save his fairies belong to the mind-worlds of Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, for they antithetically relate to our civilisation and its foibles. Aside from the successful and popular illustrated work A Fairy Find (that charmed the gay community of New York), there was Lanyon’s exhibition of wands used by ‘fairies’ to effect different modes of enchantment. That took place at the Pataphysical Museum in Highgate and attracted a good deal of interest.

Alfred Jarry’s brand of raging humour and gleeful destructionism does a good job in the sense of releasing the human prisoner from the shackles of scientific, artistic and moral dogma. It explodes pedantry and evangelism alike, but there are those who do not warm to it. I remember attending a play by Eugene Ionesco with a critic who told me later that he did not enjoy it. When I asked him why, he said, “There’s no hope there.” I grasped what he meant. If everything is absurd, if all values are powdered down into a tasteless paste, if all notions deserve equal derision, what about faith, hope, love and charity, all those high ideals that priests and worthy folk used to uphold? What about human dignity? What about the concept of redemption? All of that is sacrificed and what is left is the maniacal cackle of Ubu Roi.

Not that this applies to Lanyon personally who, like David Hume, may think such things but never acts them out save in his imagination. As an artist, he maintains high standards, helping many others along the road to recognition as well as overseeing his own productions. The majority of his titles emerge by way of his single-handed publishing operation involving hand-bound works with pasted illustrations, often using quality paper and cut-out board and card covers, all incredibly satisfying to handle and done with exemplary care and skill. Additionally, to be taken into account is his ‘Gormenghast’ or ‘Tristram Shandy’ sequence of ‘pataphysical’ novels or ‘ficciones’ featuring the Rowleys of Rowley Hall, a metaphysically boundless, post-modern, Victorian-style, stately manor madhouse in which everything and nothing happens, one anti-event cancelling another, a verbal flea circus of vertiginous possibility, promiscuously mingling profundities, inanities and ingenuities.

However, looking deeper, this genial literary monument is vitalised by scalpel slashes that haemorrhage onto the page.

“Time was once continuous. But when a thing was made of interval, Time was slotted into a clamp like ham and cut thin, chopped into ever finer slices with cameras and clocks.

Time, a dying bull, bled darkness from the lances in its neck and as it pawed the ground the bloody darkness spread.”

This tragic scene is uncannily illustrated by a candleholder seeping an elongated shadow of black, waxy blood that emulates the stems and heads of flowers – a blossoming estocada. So what we have, in fact, is a perfect imagist poem served by an illustration that is fitting as well as subtly shocking.

The drama of the foregoing highlights Lanyon’s work as a film-maker, drawing upon everything from jokes and songs to rustic cavorting and ingenious, miniaturised narratives of catastrophe, utilising wood, wire, flame, water and tiny figures, There are also savage hand-drawn cartoons that possess an authentic shock-value with their threatening, occasionally malevolent imagery. Presented with this massive oeuvre, it would take a confident critic to deliver anything more than a tentative, partial assessment.

WAR OF WORDS

Of his present book and exhibition Von Ribbentrop in St Ives – dealing with the antics of Hitler’s foreign minister in Cornwall – let us initially establish that he has visited the subject of warfare previously but often in purely abstract terms, demonstrating a strong satiric agenda in his transposition of hostilities to purely abstract constructions, notably in his illustrated fiction A Persistence of Visions:

“A battle between words and images takes place in a medieval setting. Writing sends silent e’s as spies to eavesdrop on its foes. Conspiring with speech, it sends regiments of invective to batter images in their castles with metal trebuchets, typewriters. Rotten sentences hurled like dead cows land in pastoral scenes.”

Similarly the disguise or camouflage theme, prominent in Ribbentrop, features in A Novel Solution in which Mervyn Rowley “travels abroad and disguises himself as foreign scenery so he can send postcards of himself not anywhere all over the world.” This is pushing humour to its limits, undermining both foreign travel and personal identity that for some has become a raison d’être of existence. It is funny and mildly de-stabilising, too. Given the complications of existence implied by the realm of subatomic matter alone, many prefer their literary entertainments to supply a model of the world with at least a vestigial foundation or element of dependability. Everyone wants to discover an anchorage, a secure compass-point, whether in a home or another person, and those creators who deny them this stability have not only the capacity to generate delight but also a concomitant sense of vertigo and panic, like clambering up a pyramid of marbles that slither down at the slightest pressure.

THE CRACK IN THE IMAGINATION

Lanyon opens Ribbentrop dramatically. As in a surrealist film, he exposes to the eye a vertical crack of darkness dividing the slightly open doors of a cupboard, akin to a crack in the mind through which a black stream of apprehension flows, amplified by a surge of adrenaline that bears a chill of terror.

This galvanising image is followed not by revelation of the cupboard’s content or Dr Caligari stepping forth, but by further speculation on the imagination when, in a brilliant if perplexing linkage, Lanyon likens the brain to a glove puppet controlled by a hand whose five fingers stand for the five senses. Normally, of course, an idea is portrayed as being seeded or growing in the mind rather than grasped by a hand. When the hand is displaced to the brain, there is a natural tendency to extend the metaphor, asking who is operating this glove puppet? Is it God or the Artist playing God?

This exemplifies Lanyon’s fit and active mind working at its peak, ideas and counter-ideas throwing out tendrils and connections that, as it turns out, involve the devouring nature of the imagination, the special demands of war upon the painting community in St Ives, camouflage as a means of de-familiarising one’s locale, Von Ribbentrop as strutting mock-Cornishman, preparing the way for invasion, Ben Nicholson’s exploration of the mystery of Alfred Wallis (how to create a style out of sheer indifference to such matters), abstraction as a military strategy, edible art, the deployment of language to ‘naturalise’ atrocity and the tentative suggestion that the latter may be curtailed by an imagination that is ever re-making itself, thus rendering it incapable of fixing into the brutalising logic of the death camps.

Playfully Lanyon argues that the authorities favoured abstraction during wartime as literal art might keep the enemy informed. In the same vein, he has fun with Alfred Wallis, depicting a U-boat commander guiding himself around the Manacles using the painter’s rendering as a map. Similarly with Von Ribbentrop’s collecting of postcards to assist the Nazi takeover and his instatement as emperor of the duchy. Mix this in with the love interest of Ribbentrop’s affair with Mrs Wallis Simpson, plus his aide Spitzy’s romantic skirmish with a daughter of the Bolithos, and the narrative starts to skip and release a few balloons – indeed, it becomes quite a party. Some of it is whimsical, verging on the fey, but other parts arise from a deeply engaged interior dialogue, notably on how the self-taught naïf, Alfred Wallis, provided oblique instruction to Ben Nicholson, resulting in the sophisticate unlearning himself so that he should paint less self-consciously and produce something even more intellectually authoritative.

Hence Von Ribbentrop proves an informative, provocative work, forcing through startling connections. Plenty of white space frames the statements, so that they breathe freely and stand alone. Ingenious and several-angled, it eschews a flowing thematic unity, preferring a mosaic or spreadsheet approach wherein words and images resound and work upon each other like slogans in an echo chamber. Hence it is a bit like the verbal equivalent of the Coney Island Big Dipper. You find yourself conceptually shaken, shattered and stirred. Take this for instance:

“It is by keeping our imaginations active by moving our minds between pairs of extremes, of long-shot and close-up, or of space and time, or of temperature, that we allow an imaginary pendulum to sway from side to side, describing a circle as it reaches the different pairs of opposites, like quiet and cacophony, hope and despair.”

A sentence later these fluctuations quieten into rigor mortis, out of which arises the question: “Might language be partly to blame for leading us into the kind of uniform thinking that allows well-meaning people to be led into a shoeshop and fitted for jackboots.” What have we here? The notion of syntax trapping a voice in an attitude epitomised by the request, “A pair of jackboots, please.” Any object may trigger a desire for possession, especially if there has arisen a commonality of need through a political situation. This assertion throws out yet another bud, specifically “would anyone have listened to Hitler if he’d worn tights”.

Though the Führer did relax in lederhosen occasionally, it is customarily the mournful obligation of artists to flaunt fancy dress and funny hats, outraging and tilting at conventional notions, while ruthless demagogues push ahead with their holocausts and shootings. Nevertheless, Lanyon’s hopping from allusion to leading question and puncturing levity pre-empts the possibility of the reader falling into a stupor.

THE TORTURED VASE

Swashbuckling polemics aside, there is symmetry in Ribbentrop. What began as an opening door ends on a closing one, the final image being the train door shutting on the diplomatic sortie of Von Ribbentrop as he leaves St Ives, knowing by now war is inevitable. The illustrations serving this tale of love, art, war, camouflage, espionage, sabotage and philosophy are even more eloquent than the prose. By turns they are alarming, nostalgic, tragic and wittily pertinent, mixing sepia shots of Hitler, pictures from a German airman’s album, urban and seashore scenes, provocative and haunting original artworks whose childlike placidity of technique belies the ferocious irony implied, such as a woman shooting flowers – killing the thing she most loves, thus tempering her spirit for the conflict to come. Similarly themed is a fetching study of botanical sadism entitled ‘A Vase of Flowers Undergoing Torture’, but without the caption a spectator would barely take in that the flowers’ stems are writhing because of the electrodes wired to their heads. Equally jolting is a woman on Porthminster Beach eating an ice cream from which drip white stains that convey implications of both carnality and bloodshed. Also on show is a pair of wooden galoshes used by German soldiers to wade through the snow of the Eastern Front. Their protruding tongues are personified as in argument, one urging the other to put the best foot forward and the other arguing for retreat.

This is fanciful but why not? Any attempt at an accurate record has to be concerned with causation or how one thing leads to another, especially a wartime narrative that implies a flurry of adjustments and special precautions. The joins that connect events are always suspect, the linear flow of words not finding an equivalent in the complex, radial vibrations issuing from a single happening. It is, if you like, impossible to pinpoint how a state of affairs led to a particular outcome or consequence: thus historical prose narratives, even if supported by primary sources, are plausible surface illusions, works of art rather than chronological exactitudes.

Such yawning enigmas leave Lanyon free to play the causal clown, tracing strategies and attitudes taken up by both the artistic and civilian communities of St Ives, who are obliged to educate themselves in the necessary deceit or functional lie. But he does not routinely conscript conventional assumptions. Instead he fitfully chooses to radically adjust his viewpoint, being much taken with the notion of ‘resistentialism’ – how objects appraise or initiate resistance against the human world. Hence he privileges us to share the viewpoint of a vase whose destiny it is to be mutilated by a succession of different artistic styles and also that of a cliff about to be photographed by a U-boat.

“As soon as Nicholson broke with the tie to likeness, he was free to turn his attention to the relationships between simplified forms. But from the point of view of all the objects themselves, the disfigurements to which they were subjected were no less upsetting than the experiences of cliffs faced with German cameras pointed at them from U-boats. For these cameras snapped at those coves and inlets like serpents, to take them back to their young.”

The violence of metaphor is arresting, the beak of a camera ‘snapping’, the disfigurement wrought by paint on canvas and the image of hunger applied to strategists eager for information. Objects are endowed with the greed and desires of their operators, corrupted by human motive, animated by acquisitiveness. In a specialised sense, in relation to the clashing swords of human intentions, war may be viewed as a perpetual, incurable state of affairs.

Throughout his alert enquiry, Lanyon finds time to salute the common round, the daily task, though what it entails may be devastating.

“Divesting war of all moral considerations, we might imagine how pilots who bombed St Ives felt when flying over the sea on a lovely day, how the rush of adrenaline and sense of purpose was hardly any different from what any painter or poet feels, and when the day was over, though some had broken a gasworks and killed a woman, and others had finished off a sonnet, or a sea view, all felt a sense of achievement at work well done.”

Reading such a passage makes us grateful that language is bloodless. In a perilous way – for some feel uneasy about such analogies – it is able to smooth over the dreadful fates to which some of us are assigned, for apparently, during aerial raids on St Ives in 1942, Porthmeor and Porthminster beaches were “peppered and the cinema roof looked like a colander” while “the audience emerged frightened, their faith in unreality shaken.”

If they were watching a war film, things might have been truly bewildering. positing claims between conflicting realities or unrealities. We are reminded of Günter Grass’ play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, in which the ostensibly revolutionary playwright, Bertolt Brecht, directs his version of Coriolanus in 1953 while, outside on the street, the real bloody battle, between East German workers and the government, is taking place.

STARRY NIGHTS AND FIRE BOMBS

Countering the larks are grimmer passages that relate to atrocity and mass execution. Lanyon is simultaneously aware of war as grim sacrifice and also as a state of affairs that ushers in wondrous visual dynamics. If we place side by side Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and a sky crackling with firebombs, similar celestial statements or metaphors assail the eye. Both are shows of light, and yet, in moral terms, the first is associated with mystical exaltation and the second with death and destruction. Yet both possess the same type of enticing surface appeal. This is why Oscar Wilde proclaimed “all art is immoral” in that it tends to arouse aesthetic pleasure in inappropriate contexts. Thomas de Quincey provocatively suggested that it was possible to refer to a “beautiful murder” by judging the effectiveness and grace of execution in relation to clumsier felonies. Since then the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” has been leading us into grosser and grosser territory, including the Nazi death camps.

From the point of view of a film producer, two immense battling armies make up the ultimate participative production on a scale more grand than anything devised by Cecil B. deMille. War is conceptual theatre at its most dramatic and earnest, and the actors have literally got to be prepared to play their parts to the death. Not only does it put on an awesome display but effortlessly generates a wreckage of sculptural statements, creating its own enthralling, modernist ‘Waste Land’, amazing constructions of twisted metal, cross-sliced buildings, massive powder-puffs of cordite and the ultimate nuclear mushrooms that may one day put an end to history. This line of argument may come over as conceited and offensive, but violence-inspired artists did write hymns to the ‘Cubist slug’, the tank, and other hardware of destruction – notably Marinetti and the Futurists. In a perversely anarchic way, they welcomed war as a cleanser of the spirit, a detonator of decadence and instigator of change. The slate is wiped clean for a scribe to record whatever new narrative happens to appear.

ART AND THE PHENOMENAL WORLD

Beyond the shadow of war, another argument of cosmic proportion infiltrates Lanyon’s prose, and that concerns art’s relation to what philosophers tentatively class as the phenomenal world. From the beginning, literal or figurative painters have depicted what they see in terms of the separation of objects, animals and plants, highlighting configurations and intensities, achieving unitary harmony through use of tone, line and colour, With the advent of Cubism, Surrealism and Abstraction, the stable identities of the perceived world became subverted and undermined. Picasso’s saddle and handlebar standing for a bull’s head portrayed how artists were sitting astride the horns of the dilemma. How much of the visually decoded world were they prepared to recover and discard? They desired the clarity of distinct forms, so that they could twist, shatter and mutilate them, hopefully salvaging a minimal semblance to spark off the suggestion of an intention. But with pure abstraction and conceptual art, the final severance was achieved and there was little point in seeking new extremes. What was conceptual art anyway? If one constructed an immense wooden frame at the base of the Matterhorn, so that the whole mountain appeared to be enclosed within, would that be the ultimate landscape statement or the ultimate gesture of creative bankruptcy?

The problem has tended to make the historically alert artist – who analyses rather than just turn out – revert to satire and the absurd. And Lanyon may be seen as both celebrating and railing against the almost eerie desert of freedom in which his imagination runs riot – simultaneously delighting in and being appalled by the narcissism and self-absorption of his vocation. He mocks its value but can only demonstrate his opposition by producing more. He brings out Anti-Art books, shoots Anti-Art films and brandishes works of art that supposedly guy the discipline they embody yet at the same time vindicate it by their skill and charm. Not only is he effortlessly original, he is also staggeringly literate and by that I do not mean fluent. He can forge sentences that have a graceful, acid-etched quality and stand as definitive or near-definitive statements:

“In desperate times this quicksilver of the imagination is far more potent than the body’s adrenaline, because it can move as fast as light or set suddenly into anything. In its role as master of ceremonies, the imagination performs metamorphoses, quick-change acts and impersonations for all the amazing music hall turns in our heads. And the imagination can flow like a river into moulds carved by circumstance, or by turning acid it can etch images as powerful as any cave painting on our inner walls. However, we cannot even, by sensitising ourselves through viewing art or by making it ourselves, ever hope to penetrate the armour put in place to protect the magma of rage.”

The provocative end statement brings about a shift – an irony for which the reader is unprepared. The phrasing is idiosyncratic, “The armour put in place to protect the magma of rage”, suggesting man’s relationship with his violent instincts has a protective, paternal aspect, a somewhat morbid suggestions that Freud might or might not have hailed.

 In spite of precision of language and technique, along with a reflexive tendency to draw disquieting comparisons and outré parallels, one gets the impression that Lanyon – like the Austrian novelist Robert Musil – regards events as largely interchangeable, and that what is ultimately important to him is the aura of ghostliness that haunts our gestures, lies and consequences – that “Does this furore of human effort amount to anything at all?” self-questioning that culminates in an individual’s effacement and, by proxy, that little segment of the cosmos that resides inside his skull. The very freedom of speculation he exercises, his view from ‘everywhen’, implies a doubt about the ultimate relevance of mortal striving. But there is so much laughter, delight and variety in his exploration that we feel privileged to attend his exhibitions and take our place as fellow travellers across the ocean of artists’ palettes that besiege the shores of his St Ives or along the road that winds through the dense thickets of a mind in which all sorts of conceptual con-men and hallucinatory highwaymen wait in ambush.

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A Review by Jane Griffiths of a series of books on accessing the imagination

This review covers Von Ribbontrop in St. Ives, The Daughters of Radon, The Only Non-slip Dodo Mat in the World, Bifurcated Thought, The Musings of Creatures in a Barren Land. Read it here.

One of the many remarkable things about Andrew Lanyon’s series of books on accessing the imagination is how perfectly their form and content combine. When, 10 years ago, I overheard someone saying to someone else at a party ‘Andrew Lanyon is making books’, what sprang to mind was ‘artist’s books’, perhaps something like this:

A Shortcut for Text

That is, I imagined symbolic books, or reflections on the idea of the book, in which form is everything and text has nothing to say, but is the shortest distance between two points: the arrival rather than the journey. The reality of these books is very different. On the surface, they seem to function conventionally. Their pages are two-dimensional, they contain print, and their words and images lie flat on the page. But any appearance of conformity is deceptive. They are not simply about the imagination; they manifest its workings in a mischievously clever combination of tangible and intangible ways.

            In the first of the series, Von Ribbentrop in St. Ives (2010), Andrew writes that ‘in order to think about the idea of metaphors, it helps to use metaphors to describe them’ (p. 60). Each of the books is precisely such a metaphor, developed to enable the exploration of the recurrent theme of movement. The idea they elaborate is that the imagination is both accessed through movement, and itself creates by means of movement: in these books, accessing the imagination and imaginative creation are effectively co-terminous. Each presents this principle through use of a different metaphor (or what – in other writers’ work – might be called conceits). In Von Ribbentrop, the threatened invasion of St. Ives in the Second World War becomes a way of thinking about the new forms of art that emerged there during the 1930s (and the other way around); in The Daughters of Radon (2011), the radioactive rocks under St. Ives are brought into collision with a fairground sideshow as joint imaginative metaphors. These juxtapositions, or rather fusions, border on the unthinkable; there are moments in Von Ribbentrop, in particular, that prompt the response ‘but you cannot put these things together’ – except, of course, that you can. They are designed to provoke an almost frantic movement in the reader’s mind: a mental leap from one to the other, then back again, faster and faster, in an attempt to keep both subjects simultaneously in focus.

            In later books, this movement itself becomes the subject. In The Only Non-Slip Dodo Mat in the World (2013), the writer and explorer Fortescue takes up lodging in the heads of a series of public statues, finding that movement between them is essential to his creative process. In Bifurcated Thought (2013), an entire house springs into being from the blowing of an imaginary wind, beginning as a small four-square structure like a dovecote and developing so rapidly in a great many different directions that ‘by the time wind bursts into an attic bedroom, the place is teetering on the verge of opening to the public’ (p. 8). In The Musings of Creatures Imagined in a Barren Land (2016), the entire action is set in a moving coach. Each of these central conceits is at once an image of the imagination and the stuff that the imagination acts upon, taking on an existence and an agency of its own. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the way that Rowley Hall appears in almost all these books. The elusive residence of the Rowleys, it was first introduced in an earlier book, In Search of Rowley Hall (n.d.), which technically isn’t part of the sequence about accessing the imagination, but which implies the ideas the sequence explores as a near-invisible source of a river somewhere in an inland field behind a pub might imply sea-shouldering whales. And just as that book has a continued physical existence, so too Rowley Hall reappears in book after book as a reference point – a local habitation and a name for the restless imagination.

            As this suggests, the kind of imagination that is accessed in these books is an exceptionally thingy one; although it is accessed through movement, and is itself a form of movement, such movement is most in evidence when it comes into collision with physical objects. This is manifest not just in what the books ‘say’, but also in their layout, especially the way images are woven seamlessly into the text. In Bifurcated Thought, for example, the progress of a wind-driven thought is interrupted by an obstacle in its path:

Dovecote

The image functions as an obstacle for the reader too, but the text beneath continues the narrative, embodying the power of the wind that sweeps all before it; despite taking the form of a caption, which conventionally would be separate from the main body of the text, it is gathered up into it in such a way that the layout of the page mirrors the process of transformation of which the text speaks. Similarly, in Von Ribbentrop, a caption introduces a sequence of images that symbolically represent the impact of changing fashions in art on the fabric of the world:

Chronicle of the disintegration of the real world from Dutch Realism, Baroque, Rococo, Cubism & Futurism to Abstraction. Andrew Lanyon painting, oil on board.
Chronicle of the disintegration of the real world from Dutch Realism, Baroque, Rococo, Cubism & Futurism to Abstraction.

The underlying conceit is the one that animates the entire book: that art disrupts and destroys the known world as fundamentally as war, and the way it is expressed encapsulates that disregard for boundaries. And here too, the format of the page effects an equivalent disruption. It isn’t just that the caption introduces a sequence of images that require to be read as if they were text, but also that the two together are presented as an endnote; just as text and image work collaboratively, rather than hierarchically, so too the endnotes present alternative narratives rather than supplementary information. As discursive and as fully illustrated as the ‘main’ text, they too juxtapose memories of actual bombing raids and events from the historical Von Ribbentrop’s visit to the town with combined visual and verbal explorations of the explosive effects of Naum Gabo’s and Ben Nicholson’s art practice. Both text and endnotes provide glimpses of some of the raw material that went into the making of the book, as well as of its transformation; both simultaneously make visible how history serves as footnote to acts of the imagination, and reveal its occasional intransigence. Far from being supplementary, the endnotes demand to be read alongside the text – and, since this is physically impossible, the movement of turning the pages back and forth in an attempt to take in two parallel and double-voiced narratives simultaneously makes the reader startlingly aware of how this emblematises an equivalent movement in the mind. And of how, when hand and eye falter, and logical order fails, the imagination leaps into the multiple breaches.

           All of this is a multi-media form of the wit that also manifests in off-the-cuff associative wordplay and punning, as when Fortescue writes some short stories while lodged in a statue of Kipling, ‘But these were ‘just so so’ (p. 27). It appears, too, in the way several images occur in more than one book, as if a single reinvention weren’t enough – and sometimes the text struggles to keep up with the visual play embedded within it as when, in The Daughters of Radon, a description of the game Exquisite Corpse as ‘the antithesis to wallpaper’ is followed by the instruction ‘(see page 52)’ – to which is added a pencilled asterisk and the handwritten note:

Other images not only reveal the usefulness of the real as a starting-point for the imagination (as the historical facts in Von Ribbentrop do), but also uncannily suggest that Andrew’s imagination was at work in the streets of St. Ives a decade or more before he was born. In particular, in a photograph of Ben Nicholson standing at Alfred Wallis’s door, the large and startlingly white sketchbook under his arm appears to have been placed on purpose to provide tonal and psychological contrast: bright, abstract modernist geometries juxtaposed with the brooding lived experience of Back Road West.

The discovery of Alfred Wallis by Ben Nicholson. Photo: Sir John Summerserson.
The discovery of Alfred Wallis by Ben Nicholson. Photo: Sir John Summerserson.

It looks exactly like an Andrew Lanyon painting, but isn’t – until, 15 pages later, it is.

Alfred Wallis, not noticing Ben Nicholson, while being discovered. Andrew Lanyon oil on board
Alfred Wallis, not noticing Ben Nicholson, while being discovered.

Including the photograph as well as the reworking of it not only shows life imitating art imitating life, but enables both physical, page-turning and imaginative movement between the two. The effect is comparable to that which Andrew describes in The Only Non Slip Dodo Mat, when he remembered, some time after writing Fortescue’s adventures, that:

There was a real Mr Fortescue, who had been an artist in St. Ives. I even had a glass negative of him tending bees. Having already written about such a character who summons his thoughts and gives them the freedom of his head, it was a surprise to see him with thoughts buzzing all over him. Only later did it occur to me that the whole imagination might be outside. (p. 82)

Mr Fortescue, artist,  in his garden above St. Ives. Photo: Douglas or Lanyon
Mr Fortescue, artist, in his garden above St. Ives. Photo: Douglas or Lanyon

The play between the real and the imaginary images of Nicholson causes readers, too, to question the boundaries between material and immaterial, real and imaginary, and so to participate in the process of reinvention.

            All of this means that reading these books is a delightfully disconcerting experience – and so too does the way they are shot through with what seem like flickering sideways glances to other texts. The chinked-open wardrobe on the first page of Von Ribbentrop calls to mind not just C. S. Lewis, but Gaston Bachelard’s theory of the imagination, which (he suggests) can be housed not just in formal architectural structures, but in lesser enclosed spaces, such as nests, shells, chests-of-drawers – and wardrobes. The barren landscape through which Rabelais and Cervantes journey in The Musings of Creatures invites memories of other barren landscapes that stand, loosely, for the forces that oppose the imagination: the desert in which the poet-narrator of Chaucer’s House of Fame finds himself when he decides to stop basing his writing on pre-existing sources, for example, and the wilderness traversed by Child Roland in the radio play by Louis MacNeice, or the empty beachscapes that surround Elizabeth Bishop’s houses of the imagination in ‘The Sea & Its Shore’ and ‘The End of March’. The disruptive experience of negotiating between text and endnotes in Von Ribbentrop and The Daughters of Radon just as disruptively recalls Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar. Laurence Sterne is invoked directly in Bifurcated Thought, in the guise of a thought that ‘formed a shape in smoke, a flourish like the one described in the air with a cane in Tristram Shandy’ (p. 10), but in addition, his alter ego Yorick’s excursions in France in A Sentimental Journey seem to foreshadow the coach trip taken in The Musings of Creatures: it, too, is a mental as much as a physical excursion, where the movement of the mind (and, in Yorick’s case, the emotions) has a tangible impact on events in the outside world.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the theory underpinning these books seems to be in a direct line of descent from medieval theories of creativity. In The Only Non Slip Dodo Mat, the possibility is raised that:

If the deterioration of both imagination and memory is linked, perhaps only material stored in the memory is accessed, nothing at all ever plucked out of thin air. ‘A good imagination’ may only be the ability to successfully access the memory store. (p. 4)

Both in conception and in the specific terms that are used, this quite startlingly echoes what Mary Carruthers has uncovered about the way that, in the medieval period, memory served the function that we now think of as belonging to the imagination: it was considered to be the source of invention. A key part of this theory is the way it allowed the memory to be envisaged as a store: a series of pigeonholes, a chest, or even an architectural structure, all designed to order the contents of the memory so that they could be easily retrieved and reworked into new material. And because, in the contemporary understanding of the structure of the mind, it was envisaged as made up of interconnected chambers, through which thoughts and perceptions travelled before finally taking up lodging in the memory chamber towards the rear of the head, the memory itself was frequently envisaged as an equivalent store.When Fortescue takes up residence in the heads of a series of statues, he becomes the very embodiment of this theory; moving between the eye sockets that give him glimpses of the outside world and the private chambers – or mental storehouse – at the back of the mind, and drawing on both in his writings, he becomes, as he observes himself, ‘a travelling thought’ (p. 33). Simultaneously a figure who is himself accessing the imagination, and a figure of the accessing process, he gives tangible representation to Aristotle’s observation that ‘the mind never thinks without a mental image’ – even when that image is an image of the mind.

Clearly, at least some and probably all of these parallels are purely chance perceptions: a series of Exquisite Corpses animated by juxtaposition of Andrew’s writing with what happen to be the contents of my own mind. But that is rather the point: while specific glimpses of likeness and unlikeness will vary from reader to reader, it is the process of discovery (or movement) between Andrew’s work and its ‘precedents’ that matters: it’s that process that enables each reader to experience (and embody) the idea of imagination as movement that these books explore. In this way, the comparative activity provoked by reading nicely replicates the experience of visiting the exhibitions, at Falmouth Art Gallery, of artefacts that in the books are represented by photographs. Moving from one to another, each visitor’s physical progress served as the means of making connections. And although there were suggestions as to the intended sequence of the exhibits, in practice of course people meandered, reversed, looping about in no fixed order. In doing so, they came to represent precisely the kind of reading fostered by these books, whose texts are so very far from proceeding in a straight line. Although a first glance might suggest that they function in good codex fashion, beginning at a given point and leading line by line to the end, in practice they comprehensively resist ideas of order. If they could be summed up in a single image, it would not be the ‘shortcut for text’, but one from The Daughters of Radon:

Lead submarine with lead type. 'While eyes ride waves of words, far below stir notions, the submariners of sense.' Construction from hollow book by Andrew Lanyon.
While eyes ride waves of words, far below stir notions, the submariners of sense
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‘Peter Lanyon, Pottery & Postcards’ by Andrew Lanyon

‘Delightfully irreverent’ – Jennifer Martin.

‘Superb book. I chuckled and admired every page of it. My favourite I think, is Roger on one leg’ – Nancy Wynne Jones.

‘Another very fine book…the postcards themselves are fascinating, many having a tremendous feeling of a Lanyon painting.’ – Sue Larkin.

‘Word for word, picture for picture it told me far more about Peter Lanyon than all the catalogue entries, exhibition blurbs on him and his work that I’ve ever read.’ – Jeremy Jessel.

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A Fairy Find – review by Bert Biscoe

Portobello Press ISBN 1 84627 061 8

Andrew Lanyon comes from a long and continuing line of challenging, passionate and acclaimed artists. Amongst his artistic activity he has produced a collection of hand-made books over the past twenty years or so which excite, mystify, delight and amuse those who see them. This is no ordinary writer – Andrew Lanyon treats the whole book as a piece of art. He is intense and philosophical as he explores nature, humanity, and the enigma of perceiving complex and delicate balances whilst crashing down our clumsy (not to mention greedy) boot to destroy them.

A Fairy Find explores the fairy world – a place of great fascination for the Cornish, whose experience of it is perhaps greater than most. Andrew Lanyon poses the question of whether we are not simply being manipulated by fairies; he may even suggest that there is a malicious side to fairies who, when bored or angry, may cause conflicts in order to liven things up.

This beautifully crafted book appears at first glance to be a collection of enigmatic illustrations, surreally and amusingly captioned, with occasional paragraphs of whimsical narrative which explain things in a different, fairy-biased way. As you proceed, however, it is clear that it is also a clear and powerful treatise on the modern human condition, on the difficulty of humans’ relationship with their habitat, and on the tension between outer appearances and inner turmoil.

A Fairy Find is not an overtly Cornish book. It does not explore folklore or set itself in any particular place. However, the notion of the fairy-world as an alter-world, as a source of influence and manipulation, derives from Cornish experience and imagination. It is an experience which, as a metaphor, offers a unique set of insights from a Cornish perspective to the World.

Andrew Lanyon is a unique artist – metaphysical and moral – a serious thinker who chooses to explore his ideas and views through wit, surrealism, folklore and imagination. I think this book is something special – a work of art which repays those who choose to experience it with a challenging reflection of themselves. It is an easy thing to say, but a difficult one to mean, but I love this book.

Bert Biscoe November 2006