Riddley Walker Proposal for an Exhibition London 2008
Owt uv thay 2 peaces uv the Littl shynin Man the Addom thayr cum shyningnes in wayvs in spredin circles. Wivverin & wayverin & humin with a hy soun. Lytin up the dark wud. (Hoban 2002:32)
Fragmentary, fractured, misunderstood, murky memories swirl through the darkened gallery, which is illuminated by a scattering of utterances that crackle and fizz with an unseen energy. A world of things waiting to happen. A journey through the space will veer from wonderment to horror, an uncomfortable zone in which the work tries to make sense of its surroundings, to separate meaning from myth, knowledge from superstition, the fruitful from the foul.
I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to word the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and ther backs wil talk to you. (Hoban 2002:161)
Riddley Walker, the eponymous hero of Russell Hoban’s book, attempts to understand his present world through a language riddled with knotted myths that have been wrenched form any historical anchorage. He seeks meaning from the scraps of information passed down over many generations through the story tellers that rule his world.
The Legend of St Eustace, [painting]. Canterbury Cathedral [Detail]
Russell Hoban was inspired to write Riddley Walker by the painting of The Legend of St Eustace that hangs in Canterbury Cathedral. It depicts Eustace praying in the middle of the river after his sons are carried off by animals. Eustace means "good fortune" or "fruitful". He also acknowledges his debt to Punch from the Punch and Judy Shows. In his afterword he writes: ‘The look of Punch and the sound of his swazzle voice, the whole rampant idea of him stayed with me through five and half years of revisions and rewrites; it is with me still.’ (Hoban 2002:227)
Mr. Punch, Judy, the Devil, and the rest of the cast. Punch and Judy, and their Baby
The exhibition at the Fieldgate Gallery will be a ghost train ride through a series of works by contemporary artists that illuminate themselves and the spaces they inhabit. There will be clashes between the profanity of Punch and the piety of St. Eustace
We are proposing to select a series of works that reflect the landscapes, virtual, real and imaginary, described in Russell Hoban’s 1980 book Riddley Walker. The exhibition will allude to post-modern ideas of history, narrative and language and will be as Roland Barthes writes in his 1977 book, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments:
[Narrative is] able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation... [and] narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society...... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural; it is simply there, like life itself. [Barthes, 1977:79]
In the dark gallery each work has to provide its own light source, either intrinsic or external. The artists have been chosen for their relationship to darkness and their engagement with ideas of invention, false instinct and a thwarted quest for knowledge. Blacking out the gallery, the exhibition will turn it into the heart of the wood, a place of enlightened thought and primeval slime.
Mark Ingham and Liane Lang
June 2007
Barthes, R. (2002 [1977]), A lover’s Discourse: Fragments. London: Vintage
Hoban, H. (2002 [1980]), Riddley Walker. Bloomsbury: London