Collect Art Publication July 2023

Niagara in the 90’s; After James Richards, Raking Light 2014, Digital Video with stereo sound.

Safely seated in a small darkened space

In the 1990’s rooms of the Tate

Here to see Inventory’s DaDa reflection on social housing.

London trains and busses have exhausted me.

Onscreen a series of obscure and abstract images

Until Niagara appears.

And now two films are running,

the one on screen

and the one in my memory.

Niagara Falls in December,

the nineties have just begun like a new love affair.

Niagara Falls in deep love

Of crashing foam.

A woman in a yellow trench coat

that her mother bought from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore,

Headscarf and red lipstick.

She waits at the top

for her photo to be taken.

Pose like Marilyn.

But there are no colours

Everything is blank faced, locked up

Frozen solid, danger zone.

The petrified falls and thickly

Iced, icey, walk-ways are

A hazard

Impassable.

Like this fake marriage.

Why does she persist?

Standing on the edge of

the Falls.

High Place Phenomenon in full force

Like falling off the Humber bridge or

down a deep nautilus spiral stairwell

or the Brink of Horseshoe Falls.

Falling would be so easy on this treacherous day

Freefall

Dissolving into the sublime landscape

Evanescing into the tossing waves.

Just for a moment,

just to see what it feels like.

Watching the tide this morning at Seaburn.

The steps go nowhere

Staircase and jetty are swamped by engulfing waters.

so one can only walk so far down

Before The Sea stops me

and makes me stand and stare at the awe and mighty power of the waves

set in bounds.

Sham marriage,

there is only so far she can walk with him

Collins’ Sleeping Fool

Until the sea of misery, dissolution and desperation

Stops her in her tracks.

Brings her to a halt.

Some call it rock bottom.

Full of grit and dirt and hard painfulness.

The steps leading nowhere,

It has something of a ruin about it.

There is a working of the imagination,

filling in of the gaps,

not spelling it out.

Watching the sea smash up the steps

and fizzle down again

only to be laid waste by the next oncoming wave.

What if I were engulfed in the next wave?

What if I am sucked into the swell?

it is a morbid fantasy,

I will not do it.

But I’m interested what it feels like.

Just a bit of dreadful curiosity,

while I watched and prayed by the banister this morning.

This must be a phenomen.

The video rolls on, the spray,

and the deep curve of the lip of the Falls viewed from Goat Island.

I think she is frozen like the Falls themselves.

Immobile with horror,

Of what she has convinced herself into.

If only she could go down

Draw the curtain under the falls behind her

Then she would know

The secret hidden in the cave there

And she would understand

The meaning of the light

The ice

The bitter frozen storm

The leaden sky

The bloodless relationship

The years of neglect and disorder

The loneliness and heart break.

Comprehend it all.

This relationship is in an eternity of free fall

Sartre’s vertigo of possibility, L’Appel du Vide.

Looking in the reflected blade of a knife

Holding a looking glass up to her own

Servitude

Loneliness

Sanctions.

Nearby is a small stone cabin

Blank windows, shabby disagreeableness.

Barred against the storm.

How she wishes to disappear

To melt into the icy drop

Absorbed like a water-colour in the rain

Atomise into cloud.

Images from Wiki Commons. 

 . Niagara Falls, winter. (Figure peering over the ledge.), by Langenheim, Loyd & Co 1858

  .  View from Goat Isand, taken by Daniel Mayer in late February 2006

.   The Niagara book 1893.

Stills from James Richards, Raking Light, 2014.