New Artis Focus: Lisa Panting on Helen Cammock

This is not a Love Song: Under the epidermis of the moving image of Helen Cammock

Lisa Panting
A marble bust of a woman with curly hair is covered by rust. Behind is a bunch of fresh foliage.
Chorus I, Helen Cammock, 2019

Caveat: This text was begun during lockdown during the COVD 19 pandemic. This text was continued during the BLM protests initially in the United States and now in the UK. This text has many beginnings and polymorphic ends. You can chart a love time, a timeline through a practice, or you can move things around as works come in and out of view; contingent, congruent, urgent.

Writing is an act of love, or remembrance, of feeling. Utterance and text are central to the work of Cammock who writes her own scripts as well as collaging together moments from texts by others, writers that feed her consciousness, that she pushes into the collective realm of reading. Her practice is what I might call corporeal, perforated through vision or the place of the body, an aural letter. The body as border and as conduit is central to this, and collates two of the central tenets of the practice, that can be summed up in two distinct phrases Cammock first used in 2016 ‘The Audible Fingerprint’ and the ‘Energised Frame’. The mode of address and the way in which Cammock appeals to our sensitivities, if we choose to see it, is perhaps the most beguiling sense of the practice. The energised frame is an impactful idea that deals with the concept of the mutability of the frame – the flow between the inside and the out, and the connection then to words or sound- often music. The idea of the supplement to the image is relevant with regard to Cammock who uses the supplement to add and overlay. Instead of a visual collage what you get is, following Derrida, an interplay where if we can position the image as the text, the speaking isn’t prioritised as per the duality of Western thought, but rather the interplay between position and / or origin can redetermine and produce meaning.

“if supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant” Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology p.281

Slippage offers infinite character to Cammock’s lens. I’m reminded of Proust’s opus when I watch Chorus I, (2019) her epic three-screen installation. It’s both messy and taught, elongated and elliptical. You simply have to give over to it, there is no in-between – hovering on the outside is not an option. It’s as much in an emotion and an evocation as it is a walkthrough of a research- based residency. The border as body, experienced through different kinds of trauma and reflection – war, rape, trafficking, political upheaval – and a surprising amount of beauty. Back and forth, round and outwards. Then song. Sound offers a rupture as it brings you back into a deliberated space, the learning of an early opera lament Che is poù fare by Barbara Strozzi by the artist. It brings you sharply back in culture, and the idea that this is indeed a form of expression necessary for survival, a communiqué from the past that rumbles into the present. The parsed emotion of Cammock’s voice is often at odds with the difficulty of the message. Part choir master or master of ceremony, she galvanises the senses through the optical and aural nerve.

“All this whiteness burns me” reads Cammock via Franz Fanon in Changing Room (2014). The words hang in the air, the statement turns the sensations of watching as if through innards in the body. You are that close to what is being said and felt, you enter into a sealed space – “When I’m away from you, I understand the pain, sharp yet enduring”. The intergenerational transfer of pain via daily microaggressions and soaring injustices of structural policy experienced by a man born in 1924 are described by a witness, his daughter. The time-warp in this work emanates outwards. But – Yet. This work also builds upon the act of racism itself, speaking to the confusion and drive for self that conditions our being, the sorrow of missed connections, missed opportunity and the harm we do to others. The concise framing, and sense of breath we are given, through the open window, through the use of outside, produces a sense of slippage between fantasy and the aural – it produces a dislocation between the beautiful and the ugly, empathy and rage, sorrow and frustration. The porcelain and ceramic animal characters lend an innocence at odds with what we hear. All objects generate their significance – the dried flowers, the cowed figure and the lamp shade all function as syntactic components that feel deeply domestic, reminding us that domestic space is complex and not necessarily safe; the interior has intimacy mapped onto its walls.

Changing Room, Helen Cammock, 2014

 

Speaking to Song – the manifold

In a short performance to camera Hastings Avenue (2011) Cammock attempts to sing the hymn Jerusalem. Breaking down, the resulting work is an edited sequence of outtakes. Her frustration at the time of filming isn’t performed, as it wasn’t meant to be seen. This work seeded what has become a main trope in the practice, the use of song and voice as a strategy to provide emotion through articulation, use of the body as a frontier in protest, in lament, to make the haptic nature of the audible fingerprint present. Recording and performance are also part of Cammock’s work, there have been LPs and 12” records, the format of distribution part of the circulation and re-attachment to forms of protest and the use of the cover version as a vehicle to attribute new meaning to a given situation. There have been spoken word mixed with song performances. Sometimes she has resorted to them as a form of catharsis. Cammock moves across genre, it can be pre-opera lament via the Blues, to Flag Day by The Housemartins mapping current day austerity of Brexit Hull onto 1985 Thatcherism when the song was released. In this work it is Thatcher’s legacy pulling its umbilical chords into play through the ever bubbling British fear of the ‘outside’. Sometimes song is used as a moment of jarring interruption Simmer Down Simmer Down by Jose Piet is sung in SIW with image overlays of unrest on the Westbank and then repeated with the detritus left after an inflatable boat that those seeking refuge have abandoned on a deserted beach. The song asks different questions of us in its request to simmer down – but ultimately asks us all to care. Or there is the harmonised plainsong at the beginning of Che si puo Fare enmeshed in dialogue with pre Baroque. In the Long Note, the ‘Long Note’ refers both to the perhaps insurmountable expedition in search of civil rights – and to the blue note/long note found in jazz and Irish folk music – hinting at the intersectional subject positioning of the work. In the film we witness Cammock writing the music to a short composition that only became complete when women and girls in Derry wrote lyrics and turned It into song as the performance that accompanied the film. Sometimes too, song is used to illuminate horror; ‘Drilling into Brains…’ is a short Blues refrain composed by Cammock and speaks of the experiments conducted on Black babies in A Hole in the Sky Part One. Song is used to trace and connect to histories, to individuals, to make moments of pause – to create a polyphony cross image, text and song to reach into a space beyond a normative subjectivity refused to the people of Cammock’s work but also to herself. In this way, song offers a way to short circuit, in conjunction with her scripting often a poetics of lament, the schism experienced by problematised existence within Western white patriarchy. As an alternative space, song or tune is like the note in the baseline that returns, acting as a provocation where the ear of the listener or viewer is then able to complete meaning.

Increasingly the multiple voice has entered the work. Always present as incorporated authors; Benjamin, Baldwin, Fanon, Angelou, Lorde and Walker. But the multi-perspectival kaleidoscopic presence of the voice took on a new turn in SIW, Chorus and The Long Note. There was an addition of the visual embodiment not just the audible trace or re-enactment of voices – they spoke not through Cammock as conduit but as and for themselves. Of course with Cammock still orchestrating conversation between voices, but we saw something of the face of the voice. The audible fingerprint inhabited a different collective space. The constellatory structure of these works probing a dialogical space, that overlaps, prodding meaning – a generating machine. Often this space is trans-historical, a multiplicity coming from a historical text, preempted by the contemporary. New lines of flight are connected, breaking down accounts bracketed by given event, and dissolving space between the poetic, the sung and the documentary address,

You can hear it if you listen

Helen Cammock, Che si può fare, 2019

 

Montage

Shouting in Whispers (2017) shifted Cammock’s work from the axis of the interiority of British Black experience to worldly collaged discursivity. The red square opens the work with the sound of a South African musician straight into a South African white supremasist explaining that ‘We will all become chocolate colour’…. ‘If they carry on like that’….there might be ‘one big wipeout’. It’s not that long ago that the British government publicly colluded with apartheid, these views are also British, part of the Colonial armature. Cammock weaves us through this logic and places it firmly back into British soil through the Brixton and Handsworth ‘riots’. Then we move to Yadizi fighters on the border of Turkey and Syria; scenes from the West bank; moments of individual human intervention. A young Israeli woman challenging her military, an underage Black American soldier in Vietnam, the sheer courage of the young Yadizi fighters, to more hopeful political attempts to change something; the campaign of Shirley Chisholm in 1976, predating Barack Obama by 32 years. The film osculates between individual sacrifice and the silence of the moving machine – exemplified by the footage from Tiananmen Square, and footage from the growth of the Nazi youth movement in Germany. Moments that have marked generations, whisper where were you when. Cammock appears playing noughts and crosses with herself, in red, sharing an Adidas hoodie with a protester in Brixton in the early 1980s. SIW is fraught with coincidence, global contamination, human resilience – a torrent of world affairs – both recent and historical. It is also personal. Cammock throughout her filmmaking always reminds us that personal experience, no matter how lived, is deeply imbedded within the political fabric. The stories of young people resonate with Cammock who spent time working with young people in statutory social services. Whilst this is disconnected from her formal sensibility as an image maker, as a singer, as a wordsmith, it has informed her, sharpened her optics onto the smaller, less visible human tragedy. The Obama fabric, bought in Mali is already of yesteryear by the time it ends up on film. A souvenir of something broken and fought for.

The Long Note (TLN,) 2018, is a swooping look at the conditions of violent structural exclusion that led to the rise of the troubles in Derry, Northern Ireland through the voices of women, past and still present. A central interview with Bernadette Devlin McAliskey recalls and recasts the beginning of protest and then the march that occurred on what became Bloody Sunday. Through conversation and probing Cammock brings forth Devlin – McAliskey’s relationship to Black American activism and feminism in the 1960s. Calling into question white feminists who had their houses kept by Black women which wasn’t a kind of feminism she could recognise, rather, seeing some connection between the experience of Black women in the USA and Catholic women in Northern Ireland. Devlin is sanguine about the past, at one point she says ‘It’s about going back for them’, naming women whose acts have been attributed to her (because perhaps an army of women would be too terrifying) in the haze of the police and social storm of the Troubles. This work, more than other films by Cammock, cast the role of struggle beyond the Black voice of the diaspora, to another context fuelled by British Colonialism and full of individual stories of loss and endurance. Perhaps like Chorus I and to some extent Shouting in Whispers, TLN demands our time as well as our attention. The film navigates an exteriority provided by architecture and expression of site through the emblems of a divided city; murals, flags, colour and graffiti. The work is also remarkable for its attempt to shift gears between slow and fast ‘looking’. It incorporates within its structure the notion of looking with and in. When I look at TLN the physicality of place carves out something towards me. The screen becomes porous and the event and its lack underscores the absolute unremarkable remarkable conditions of this place. Like visiting any site where the spectre of history weighs heavy, the scenes in TLN offer a vacant veneer of the ordinary. The past and present collapse into one. Our understanding is stretched. At the end a visiting American choir sing The Parting Glass in a pub. Ireland, both North and South has seen the mass exporting of population, notably to the USA. The flow of diaspora, back and forth, questioning, seeking answers, probing and trying to lay understanding to rest and finding root.

The sky, the earth, the road, and the vernacular

The artist’s limb stretched out to a shell on the ledge. The tight frame of a wall, or building or window, industrial building, site is a device inhabited by Cammock. The filmic language is indebted to Modernist photography, straight lines, sharp angles, bold colour; the machine of capitalism is portrayed, detached, in the ever producing meaning and legacy if not product and labour. Often shots are set up as stills then things occur within them. There is an unfolding that happens, Cammock as witness, as an eye onto an ever yielding picture plane. The everyday is framed, cut against moments of rupture, the camera sometimes drawing what is in front of it, swaying and reaching into and over space. Public infrastructure deployed as a mechanism to give image to the system. We see bridges as portals, an attempt to reimagine the present. The space is in motion, goalposts keep moving it is as if she is telling us, or caught still, stuck, with the frame almost, not only, a frame but a container – a visual analogy for the systemic oppression that these spaces are for so many. Who can walk freely and who cannot. Stories of chased Black seafarers in historical Hull, scenes of protest, the artist herself enacting noughts and crosses. The camera as voyeur, as liberator or enforcer, we are not sure. Cammock sometimes catches herself in the frame, gently cleaning a misty lens or reaching into the frame to touch something. She almost uses the camera as a cartographer, lived experience in detail, an alarm accompanies a pan down a door frame catching graffiti (TLN), texture is important, as is colour, we are often reminded that we are embedded in the earth; the green high grasses and sugar cane of Barbados, the smashed rowan berries of Derry, the swishing drying grass of Hull, the yellow flowers of the botanical gardens of Florence, the motifs of plant life becoming giant, the human dwarfed again and again Cammock seems to be telling us. Often an emphasis is made by the use of found footage, towering over us from the past. The radical often enters the work in this way. Whether it is Nina Simone, the Nicholas Brothers, footage of Vietnam, Shirley Chisholm, Yadizi fighters, countless examples of survival, risk, expression.

The external made internal. From the macro to the micro. Things are not so different are they?


Embodiment

There is a Hole in the Sky Part I and There is a Hole in the Sky Part II: Listening to James Baldwin from (2016) are both one and apart. Part I is set in Barbados, Part two in an unidentifiable landscape, part future, part past. Sugar connects them, from the place of production to the Tate & Lyle refineries in the docks of London. From the place of enslavement, to a place of entrapment. In part one George Lamming from In the Castle of My Skin tells us of the rose tinted notion of Britain held in the Caribbean, luring people from home to seek out a ‘better life’ at the invitation of the UK government. Through both films there is a ricochet between colonial history and the doubling back on the viewer with the protagonist/artist sitting barely beyond this logic. Cammock reveals her visitor status, as the sugar worker eyes her expensive camera equipment and her English accent. She meets a Hackney born man working in a tourist sugar plantation ‘museum’/specialist rum distillery. The diaspora’s machine in action. The continual flow between history, place and culture and the tourism of rampage. In Part II her imagined conversation with James Baldwin activates another layer of this displacement. The harsh realities of American racism led Baldwin abroad, Cammock thinks with him and muses too on other Black figures lost to the USA on account of an aggressive racist culture. These include the Nicholas brothers, dancers and choreographers, innovators of ‘move and style, slide and glide’, who were ripped off by their better known white counterparts. Cammock says over footage of their dance work:

I sat long ago and considered this notion of appropriation through music, fashion, dance, ideas, art, writing, invention, thought…. it runs deep within society’s furred arteries and is always eventually connected to power – developing, sustaining, maintaining – stripping, stealing and gouging – someone is always hurt.

There are hazy beginnings and never ever endings and race and gender weigh heavy, mellifluous and dormant throughout history. So we live in this haze of appropriation that is difficult and dangerous to traverse – scree down the mountainside, unnavigable fog.

Cammock reminds us through Part I and Part II that it isn’t only physical labour that has been stolen but also intellectual and cultural labour, invisibilised ‘appropriated’ away from authors, faced with cultural exploitation and closed doors. Violence, Cammock contends, is so very near the surface, stealing ideas is also a form of violence is the feeling we are left with. At the end of Part II, a figure sits with their back to us. We can only assume it is the artist – an embodiment of Baldwin, and embodiment of generations of hardship, of conversation, of handed down missed opportunity – but also creativity, expression. She refuses our gaze, ‘Its enough’ her body tells us, as I’m turned away, please do some work, I exhort you.

Surviving an assault brutal as abattoir fear, killing ships, killing room, killing chair, killing chamber; Deaths of denial on my screen. Relentless, and suffocating screens invading dreams. Stuck, I’m stuck. Action, but I am stuck….

And you said to me, you write in order to change the world, if you alter even by a millimetre the way people look at reality then you can change it.

Windows are clear if you clean them

In 2016 Hull voted 68% leave in the Brexit referendum. Moveable Bridge (2017) is an encounter with Hull, its docks, it’s armature and it’s civic history. As a port it has a history of the ebb and flow of people. Cammock’s script crackles with an intense scrutiny, a searchlight beam lures out facts and people, seeing and unseeing. Amy Johnson, a pilot pioneer shot down by friendly fire, her code is wrong. Moveable Bridge walks the line of the disputed, histories that are told and now retold. A revision of sorts, there is always so much to tell. Familiar chimes familiar chimes. Black sailors taking jobs and women, Arab men getting better jobs, hatred and division stoked.

MB sets the scene of later works, especially The Long Note from the following year. The elliptical resonances found within a tight knit weave within local geographies, amplified outwards. Like a musical bridge, Flag Day by The Housemartins is sung by Cammock overlaying the propaganda machine that whipped up anti EU sentiment, The Ukip posters, the immigration van. Fear and hate, it all comes back in circles says Cammock, the histories of Hull and its fortunes have forever been in flux according to the in and out, ebb and flow, ebb and flow of the humber.

It’s a waste of time if you know what I mean
Try shaking a box in front of the Queen
‘Cause her purse is fat and bursting at the seams
It’s a waste of time if you know what they mean (Flag Day chorus)

And like Chorus I (2019) that later took the form of expanding sideways, through a multiscreen amplification, the chapter-like structure of MB brings its circularity in a forwards motion. Only heard this time, Nina Simone tells us that it’s the duty of the artist to reflect the times. From Simone, Cammock takes this edict and as if in conversation with her, as with Baldwin earlier – she points and prods, pushing at the paper thin sticking plaster not only to reveal the gaps but to examine the glue that holds the enduring sense of place in a space of part suspension whilst constantly moving, inconsistently changing.

The Long Note, Helen Cammock, 2018

The gap in between the words

In early works you sometimes spot trains of thought, to be unpicked and built upon – referenced and recast. Character Building (2009) is one such work. The gap between words weighs heavily silent. This piece is a manifesto of sorts, and there are many beginnings and many ends, folding back into later work for which Cammock is better known. ‘Early work’ so called, is in this case not a young work. It catalogues through chronology and tableaux event upon event, pulling from them the forms of racism and encounter with the cityscape over 25 years . The formal qualities of CB draw on photography. The work of Joel Sternfled, Helen Levitt and others had influenced Cammock’s lens. Whilst Levitt’s work is populated, Cammock’s work is often unpopulated in front of the lens, a solo protagonist, that of the author is experienced via the voice. Speak to me, say something. Each tableaux is slow, but if you look carefully enough something specific does happen. The work is based on recall and deals with the memories from age 6 to age 31. Punctuation of the event about memory you say? The event is not only first hand experience but an amalgamation, my mum said that. As is the case with later and more mature work, Cammock refuses to rest her head on the axis of pain. She resists, she pushes back. Aged six holding her mothers hand as the shout ‘Nigger Lover’ lands across mother and child’s walk up municipal steps. Some events are at remove, the National Front march deciding which streets to avoid, overheard conversation, adult protections, such as they are. Language provides her rescue. The final tableaux moves us from the powerless to the powerful. At an underpass she passes a man who says;

‘What are you staring at you Black cunt, don’t stare at me in my own country, this is my country’ The woman said ‘I’m sorry he has just had too much to drink’. I said ‘Don’t be sorry for me, I am sorry for you’ – 2001 aged 31.

In Idlewild, 2020 the haptic caress of the camera, of words, winds round you. “Randomness is like idleness’ route to possibility, keychain, never the sepulchre for word, or line or frame”, Cammock intones. There is an intimacy here about time and thinking and space – what idleness is and what it can produce. The productive forces for whom and why. Idleness as a concept that is both political and laden. Idlewild moves through poetic evocation of this space as contingent and necessary to artistic production, through the polarisation of who gets to be idle or who is deemed lazy. Cammock sings Lazybones, a song that has suffocating connotations of the Black man and labour, singing reaching across and through history – there are resonances with other works where song touches histories that are hard to speak, There is a hole in the sky: Part I (2016) singing Drilling into brain, black babies can’t feel – the Black body subjected to violence and hate and experiment as if feeling nor agency exist. The Black body as owned, cut across by the Black body as thinker as producer – here as artist, as writer – articulating with prescience (written before the COVID pandemic) the slowing down and fixing in space of detail that we are all now familiar with. Who hasn’t been witness to the changing shapes and shades in a room as the day moves through it? The worker who gets up at dawn to clean the hospital wards, to drive the bus, to keep the supermarket open. The unprotected and those ‘essential’ to the emergency conditions, it has deep roots, the landowner Tory MP – showing equal disregard to life today as through history, gaining wealth and privilege though the subjugation of others. Like Changing Room (2015) there is a containment, breath is held and expelled, held and expelled – swaying when writing, swaying when filming.

The body reaches through and around the corners and edges where thoughts can intervene and find space to grow, as long as a crack is left open something can always grow. ‘We are the builders of our own destiny aren’t we?’ (AHitS:PartII)

Beyond the song, beyond the frame, we have the hand, the writer, the giving of language. Cammock uses slippage to post the in-between. Whilst systemic oppression is blinding, the poetics at force acknowledge and probe at something else – a more personal evocation and understanding. The force of personal insight and breath she alludes to, is something we all have and can all inhabit. The empty page, and space on the street is all yours if you are prepared to both claim it and to inhabit it.

Reprise

And you said to me, you write in order to change the world, if you alter even by a millimetre the way people look at reality then you can change it.


Lisa Panting co-founded Hollybush Gardens with Malin Ståhl in 2005. The gallery represents an international roster of artists working in a range of disciplines, including Anne Tallentire, Lubaina Himid, Johanna Billing, Charlotte Prodger and Kirschner + Panos.. Its gallery artists have won significant awards, among them the Turner Prize, Max Mara Art Prize for Women, the Jarman Award, and Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists. In addition to its regular exhibition programme of monographic and group shows, Hollybush Gardens sustains a commitment to delivering lectures, performances and publications, including a small imprint, Hollybush Issue. Prior to the gallery Lisa was a lecturer in 4D at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design and an editor at Book Works, both in London, and has written and lectured on art widely.

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