"WHY CLIMB THE SHARD WHEN YOU COULD JUST PISS ON THE BOTTOM OF IT?" - Will Self
Last week I made my way to the Barbican to listen to a discussion between urban explorer-in-chief Bradley L. Garrett and a writer I very much admire, Will Self. Garrett’s book ‘Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City’ had just been released and I was intrigued to hear more about the exploits from the man who – along with his ‘urbex’ cohorts – had scaled the Shard and all its high rise minions, abseiled up Battersea Power Station’s chimneys, wormed through abandoned tube stations, and uncoiled large sections of London’s Victorian sewer system.
The subject holds a particular interest to me, not just as I have written on this blog about the subversive potential of long-distance urban running, but also because I made my own feeble attempts at ‘urbex-ing’ whilst at university, long before I became aware either of the practice or the dedicated community behind it.
My university town of Loughborough in the East Midlands contained an abandoned Victorian-era hospital right in the town centre, hidden away amongst waste ground behind an Argos. At 5am one Sunday morning I snuck onto the site, had a rudimentary look around, took some photos and swiftly left. This inspired me to then make the 5-mile journey to locate an abandoned asylum, the directions to which had been helpfully passed on through previous years of art and photography students also making the trip. Whilst this may serve as a backdrop for my personal interest in the subject, my lone exploits were merely light callisthenics in comparison to Garrett and the wider ‘urbexing’ communities’ marathon travails.
Garrett began the discussion with the adroit and perversely accurate idea that the vast majority of our presence in the city environment is forbidden; a thought I’d hitherto not fully considered. Indeed, the city is made up of places to which entry is prohibited, most public spaces are subject to curfew, and even places of work and accommodation are subject to necessarily stringent levels of reciprocal exchange.
By undertaking the exploration of one's urban space to these extremities, Garrett argues that the strict matrices of the geography are demonstrably flouted. Anyone who lives in a city or large town will recognise that more often than not we are subject to prescribed movements synchronised at the behest of time and commercial imperatives. There are many invisible yet tacit pressures exerted on the city dweller to conform to an orthodox and routine transit; it leaves us beholden to the public transport system, to authorised rights of way, and to the commodified incentives that maintain their ceaseless barrage. Urban exploring is, Garrett seemed to stress, the most defiant means of escaping the time and fiscal pressures that mandate so many of our movements in and around the urban space.
Will Self, a bastion of the modern resurgance of that loose bundle of ideas known as 'psychogeography', expressed his admiration and support, but had several caveats with which to prise the manhole cover open on the underbelly of the urbexing movement.
He sought to question the ethnography of urbexers; why it appears to be a praxis of, in the main, white, middle-class young men? Garrett conceded that it was this perception of a 'colonial' attitude, particularly invoked through the photography produced by the community, that needed to be moved beyond in the future.
Self also levelled the charge of territoriality on the urbexers, arguing that the everyman could - and indeed, should - subvert the rigid confines of their orientational routine by as trivial a means as simply wandering through the urban space with no ulterior motive other than to experience the locality anew. With this in mind, he raised the characteristiclly acerbic and witty proposal - 'why climb the Shard when you can just piss on the bottom of it?'
The production and disseminating of visual imagery bound up in the mantra of urbexing was another dimension Self took issue with. By taking the images and spreading them online, they were contributing to the vast ocean of simulacra that we are confronted with on a continual basis. Drawing reference to the Situationist's mastermind Guy Debord, Self claimed that the urbex community was conforming to the 'society of the spectacle' by producing a digital duplication of the event and offering it up for consumption, and that the only truly subversive means of exploring the urban environment would be to do so without creating the imagistic by-product.
As Walter Benjamin astutely surmised in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ –
‘The fact is: ‘getting closer to things’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction.'
This obsessive-compulsive urge to capture and replicate for the online medium is at the forefront of my novel ‘Digital’, and something one can see evidence of all the time. Just recently, I attended the Open House London event where myself and apparently half the city’s inhabitants mooched through the carcass of Battersea Power Station; to all intents and purposes becoming a single transitory organism capturing and recapturing the same limited viewpoints on varying technological devices. And yet I succumb to this compulsion just the same, I snapped away in an identical effort to, in some way, crystallise the experience in digital time for posterity.
I can empathise completely with the urbexers, the majority of them accomplished photographers, for wanting those ‘souvenir images’ enshrining their adventures, but I also concur with Will Self, that to truly rebel the only means of so doing would be to resist and simply experience the place on its own terms.
In many ways, urbexing is just another modern example of mainstream culture adopting rebellion for its own insatiable purposes, packaging it nicely for the consumption of the ‘chattering classes’ who in turn are enlivened by their exposure to edgy or 'controversial' symbols of the zeitgeist.
This growing trend can be seen everywhere, from Che Guevara adorning a million student T-shirts, to the shifts in rave culture giving rise to the generic ‘superclub’, to the work of guerrilla artist Banksy being stolen from the very fabric of the city to be sold for extortionate sums as though they’d been lifted straight from the Louvre.
The resurgence of interest in derelict and abandoned places and the hemisphere of artistic photography that envelopes it has become, in essence, a kind of ‘ruin porn’. In any book shop or on countless online blogs, you will find overly-processed images of Detroit (‘the mecca of urban exploring’), Pripyat and countless other abandoned asylums, stations, hospitals, industrial factories; such that any pre-existing subversive quotient becomes instantly diluted by their exposure to the bright lights of the mainstream.
Whilst the acts of urban exploring are to be commended (and, I believe, more useful information should be made available for those budding protégés seeking to join the community); the inevitable secondary tier of ‘spectacle’ that no doubt serves its purpose in attracting those protégés, is equally likely to simply serve as ample fodder for those content instead to experience the adventures of others vicariously through the portal of the internet. As Self advocated, your everyday subversion of the city need not be swinging from Battersea’s chimneys, it could be as simple as long-distance urban running, or as mundane as walking a different route to work, something that excludes no one and is possible of being realised by everyone.
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