November 18, 2022 • 65 mins
In this sixth podcast, I'm joined by Dave Beech, an artist and writer from a working class background. We talk about tourism, class and colonial gaze; how culture and lifestyle is commodified and purchased, and the potential impacts of this.
Dave is reader in art and Marxism at University Arts London, and is author of the books Art and Labour (Brill 2020), Art and Postcapitalism (Pluto 2019) and Art and Value (Brill 2015). Beech worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. He has recently had exhibitions as a solo artist in UNO gallery, New Orleans, Loft 8 gallery, Vienna and Exeter Phoenix.
MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh (tr. Mussel Gathering | Precious Fragments) is a multi-platform project using sculpture-making and conversation to explore contemporary Cornish cultural identity. To find out more please visit www.sovayberriman.co.uk/MESKLA-Brewyon-Drudh. Through workshops, podcasts, a symposium and an exhibition the project invites people to share their experiences of identity and Cornwall, and their views on Cornish culture and its relationship to land, language, heritage, tourism, the Cornish diaspora and much more.
These podcasts record conversations between me, Sovay Berriman, and guests whose research or lived experienced touches on the project themes. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker’s own. All conversations are carried out with a spirit of generosity and openness, creating space for the discussions to twist and turn.
Govenek a'm beus hwi dhe omlowenhe goslowes orto/ I hope you enjoy listening
Please note: These podcasts were recorded in different locations and with a range of equipment. As such the sound quality varies and at times external factors are more present than ideal in the recordings. Resources: For a full list of resources and references for the project please visit https://sovayberriman.co.uk/MESKLA-Resources
Emily Thomas - The Meaning of Travel
https://philosophynow.org/issues/140/The_Meaning_of_Travel_by_Emily_Thomas Michael John Law - A World Away Nanook of the North - Wikipedia Richard Hoggart - The Uses of Literacy Alain Badiou - Theory of Ethics
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Sovay Berriman (00:00):
Dydh da ha dynnargh pub huni dhe bodkastow
MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh ostyesgenev, Sovay Berriman. Hello
(00:25):
and welcome everyone to theMESKLA | Brewyon Drudh podcasts,
hosted by me Sovay Berriman.MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh is a
multi platform project, usingsculpture making and
conversation to explorecontemporary Cornish cultural
identity. Through workshops,podcasts, a symposium, and an
(00:50):
exhibition. The project invitespeople to share their
experiences of identity andCornwall, and their views on
Cornish culture and itsrelationship to land, language,
heritage, tourism, the Cornishdiaspora, and much, much more.
These podcasts recordConversations with guests whose
(01:14):
research or lived experiencetouches on the project themes.
The views, thoughts and opinionsexpressed are the speaker's own.
All conversations are carriedout with a spirit of generosity
and openness, creating space forthe discussions to twist and
turn. And I'm very grateful toall who have taken part.
(01:40):
In this sixth podcast, I'mjoined by Dave beech, an artist
and writer from a working classbackground. He is reader in art
and Marxism at University ArtsLondon. And he is author of the
books Art and Labour, Art andPost Capitalism, and Art and
Value. Beech worked in thecollective Freee with Andy here
(02:06):
and Mel Jordan between 2004 and2018. And has recently had solo
exhibitions at Ina gallery, NewOrleans, loft eight gallery,
Vienna, and Exeter Phoenix,Devon, we join the conversation
with Dave introducing his artand writing practices.
Dave Beech (02:28):
Okay, so there are two things that I'm working on
at the moment, which might berelated. So one is I'm writing a
book called Art and class. Andthis is, so as part of my
thinking around this, I've beenkind of looking at the way that
(02:48):
the working class has beenrepresented culturally, both in
in artworks but also in, in theliterature on on culture. And
one of the so one of the thingsthat might come out of that, in
our discussion is therelationship between the urban
(03:10):
working class and the ruralworking class, and have
different kinds of relations tomodernity, and on relations to
technology and so on. Andfantasies around the working
class and the fantasies aroundwork. And fantasies around
different kinds of organisationof of work, you know, so So, so
(03:36):
that's one thing that comesthrough that study of, of the
literature. And the other thingis that I'm an artist and I'm, I
make photo based artworkswithout a camera because I use
books. So my, the, you know,the, my process isn't to take a
(03:57):
camera out onto the streets andphotograph things, my process is
to go to secondhand book shops,and buy books with photos in
them that have travelled to mefrom all over the world. And, as
you might imagine, you know,quite a lot of photographs,
photographs of people doingthings that you find in these
(04:17):
books, and I'm kind of I'mreally interested in, in in this
this sort of, you know, verystrange what you end up with is
a very strange collection ofimages of different people doing
things which I've, you know,stacked up in my studio, kind of
images of people on various invarious places around the world,
(04:42):
you know, maybe looking at thecamera are looking at some some
objects that they've made orthat they're selling or
something like that. And I'mreally interested in these
encounters that are there andbeing in a sense kind of
transported to me so so. So in asense you've got in the history
(05:06):
of photography, what you havegenerally is photographers
leaving their house to gosomewhere else to take a
photograph of something. But inmy case, what I do is I stay
put, and allow these photographsto come to me from all over the
world, and then I rearrangedthem into montages that kind of
tell stories about relationsbetween people in different
(05:30):
places. So So those are thethings that I kind of pick up
by, by looking at the wholehistory of photography, then
kind of feed into myunderstanding of what it is that
I'm looking at when I'm lookingat things in the world, because,
because in a sense, the worldends up looking like a lot of
photographs. Because this isthis is what I'm looking at on a
(05:52):
day to day basis is like, well,you know, why do they photograph
African people this way, andEuropean people that way? And
then you kind of get this senseof like, Ah, okay, so they
relate to their environment indifferent ways, supposedly, so
so then you can kind of you seethat replicated in the way that
people represent themselves. SoI can kind of then deconstruct
(06:15):
my experience of the world viamy kind of understanding of how
photography has shaped how welook at people.
Sovay Berriman (06:22):
Is this process akin to your writing process?
Dave Beech (06:29):
Yeah. When I write, and I've been told this by other
writers and that have given mefeedback on my writing at
certain stages in my in writingthe books is I quote too much.
Why can't you just summarisewhat people say? And I'm like,
Well, I want to use their words.Because the way that they phrase
(06:53):
things is part of theinvestigation. And that carries
information. You know, so theway that people talk about
things carries information, notjust what they said. So if I
summarise it, then I'm losinginformation. And so quoting, and
in a sense, building a book outof quotes, is, is part of my
(07:14):
writing practice. And thenbuilding images out of other
people's images is part of myartistic practice. And, you
know, when I wrote art andvalue, the initial idea for that
was to go through the entirehistory of economics. And just
identify the points at whicheconomists have mentioned art.
(07:35):
And just cut out those quotesand then contextualise them. And
effectively, that's what I dowith the history of photography
as well. Yeah,
Sovay Berriman (07:41):
so within both those practices, there is a very
analogue or manual sort of wayof working. And this is
something we've spoken aboutbefore. And I got to mention to
you before we started speakingtoday, around a nation of hands
(08:04):
working, and is that connectedin your research? or V to
certain identities? Or cultures?Or? Yeah, would you expand? For
me,
Dave Beech (08:22):
as soon as we start to talk about hands, I can have,
like, I have all that I've got,there's all these red flags
around it. So whilst I have avery particular interest and
commitment to working with myhands, you know, sometimes
working with my hands just lookslike this, you know, I'm using
(08:45):
my hands to flip through thebook. And it's like, that's,
that's me doing something manualas opposed to maybe doing a
Google image search forsomething, you know, so it's
like, um, so there's thisphysical thing in my room, which
is me with a book. And that's,that's got a kind of charge for
(09:07):
me. It relates me to the worldin a particular way, which doing
a Google search doesn't orrather, the Google Search
relates to the world in adifferent way. And so whilst I
am really there's a commitmentfor me, so working with physical
(09:28):
books, but I am really worriedthat when I if I if I, if I just
say that in a very casual way,that it could be read as me
having a very romantic attitudetowards the handmade or
something like that, or, ormaybe even worse than a romantic
(09:52):
attitude to the handmade with acommitment to the handmade as a
form of luxury or something likethat. So, so the hand is
important in some respects. ButI've always got to be very
careful not to allow that to beconflated with other conceptions
of the hand.
Sovay Berriman (10:13):
Yeah, and there's so much around that, for
instance, in like, well, this ismy interpretation of it, like
thinking around now farmersmarkets and such, like and
wanting vegetables with mud onthem, or, you know, it's even
in, you know, my lifetime, whichis sort of meat medium, long and
(10:35):
short has. It was just normal tohave markets that sell
vegetables, and then they sortof disappeared, and then they
came back, but sort of escalatedprices and selling something
more than just carrots, there'ssome there's totally lifestyle
purchasing going on there. Is itfetishized?
Dave Beech (11:02):
I think that the hand itself has become a kind of
fetish. So you know, this ideaof, of, of being hands on, are
of doing something with yourhands, as a way of, in a sense,
reconnecting yourself with aworld that you don't belong to.
(11:23):
So you know, going to thefarmers market yourself. And
being faced, what you want, whenyou go to the farmers market is
to be face to face with afarmer, you know, so you don't
want you don't want to send anintermediary to do the shopping
for you. And you don't want thefarmer to send an intermediary
(11:44):
to do the selling for them, youwant in a sense to shake the
hand of the farmer, even if thatshake is really just you handing
over money, and then taking themoney and giving you some
vegetables, that that contact,which is which is really
signified by the idea of ahandshake, or the idea of a kind
(12:06):
of an exchange of money in onehand and, and product in the
other is a kind of fetish for acertain kind of like a
corrective to a problem in theworld corrected to a problem in
(12:28):
your life, a sense that maybe,you know, in the midnight in the
mid 20th century, you would, youwould use the language of
alienation, you'd say you feelalienated from the land, you
feel alienated from other fromthe poor, you feel alienated
from nature, and so on and soforth. And so what you do is
(12:52):
you, you, you cure thatalienation, by I don't know,
befriending the community offarmers or something like that.
And so you, you, you, you, yourecognise this loss of
connection, and then you createa different kind of connection,
(13:12):
you don't actually become afarmer, or work with farmers or
live with farmers, you create adifferent kind of connection,
which you then can imagine,solves the problem that you
otherwise feel,
Sovay Berriman (13:26):
perhaps the Fetish and that is around
honesty, or a notion of honestyor a nation of the authentic and
authentic connection. That isactually a performance.
Dave Beech (13:39):
Yeah, so in my, in my Marxist way of thinking about
it, what you have is, as a is aproblem, that's a social
relation, and you cure it withan activity. So so that's where
the Fetish comes in, you thinkthat you can, you can, I don't
(13:59):
know, you can retain all of yourprivileges. And you can retain
all your luxuries, but they canall be compensated by a gesture.
And so you can do that gesture,like with the I want to go to
(14:21):
the farmers market, and Isupport farmers and, you know,
you can have this kind of ethicsof going to a farmers market
rather than a supermarket orsomething like that. And so
you've got this kind of gesturalsolution to an ingrained,
structural, historical, socialproblem where every time you go
(14:43):
to the farmers market, you'redoing your bit, you know, so
there's this kind of gesturalaspect to it, but you can also
do this in relation to yourself.So so you can do it in relation
to farmers or to workers in someway but you can also do it in
relation to yourself and you cansay, you know, I I work in an
office or I don't work at all,or, you know, I have this
(15:08):
luxurious lifestyle, but Icompensate for this, because I
also, I don't know, I work oneday a week for the food bank,
you know, our I, I have, I growmy own vegetables, you know, so
(15:29):
I'm not completely sort of cutoff from the land and cut off
from that kind of that life ofneed, and, and nature and so on.
And there's there's, so there's,there's a kind of self gesturing
(15:50):
where you, you have this onelittle aspect of your life,
which you which you, which youdo as a way of compensating for
everything else in your life. Soone of the ways that this is
done in the art world, forinstance, is you have this
(16:10):
performative relationship tocooking together. So you say,
you know, what we're going to dois we're going to have, we're
going to have this 12 monthproject with artists and this
local community. And what we'regoing to do is, we're going to
start by cooking together andeating together. And this is
going to be our way of, youknow, not being intellectuals
(16:36):
not being not, there's nodifference between an artist and
a, an audience member, if whatyou're doing is chopping onions.
And so you have this, this kindof this idea that Praxis can
solve social relations, becauseat the moment, when you're
practising something, thosesocial relations become
(16:58):
invisible. But they're beinginvisible doesn't actually make
them no longer existent. So sothat's what I mean by when I say
that it's gesture, or is that wecan put it to one side for the
time being. So it's a formalequality, that we're all cutting
onions, in the same way, when,in fact, our reasons for being
(17:22):
in that place, and sometimes ourrelations, our social relations
to that place, you know, forinstance, one being employed to
be there, the artist and theother not being employed to be
there, the member of the publicare very, very different. But
they those things also becomeinvisible, when you're doing
Praxis together when you'redoing something with an
(17:45):
audience. Which is, which is,which is practical, rather than,
I don't know, theoretical oraesthetic or something.
Sovay Berriman (18:00):
So there's something I mean, it seems like
there's something in all thoseactivities that is around, like,
whether it'd be the artist doingthe sort of Greek cooking that
you suggest or like the shopper,the farmers market, or the
volunteer, a community projector the food bank, a charity
(18:21):
setting that there's somethingthere about seeking
reconnection, or, I mean, Isuppose I'm sort of, cuz you use
the word around compensation,which is easy, I think to hear
as a negative. Oh, you know, sothis is someone who is knowing
(18:47):
but is that also potentiallysomething in there and a general
a genuine like, seeking toconnect with something more
manual?
Dave Beech (19:01):
Okay, so it's what I'm gonna say no. And I'm gonna
give a different example nowjust to kind of illustrate the
kinds of problems that I'mlooking into and thinking about
all the time. So if we thinkabout travel, okay, and the
(19:22):
difference between working classtravel or middle class travel.
All right, so there's thisthere's this amazing book by
Michael John law called a worldaway. And it's about the the
invention of the packageholiday. And basically, the
invention of what we would nowkind of pejoratively call
(19:45):
tourism, as opposed to genuinetravel, you know, genuine travel
the there's, there's anotherreally interesting book by Emily
Thomas called the meaning oftravel. I'm interested in travel
because of my I'm interested inthe history of photography,
because photographers travel.And quite often what we what we
(20:05):
want from the photograph is thatthe photographer is genuinely
gone somewhere, and had agenuine encounter with something
that is remote to us, and theyphotograph it. And then we get
to, in a sense, experiencesomething of that real travel,
not just a tourist experience,but real travel through the
(20:25):
photograph. And so I'm reallyinterested in different theories
of travel. And one of the thingsthat is that comes through every
study of, of travel, you know,like, so Emily Thomas has looked
at, when she talks about themeaning of travel, she's looked
at the way that philosophershave written about travel. And
(20:48):
the way that Michael John Latalks about travel is actually
looked at the way the industryitself, the tourist industry.
And, and the difference betweenwhen so, so you have middle
class people initially going onforeign holidays, and working
(21:10):
class, people don't go onforeign holidays. So going into
a foreign place is genuine, is agenuine experience of another
culture. All right, and thenwhen working class, people start
to do the same thing, thenyou're going to have to do
something extra, to have agenuine experience of a foreign
(21:31):
culture, that's not the same asa working class experience of
going to a foreign place. And soyou have to go effectively, this
goes back to the hands idea,effectively, you're going to
have to organise this yourself.In other words, you're going to
have to have a hands onrelationship to your own
(21:52):
holiday, whereas the workingclass will go on holidays that
are packaged for them, by ourcompany. And so you're gonna
have to, you know, so it becomeslike more about sort of
wandering around a foreigncountry and trying to go
somewhere that you would nothave planned to go to, you know,
(22:16):
and that's genuine travel. And,and the way that the way that
Emily Thomas talks about genuinetravel, as opposed to tourism
is, is the the, there's there'sincreased levels of alterity,
there's increased levels ofotherness, the more otherness
you get into your, into yourjourney, the more genuine this
(22:41):
is, and therefore, the moreauthentic your experience has
been. Whereas the the idea ofworking class foreign travel, is
that you go to Spain, and youhave fish and chips, and then
you go to a British or an IrishPub. And so you try. So the idea
that the negative picture ofworking class travel, is that
(23:05):
you're going somewhere else, butyou're getting exactly the same
as what you would have had, ifyou'd have stayed there's zero
alterity zero otherness. So thisis not genuine travel. And what
you what you what you what youthen see in the as a pattern
(23:27):
is is this designation of acertain class to a certain kind
of activity. So what's reallyinteresting that comes out of
Michael John laws book on aworld away, is when, when
package holidays, first started,they were described as being
(23:51):
very working class kinds ofholidays. But actually,
subsequently, when historianshave looked at the data, most of
the people that went on themwere middle class, but they were
assigned a kind of working classcharacteristic, because they
were packaged because they werecommercial. And because a
(24:15):
minority of the middle classwould, I had already rejected
that and then started to havethese more genuine more
authentic experiences of foreignplaces of more out of the way
places so so one of the ways ofdoing that is to go to other
other countries, countries thathad not been traditional holiday
(24:39):
destinations for the British forinstance. And another way of
doing it is to go to more remoteplaces within countries that
people have traditionally goneto add. Another way of doing it
is to is to organise it yourselfand to do your research before
you go Oh, all of that kind ofthing. So so it's like you, it
(25:03):
becomes a kind of craft, you arecrafting your own holiday,
whereas the the package holidaysindustrialised. And so pattern
so you kind of have, in a sense,this kind of a sort of William
Morris ethic of the holiday,which dis which, even if you're
so so in a sense, even if you'remiddle class, you can end up
(25:25):
having a working classexperience. And, and, but what,
because you've gone on thisindustrial holiday, or
industrialised holiday. And soyou get this kind of crafting of
a holiday, which makes you oddlymiddle class. So historically,
you would say that craft is aworking class activity. But when
(25:46):
you craft your own life, that'sa middle class activity. And the
crafting then becomes that andthis is what I think makes it
sing. This is why I think youare right to say that the hand
becomes fetishized, becausecrafting becomes fetishized
insofar as it it becomes awithin within, you know, so long
(26:11):
as craft isn't what you do for aliving, then crafting becomes
very middle class. Whereas whenwhen you craft for a living,
then it's not middle class. Soyou get these. So another thing
that I'm really interested in isfood, and cooking and things
like that. So that what thatmeans is that you could do
(26:32):
exactly the same thing assomebody else. And when you do
it as a middle class personthat's crafting. And when
somebody else does it, it's justwork. So you know, that you can
you can fetishize the degree towhich, when you cook dinner,
you're crafting your life andyou're expressing yourself and
(26:55):
you're objectifying yourself,and your and your, your, your
being fulfilled, and so on andso forth. And you're doing the
right thing, and all thesethings. But when somebody else
does exactly the same activity,they're showing just how much
they are. They're not livingtheir own life. They're
(27:16):
alienated from their own lifebecause they're cooking
something for somebody else. Andso all of the all of these kinds
of patterns of differentiationare expressed in the various
ways in which we pat ourselveson the back, or we sneer at
(27:39):
other people through doing insome cases, exactly the same
thing.
Sovay Berriman (27:45):
Just going back to the tourism point. I mean, it
seems to me that this is tourismor an aspect of where tourism is
connected to colonial activity.And this sort of , and the
romanticising of the Explorer.It also seems to me that that,
(28:09):
that behaviour has equally or ifnot more impactful impact upon
the place, the touristicdestination and the people and
(28:30):
culture that that is becomingthat tourist destination.
Dave Beech (28:36):
So one of the I think you're right that
especially historically so in inEmily Thomas's book, there's,
there's there's a reallyinteresting relationship between
the kind of the philosophicalidea of travel and colonialism
(29:00):
and settlement and so on. Butwhat what one of the really
interesting developments is thatin the late 20th century, and in
the 21st century, it's certaincolonialist patterns become the
solution to the problem oftourism. So, so, for instance,
(29:23):
the idea of working for acharity for a year or also
becomes associated with like,genuine travel, because you
have, you know, you go and maybework alongside people from
another culture people in, inmany cases, people of a
(29:44):
different race, and you spendreal time with them. And so that
so that colonial relationship,then feels to our at least it's
written about as being moregenuine In more authentic more
real than, than the Brits goingto Spain and getting a suntan,
(30:10):
you know and and, and and soit's there's been a kind of
maybe there has been a kind ofblindness towards how much that
reintroduces the colonialrelationship into our desire for
an authentic experience of theother, the your, the desire for
(30:36):
otherness that Emily Thomastalks about them then becomes,
you know, more and moreintensified, so that the only
way you can really get it is tois to actually go and live in
another community. And in and insome cases that that then
(30:59):
becomes less about less aboutholidaying. And perhaps it
becomes work. So, you know, the,the only way to really seriously
experienced the other is to geta job working in another
country. So you're paid to goand work with people who are
(31:21):
other. And that becomes evenmore genuine, even more
authentic than somebody justtaken a year out. So yeah, so
it's, you would think, I don'tknow what I would think anyway,
that this whole experience ofcolonialism would have would
have made those cuts would havemade us very conscious, and very
(31:47):
alert and very concerned aboutthose relationships, but
actually, in, in studies bysociologists, of people going on
Gap Year breaks, to work forcharities and so forth. Shows
that actually, there's, there's,there's very little trace of
(32:07):
that perception of that being aconcern. But more of like that
this was this was an experiencethat improved me, that made me
better, that made me moreauthentic, they made me
understand the world better.
Sovay Berriman (32:26):
Huh. So connecting that to objects, and
the tourism memento, but alsoexpanding upon that into
lifestyle mementos and adoptionof life's ever, I suppose what
(32:54):
I'm trying to say is like,turning, potentially turning
what is perceived as somebody,an other lifestyle, or a
fetishize lifestyle. It becominga product that can be purchased
and put on. Yeah, and that feelslike an extension to this
(33:21):
tourism conversation.
Dave Beech (33:23):
Yeah, absolutely. Is. And I've written about this.
And it's very clear, no, there'sthere's lots of ways that, that,
that it feels very intricate tome the way that things have been
(33:45):
transposed the way that thingsare substituted for each other.
So So for instance, you in the18th century, there arises this
idea that philosophically, ahuman being becomes authentic,
when they make a world thatrepresents their subjectivity
(34:08):
out of them. So So you so youknow, like, building you're
building, making things, youknow, making things is an
expression of who you are. Andthen when you recognise yourself
in the world, then you're athome, and it is a world that
you've made, and you've made itin your own image, according to
your subjectivity and so on andso forth. And that's the theory.
(34:32):
But actually, when it's appliedto especially middle class urban
life, at the end of the 18thcentury, beginning of the 19th
century, it takes on a slightlydifferent form, which is you
express yourself, you becomemore authentic, when you buy
things that express your taste.So, this is where the that whole
(34:56):
kind of concept of taste comesfrom. Taste becomes this way of
seeing yourself in a world andhaving the world reflect back to
you, and therefore have an innersense of our view of your of the
inner world, becoming an outerworld and the outer world
(35:17):
becoming an inner world of thesethings, being completely sort of
at one with each other. But nowthrough purchase, not through
making. And what you get then,in the early 19th century, is
this is this sense, andespecially with the rise of
industrialization, where you,the person who buys the
(35:41):
products, expresses themselvesin his authentic through that
purchase, but the people thatmade it are not expressing
themselves. They don't becomeauthentic by making the things
that middle class people want tobuy. And then this is extended
and transposed into this ideathat the, the indigenous make,
(36:12):
let's, let's, let's put it inthe most negative way we can
make tourist trinkets that allowthe tourist to feel authentic,
but where the indigenousproducer is, is producing things
for money. So is therefore nothaving that authentic experience
(36:36):
in either in the production ofthe things or in the sale of the
things, that there's, there's akind of, there's a double
alienation there. Becauseyou're, you're alienated from
the product, because the productis now being taken away from
you. But you're also alienatedfrom yourself, because you're
producing things for the marketfor the tourist market. So yeah,
(36:58):
exactly what you were saying.
Sovay Berriman (37:00):
I was just thinking, and the other layer to
that is that many touristtrinkets, for want of a better
term, that a mass produced, mayvery well be mass produced
elsewhere, in an 'other' placeentirely to the tour, the place
(37:20):
that they are representing. Andthat, so that's that other layer
of disassociation. And, and thenthere's a hierarchy of, of
tourists trinkets, the craftedartisan, slice of that tourism
(37:44):
memento market, if you like.
Dave Beech (37:48):
Yeah. And so, we we then have, in a sense, the split
between Tourism and Travel isthen in a sense marked on the
objects themselves, because youhave these tourist objects, and
then the genuine article, youknow, which is which is handmade
(38:11):
by local people. And, and so andso you get this kind of class
split in objects, which followsthe contours of this
intellectual distinction betweentourism and travel. And the,
the, the ideal situation is thatyou fill your house with genuine
(38:39):
handmade, locally producedlocally sourced traditional
objects that have that othernessin them, you know, so, so it's
still about that alterity, it'sstill about making contact with
wilderness and somehow capturingthe wilderness taking the
(39:06):
wilderness with you have of allalways I think of as a kind of
self making, through theencounter with wilderness. So
the wilderness is always anotherness for you. It's not an
otherness for the other, becausethen you'd leave the stuff
(39:27):
there. You have to take it withyou because the otherness is for
you. And it's part of yournarrative and your crafting of
yourself and your craft yourselfthrough the encounter with
others.
Sovay Berriman (39:44):
So, can we think now or perhaps hear took a bit
about the, that otherness fromthe other'ed's perspective. And
that relationship with, yeah,the the objects, the totems, of
(40:06):
that otherness. And, yeah.
Dave Beech (40:12):
Well, in a very, very straightforward, slightly
sceptical, cynical way ofthinking about this. But I want
to link that to our sort ofcritique of the romance of the
wilderness. So the romance ofthe wilderness says, You, the
(40:34):
other should only make thingsthat are traditional, and
indigenous, and local, and soon, and so on, that the
tradition should determine youractivity, not the market. You
know, as soon as you startmaking market things, then this
(40:55):
isn't what the romance of theauthor wants. That's from the
the romance is from theperspective of the visitor. So
if you, if you dismantle theromance, then then you the, the
(41:16):
person producing the artisangoods or the tourists goods, is
doing that for money. And theproblem is, you can't simply
express that without devaluingthe object. And the whole point
(41:38):
of it is to produce value. Soyou so there's a sense in which
you have to sort of go alongwith the romance to a certain
point, in order to sell to thepeople who are subscribing to
that romance. But ultimately, ifyou want to be cynical about
this, or sceptical about this,you can say that the there is no
(42:03):
there is no romance for theproducer that the producer knows
full well what they're doing,when they're making these things
in this kind of commercial way.And and that you know, the
difference between the massmarket and the artisan market is
(42:25):
not just that one is inauthenticand the other is authentic. But
that one is low cost are low,low value, and the other is high
value. The Artisan has got morevalue in one of the ways that
the artisan gets more value isthat it is closed enrollments.
And not just that it's handmade,the handmade aspect is part of
(42:48):
the romance. And ARV means ittakes more time and it's more
expensive to produce, becauseit's made out of it's not made
of plastic or something, youknow, but it's also about
marking the object with thatromance. So that from the
perspective of the producer, theromance, you have a kind of
(43:15):
conflict, conflictedrelationship to the romance,
because the romance is not yourromance. But the romance is part
of the value. And therefore is,is in your discourse around the
object and might be even in youmight need to mark your space
and mark your body with thisromance as well. You know, so
(43:38):
there's, there's this whole kindof apparatus of being ourselves
for others, that you have tosignify your selfishness to your
to others and signify yourotherness of to them to them,
and to yourself. And you know,and so you end up with this kind
(43:59):
of living kind of romance ormarking your territory with that
romance.
Sovay Berriman (44:10):
And that's,
Dave Beech (44:11):
it's part of the marketing
Sovay Berriman (44:12):
that surely is in itself, distancing and
creates the opportunity or thesituation for a disconnect of
place, self, identity.
Dave Beech (44:39):
Yeah, so there's, there's a really famous example
of this. So the very first,apparently, you know, this is
what I've read. The very firstdocumentary movie of an
indigenous person is Nanook ofthe North. off, which was made
(45:01):
in 1922, by Robert flattie. AndNanuq of the North is a film
about Nanuq. And Nanuq was notcalled Nanuq. The name is given
to the, to him, because it feelsmore authentic, it feels like a
proper indigenous name, whereashis actual name didn't feel
(45:28):
indigenous enough. And Nanuq ofthe North is a film about whale
hunting. And the filmmakerwanted him to hunt with a spear,
even though by this time, by thetime that it's made in the
1920s, they hunted with guns,it's like, that doesn't make the
movie that I'm after. So we'regonna get you to hunt with a
(45:50):
spear for the benefit of thefilm. So it's like, you know, so
that there are all these issuesaround documentary generally,
and this is just like oneexample of it, but this is like,
this is how the an image of theindigenous is projected onto the
indigenous. And, you know,there's, there are, it's not
(46:12):
just an idea, there are realobjective forces, which are
then, in a sense, put onto theindigenous to be indigenous to
be really indigenous, you know,and, and there's this, there's
this trope that comes out overand over again, in, in
(46:32):
contemporary writing on workingclass culture. For instance,
where as soon as you don't go tocollege, or become successful in
a particular field, or, youknow, you're, you're good at
something, music, sports,something like that. When middle
(46:52):
class people encounter you, thefirst thing they say, and they
say, it's just like, it's apattern, it's like a tick, that
they can't help say it is youdon't seem working class. And,
and so, you know, you're you're,you you speak, to articulately
(47:13):
to be working class, I wouldn'thave guessed that you're working
class, you know, you don't dressworking class and all this kind
of thing, because they have thisidea of what the working class
should look like, should speak,like, should act like. And, and
so there's this, there's this.There's this parallel, I think,
with like, it's not enough justto be indigenous, it's not
(47:36):
enough just to be working class,you have to look and act and
talk and seem like that, whichmeans you have to conform to a
predetermined image, and theimage, more than likely will
have been produced decades orlonger ago. And so there's,
(47:56):
there's there becomes a kind oftemporal element to this. And so
the romance of the indigenousand the romance of the working
class. And the romance of thehandmade, is always presented as
a kind of nostalgia, because theimage that we have of it was
always produced a generation ortwo ago,
Sovay Berriman (48:18):
thinking about class and place, and yeah, very
much that romanticism around andwhat I've called before the
Fetish around class, itsboundaried, and it needs to stay
within that boundary, and therecan't be these sort of tendrils
or shifts or movements.
Dave Beech (48:40):
Yeah, there's this really odd moment, you know,
Richard Hoggart, who wrote theuses of literacy. So it's like,
one of the books that that thathelped to found what we now
think of as cultural studies.And Richard haka, who was
himself working class and wentto university, and then became
(49:01):
one of the first people to studythe working class, as a as a
living culture within within hisresearch, and so he's like,
really important in terms ofthat, that that resistance to
the idea of of, of like, whatshould be studied in in
(49:23):
university, what counts is asproper culture and so forth, but
even he said, that during hislifetime, the working class have
gone from being you know, peoplein in rags in slums, you know,
with nothing, you know, who wereand he says that when he when he
(49:46):
was growing up, they were, youknow, he experienced days, with
or without food, or with, youknow, with just eating a slice
of bread or something like that.So hunger is part Out of his
conception of the working class,because that's where it was when
he was young. And then he says,you know, there can't be a
(50:08):
working class anymore becausethe working class have got
radios and televisions. And, andthey, they, they have nice
clothes, you know. And then theyhave steady employment. And so I
was like, as soon as the workingclass changes, its its form, it
changes. Its its look. And youknow, and changes, you know, as
(50:33):
soon as the working class itselfhas organised itself to a point
where it's forced its employees,its employers to give it higher
wages, and therefore, to havebetter clothes, and better
houses and more food, then it'sno longer working class. That,
to me, is a really bogusargument, because the working
(50:56):
class has improved itsconditions. And that does not
mean it's no longer workingclass, it just doesn't look like
our image of the working classthat we have, from the 19th
century, and from the first 30years of the 20th century. And
the same thing happens withmodern rural lifestyles and
(51:19):
things like that.
Sovay Berriman (51:23):
There's, there's something that's coming into my
mind here that, that I can'tarticulate better than saying,
what, making friends with anexperience of being in a place,
(51:47):
going to and other, and yeah,putting it on, and making
friends with it. And itsrepresentatives. Yet still,
there are very clear lines andboundaries. And again, how, I'm
(52:12):
interested in how from yourresearch and what you speak of,
how those other hold on toidentity or space, what are the
I don't know, mechanisms of thator behaviours of that or I
(52:34):
haven't got the right words forfor it, if you know what I mean.
Dave Beech (52:40):
I don't think I've got the right words for it
either. And I don't think that Idon't think I've got a solution
for this because I think whatwhat was what we're experiencing
in this period of history is isa right wing ascendancy a middle
(53:04):
class ascendancy or whiteascendancy? Where the struggles
of I don't know of, of peoplewho don't live that, that kind
(53:24):
of hegemonic life, theirstruggles have been
marginalised, and you know, we,we, we hear a lot from the right
about how woke our culture isbecause, you know, we're
(53:48):
interested in diversity and soon and so forth. And diversity
has become a kind of ethicalnecessity. It's demanded of us,
but, but at the same time thisthis is this is a perception,
okay? This is a subjectiveperception. It feels to me as if
(54:13):
the diversity the diversity isbeing imposed on the
Metropolitan centre as somethingthat makes them ethical by by
acknowledging diversity. Allright. So in that sense, you
(54:35):
can't be an indigenous ruralperson. With diversity, you're
the object of somebody else'sdiversity, you're not that
diverse yourself. You arespecific particular individual,
you are of a particular place ofa particular tradition. You're
(54:57):
not being asked to becomediverse. You're asked to remain
identical with images of you.And, and the same, actually, is
the case for, you know, aworking class person who accepts
(55:19):
dive diversity, then, in theliterature, and I've read this
on more than one occasion,within the literature, as soon
as the working class personacknowledges the the importance
of diversity, they become middleclass. So you lose your identity
through through thisacknowledgement of, of
(55:43):
diversity. And some people, itaren't in order for that
diversity to work, some peoplehave to remain identical with
themselves to not. So to notbenefit from the ethics of
diversity, and this is this isAlan by Jews, theory of ethics.
So he says, what ethics demandsis an other and, and the other
(56:10):
comes in two forms, the other tosave, and the other to kill. So,
and you basically do both at thesame time. And he was saying
that what you have to do to beethical is to identify the evil
and identify who you're savingby killing that evil, and then
(56:30):
kill them. So So you need another in order to remain
ethical. And you need that othernot to save itself. But for you
to save it. And so that's whatI'm basing this on, really is
that that kind of idea ofethics. And I think that
there's, there's a version ofyou, we could, we can apply that
(56:54):
I think, to this idea of AI ofidentity and diversity, and who
gets to be ethically diverse?
Sovay Berriman (57:06):
Can you, This is pushing a bit the bounds of the
themes of our conversation, butit really, I'd be really
interested to hear your thoughtsin connection to this with the
term social mobility.
Dave Beech (57:25):
Okay, so this is social mobility is particularly
related for, in my reading ofthe literature anyway, on class.
And, and part of the idea ofthis really is about denying
class. So if you have socialmobility, and if social mobility
(57:46):
is possible, is potential, thenpeople are not in a class. As a
matter of the structure ofsociety, they're in a class
because I've chosen to be inthat class. In other words, if
if you if you can say thatworking class, people can work
(58:08):
their way out of poverty, oreducate themselves out of out of
poverty, and so on. So if yousay that every single working
class person is capable ofbecoming middle class, then
anyone who's left behind asworking class is there, of their
own volition, it's their ownfault. They just didn't work
(58:31):
hard enough, they didn't tryhard enough, they didn't
succeed. And if they tried alittle harder than they could
have become middle class and theidea in the neoliberal idea, but
also the idea in America of theunderclass, is really the idea
that it's entirely their ownfault. And nobody else is to
(58:51):
blame for this, and therefore,they have no right for society
to help them out in any waywhatsoever. In fact, the more we
help them, the less likely theyare to try themselves to become
middle class.
Sovay Berriman (59:08):
Can I bring that back around, social mobility and
the tourism conversation, andbehaviours of colonialism and
this boundaried or positioningof otherness, fetish, and who
(59:35):
stays in what place. As a, to Toconclude, conversation?
Dave Beech (59:47):
Well, this means as well as talking about social
mobility, we need to talk aboutmobility itself. And there's in
terms of the the the philosophyof travel, travel is a positive
thing. Travel is something thatthat helps you develop as a
human being. It's educative.It's it's enriching, travel,
(01:00:13):
travel. Travel is, is a form ofknowledge. Travel is a is a form
of experience that that is that,that allows us, like I said
before to craft, who we are. Andobviously, in order for this to
(01:00:34):
work, some people have to staywhere they are, because we're
travelling to experience thatotherness. If they travelled to
us while we travelled to them,then that otherness wouldn't be
there. And also, the, theotherness of travel clearly, if
you look at the literaturedoesn't work, when people from
(01:00:58):
other places come to theMetropolitan centre, that
doesn't count their otherness,we don't experience their
otherness, they experience ourotherness. So we don't get the
benefit from that. So they haveto stay still. And we have to
travel to them, in order forthis romance of travel, to be
realised, and therefore, we haveto have this economy of
(01:01:24):
mobility. Some people are verymobile, and travel a lot and
experience a lot, you know,think think about, think about
curators versus artists, forinstance, you know, are even
artists versus publics, youknow, there's, there's a,
there's a, there's adifferential schema going on,
(01:01:44):
where the higher you are, themore travel you have. And the
lower you are, the less travelyou have, and the people with
the least amount of travel.communities who artists visit
our curators visit and then theythe whole point of acuity is
(01:02:06):
that they stay still there in aplace. And so so there's this
there's this value attached totravel and mobility, which which
it's, it's a kind of surplusvalue, because it's based on
(01:02:28):
other people being stationary,and they're being fixed in a
place is a necessaryprecondition for anybody else to
benefit from travelling. So it'sit's structural.
Sovay Berriman (01:02:48):
That so neatly brings us back around to the the
photograph and the travelphotographer. Thank you, meur
ras Dave. And it's been lovelyspeaking to you really generous.
Thank you.
Dave Beech (01:03:10):
Lovely, speak to you. Thanks for asking me to do
this.
Sovay Berriman (01:03:17):
Meur ras, a’gas goslowes, thank you for
listening. Further episodes ofthe MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh
podcast can be find on mywebsite Sovay berriman.co.uk.
(01:03:48):
That's sovayberriman.co.uk Whereyou also find guest's
biographies and a resource pageof links to further reading on
the topics discussed. If youfeel inspired to join the MESKLA
conversation about contemporaryCornish cultural identity,
please get in touch with meSovay Berriman. via my website
(01:04:09):
or social media, you'll findMESKLA | Brewyon Drudh on
Facebook, Instagram, andTwitter.
The MESKLA | Brewyon Drudhpodcast and project has been
made possible due to a wealth ofin-kind help and support for
many parties, including theLowender Peran festival. Gorsedh
(01:04:32):
Kernow, Cornwall Council'sCornish language office,
Kowethas an yeth Kernewek,Cornwall neighbourhoods for
change and Falmouth UniversityFalmouth campus. The project
has been supported using publicfunding by the National Lottery
through Arts Council England,and further funding has been
(01:04:54):
gratefully received fromHistoric England by Redruth
Unlimited. Meur ras dhywgha'gas termyn, agas gweles. Thank
you for your time. See youlater.
Dydh da ha dynnargh pub huni dhe bodkastow
MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh ostyesgenev, Sovay Berriman. Hello
(00:25):
and welcome everyone to theMESKLA | Brewyon Drudh podcasts,
hosted by me Sovay Berriman.MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh is a
multi platform project, usingsculpture making and
conversation to explorecontemporary Cornish cultural
identity. Through workshops,podcasts, a symposium, and an
(00:50):
exhibition. The project invitespeople to share their
experiences of identity andCornwall, and their views on
Cornish culture and itsrelationship to land, language,
heritage, tourism, the Cornishdiaspora, and much, much more.
These podcasts recordConversations with guests whose
(01:14):
research or lived experiencetouches on the project themes.
The views, thoughts and opinionsexpressed are the speaker's own.
All conversations are carriedout with a spirit of generosity
and openness, creating space forthe discussions to twist and
turn. And I'm very grateful toall who have taken part.
(01:40):
In this sixth podcast, I'mjoined by Dave beech, an artist
and writer from a working classbackground. He is reader in art
and Marxism at University ArtsLondon. And he is author of the
books Art and Labour, Art andPost Capitalism, and Art and
Value. Beech worked in thecollective Freee with Andy here
(02:06):
and Mel Jordan between 2004 and2018. And has recently had solo
exhibitions at Ina gallery, NewOrleans, loft eight gallery,
Vienna, and Exeter Phoenix,Devon, we join the conversation
with Dave introducing his artand writing practices.
Dave Beech (02:28):
Okay, so there are two things that I'm working on
at the moment, which might berelated. So one is I'm writing a
book called Art and class. Andthis is, so as part of my
thinking around this, I've beenkind of looking at the way that
(02:48):
the working class has beenrepresented culturally, both in
in artworks but also in, in theliterature on on culture. And
one of the so one of the thingsthat might come out of that, in
our discussion is therelationship between the urban
(03:10):
working class and the ruralworking class, and have
different kinds of relations tomodernity, and on relations to
technology and so on. Andfantasies around the working
class and the fantasies aroundwork. And fantasies around
different kinds of organisationof of work, you know, so So, so
(03:36):
that's one thing that comesthrough that study of, of the
literature. And the other thingis that I'm an artist and I'm, I
make photo based artworkswithout a camera because I use
books. So my, the, you know,the, my process isn't to take a
(03:57):
camera out onto the streets andphotograph things, my process is
to go to secondhand book shops,and buy books with photos in
them that have travelled to mefrom all over the world. And, as
you might imagine, you know,quite a lot of photographs,
photographs of people doingthings that you find in these
(04:17):
books, and I'm kind of I'mreally interested in, in in this
this sort of, you know, verystrange what you end up with is
a very strange collection ofimages of different people doing
things which I've, you know,stacked up in my studio, kind of
images of people on various invarious places around the world,
(04:42):
you know, maybe looking at thecamera are looking at some some
objects that they've made orthat they're selling or
something like that. And I'mreally interested in these
encounters that are there andbeing in a sense kind of
transported to me so so. So in asense you've got in the history
(05:06):
of photography, what you havegenerally is photographers
leaving their house to gosomewhere else to take a
photograph of something. But inmy case, what I do is I stay
put, and allow these photographsto come to me from all over the
world, and then I rearrangedthem into montages that kind of
tell stories about relationsbetween people in different
(05:30):
places. So So those are thethings that I kind of pick up
by, by looking at the wholehistory of photography, then
kind of feed into myunderstanding of what it is that
I'm looking at when I'm lookingat things in the world, because,
because in a sense, the worldends up looking like a lot of
photographs. Because this isthis is what I'm looking at on a
(05:52):
day to day basis is like, well,you know, why do they photograph
African people this way, andEuropean people that way? And
then you kind of get this senseof like, Ah, okay, so they
relate to their environment indifferent ways, supposedly, so
so then you can kind of you seethat replicated in the way that
people represent themselves. SoI can kind of then deconstruct
(06:15):
my experience of the world viamy kind of understanding of how
photography has shaped how welook at people.
Sovay Berriman (06:22):
Is this process akin to your writing process?
Dave Beech (06:29):
Yeah. When I write, and I've been told this by other
writers and that have given mefeedback on my writing at
certain stages in my in writingthe books is I quote too much.
Why can't you just summarisewhat people say? And I'm like,
Well, I want to use their words.Because the way that they phrase
(06:53):
things is part of theinvestigation. And that carries
information. You know, so theway that people talk about
things carries information, notjust what they said. So if I
summarise it, then I'm losinginformation. And so quoting, and
in a sense, building a book outof quotes, is, is part of my
(07:14):
writing practice. And thenbuilding images out of other
people's images is part of myartistic practice. And, you
know, when I wrote art andvalue, the initial idea for that
was to go through the entirehistory of economics. And just
identify the points at whicheconomists have mentioned art.
(07:35):
And just cut out those quotesand then contextualise them. And
effectively, that's what I dowith the history of photography
as well. Yeah,
Sovay Berriman (07:41):
so within both those practices, there is a very
analogue or manual sort of wayof working. And this is
something we've spoken aboutbefore. And I got to mention to
you before we started speakingtoday, around a nation of hands
(08:04):
working, and is that connectedin your research? or V to
certain identities? Or cultures?Or? Yeah, would you expand? For
me,
Dave Beech (08:22):
as soon as we start to talk about hands, I can have,
like, I have all that I've got,there's all these red flags
around it. So whilst I have avery particular interest and
commitment to working with myhands, you know, sometimes
working with my hands just lookslike this, you know, I'm using
(08:45):
my hands to flip through thebook. And it's like, that's,
that's me doing something manualas opposed to maybe doing a
Google image search forsomething, you know, so it's
like, um, so there's thisphysical thing in my room, which
is me with a book. And that's,that's got a kind of charge for
(09:07):
me. It relates me to the worldin a particular way, which doing
a Google search doesn't orrather, the Google Search
relates to the world in adifferent way. And so whilst I
am really there's a commitmentfor me, so working with physical
(09:28):
books, but I am really worriedthat when I if I if I, if I just
say that in a very casual way,that it could be read as me
having a very romantic attitudetowards the handmade or
something like that, or, ormaybe even worse than a romantic
(09:52):
attitude to the handmade with acommitment to the handmade as a
form of luxury or something likethat. So, so the hand is
important in some respects. ButI've always got to be very
careful not to allow that to beconflated with other conceptions
of the hand.
Sovay Berriman (10:13):
Yeah, and there's so much around that, for
instance, in like, well, this ismy interpretation of it, like
thinking around now farmersmarkets and such, like and
wanting vegetables with mud onthem, or, you know, it's even
in, you know, my lifetime, whichis sort of meat medium, long and
(10:35):
short has. It was just normal tohave markets that sell
vegetables, and then they sortof disappeared, and then they
came back, but sort of escalatedprices and selling something
more than just carrots, there'ssome there's totally lifestyle
purchasing going on there. Is itfetishized?
Dave Beech (11:02):
I think that the hand itself has become a kind of
fetish. So you know, this ideaof, of, of being hands on, are
of doing something with yourhands, as a way of, in a sense,
reconnecting yourself with aworld that you don't belong to.
(11:23):
So you know, going to thefarmers market yourself. And
being faced, what you want, whenyou go to the farmers market is
to be face to face with afarmer, you know, so you don't
want you don't want to send anintermediary to do the shopping
for you. And you don't want thefarmer to send an intermediary
(11:44):
to do the selling for them, youwant in a sense to shake the
hand of the farmer, even if thatshake is really just you handing
over money, and then taking themoney and giving you some
vegetables, that that contact,which is which is really
signified by the idea of ahandshake, or the idea of a kind
(12:06):
of an exchange of money in onehand and, and product in the
other is a kind of fetish for acertain kind of like a
corrective to a problem in theworld corrected to a problem in
(12:28):
your life, a sense that maybe,you know, in the midnight in the
mid 20th century, you would, youwould use the language of
alienation, you'd say you feelalienated from the land, you
feel alienated from other fromthe poor, you feel alienated
from nature, and so on and soforth. And so what you do is
(12:52):
you, you, you cure thatalienation, by I don't know,
befriending the community offarmers or something like that.
And so you, you, you, you, yourecognise this loss of
connection, and then you createa different kind of connection,
(13:12):
you don't actually become afarmer, or work with farmers or
live with farmers, you create adifferent kind of connection,
which you then can imagine,solves the problem that you
otherwise feel,
Sovay Berriman (13:26):
perhaps the Fetish and that is around
honesty, or a notion of honestyor a nation of the authentic and
authentic connection. That isactually a performance.
Dave Beech (13:39):
Yeah, so in my, in my Marxist way of thinking about
it, what you have is, as a is aproblem, that's a social
relation, and you cure it withan activity. So so that's where
the Fetish comes in, you thinkthat you can, you can, I don't
(13:59):
know, you can retain all of yourprivileges. And you can retain
all your luxuries, but they canall be compensated by a gesture.
And so you can do that gesture,like with the I want to go to
(14:21):
the farmers market, and Isupport farmers and, you know,
you can have this kind of ethicsof going to a farmers market
rather than a supermarket orsomething like that. And so
you've got this kind of gesturalsolution to an ingrained,
structural, historical, socialproblem where every time you go
(14:43):
to the farmers market, you'redoing your bit, you know, so
there's this kind of gesturalaspect to it, but you can also
do this in relation to yourself.So so you can do it in relation
to farmers or to workers in someway but you can also do it in
relation to yourself and you cansay, you know, I I work in an
office or I don't work at all,or, you know, I have this
(15:08):
luxurious lifestyle, but Icompensate for this, because I
also, I don't know, I work oneday a week for the food bank,
you know, our I, I have, I growmy own vegetables, you know, so
(15:29):
I'm not completely sort of cutoff from the land and cut off
from that kind of that life ofneed, and, and nature and so on.
And there's there's, so there's,there's a kind of self gesturing
(15:50):
where you, you have this onelittle aspect of your life,
which you which you, which youdo as a way of compensating for
everything else in your life. Soone of the ways that this is
done in the art world, forinstance, is you have this
(16:10):
performative relationship tocooking together. So you say,
you know, what we're going to dois we're going to have, we're
going to have this 12 monthproject with artists and this
local community. And what we'regoing to do is, we're going to
start by cooking together andeating together. And this is
going to be our way of, youknow, not being intellectuals
(16:36):
not being not, there's nodifference between an artist and
a, an audience member, if whatyou're doing is chopping onions.
And so you have this, this kindof this idea that Praxis can
solve social relations, becauseat the moment, when you're
practising something, thosesocial relations become
(16:58):
invisible. But they're beinginvisible doesn't actually make
them no longer existent. So sothat's what I mean by when I say
that it's gesture, or is that wecan put it to one side for the
time being. So it's a formalequality, that we're all cutting
onions, in the same way, when,in fact, our reasons for being
(17:22):
in that place, and sometimes ourrelations, our social relations
to that place, you know, forinstance, one being employed to
be there, the artist and theother not being employed to be
there, the member of the publicare very, very different. But
they those things also becomeinvisible, when you're doing
Praxis together when you'redoing something with an
(17:45):
audience. Which is, which is,which is practical, rather than,
I don't know, theoretical oraesthetic or something.
Sovay Berriman (18:00):
So there's something I mean, it seems like
there's something in all thoseactivities that is around, like,
whether it'd be the artist doingthe sort of Greek cooking that
you suggest or like the shopper,the farmers market, or the
volunteer, a community projector the food bank, a charity
(18:21):
setting that there's somethingthere about seeking
reconnection, or, I mean, Isuppose I'm sort of, cuz you use
the word around compensation,which is easy, I think to hear
as a negative. Oh, you know, sothis is someone who is knowing
(18:47):
but is that also potentiallysomething in there and a general
a genuine like, seeking toconnect with something more
manual?
Dave Beech (19:01):
Okay, so it's what I'm gonna say no. And I'm gonna
give a different example nowjust to kind of illustrate the
kinds of problems that I'mlooking into and thinking about
all the time. So if we thinkabout travel, okay, and the
(19:22):
difference between working classtravel or middle class travel.
All right, so there's thisthere's this amazing book by
Michael John law called a worldaway. And it's about the the
invention of the packageholiday. And basically, the
invention of what we would nowkind of pejoratively call
(19:45):
tourism, as opposed to genuinetravel, you know, genuine travel
the there's, there's anotherreally interesting book by Emily
Thomas called the meaning oftravel. I'm interested in travel
because of my I'm interested inthe history of photography,
because photographers travel.And quite often what we what we
(20:05):
want from the photograph is thatthe photographer is genuinely
gone somewhere, and had agenuine encounter with something
that is remote to us, and theyphotograph it. And then we get
to, in a sense, experiencesomething of that real travel,
not just a tourist experience,but real travel through the
(20:25):
photograph. And so I'm reallyinterested in different theories
of travel. And one of the thingsthat is that comes through every
study of, of travel, you know,like, so Emily Thomas has looked
at, when she talks about themeaning of travel, she's looked
at the way that philosophershave written about travel. And
(20:48):
the way that Michael John Latalks about travel is actually
looked at the way the industryitself, the tourist industry.
And, and the difference betweenwhen so, so you have middle
class people initially going onforeign holidays, and working
(21:10):
class, people don't go onforeign holidays. So going into
a foreign place is genuine, is agenuine experience of another
culture. All right, and thenwhen working class, people start
to do the same thing, thenyou're going to have to do
something extra, to have agenuine experience of a foreign
(21:31):
culture, that's not the same asa working class experience of
going to a foreign place. And soyou have to go effectively, this
goes back to the hands idea,effectively, you're going to
have to organise this yourself.In other words, you're going to
have to have a hands onrelationship to your own
(21:52):
holiday, whereas the workingclass will go on holidays that
are packaged for them, by ourcompany. And so you're gonna
have to, you know, so it becomeslike more about sort of
wandering around a foreigncountry and trying to go
somewhere that you would nothave planned to go to, you know,
(22:16):
and that's genuine travel. And,and the way that the way that
Emily Thomas talks about genuinetravel, as opposed to tourism
is, is the the, there's there'sincreased levels of alterity,
there's increased levels ofotherness, the more otherness
you get into your, into yourjourney, the more genuine this
(22:41):
is, and therefore, the moreauthentic your experience has
been. Whereas the the idea ofworking class foreign travel, is
that you go to Spain, and youhave fish and chips, and then
you go to a British or an IrishPub. And so you try. So the idea
that the negative picture ofworking class travel, is that
(23:05):
you're going somewhere else, butyou're getting exactly the same
as what you would have had, ifyou'd have stayed there's zero
alterity zero otherness. So thisis not genuine travel. And what
you what you what you what youthen see in the as a pattern
(23:27):
is is this designation of acertain class to a certain kind
of activity. So what's reallyinteresting that comes out of
Michael John laws book on aworld away, is when, when
package holidays, first started,they were described as being
(23:51):
very working class kinds ofholidays. But actually,
subsequently, when historianshave looked at the data, most of
the people that went on themwere middle class, but they were
assigned a kind of working classcharacteristic, because they
were packaged because they werecommercial. And because a
(24:15):
minority of the middle classwould, I had already rejected
that and then started to havethese more genuine more
authentic experiences of foreignplaces of more out of the way
places so so one of the ways ofdoing that is to go to other
other countries, countries thathad not been traditional holiday
(24:39):
destinations for the British forinstance. And another way of
doing it is to go to more remoteplaces within countries that
people have traditionally goneto add. Another way of doing it
is to is to organise it yourselfand to do your research before
you go Oh, all of that kind ofthing. So so it's like you, it
(25:03):
becomes a kind of craft, you arecrafting your own holiday,
whereas the the package holidaysindustrialised. And so pattern
so you kind of have, in a sense,this kind of a sort of William
Morris ethic of the holiday,which dis which, even if you're
so so in a sense, even if you'remiddle class, you can end up
(25:25):
having a working classexperience. And, and, but what,
because you've gone on thisindustrial holiday, or
industrialised holiday. And soyou get this kind of crafting of
a holiday, which makes you oddlymiddle class. So historically,
you would say that craft is aworking class activity. But when
(25:46):
you craft your own life, that'sa middle class activity. And the
crafting then becomes that andthis is what I think makes it
sing. This is why I think youare right to say that the hand
becomes fetishized, becausecrafting becomes fetishized
insofar as it it becomes awithin within, you know, so long
(26:11):
as craft isn't what you do for aliving, then crafting becomes
very middle class. Whereas whenwhen you craft for a living,
then it's not middle class. Soyou get these. So another thing
that I'm really interested in isfood, and cooking and things
like that. So that what thatmeans is that you could do
(26:32):
exactly the same thing assomebody else. And when you do
it as a middle class personthat's crafting. And when
somebody else does it, it's justwork. So you know, that you can
you can fetishize the degree towhich, when you cook dinner,
you're crafting your life andyou're expressing yourself and
(26:55):
you're objectifying yourself,and your and your, your, your
being fulfilled, and so on andso forth. And you're doing the
right thing, and all thesethings. But when somebody else
does exactly the same activity,they're showing just how much
they are. They're not livingtheir own life. They're
(27:16):
alienated from their own lifebecause they're cooking
something for somebody else. Andso all of the all of these kinds
of patterns of differentiationare expressed in the various
ways in which we pat ourselveson the back, or we sneer at
(27:39):
other people through doing insome cases, exactly the same
thing.
Sovay Berriman (27:45):
Just going back to the tourism point. I mean, it
seems to me that this is tourismor an aspect of where tourism is
connected to colonial activity.And this sort of , and the
romanticising of the Explorer.It also seems to me that that,
(28:09):
that behaviour has equally or ifnot more impactful impact upon
the place, the touristicdestination and the people and
(28:30):
culture that that is becomingthat tourist destination.
Dave Beech (28:36):
So one of the I think you're right that
especially historically so in inEmily Thomas's book, there's,
there's there's a reallyinteresting relationship between
the kind of the philosophicalidea of travel and colonialism
(29:00):
and settlement and so on. Butwhat what one of the really
interesting developments is thatin the late 20th century, and in
the 21st century, it's certaincolonialist patterns become the
solution to the problem oftourism. So, so, for instance,
(29:23):
the idea of working for acharity for a year or also
becomes associated with like,genuine travel, because you
have, you know, you go and maybework alongside people from
another culture people in, inmany cases, people of a
(29:44):
different race, and you spendreal time with them. And so that
so that colonial relationship,then feels to our at least it's
written about as being moregenuine In more authentic more
real than, than the Brits goingto Spain and getting a suntan,
(30:10):
you know and and, and and soit's there's been a kind of
maybe there has been a kind ofblindness towards how much that
reintroduces the colonialrelationship into our desire for
an authentic experience of theother, the your, the desire for
(30:36):
otherness that Emily Thomastalks about them then becomes,
you know, more and moreintensified, so that the only
way you can really get it is tois to actually go and live in
another community. And in and insome cases that that then
(30:59):
becomes less about less aboutholidaying. And perhaps it
becomes work. So, you know, the,the only way to really seriously
experienced the other is to geta job working in another
country. So you're paid to goand work with people who are
(31:21):
other. And that becomes evenmore genuine, even more
authentic than somebody justtaken a year out. So yeah, so
it's, you would think, I don'tknow what I would think anyway,
that this whole experience ofcolonialism would have would
have made those cuts would havemade us very conscious, and very
(31:47):
alert and very concerned aboutthose relationships, but
actually, in, in studies bysociologists, of people going on
Gap Year breaks, to work forcharities and so forth. Shows
that actually, there's, there's,there's very little trace of
(32:07):
that perception of that being aconcern. But more of like that
this was this was an experiencethat improved me, that made me
better, that made me moreauthentic, they made me
understand the world better.
Sovay Berriman (32:26):
Huh. So connecting that to objects, and
the tourism memento, but alsoexpanding upon that into
lifestyle mementos and adoptionof life's ever, I suppose what
(32:54):
I'm trying to say is like,turning, potentially turning
what is perceived as somebody,an other lifestyle, or a
fetishize lifestyle. It becominga product that can be purchased
and put on. Yeah, and that feelslike an extension to this
(33:21):
tourism conversation.
Dave Beech (33:23):
Yeah, absolutely. Is. And I've written about this.
And it's very clear, no, there'sthere's lots of ways that, that,
that it feels very intricate tome the way that things have been
(33:45):
transposed the way that thingsare substituted for each other.
So So for instance, you in the18th century, there arises this
idea that philosophically, ahuman being becomes authentic,
when they make a world thatrepresents their subjectivity
(34:08):
out of them. So So you so youknow, like, building you're
building, making things, youknow, making things is an
expression of who you are. Andthen when you recognise yourself
in the world, then you're athome, and it is a world that
you've made, and you've made itin your own image, according to
your subjectivity and so on andso forth. And that's the theory.
(34:32):
But actually, when it's appliedto especially middle class urban
life, at the end of the 18thcentury, beginning of the 19th
century, it takes on a slightlydifferent form, which is you
express yourself, you becomemore authentic, when you buy
things that express your taste.So, this is where the that whole
(34:56):
kind of concept of taste comesfrom. Taste becomes this way of
seeing yourself in a world andhaving the world reflect back to
you, and therefore have an innersense of our view of your of the
inner world, becoming an outerworld and the outer world
(35:17):
becoming an inner world of thesethings, being completely sort of
at one with each other. But nowthrough purchase, not through
making. And what you get then,in the early 19th century, is
this is this sense, andespecially with the rise of
industrialization, where you,the person who buys the
(35:41):
products, expresses themselvesin his authentic through that
purchase, but the people thatmade it are not expressing
themselves. They don't becomeauthentic by making the things
that middle class people want tobuy. And then this is extended
and transposed into this ideathat the, the indigenous make,
(36:12):
let's, let's, let's put it inthe most negative way we can
make tourist trinkets that allowthe tourist to feel authentic,
but where the indigenousproducer is, is producing things
for money. So is therefore nothaving that authentic experience
(36:36):
in either in the production ofthe things or in the sale of the
things, that there's, there's akind of, there's a double
alienation there. Becauseyou're, you're alienated from
the product, because the productis now being taken away from
you. But you're also alienatedfrom yourself, because you're
producing things for the marketfor the tourist market. So yeah,
(36:58):
exactly what you were saying.
Sovay Berriman (37:00):
I was just thinking, and the other layer to
that is that many touristtrinkets, for want of a better
term, that a mass produced, mayvery well be mass produced
elsewhere, in an 'other' placeentirely to the tour, the place
(37:20):
that they are representing. Andthat, so that's that other layer
of disassociation. And, and thenthere's a hierarchy of, of
tourists trinkets, the craftedartisan, slice of that tourism
(37:44):
memento market, if you like.
Dave Beech (37:48):
Yeah. And so, we we then have, in a sense, the split
between Tourism and Travel isthen in a sense marked on the
objects themselves, because youhave these tourist objects, and
then the genuine article, youknow, which is which is handmade
(38:11):
by local people. And, and so andso you get this kind of class
split in objects, which followsthe contours of this
intellectual distinction betweentourism and travel. And the,
the, the ideal situation is thatyou fill your house with genuine
(38:39):
handmade, locally producedlocally sourced traditional
objects that have that othernessin them, you know, so, so it's
still about that alterity, it'sstill about making contact with
wilderness and somehow capturingthe wilderness taking the
(39:06):
wilderness with you have of allalways I think of as a kind of
self making, through theencounter with wilderness. So
the wilderness is always anotherness for you. It's not an
otherness for the other, becausethen you'd leave the stuff
(39:27):
there. You have to take it withyou because the otherness is for
you. And it's part of yournarrative and your crafting of
yourself and your craft yourselfthrough the encounter with
others.
Sovay Berriman (39:44):
So, can we think now or perhaps hear took a bit
about the, that otherness fromthe other'ed's perspective. And
that relationship with, yeah,the the objects, the totems, of
(40:06):
that otherness. And, yeah.
Dave Beech (40:12):
Well, in a very, very straightforward, slightly
sceptical, cynical way ofthinking about this. But I want
to link that to our sort ofcritique of the romance of the
wilderness. So the romance ofthe wilderness says, You, the
(40:34):
other should only make thingsthat are traditional, and
indigenous, and local, and soon, and so on, that the
tradition should determine youractivity, not the market. You
know, as soon as you startmaking market things, then this
(40:55):
isn't what the romance of theauthor wants. That's from the
the romance is from theperspective of the visitor. So
if you, if you dismantle theromance, then then you the, the
(41:16):
person producing the artisangoods or the tourists goods, is
doing that for money. And theproblem is, you can't simply
express that without devaluingthe object. And the whole point
(41:38):
of it is to produce value. Soyou so there's a sense in which
you have to sort of go alongwith the romance to a certain
point, in order to sell to thepeople who are subscribing to
that romance. But ultimately, ifyou want to be cynical about
this, or sceptical about this,you can say that the there is no
(42:03):
there is no romance for theproducer that the producer knows
full well what they're doing,when they're making these things
in this kind of commercial way.And and that you know, the
difference between the massmarket and the artisan market is
(42:25):
not just that one is inauthenticand the other is authentic. But
that one is low cost are low,low value, and the other is high
value. The Artisan has got morevalue in one of the ways that
the artisan gets more value isthat it is closed enrollments.
And not just that it's handmade,the handmade aspect is part of
(42:48):
the romance. And ARV means ittakes more time and it's more
expensive to produce, becauseit's made out of it's not made
of plastic or something, youknow, but it's also about
marking the object with thatromance. So that from the
perspective of the producer, theromance, you have a kind of
(43:15):
conflict, conflictedrelationship to the romance,
because the romance is not yourromance. But the romance is part
of the value. And therefore is,is in your discourse around the
object and might be even in youmight need to mark your space
and mark your body with thisromance as well. You know, so
(43:38):
there's, there's this whole kindof apparatus of being ourselves
for others, that you have tosignify your selfishness to your
to others and signify yourotherness of to them to them,
and to yourself. And you know,and so you end up with this kind
(43:59):
of living kind of romance ormarking your territory with that
romance.
Sovay Berriman (44:10):
And that's,
Dave Beech (44:11):
it's part of the marketing
Sovay Berriman (44:12):
that surely is in itself, distancing and
creates the opportunity or thesituation for a disconnect of
place, self, identity.
Dave Beech (44:39):
Yeah, so there's, there's a really famous example
of this. So the very first,apparently, you know, this is
what I've read. The very firstdocumentary movie of an
indigenous person is Nanook ofthe North. off, which was made
(45:01):
in 1922, by Robert flattie. AndNanuq of the North is a film
about Nanuq. And Nanuq was notcalled Nanuq. The name is given
to the, to him, because it feelsmore authentic, it feels like a
proper indigenous name, whereashis actual name didn't feel
(45:28):
indigenous enough. And Nanuq ofthe North is a film about whale
hunting. And the filmmakerwanted him to hunt with a spear,
even though by this time, by thetime that it's made in the
1920s, they hunted with guns,it's like, that doesn't make the
movie that I'm after. So we'regonna get you to hunt with a
(45:50):
spear for the benefit of thefilm. So it's like, you know, so
that there are all these issuesaround documentary generally,
and this is just like oneexample of it, but this is like,
this is how the an image of theindigenous is projected onto the
indigenous. And, you know,there's, there are, it's not
(46:12):
just an idea, there are realobjective forces, which are
then, in a sense, put onto theindigenous to be indigenous to
be really indigenous, you know,and, and there's this, there's
this trope that comes out overand over again, in, in
(46:32):
contemporary writing on workingclass culture. For instance,
where as soon as you don't go tocollege, or become successful in
a particular field, or, youknow, you're, you're good at
something, music, sports,something like that. When middle
(46:52):
class people encounter you, thefirst thing they say, and they
say, it's just like, it's apattern, it's like a tick, that
they can't help say it is youdon't seem working class. And,
and so, you know, you're you're,you you speak, to articulately
(47:13):
to be working class, I wouldn'thave guessed that you're working
class, you know, you don't dressworking class and all this kind
of thing, because they have thisidea of what the working class
should look like, should speak,like, should act like. And, and
so there's this, there's this.There's this parallel, I think,
with like, it's not enough justto be indigenous, it's not
(47:36):
enough just to be working class,you have to look and act and
talk and seem like that, whichmeans you have to conform to a
predetermined image, and theimage, more than likely will
have been produced decades orlonger ago. And so there's,
(47:56):
there's there becomes a kind oftemporal element to this. And so
the romance of the indigenousand the romance of the working
class. And the romance of thehandmade, is always presented as
a kind of nostalgia, because theimage that we have of it was
always produced a generation ortwo ago,
Sovay Berriman (48:18):
thinking about class and place, and yeah, very
much that romanticism around andwhat I've called before the
Fetish around class, itsboundaried, and it needs to stay
within that boundary, and therecan't be these sort of tendrils
or shifts or movements.
Dave Beech (48:40):
Yeah, there's this really odd moment, you know,
Richard Hoggart, who wrote theuses of literacy. So it's like,
one of the books that that thathelped to found what we now
think of as cultural studies.And Richard haka, who was
himself working class and wentto university, and then became
(49:01):
one of the first people to studythe working class, as a as a
living culture within within hisresearch, and so he's like,
really important in terms ofthat, that that resistance to
the idea of of, of like, whatshould be studied in in
(49:23):
university, what counts is asproper culture and so forth, but
even he said, that during hislifetime, the working class have
gone from being you know, peoplein in rags in slums, you know,
with nothing, you know, who wereand he says that when he when he
(49:46):
was growing up, they were, youknow, he experienced days, with
or without food, or with, youknow, with just eating a slice
of bread or something like that.So hunger is part Out of his
conception of the working class,because that's where it was when
he was young. And then he says,you know, there can't be a
(50:08):
working class anymore becausethe working class have got
radios and televisions. And, andthey, they, they have nice
clothes, you know. And then theyhave steady employment. And so I
was like, as soon as the workingclass changes, its its form, it
changes. Its its look. And youknow, and changes, you know, as
(50:33):
soon as the working class itselfhas organised itself to a point
where it's forced its employees,its employers to give it higher
wages, and therefore, to havebetter clothes, and better
houses and more food, then it'sno longer working class. That,
to me, is a really bogusargument, because the working
(50:56):
class has improved itsconditions. And that does not
mean it's no longer workingclass, it just doesn't look like
our image of the working classthat we have, from the 19th
century, and from the first 30years of the 20th century. And
the same thing happens withmodern rural lifestyles and
(51:19):
things like that.
Sovay Berriman (51:23):
There's, there's something that's coming into my
mind here that, that I can'tarticulate better than saying,
what, making friends with anexperience of being in a place,
(51:47):
going to and other, and yeah,putting it on, and making
friends with it. And itsrepresentatives. Yet still,
there are very clear lines andboundaries. And again, how, I'm
(52:12):
interested in how from yourresearch and what you speak of,
how those other hold on toidentity or space, what are the
I don't know, mechanisms of thator behaviours of that or I
(52:34):
haven't got the right words forfor it, if you know what I mean.
Dave Beech (52:40):
I don't think I've got the right words for it
either. And I don't think that Idon't think I've got a solution
for this because I think whatwhat was what we're experiencing
in this period of history is isa right wing ascendancy a middle
(53:04):
class ascendancy or whiteascendancy? Where the struggles
of I don't know of, of peoplewho don't live that, that kind
(53:24):
of hegemonic life, theirstruggles have been
marginalised, and you know, we,we, we hear a lot from the right
about how woke our culture isbecause, you know, we're
(53:48):
interested in diversity and soon and so forth. And diversity
has become a kind of ethicalnecessity. It's demanded of us,
but, but at the same time thisthis is this is a perception,
okay? This is a subjectiveperception. It feels to me as if
(54:13):
the diversity the diversity isbeing imposed on the
Metropolitan centre as somethingthat makes them ethical by by
acknowledging diversity. Allright. So in that sense, you
(54:35):
can't be an indigenous ruralperson. With diversity, you're
the object of somebody else'sdiversity, you're not that
diverse yourself. You arespecific particular individual,
you are of a particular place ofa particular tradition. You're
(54:57):
not being asked to becomediverse. You're asked to remain
identical with images of you.And, and the same, actually, is
the case for, you know, aworking class person who accepts
(55:19):
dive diversity, then, in theliterature, and I've read this
on more than one occasion,within the literature, as soon
as the working class personacknowledges the the importance
of diversity, they become middleclass. So you lose your identity
through through thisacknowledgement of, of
(55:43):
diversity. And some people, itaren't in order for that
diversity to work, some peoplehave to remain identical with
themselves to not. So to notbenefit from the ethics of
diversity, and this is this isAlan by Jews, theory of ethics.
So he says, what ethics demandsis an other and, and the other
(56:10):
comes in two forms, the other tosave, and the other to kill. So,
and you basically do both at thesame time. And he was saying
that what you have to do to beethical is to identify the evil
and identify who you're savingby killing that evil, and then
(56:30):
kill them. So So you need another in order to remain
ethical. And you need that othernot to save itself. But for you
to save it. And so that's whatI'm basing this on, really is
that that kind of idea ofethics. And I think that
there's, there's a version ofyou, we could, we can apply that
(56:54):
I think, to this idea of AI ofidentity and diversity, and who
gets to be ethically diverse?
Sovay Berriman (57:06):
Can you, This is pushing a bit the bounds of the
themes of our conversation, butit really, I'd be really
interested to hear your thoughtsin connection to this with the
term social mobility.
Dave Beech (57:25):
Okay, so this is social mobility is particularly
related for, in my reading ofthe literature anyway, on class.
And, and part of the idea ofthis really is about denying
class. So if you have socialmobility, and if social mobility
(57:46):
is possible, is potential, thenpeople are not in a class. As a
matter of the structure ofsociety, they're in a class
because I've chosen to be inthat class. In other words, if
if you if you can say thatworking class, people can work
(58:08):
their way out of poverty, oreducate themselves out of out of
poverty, and so on. So if yousay that every single working
class person is capable ofbecoming middle class, then
anyone who's left behind asworking class is there, of their
own volition, it's their ownfault. They just didn't work
(58:31):
hard enough, they didn't tryhard enough, they didn't
succeed. And if they tried alittle harder than they could
have become middle class and theidea in the neoliberal idea, but
also the idea in America of theunderclass, is really the idea
that it's entirely their ownfault. And nobody else is to
(58:51):
blame for this, and therefore,they have no right for society
to help them out in any waywhatsoever. In fact, the more we
help them, the less likely theyare to try themselves to become
middle class.
Sovay Berriman (59:08):
Can I bring that back around, social mobility and
the tourism conversation, andbehaviours of colonialism and
this boundaried or positioningof otherness, fetish, and who
(59:35):
stays in what place. As a, to Toconclude, conversation?
Dave Beech (59:47):
Well, this means as well as talking about social
mobility, we need to talk aboutmobility itself. And there's in
terms of the the the philosophyof travel, travel is a positive
thing. Travel is something thatthat helps you develop as a
human being. It's educative.It's it's enriching, travel,
(01:00:13):
travel. Travel is, is a form ofknowledge. Travel is a is a form
of experience that that is that,that allows us, like I said
before to craft, who we are. Andobviously, in order for this to
(01:00:34):
work, some people have to staywhere they are, because we're
travelling to experience thatotherness. If they travelled to
us while we travelled to them,then that otherness wouldn't be
there. And also, the, theotherness of travel clearly, if
you look at the literaturedoesn't work, when people from
(01:00:58):
other places come to theMetropolitan centre, that
doesn't count their otherness,we don't experience their
otherness, they experience ourotherness. So we don't get the
benefit from that. So they haveto stay still. And we have to
travel to them, in order forthis romance of travel, to be
realised, and therefore, we haveto have this economy of
(01:01:24):
mobility. Some people are verymobile, and travel a lot and
experience a lot, you know,think think about, think about
curators versus artists, forinstance, you know, are even
artists versus publics, youknow, there's, there's a,
there's a, there's adifferential schema going on,
(01:01:44):
where the higher you are, themore travel you have. And the
lower you are, the less travelyou have, and the people with
the least amount of travel.communities who artists visit
our curators visit and then theythe whole point of acuity is
(01:02:06):
that they stay still there in aplace. And so so there's this
there's this value attached totravel and mobility, which which
it's, it's a kind of surplusvalue, because it's based on
(01:02:28):
other people being stationary,and they're being fixed in a
place is a necessaryprecondition for anybody else to
benefit from travelling. So it'sit's structural.
Sovay Berriman (01:02:48):
That so neatly brings us back around to the the
photograph and the travelphotographer. Thank you, meur
ras Dave. And it's been lovelyspeaking to you really generous.
Thank you.
Dave Beech (01:03:10):
Lovely, speak to you. Thanks for asking me to do
this.
Sovay Berriman (01:03:17):
Meur ras, a’gas goslowes, thank you for
listening. Further episodes ofthe MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh
podcast can be find on mywebsite Sovay berriman.co.uk.
(01:03:48):
That's sovayberriman.co.uk Whereyou also find guest's
biographies and a resource pageof links to further reading on
the topics discussed. If youfeel inspired to join the MESKLA
conversation about contemporaryCornish cultural identity,
please get in touch with meSovay Berriman. via my website
(01:04:09):
or social media, you'll findMESKLA | Brewyon Drudh on
Facebook, Instagram, andTwitter.
The MESKLA | Brewyon Drudhpodcast and project has been
made possible due to a wealth ofin-kind help and support for
many parties, including theLowender Peran festival. Gorsedh
(01:04:32):
Kernow, Cornwall Council'sCornish language office,
Kowethas an yeth Kernewek,Cornwall neighbourhoods for
change and Falmouth UniversityFalmouth campus. The project
has been supported using publicfunding by the National Lottery
through Arts Council England,and further funding has been
(01:04:54):
gratefully received fromHistoric England by Redruth
Unlimited. Meur ras dhywgha'gas termyn, agas gweles. Thank
you for your time. See youlater.
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