This is a coloured screenprint by Alan Baines from 1974. It shows two big US railway diesels…
Alan has cleverly combined the two images so that one speaks of scale and the other of speed. The cropping of the images also adds to the dysnamism of the print. And the focus on graphic details of railway typography, and machine details, is all very pop art.
I’ve worked out that this is early years Alan Baines…not sure whether to work as an artist or graphic designer, and probably just finishing an MA. Actually, you can sense the graphic design coming through in the combination of images and in the reference to popular cultural and film references in the print.
The top engine is rendered in metallic silver ink…brilliant. And Alan mentioned that there are more than thirty colour separations in this print.
Thank you Alan, and thanks for your work as course leader on BAGD at CSM. Top man!
Helen, from the letterpress workshop at CSM, has made a lovely coloured lino-cut of a Gresley A4 streamlined steam loco….
I love the telegraph pole by the railway line.
That’s an absolutely accurate historical detail, that you see in the films from that period. Indeed, if you are old enough, it was part of the experience of the train. You could always see the wires and poles, flashing past, from your seat.
The BBC have repeated a documentary about the people who play with model railways…you can watch it on the UAL streaming site, Box of Broadcast, at
www.bobnational.net
Just log-in with your UAL username and password, and search for The Joy of (train) Sets…
Box of Broadcasts is a fabulous resource, and everyone at UAL should use it.
The BBC iplayer page is here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q9vhy
Now, back to the railway…
I’ve posted before about model railways…and I’ve recently been thinking about how the psychogeographic reality of a railway could be modelled…and looking at fair ground track rides as a source of inspiration, especially the ghost train…
A lot of modern philosophy is about trying to figure out whether our primary engagement with reality is intellectual or sensory. This re-casts the familiar chicken and egg conundrum as, which comes first, ideas or feeling?
The Enlightenment philosophers, Diderot and Rousseau, had this argument in the middle of the 18C. For practical purposes, and because the world of feelings seemed arbitrary and inconsistent, the late 18C social philosophers rejected feeling in faour of a steely-eyed moral calculus of ends and means (utilitarianism, for example)…thus was the brutality of modern political administration begun.
Taken to its extreme, this administrative precision always ends in a terrible, and sterile, beauty, with everything in its place and everything accounted for…it’s as though the absence of feeling provides for a sort of death…a truth, but without meaning…
The British, pragmatic as ever, have tended to focus on what can be be measured…even if it is the wrong thing! Indeed, modern science suggests that measuring is not neutral…it tends to alter wahat is being measured…and quantum physics tells us that it is impossible to measure with complete accuracy.
So, if it’s all an approximation anyway, why should anyone have to suffer? That’s the question for our administrators…
It turns out that model railways can provide a helpful way of thinking about all this…The theoretical train set is not an imaginary model railway…it’s a model railway as a framework for thinking, and feeling, about the world…
The model railway starts out as a project based on the methodology of observation and measurement. The vocabulary of railway modellers is all about accuracy, detail and engineering precision. Observation and meaurement are the foundation of empirical science, and of philosophical enlightenment…
It turns out that accuracy and precision also define another characteristic of the model railway…it’s historic context. But, it is impossible to consider the historic context of a model railway without the consideration of memory and feeling…there’s a little space, just there, for emotion; and it creeps in…
Memory and feeling are things that can’t be exactly observed…indeed, the railway modeller crafts the buildings and trains, and lets the feeling emerge in the spaces around the layout. The emotional power of the layout is contingent on the material accuracy of the model.
You can’t have feeling without accuracy; but you can definitely have accuracy without feeling.
So, feeling in models (and art, and science, and life, and everything) is not inevitable…it’s perfectly possible to imagine an exquisitely accurate model that is real…but not convincing. We recognise this in dramatic or musical performance, where we demand more than the accurate repetition of dialogue, or notes.
The test for a convincing expression of intelligence proposed by Alan Turing suggested that machine communication would have to be indistinguishable from human. Manuel de Landa claims that, by this measure, successful AI will depend on empathetic intelligence…that’s not what the ultilitarians, nor first computer engineers, were thinking of; it means that intelligence and feeling are both true…
The train set models our material reality and suggests the associated emotional reality. What we see, and what we feel are different things. From a human point of perspective, I would say that feeling is the more meaningful of these realities…it is overwhelming and sublime, in the best possible way…and resistance is futile.
Technical accuracy as an end-in-itself is a dead-end, and a bit pointless. In life and art, as in model railways.
Empathy is not just a feeling though, it is a moral quality…it turns out that feeling and ethics go together. I suppose that is what is meant by good work: technically accomplished and emotionally nuanced.
The post-Freudian philosophers of language in France, notably Monsieur Derrida and Madame Kristeva, have analysed language in terms of its spaces and silences…it turns out that not saying is just as important as saying…
Personally, I wish that more philosophers had had train sets…next stop, Wittgenstein!
I’ve been thinking about ghost train fairground rides…maybe because of halloween.
The ghost train was an elaboration of the affinity between steam locomotives and the spirit world. Indeed and to ordinary people, steam locomotion appeared to be based entirely on the magical power of vapour… The firebox, and the howling steam whistle, simply made the connection between the mechanical and the supernatural more explicit…and terrifying.
The doppler effects associated with fast-moving sources of radiation, for example, would have given the train steam whistle a naturally spooky wailing sound.
Of course, the ghost train didn’t arrive out of nowhere…except for effect.
The first entertainments associated with the world of ghosts appeared at the end of the 18C. The entertainments of phantasmagoria evolved out of a combination of theatrical and magic show. Light projections were used, in combination with contextualising effects, to create an enhanced experience of confusion, surprise, anxiety, and excitement.
The film theorist, peter Wollen, has described the Freudian association between speed, movement, anxiety, and desire, in relation to the moving images of cinema entertainment and as theorised by Michael Ballint. In the context of the fun fair ride, this theorisation is augmented by reference to Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of carnivalesque…and Edward Said’s notion of Orientalist exoticism. That’s quite a combination!
Paul Philidor, in France, and EG Robertson Robert, from Belgium, were the early pioneers of this muti-media presentations.
It’s no surprise that these kinds of entertainment should emerge as part of the Romantic reaction to the secularism of republican politics, and to the rationalism of Enlightenment thought.
Throughout the 18C, and since, the worlds of thought and feeling have been ranged against each other. The Romantics, after the philosopher Rousseau, believed in the primacy of feeling…and rejected the intellectual elaboration of machine systems as inhuman and alienating (how right they were).
Reason and romance exist in counterpoint to each other…so, it is not surprising that the romantic sensibility should be elaborated, throughout the 19C, as a reaction to the increasingly brutal normative formation through the systems and structures of industrial democracy.
Lynda Nead (2007) has described the evolution of imersive cultural entertainments as characteristic of the modern world. And, as a new kind of technologically facilitated cognitive experience…an experince so powerfully felt, that it remained with the viewer.
The Romantic fascination with heightened emotion and visceral feelings expressed itself through a number of channels that overturned the polite aesthetics of art…the phantasmagoria, the gothic, the wax-work, and the morgue, all contributed to the the 19C spectacular.
At the same time, the acceleration of the machine-ensemble associated with the late 19C metroplolis fed an appetite for speed and excitement.
These two strands of development combined in the elaboration of increasingly exhilerating mechanical fairground entertainments. I’ve already written about the history of seaside big dipper rides. The ghost train provides for a different kind of excitement. That is the opposite of the traditional fairground joy ride…gallopers and so on.
In its first iteration, the ghost train entertainments were static dark rides…the complexity and cost of the background machinery of train track, along with the employment of various actors and operators, meant that the first rides were semi-permanent. Indeed, the first ghost train ride in Britain was designed by the modernist architect, Joseph Emberton, in 1930, for Blackpool. As an aside, I’ll mention that Blackpool also had an hydraulically controlled Captive Flying Machine ride, designed by Sir Hiram Maxim, of the eponymous machine gun! All pretty high-tech stuff.
Many fairground rides are based on a circular rotation…this is mechnaically efficient and provides for a simple on and off movement of passengers. It was natural, in the circumstances, for the more complex and track based rides to have the same kind of layout and logic.
The development of mechanical rides for travelling fairs required complex dismountable engineering and was only really possible after the development of powered road transport. Typically, the ghost train had a highly decorated proscinium front and afforded an entertainment based around a darkened labyrinth of hair-raising spectale and sudden cloying tactility (Braithwaite 1968.160). The unpredictable track layout of the ride used sudden changes in direction and elavation to disorientate…and confuse.
The style of decoration associated with ghost train rides is a form of late-romantic and expressionistic painting. That’s a bit like the set designs in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). An irregular space that is in emotional contrast to the reguarity of the Cartesian geometry of space and time.
Did you know that the CSM Museum collection includes a number of rare German film posters from the period immediately after WW1…
Braithwaite D (1968) Fairground Architecture London, Evelyn
Crary J (1999) Suspension of Perception Cambridge, MITP
Nead L (2007) The Haunted Gallery London, YUP
Rennie P (2007) Oh Dreamland Big Dipper Arty No23, London
It’s October, so yesterday, I went to my local Model Railway Exhibition. This happens every year, and I’ve posted about it before. Yesterday, I visited with my friend and former colleague, Alan Baines. It turns out, he’s quite an expert…
Back in 2011, when I first posted about this show, I mentioned several things that seemed to be missing…you can read my original, here
I would say that model railways are probably where fine art was in about 1850! The show acts as a kind of salon where only certain kinds of lay-out are allowed. At the moment the quality of the work and the forms of realism are of a “classical” kind. Digital sound effects are just beginning to make an impact, but there is no point-of-view interaction and there are no film (movement or time) effects.
I think the absence of “cinema” effects is really surprising. Particularly since, as I’ve posted before, there is a long and glorious association between cinema and railways.
Anyway, you can see various groups trying to move their lay-outs to a new level of realism. This usually involves extending the scope of the lay-out so that the surrounding area (context) is also rendered in detail. The thinking is that more detail is necessarily better…It’s as though detail (verisimilitude) is an absolute measure of quality.
But this is nonsense. Think about literature for a moment. It is as if the writing of descriptive passages was thought of as more significant than the writing of character or plot. By attending to the detail, the models miss out on the feelings that are associated with the experience of the railway. Accordingly, the level of emotional realism is actually diminished.
It took years for painting to resolve the traumas associated with realism. This was especially the case after photography case on the scene and hi-jacked the claims to realism that had been implicit in fine art.
I still think that this is the case…
It’s all a bit odd, because all model railways are freighted with powerful feelings of nostalgia and desire. Nostalgia is a sensibility informed by history, delapidation, memory and place…the charm of the miniature and of the exquisite detail simply amplify these feelings, and implicitly make a connection to how we think about desire.
Going around the show, you can see that the people there are desperate…for new faces. Granted, there were a few yery young faces; but there were no female faces. Actually, there were two friendly ladies on the door. Inside, it is mostly white men, of a certain age.
This doesn’t make sense. Women like exquisite detail and the miniature just as much as anyone. There must be Indian model railways. I’ve watched the TV films…indeed, in the recent series about the Bombay railway, there was a sequence at the drivers’ school, where would be loco men are taught how signals work on a massive layout.
I would love to see a psychogeographical model railway…maybe with an essay by Will Self.
By a wonderful co-incidence, Nigel Carrington, the Vice Chancellor of UAL, was a non-exec at model railway company, Hornby PLC.
If I were Hornby, I’d be giving artists a model railway to play with…Jake and Dinos Chapman for starters, and possibly Grayson Perry too. With a book of essays by Ian Sinclair and Brian Dillon etc, and with a short film by Patrick Keiller…
Avtually, Rowland Emett created just this kind of whimsical railway for the Festival of Britain in 1951…part fairground ride and part railway…Ealing Films also mined this territory with the Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). Even better, Hornby issued a model layout set after the film…
And then I found that someone had made a layout with this set…
And that Edwrad Bawden designed the original poster for the film.
I’ve previously posted about the American artist, Thomas Hart Benton.
Benton is part of what art historians call American Scene Painting. This was a cultural group that was part of FDRs New Deal of the 1930s. Artists became an important part of attempts to document and describe the lives of ordinary Americans in the dust-bowl and depression in the US.
This movement also provided an opportunity, across many cultural forms, to mythologise the lives and experiences of ordinary Americans…
The print image, above, is called The Race. It shows the railway locomotive and a horse, racing against each other across the mid-west. The image speaks of the anxieties attaching to progress, and the widespread understanding of technology as a form of disruptive agency…
Perhaps the best known of this kind of painting is Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930). The painting makes the connection between architecture and values explicit. The couple exemplify a kind of austere stoicism founded on religious belief and agricultural self-sufficiency.
These small-town themes are also found in the work of Garrison Keillor, John Adams, and even, to a certain extent, that of David Lynch.
Here’s a terrific poster, from the 1920s, for the Mitropa long-haul services across Europe.
Mitropa began as a specialist railway catering company in Germany during WW1. The war provided for an enormous expansion of railway services to support the German military effort. The firm effectively took over the German parts of the Wagons Lits services.
After WW2, the firm became a staple of travel across the Soviet bloc of countries.
Since the 2000s, the company has focussed on platform services and has become part of the Compass Group.
We watched the concluding episode of BBC2TV’s, The World’s Busiest Railway…This featured a number of stories about the problem of safety and capacity on the Mumbai railway network.
It turns out that people wander all over the place…on avarage, nine people are killed every day on the Indian railway, and train drivers are inured to the tragedy of the train hitting someone. By the time the train driver can see that someone is on the track, it is too late to stop anyway!
Here’s a picture of a poster, showing a man being hit by a train. They’ve put it up to try and shock people into thinking about safety on the railway track.
I’m not sure how successful this will be…but, I love the exaggerated facial expression on the man’s face. That’s straight out of Soviet era film posters and Bollywood acting.
This is a coloured screenprint by Alan Baines from 1974. It shows two big US railway diesels…
