Glenn Harvey

Back on Boschplaat in Roanne after a few days in Lyon...looking forward to the eclipse this evening. Venturing out to Roanne Airport for the celestial viewing.

 

A Network of Stoppages

For years our journeys through the inland waterways of France were accompanied by charts. They accumulated in cupboards and beside the helm, folded and refolded, annotated, occasionally damp, their pages carrying the lines along which we intended to travel. Rivers widened and narrowed; canals crossed country with improbable directness; junctions offered alternatives; locks interrupted progress with their regular notation. Towns appeared beside the lines, sometimes no more than names until we reached them. Looking at those charts, I have often been reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages. The resemblance is partly visual. Duchamp’s network has something of the chart about it: lines travelling across a surface, intersecting, diverting, apparently proposing connections. Yet those lines have a peculiar ancestry. They derive from the Three Standard Stoppages, Duchamp’s experiment of 1913–14 in which three metre-long threads were prepared, fixed, and then allowed to assume irregular curves before being preserved as new templates of measurement. The familiar account describes them as if they were simply dropped from a height of one metre and allowed to fall as they would; in fact, the process is more carefully staged than that suggests, the “chance” already mediated by preparation, sewing, and selection. The metre, that supposedly dependable unit, is thus not only submitted to gravity and contingency, but also to a subtle choreography of making.

In Network of Stoppages those curves acquire another existence. They become part of a larger diagram. And beneath that diagram lies still another work, because Duchamp painted the network over an earlier canvas, Young Man and Girl in Spring. A network, then, laid over something that was already there. Perhaps that is where the resemblance to the waterway charts becomes more interesting. The charts describe a system whose purpose is precisely to resist accident. A canal is measured landscape: depths, distances, levels, locks, bridge heights, permitted passages. Water itself has been persuaded into an administrative geometry.

Even a river, once navigated commercially, becomes surrounded by measurements, markers and rules. Travelling through this system meant submitting to its sequences. Kilometre followed kilometre; one lock led towards another; junctions required decisions; the chart anticipated what lay ahead. But another map was gradually being made over the top of it. Its coordinates were less dependable. Castelnaudary. Moissac. Auxonne. Fragnes. Roanne. Châtel-sur-Moselle. Names on a chart became stoppages, and the stoppages accumulated experiences that no chart could have predicted. A walk with the dogs led away from a mooring. A tree arrested attention. A walnut was picked up and later found resting absent-mindedly on an instrument panel. Clouds gathered above an arboretum. A fortress wall appeared halfway around a walk. Somewhere else it was a lock, a field of decapitated sunflowers, hens scratching beneath trees, an old olive tree, a church face glimpsed from the water. Sometimes there was a drawing. 

The word stoppage appeals to me because it contains more than stopping. There is interruption in it, perhaps obstruction too: something temporarily interfering with an intended progression. Duchamp’s usage inevitably accompanies the word for me, although I have no wish to make every pause beside a French canal carry the burden of art history. Most of our stoppages were determined by thoroughly practical considerations — locks, weather, shopping, water, fuel, repairs, dogs requiring a walk, or simply the arrival of evening. 

Yet chance operated inside those necessities. The dogs were particularly accomplished practitioners of it. Haggis, Delilah and later Else had no respect for an itinerary. Once ashore, the purposeful line of navigation dissolved into smells, verges, tracks, patches of grass and unexplained deviations. Their map of a place was invisible to me, but following portions of it repeatedly brought things into view. The apparently secondary activity — the walk undertaken because dogs needed walking — became one of the principal means by which places were encountered. The chart got us there. The walk disrupted the chart. 

There is a temptation, retrospectively, to make this sound more deliberate than it was. It was not a Duchampian project conceived in advance. We did not set out to construct a Network of Stoppages, nor were the drawings intended as demonstrations of chance operations. Duchamp had simply been part of my intellectual and artistic landscape for so long that certain ways of thinking had become difficult to separate from looking. Influence can work quietly like that. It need not announce itself through quotation or homage. It can become a counter-melody: sometimes almost inaudible, occasionally surfacing, then disappearing again beneath whatever else is happening. 

The principal melody of these drawings belongs to places, walks, dogs, weather, water and the ordinary circumstances in which a sketchbook happened to be opened. Beneath it, though, there has perhaps always been another rhythm — an interest in accident, interruption, measurement, recurrence and the unstable relationship between intention and what actually occurs. Duchamp’s decision to paint Network of Stoppages over Young Man and Girl in Spring makes the analogy more compelling for me. The earlier painting was not simply replaced. It remained physically present beneath the later network. One image became the ground of another. The journeys have acquired something of this palimpsestic character. 

Beneath each drawing lies the navigational journey that made it possible; beneath that, the waterways themselves, carrying older histories of trade, industry, warfare and settlement. Over them comes the route actually travelled. Over that, the deviations made on foot. And over those, years later, memory and writing. None entirely erases what preceded it. Perhaps this also explains the recurrence of forts, castles, châteaux, citadels and ramparts among our stoppages. There is no need to turn this into a symptom requiring interpretation. 

The historical explanation is compelling enough. Waterways were routes of commerce and invasion; settlements controlling them required defence. Travelling those same routes centuries later naturally brought their surviving architectures repeatedly into view. Still, the coincidence has its pleasures. A journey organised around movement repeatedly stops beside structures built to control movement. The canal carries the boat onwards; the fortress commands passage. One opens a route while the other remembers an older desire to close, tax, inspect or defend it. At Châtel-sur-Moselle, Boschplaat lay somewhere below while the dogs and I wandered through the remains of an enormous fortified complex. Eventually a pencil drawing interrupted the walk.

Another stoppage within a stoppage. Perhaps the drawings themselves can be understood in this way. They are not simply records of places visited. Each represents a temporary suspension of the journey — a small withdrawal from forward movement. The boat stops. Walking begins. Walking stops. Drawing begins. Then the sketchbook closes and movement resumes. The resulting marks bear only an oblique relationship to the chart that brought us there. Placed together, however, the drawings begin to suggest another chart altogether: discontinuous, subjective, governed by attention rather than geography. Its important locations are not necessarily the celebrated ones. 

A canal bank can acquire greater weight than a cathedral; a walnut can displace a vineyard; dogs can determine a route more decisively than a guidebook. It is a map that could only have been drawn afterwards. And perhaps that is the quietest connection with Duchamp. The Three Standard Stoppages did not abolish measurement. They allowed chance to bend it — though even that bending was already shaped by preparation, by the conditions of its making. The metre remained a metre, yet its straight certainty acquired three unexpected curves. Our waterway charts remained perfectly serviceable charts. They told us where the locks were and which way the canal turned.

But over the years another network settled across them: walks, interruptions, encounters, drawings, memories. A network of stoppages. The lines are still being discovered.