A Search for Mrs. B

Posthumous Progress curated by Nottingham based performance artist Simon Raven, took place on October 24th at Wollaton Hall. The event constituted an eccentric array of performance based interventions by artists Brian Catling, Aaron Williamson, Kirsten Norrie, Sian Robinson-Davies, Jack Catling, Jenna Finch, Simon Raven and Alia Pathan. All of the artists, with the exception of Pathan, following the vernacular and expectations of performance art, delivered their interventions in person. However, Pathan’s offering to Posthumous Progress took the form of an audio guide, entitled A Search for Mrs B, which endeavoured to evoke the resonance of former Wollaton Hall resident Cassandra Willoughby (subsequently Bridges). In this article I hope to demonstrate how this playful subversion of the conventional heritage site experience which demonstrates the other worldly in our midst, can be situated within the psychogeographical literary tradition established by figures such as Daniel Defoe and Thomas de Quincey.

Before continuing with this analysis, it seems important to give a description of A Search for Mrs B. The piece requires that you accept Pathan as your guide, who can be considered an interlocutor with Wollaton Hall and its past inhabitants. The journey commences in the grand entrance hall and proceeds to the landscape gardens at the rear of the house, the route prescribed by Pathan entails encircling the hall and an exploration of its various rooms; seemingly premised on capturing an illusive glimpse of Mrs B a previous aristocratic resident of the hall. The piece not only presents the supernatural reverberations of Mrs B but also her material traces such as the painting on the ceiling above the stairs.  Pathan also describes an array of occult signifiers such as a spectral chess player, a séance conductor and a spirit summoning organ player. Throughout the audio guide Pathan creates an atmosphere of tension, anxiety and risk, refusing to enter into certain rooms, at others entering against her judgement, which seemingly evokes the tangibility of the occult. This is heightened through descriptions of inexplicable variations in the thickness of the air and temperature. Pathan also utilizes multilayered sound effects, which effectively juxtapose the general milieu typical to Wollaton Hall with the breath and sinister murmurings belonging individuals other than Pathan.

 A Search for Mrs B is not intended for the curmudgeon rationalist.  The piece asks that you accept the notion that somebody can leave a physical imprint on a building they once inhabited and that this continued resonance can lead to spectral apparitions from beyond the grave. There is also disparity between the authority of the narrative and the actuality of what you see whilst on the audio guide. One’s imagination has to quickly respond as you are informed that you see a “dozen black crows”, “a woman conducting a séance” or an “organ player” etc.  The overall effect being that artist’s internal monologue supplants your own.  This creates a tension, and perhaps it would easier to suspend one’s disbelief if the artist was sharing rather than instructing a vision.   Arguably, the piece could have attempted more gradual erosion between the artist’s fantasy and the experience of the participant, engendering a scenario where two separate minds fuse. However, this potential weakness also contributes to one of the strengths of A Search For Mrs B. Pathan achieves a fruitful juxtaposition between the ordinary and the supernatural. By taking the audio and accepting its didactic approach, there is the sense of being isolated from the conventional and easily anticipated experience of Wollaton as a site of heritage; Pathan supplants this with a gothic and supernatural intrigue.  The piece successfully isolates its participants and ushers them on a journey into the psychogeographical macabre.

Now let us consider how A Search for Mrs B intersects with the psycho-geographical tradition, which will be achieved by using an analytical lens provided by Merlin Coverley’s work Psychogeography.  As Coverley explains psychogeography ‘often seems nebulous and resistant to definition’ because ‘it appears to harbour within it such a welter of seemingly unrelated elements’. However, as Coverley also points out ‘amongst this melange of ideas, events and identities, a number of predominant characteristics can be recognized’. 

A Search for Mrs B demonstrates some noteworthy affinities with the early psychogeographical tradition. The trajectory towards what we might comprehend to be psychogeography was initiated by Daniel Defoe with works such as Journal of the Plague Year, Robinson Crusoe and A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. This was continued by authors such as Thomas de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen. Within Defoe we find a precursory psychogeographer. His Journal of the Plague Year was the result of extensive urban explorations filtered through his imagination to create a ‘subjective re-working of the city’. Importantly Cynthia Wall’s description of the work as a ‘haunted geography’ seems equally applicable to A Search for Mrs B. The works of de Quincey, Stevenson and Machen demonstrate the superimposition of macabre or otherworldly visions onto the environments they represent. Each of them refute the banality of the everyday and create shortcuts to the ‘magical [or invisible] realm[s] behind our own. Such creative tendencies resonate strongly with A Search for Mrs B, with its playful sense of subversion, and the way that Pathan creates an imaginary voyage which eerily suggests that the spiritual world is holistically entwined with our own. Also, a Coverley highlights, within the work of Defoe, de Qunicey and Machen, there emerged the notion of ‘genius loci ‘or sense of place’, a kind of historical consciousness that exposes the psychic connectivity of landscapes both urban and rural’. Indeed, A Search for Mrs B can be perceived as reflecting an awareness of genius loci, in its performance of the notion that landscapes can be permeated with a sense of the histories of past inhabitants and the events, which have taken place against them.

Of course, it must be highlighted that Pathan cannot be perceived as holding affinities with the Situationist’s (Spearheaded by Guy Debord) and their use of psychogeography, which stripped the practice of its artistic dimension and aspired with a pseudo scientific vigour to study ‘the emotional and behavioural impact of the urban space upon individual consciousness’.

Importantly, the tradition established by Defoe and de Quincey was subsequently resurrected by figures such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. Ackroyd’s position as a London Psychogeographer is somewhat ambivalent due to ‘his insistence on London’s eternal nature’ this reflecting an innate conservatism ‘in which all change is subsumed within this unending historical overview’. Sinclair’s evocations of the London urban environment are by contrast often interpreted as being vehement critiques of Thatcherite redevelopment. Pathan does not invite contextualization into either of these respective uses of psychogeography. This might led a more vociferous or partisan critic to conclude that A Search for Mrs B is vulnerable to the criticisms of contemporary psychogeography made by film-maker Patrick Keiller. As Coverley highlights, ‘Keiller has characterised psychogeography as increasingly pre-occupied with its own practices as an end in themselves, no longer the tool of any larger political or even cultural project’.

Whilst it is necessary to acknowledge this criticism for the sake of self-reflexivity I do not wish to follow this line of argument. Importantly, A Search for Mrs B is quite distinct from other contemporary practitioners use of the audio guide. A salient example being Graeme Miller’s Linked which recorded the inhabitants and general milieu of the area demolished to create the M11 link road . This to some extent forming a critique of urban regeneration, but also arguably existing in state of passive representation.  By contrast Pathan dominantly superimposes her imagination onto the landscape in question. A Search for Mrs B is held together with a slick and well-timed narrative, and the piece translates the high quality production values typically associated with Pathan’s work (for example, Empty Vessels).  However, the piece also suggests future avenues of exploration. Within the context of Pathan’s practice, the work is by no means hermetically sealed. It seems salient to point out that the work tacitly suggests the strength and future possibility of utilizing the audio guide as a tool for psychogeographical investigation. Indeed, the creative superimposition of an artist’s vision (devised individually or perhaps collectively) onto an environment, urban or otherwise, could be used for the purpose of an utopian re-imagining of that space; anyway, just a thought.