SPECTATE: I went camping once, too
SPECTATE is a new series of flash essays, written as records of happenings, performances, television shows, films, books, and other moments.
I went camping once. Actually, I’ve been a few times. Mostly I pitch up in family friendly sites, where running water comes from a tap near a wooden fence, and the communal kitchen is a lonely, retired kitchen sink.
I’ve dreamt about wild camping. Out in the muck, surrounded by long grass, where the lambs in spring jump and home – the city – is a distant misfortune. I imagine it to be my empty place, twinkling in a distant dream world, there waiting for me to arrive with my fingers plugged into my ears.
Sometimes people call pop music dreamy. Theodor Adorno wrote that popular music is “for the masses a perpetual busman’s holiday.”1 It can’t be true that just by listening to whatever has landed prematurely in the charts, we are lulling ourselves “to inattention.”2 Did he ever think that maybe the oft-condemned listener really does enjoy the experience of listening to pop music? Bus drivers have dreams too, and maybe pop takes them to the same dream land that camping takes me. Somewhere wild, free, undistracted and alive.
I thought about all of this after watching Nathan Walker’s Twenty Truant Shapes at GLOAM in Sheffield. They spent a full eight hours in the company of a burnt orange camping tarp, strung up at the corners, moving, adjusting, readjusting, uttering single words, and - at points – climbed out from under it to walk around and play with scattered objects.
We spent around ten minutes sitting and watching. Cross-legged on the painted black hard floor. Admiring the dedication to sustained performance, lulling ourselves into inattention. Grasping at that still, motionless body under the cover and wishing that its presence in the room would force every lick of attention out of us.
Eventually we left, but not before becoming part of it all. As our hands lifted the carabiner, and we grazed the tops of our heads on the corner of the straps tugging the tarp into place, we shared a moment with the body in hiding. And it stirred something in me. A forgotten dream, or something else.
In that small square room, all at once we had wild camped, listened to a kind of pop music, and lifted ourselves into and out of a dream.
Twenty Truant Shapes happened on 07.09.2024 and was curated by Victoria Sharples.
Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music”. In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Storey, John. 1998.
Ibid.