Eight
Days A Week :1999 :
`City
of Ships and Stores' `Tesco to Birkenau'
An exhibition of twenty Small Paintings : Pete Clarke
No 37, St. Peters Street University of
Central Lancashire Preston, PRl 2HE
curated, by
Lebaina Himid [Reader in Contemporary Art].
City
of ships!
[O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
O the beautiful sharp-bow'd steam ships and sail ships!]
City of the world! [for all races are here,
All lands of the earth make contributions here;]
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and
out with
eddies and foam!
City of wharves and stores-city of tall facades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city-mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Spring up O city-not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
Fear not-submit to no models but your own, O city!
Behold me- incarnate me as I have incarnated you!
I have rejected nothing you offer'd me-whom you adopted I have adopted,
Good or bad I never question you-I love all-I do not condemn any thing,
I chant and celebrate all that is yours-yet peace no more,
In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine,
War, red war is my song through your streets, O city!
Walt Whitman - `I eaves of Grass' 1885.
`The city' does not just refer to a set of buildings
in a particular place. To put it polemically, there is no such thing
as a city.,Rather, the city designates the space produced by the interactions
of historically and geographically specific institutions, social relations
of production and reproduction, practices of government, forms and
media of communication and so forth The city, then, is above all a
representation ....I would argue that the city constitutes `an imagined
environment.'
James Donald
`Metropolis: the city as text', in Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson
[eds], Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity [Cambridge: Polity Press/O.U,1992],
p. 422.
Pete
Clarke was brought up in Nelson, Lancashire. He studied at Burnley
Municipal College, Bristol Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art.
He is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central
Lancashire, Preston. He lives and has a studio in Liverpool.
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