Swandown

As Andrew Kötting’s work is laced with rig­or­ous philo­soph­i­cal quo­ta­tions from the likes of Roman­ian philoso­pher EM Cio­ran, it’s safe to say he assumes a cer­tain amount of the­o­ret­i­cal knowl­edge on the part of his viewers.

Yet his jour­neys – from 1997’s Gal­li­vant (around Britain’s coasts), to the 2003 book/​installation In The Wake of Deadad (through Eng­land to Mex­i­co with inflat­able rep­re­sen­ta­tions of his late father) and now in Swandown (up the Riv­er Thames) – depend on unself­con­scious inter­ac­tions with local res­i­dents who remain obliv­i­ous to the fact that they’re spring­boards for larg­er musings.

“Meet ordi­nary peo­ple,” Köt­ting notes in mock­ing voiceover while detail­ing his plan for the first few days. But he is green with exhaus­tion and ready to pack it in on day one, fit only for a few TV inter­views by day three. There are a few encoun­ters with the same kind of friend­ly natives that pop­u­lat­ed Gal­li­vant; local eccentrics who can be count­ed on to lead a brief tour through the coun­try­side or pop off a song. But the focus is large­ly on Köt­ting and his trav­el­ling com­pan­ions, most often writer/​psychogeographer Iain Sinclair.

The task of divin­ing essences from the land­scape is one fraught with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of alien­at­ing less aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly root­ed view­ers, hence the need for con­stant self-mock­ery and defla­tion. ​“We’re in a dif­fer­ent kind of Eng­land… The mor­phic res­o­nances of some of the things that we’ve begun are begin­ning to come back and haunt us in a dif­fer­ent way, a kind of sub­ur­banised way,” Köt­ting mus­es to his crew via walkie-talkie. ​“Every­thing around Maid­stone is a par­o­dy. You’re gonna see pirate ships, you’re going to see cas­tles pre­tend­ing to be cas­tles that are real­ly tax offices.” Their response is meant to dash all charges of pre­ten­tious self-involve­ment: ​“You think what? Over.”

With his big head and reas­sur­ing­ly blok­ish pres­ence astride an inef­fi­cient swan-shaped ped­a­lo (bor­rowed from ven­er­a­ble Hast­ings seafront attrac­tion, Swan Lake), Köt­ting reas­sures view­ers noth­ing too pre­ten­tious is about to hap­pen. Stick­ing to small rur­al towns achieves, like Gallivant’s coast­line route, the sooth­ing side-effect of keep­ing all poten­tial unpleas­ant­ness off-cam­era: there are no signs of racial fric­tion or eco­nom­ic dis­pos­ses­sion here, no home­less drug addicts or oth­er mar­gin­alised social members.

Indeed, Eng­lish­ness remains dis­con­cert­ing­ly, ill advis­ed­ly close to the ​‘Lit­tle Britain’ eulo­gies of JB Priest­ley. Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, much of Gal­li­vant unfold­ed with Kötting’s fin­ger on the fast-for­ward but­ton, the jerky visu­als exem­pli­fy­ing his mus­ings on technology’s over-rapid march. Here, he favours long shots, some of which are allu­sive (morn­ings in the fog on the Thames that resem­ble Gains­bor­ough can­vas­es) and oth­ers mere­ly sym­met­ri­cal­ly serviceable.

As in his ear­li­er film, audio and video snip­pets from gov­ern­ment-pro­duced shorts of the ​’30s and ​’40s rest against chilly elec­tron­i­ca, neat­ly in line with the effect pro­duced by ​‘hauntology’-minded elec­tron­ic musi­cians like Mor­dant Music. Lon­don, unavoid­ably, resists this affir­ma­tion of cul­tur­al continuity.

Fum­ing over ​“the huge enclo­sures of the Olympic site”, Köt­ting is denied per­mis­sion to nav­i­gate the waters near­by, his jour­ney end­ing with peev­ish jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for his pref­er­ence for a rel­a­tive­ly untrou­bled past alive in the countryside.