Hacking the Silence with Hannah Thompson

We are in Senate House - 'the vast bulk of London University insulting the autumnal sky' (Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags). The glacial brutalist monolith is softened by wood, glass and bronze deco fittings once you get inside.

According to myth, the Chancellor's Hall - now the ceremonial focus of the building - was earmarked to be Hitler's office. Tonight, a long table bears a sprawl of gadgets with a hint of Bakelite, dinky pound shop pseudo-Tupperware boxes housing unfathomable electronics, an arterial system of leads, and gear from the dictatorship of Apple.

'Hacking the Silence' is sound artist Hannah Thompson's final event in her Leverhulme-funded residency at Senate House Library. Hannah doesn't press 'play' and sit back. It's live performance, manipulating captured sounds of the building and people.

Roars, gushes and filigree episodes move around the hall as different speakers are animated.

At one point Hannah darts out to play her amplified violin; she ends with a heartbreaking recorder solo.

In the Second World War, when the Ministry of Information was based in the building, this space would resonate to gunfire:

"The hall bridges the space between Senate House’s northern and southern blocks and has tall windows providing views west towards Gower Street and east towards Russell Square. It is one of the only rooms that faces both approaches. This geography led to it being used as the headquarters of the Ministry’s unit of the Home Guard. Guns were set up overlooking each entrance and practice drills would take place in the hall. This was said to ‘create a great deal of disturbance’ because the room was also used for meetings." - Dr Henry Irving, Leeds Beckett University, from a blog Senate House Revealed.

Hannah Thompson: https://soundcloud.com/gpud 

Hacking the Silence is part of the Being Human Festival. 

Salon Voltaire: a Dadaist evening at Senate House, London

The spirit of Dada is resuscitated for a cabaret in the space which - according to folklore - was earmarked to be Hitler's London office. We are in the Chancellor's Hall in Senate House.

The brutalist Deco architecture has been modified for the evening with fairy lights, but don't get too comfortable: the building inspired Orwell's Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty Four, and my drawing of my eyes has been enlarged and stuck on the wall to give that Big Brother feeling.

Dada is 100 years old this year. Taking part in this evening of music and words are Hannah Thompson (the Leverhulme-funded sound artist in residence at Senate House Library - her final performance in her residency is on 24 November), Joanne Anderson (Warburg Institute), Sarah Churchwell (Institute of English Studies), Catherine Davies (Institute of Modern Languages Research), Sadaf Fahim (Institute of English Studies), Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute), Dominic Glynn (IMLR), Claire Launchbury (Institute of Historical Research/IMLR), Katia Pizzi (IMLR), Gregory Toth (Senate House Library), Vocal Constructivists, Godela Weiss-Sussex (IMLR).

The evening is devised and presented by Colin Homiski, Research Librarian at Senate House Library.

The Vocal Constructivists (below):

 

Senate House exhibition: evading the issue

Dr Judith Townend of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, who kindly invited me to exhibit some law-based pictures in Senate House, asks the following:

How did you select the drawings? 

First, they had to go with the tawny yellow Travertine walls. Then I went for variety.

 

Which ones were created especially for this exhibition? 

I'd already drawn a QC in chambers doing an intense yoga routine. I don't own the originals so I framed two digital reproductions, about half actual size. (These are not to be confused with prints.) This is a terrible sin as such reproductions look dull compared with originals, but I wanted the QC's physicality to be part of the show.

 

I created a large drawing of a barrister for a particular space. The vulnerability of the work - unframed paper - reflects that of the subject.

 

Senate House is a mysterious machine. My best discovery there is the magical realm of music and gadgets run by Hannah Thompson, the Leverhulme-funded Senate House Library sound artist in residence [left].  

Can you explain a bit more about the rope work?

The exhibition space is a hectic accretion of furniture, recycling bins, red rugs and signage. Framed drawings would have to fight for attention. But how? 

The first thing that caught my eye was jute - upholstery bands trailing from two broken benches. I decided to reflect the falling jute with jute climbing the wall. The tension of the rope would reflect the tension of the courtroom. Fred Hatt and Anna Bones of Anatomie Studio kindly installed a taut trail of rope and pink legal tape by the most physical group of drawings (the yoga QC and the Naked Rambler).

My plan was then exploded. I'd thrown such a tantrum about the state of the benches that they've been repaired. The power has now gone to my head.

What are people’s reactions to your in-court/about law sketching? Do they vary between lawyers or non-lawyers? 

When I'm drawing in the public seats of the Supreme Court, reactions fall roughly into these categories:

'Did you draw me?'

'I just love your work.' (Thank you, Dean.)

'Where are the toilets?' 

'Who's going to win?' Not my field, hunny. But if you're trying to interpret the body language of the justices, be careful. There's a difference between the performance of counsel and the undertow of judgment.

Not many counsel ask, 'Can you see my best side?' Even if they notice me through the blur of Supreme Court nerves, I think they twig that I'm not there to depict Action Person Top QC.

Non-lawyers say, 'Your other blog is better.'

Are you motivated by the notion of bringing the public more closely into contact with law and legal processes (as I am) or do you have another motive for choosing legal settings/themes? 

I like live drawing (not the same as life drawing) - depicting the passing scene, almost as part of it. If you do it in the street, people want to talk to you. Sometimes I'm up for that. But during a court hearing, they can't. Good.

I was once on an after-hours tour of the Old Bailey when some people thought it would be a lark to climb into the dock and giggle a bit. They were solicitors. As I don't have the carapace of legal training, I was shocked - the dock is a numinous space and there but for the grace of God, etcetera - anyone who drives a car, for example, could end up there. Lawyers would dismiss that as sentimentality, but I still think that lawyers and people who administer and design courts have something to gain from reflecting about the legal process. I'm at the finger-painting end of things, though, and easily distracted by appearances. 
  

My exhibition of drawings, The Body of Law, is on the second floor of Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. It is part of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies’ public engagement programme, www.ials.sas.ac.uk. Open until 30 July, Mon-Fri 9am-8.30pm, Sat 9.45am-5.15pm.


 

Thoughts on my Senate House exhibition

I'm not sure why I write about drawing in the Supreme Court (stream-of-consciousness posts here) but it probably occupies some dodgy hinterland between discipline, hobby and eccentricity. 

And I couldn't whip out a sheet of Canson Mi-Teintes on these lofty premises if I hadn't been toughened up by drawing in the mud and snow of Occupy's tragicomic protest camps.

I sit in the public seats. I see what you see. There’s plenty of law, but I leave that to the professionals. Drawing materials have to be small, non-spillable and quiet (you can make quite a racket dragging chalk across paper). 

I’m probably too fond of the Kuretake Little Red Gift Set; the water is safely confined in a plastic brush pen. 

I draw small because of the constraints. But there’s a wall in Senate House asking for something big, maybe cartoonish. And vulnerable.

I go to the wholesalers, John Purcell Paper, and get a roll of white paper nearly my height for about sixteen quid. 

I cut some off and crease it by accident. To make it look deliberate I crush the whole sheet. To avert snow blindness I paint it with tea. 


 




I draw a distillation of a QC I saw at PMS International Limited v Magmatic Limited. I use sheep’s wool dipped in ink which is handy if you want to be big and fast - as when drawing the pole performer Ayumi LaNoire in kimono.  

I include a nod to the Supreme Court emblem, which incorporates the letter omega (it’s your last stop before Europe), Libra (the scales of justice), the Tudor rose of England, the thistle of Scotland, the flax flower of Northern Ireland and the leaves of the Welsh leek. I omit the green – I don't want too many colours. For the flowers I use acrylic ink because I've forgotten how much I dislike its insolent opacity.

 

This time, instead of a single seat in the court, I have a whole kitchen table - from Luke Hughes’s ready-to-wear range in the days before he got to design the woodwork in the Supreme Court.

And guess what - my picture turns out to be legally useful. I am secretly thrilled. 

My friend Hubert is going to use it in a law lecture, to illustrate the difference between copyright and design right: 'Copyright protects "the expression of an author's intellectual creation" whereas the design right protects "the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation" (where a "product" is "any industrial or handicraft item, including parts intended to be assembled into a complex product, packaging, get-up, graphic symbols and typographic typefaces, but excluding computer programs").'

My exhibition of drawings, The Body of Law, is on the second floor of Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. It is part of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies’ public engagement programme, www.ials.sas.ac.uk. Open until the end of July, Mon-Fri 9am-8.30pm, Sat 9.45am-5.15pm.

More twangling instruments: Hannah Thompson's performance at Senate House Library

Whispers, waspish Vespas, Shakespeare mash-ups, blackbirds, squelches, beats, bangs, clangs, library clamour: Hannah Thompson's improvisatory soundscape of a building in flux bounces around the Dr Seng Tee Lee Centre in Senate House Library.

Hannah, the Leverhulme-funded sound artist in residence, is playing with the proportion and perspective of noise. Textures are rhythmic and rich.

Quite a lot of the sound looks like the painting with us in the room, Yellow Grid and Blue by John Edwards, 1969.

We're invited to move around to sample different sonic flavours but I'm trying to control a concertina sketchbook, the kind which spills its guts on the floor, so I stay put.

The event develops at the darkened Horse Hospital in a cobbled mews nearby, where Hannah and other musicians make electronic variations on her Senate House themes.

But after The Incident With The Deer Rifle at Bisley (no furry animals were present, and yes I was wearing ear defenders) I avoid loud noise, so I disappear during the first number. Which is a shame.  Hannah can tell you what I missed.

Hannah has open studio on Wednesdays on the fourth floor of Senate House (please check in advance). Her sound art installation goes on show in November as part of the 2016 Being Human festival. For details, please see Senate House Library and School of Advanced Study websites.

 

I have an exhibition of drawings in Senate House (free and open to the public in the second floor foyer) until 30 July, as part of the Institute of Legal Studies' public engagement programme which explores and promotes the humanity of law. 

Book noise and a suicidal entomologist: Senate House Library

I get The Fear when Hannah Thompson describes how she makes soundscapes out of the general racket in Senate House. It's too much like O-Level physics.

At school I switched to physics-with-chemistry, a pantomime-horse subject for people with soft-boiled science brains. I ended up at the sort of college which tolerates women who read without noticing that the porridge is boiling over.

Today Hannah works ferociously in her studio in Senate House. She is the Leverhulme-funded sound artist in residence, recording upheaval in the life of the building as London University institutions move around the Monopoly board.

Hannah is preparing for a performance on 2 June. She's scouting for a violinist to join her in the Bach Double. Contact her if you think you're hard enough.



She is also creating a soundtrack for the exhibition of Senate House Library treasures, Shakespeare: Metamorphosis. Around the building, staff members' recordings of Shakespeare gobbets are set off by movement sensors in Pound Shop plastic boxes customised with a soldering iron.






Outside Hannah's studio is an installation by Tom Phillips, The Library at Elsinore. The painted-over books - real ones with titles from Hamlet - compete with the cacophany of signage.










 This is how it was displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007 (below):

In 2008 it was exhibited by the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall, North Yorkshire. Where next?

I go home on a sweltering Heatherwick Routemaster, which rhymes with design disaster, reading The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion.

He describes the almost-sound that Hannah's instruments can't capture: 'The Porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire - the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing. It makes me shudder to think of Lamb's Essays being carted about as if they were fardels.'

Fardels, a word from Hamlet. Later in the journal: 'The best girl in the best dress immediately looks disreputable if her stockings be downgyved.' Hamlet again. The current of words, the ocean of association.

For details please see Senate House Library and School of Advanced Study websites. Earlier blog posts here.

I have a small exhibition in Senate House under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies starting in June. No sound but enough rope.

A Bard-ass show at Senate House Library

It’s all about the hang. Displaying a work of art draws attention to its context. 

This unlabelled sculpture in Senate House highlights the circuit breaker. They embody the tension in the building between art and function.

I’m on my way to the exhibition Shakespeare: Metamorphosis. 

Sir Peter Hall described Shakespeare as the heavyweight champion of the world: no one can go the distance with him. Someone who took exception to Shakespeare’s immortality was Tolstoy.  In Tolstoy on Shakespeare (1906), he complains of ‘an irresistible repulsion and tedium’.

Hamlet ‘has no character whatever...During the whole of the drama, Hamlet is doing, not what he would really wish to do, but what is necessary for the author’s plan.’ 

Eh? Watch out for that train, Anna.

He does a hatchet job on King Lear, complaining that ‘all the characters speak in a way in which no living men ever did or could speak.’

He sees veneration of Shakespeare as ‘an hypnotic state’, dismisses the oeuvre as ‘trivial and immoral…aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators’ and blames the Germans for bigging up the Bard. 

George Orwell, writing while engaged in wartime propaganda, steps in to referee. His essay Tolstoy and Shakespeare describes Tolstoy’s carping as ‘one of the greatest pieces of moral, non-aesthetic criticism – anti-aesthetic criticism, one might say – that have ever been written’ but points out that Tolstoy is on the ropes. ‘Tolstoy criticises Shakespeare not as a poet, but as a thinker and a teacher…’ but ‘Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or poem or play or what not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning – a residuum of something we can only call art.’

Senate House was Orwell's model for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Senate House Library website refers to ‘our infamous Room 101’. But that’s just propaganda. The inspiration for the room which contains the worst thing in the world was not here but in Portland Place where Orwell got bored out of his skull in committee meetings. Still, to reflect the room’s overtones of psychological manipulation, the exhibition links it to Othello. Its usual tenants have been dislodged.

Today, a photographer is recording the set-up.

The best way to prepare for this beautifully presented compilation of Senate House Library treasures is to look at the engaging miniature films under the Timeline heading made by the curators, Dr Karen Attar and Dr Richard Espley.

The exhibition celebrates how Shakespeare thrives on reinvention, his and ours. And it’s a stonking display of world-class scholarly librarianship, past and present, in an age when public libraries are being dumped on volunteers. 

Elegant captions steer you from early sources to the digital era. A taster showcase three floors below starts with Ovid’s Metamorphoses – one of Shakespeare’s lifelong sources, now required to carry trigger warnings for a certain type of student.

The display uses ceiling suspension and screens to crack the problem of the noli-me-tangere Travertine walls. A shadow falls on Hamlet - 

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

The way out takes you past some busts: William Shaen, lawyer and social reformer...










...Augustus De Morgan, mathematician...

 …and, tucked away, the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham. His real preserved head and, separately, his auto-icon (the dapperly dressed, waxen-headed skeleton) are up the road in UCL. 

This bust is inscribed with his motto, plurimorum maxima felicitas – literally, ‘of the most, the biggest happiness’. As Bentham put it, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’

He also pointed out that the smaller the majority, the greater the infelicity. And so we totter towards a referendum – still clutching for moral support at the genius of our global propagandist, our agent of soft power rooted in Stratford-upon-Avon.

For details of Shakespeare: Metamorphosis and related events, please see the Senate House Library website. Back at the kitchen table, something is forming: I have an exhibition in Senate House starting in June, under the auspices of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.