1 One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm 2 3 One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm James N. Hutchinson 4 5 Contents 1 Of Time and the Hill: An Introduction Edinburgh 11 Looking at Pictures, Thinking about Exhibitions Dieppe | Varengeville-sur-mer 39 A Symmetrical Echo: Some Thoughts on Art and Biography Rouen | Wädenswill 59 Three Moves Around a Problem Fontainebleau | The Peak District | Cape Town 89 Dyads or A Review of Römerstrasse Car Park for Google Guides Baden | Viamala | Bologna 113 An Asterism of Absences: Four Short Texts Bad Ragaz | Soncino | Como | Chiavenna 133 From Art Objects to Art Things: The Broken Artworks of Mark Landis and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini Brescia | Laurel 145 Sidhe Vicious Bolca | Eigg 6 1 Of Time and the Hill An Introduction Edinburgh 2 3 This book contains a set of site-specific essays, written to be read on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. They are part of a wider project, Rumours of a New Planet, which I have undertaken over the last two years, following an invitation from Collective to devise an alternative way to access the potentialities present in a site rich in historical and associative narratives. My approach – both in this book and in the wider project – has been to consider Calton Hill as a central node in a network of ideas, events, people and spaces. As such, the essays in this book are not about Calton Hill, but instead represent a view from it, or more specifically, a view from a building positioned on its peak: the City Observatory. In its heyday, the observatory site contained numerous telescopes pointing up into the night sky, but it also contained a deep-earth thermometer, pointing down to the centre of the planet. Looking up beyond the earth’s atmosphere and looking down beneath the earth’s surface are both embedded in Edinburgh’s understanding and representation of time. In terms of astronomical time, during the building’s working life as a Royal Observatory (1822-1896)⁠1 its main purpose was to track the movement of the stars in order to keep the observatory clock accurate, such that it could be used to calibrate the clocks and navigation instruments on the ships in Leith Harbour. The observatory was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment as was the idea of deep time, which was proposed 4 OF TIME AND THE HILL by the Edinburgh geologist, James Hutton. The rock face on nearby Salisbury Crags is named ‘Hutton’s Section’ because it is where many of his observations were made. Half of this rock face is visible from the front gate of the observatory. This is not the only sight you can see from here though; Calton Hill has long been a vantage point for looking out onto the entire city. In 1787, the artist Robert Baker produced the world’s first panoramic painting from atop the hill (and coined the term, panorama, in the process), in which Salisbury Crags appears, as does the emerging New Town, and the site which is now occupied by Edinburgh’s currently operational Royal Observatory: Blackford Hill. The intense activity that took place in Edinburgh during the Enlightenment gave rise to a number of significant thinkers (such as David Hume, Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart) who have become synonymous with that period, and who have left their scientific and cultural marks on the city and the wider world. Many of these figures had a direct relationship with Calton Hill, and the ideas (and histories) they generated loom as large as the hill itself. There is, perhaps, little to be gained in mining their stories further when there are other people whose outputs are yet to be brought to the foreground, and as an artist attempting to a) find a different way of looking out from Calton Hill and b) develop a method of production that might offer some sort of access to the hill’s unique relationship to time, it was those currently in the background to whom I turned. One of these people is Jessica Duncan, a woman from Aberdeenshire whose work can be found via the dominant narrative of her husband, Charles Piazzi Smyth, the last Astronomer Royal for Scotland to be based at the observatory on Calton Hill. Piazzi Smyth took up the position in 1846 after working at the Cape Observatory in South Africa, where he’d observed Halley’s Comet with astronomers Thomas Maclear and John Herschel. OF TIME AND THE HILL 5 His tenure at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh mainly consisted of battling against poor financing and equipment that was borderline obsolete, but his significant achievement was the design and construction of the timing device on the adjacent Nelson’s Monument. This was a ball, connected to the observatory clock by an underground electrical cable, which was automatically raised and lowered depending on the time. The monument’s height made the ball visible to the captains of ships anchored in Leith Harbour, enabling them to set their chronometers by it. The famous one o’clock gun fired from Edinburgh Castle was an advance on this device, so that clocks and chronometers could still be set when the ball was obscured by fog. The ball is now operated manually, and is set not by the astronomical clock but – perversely – by the sound of the gun. Piazzi Smyth combined his interest in astronomy with pyramidology, and visited Egypt to measure the Great Pyramid, from which he drew a number of ‘divine’ conclusions. He constructed elaborate theories about relationships between the dimensions of the pyramid, the number of days in a year and the distance between Earth and the sun, and he used his formulas to predict three dates for the Second Coming, modifying each when it turned out not to be true. He married Jessica Duncan in 1855, and they took their honeymoon on Tenerife, to which he also shipped a massive telescope in order to conduct a number of high-altitude astronomy experiments. His achievements and his eccentricity make it clear why he is so present in the story of Calton Hill. Following their marriage, Duncan accompanied Piazzi Smyth on all his trips, writing up all his field notes. In the archive at the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill, there are a number of boxes that contain Piazzi Smyth’s notebooks (in Duncan’s handwriting) and a number of projects the pair did together, such as observational studies of ferns. There are three small notebooks amongst the set, however, that represent a solo project by Duncan that she’d 6 OF TIME AND THE HILL embarked on before they met, a project that would ultimately remain unfinished. Duncan moved to Edinburgh in 1847 to attend Alexander Rose’s lectures on geology, which he delivered at his house on Drummond Street. Rose was a craftsman with an interest in geology, and he set up the Edinburgh Geological Society in 1843 with a group of friends. In her notebooks, Duncan transcribed all forty- three of Rose’s lectures (which she illustrated with drawings and diagrams), made translations of essays and articles by Italian and French geologists, produced instructional texts and schematics on fieldwork methodologies, and also documented a number of local excursions she went on with her classmates, including one to Salisbury Crags to study Hutton’s Section. After she’d completed Rose’s course, she went on a number of other geology excursions, mainly around Scotland, England and Ireland. She was in Belfast in 1852 for the 22nd meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and although Smyth was there too she does not mention him, so it isn’t clear whether they met there. The climax of her notebooks, though, the final section before she becomes absorbed into the Piazzi Smyth story, are notes from 1854, when she undertook her most ambitious excursion, which took her across Europe from Dieppe to Florence. Her journey seems to have been made by rail and – at the Swiss and Italian lakes – by water. Her notes consist mainly of geological observations, sometimes from the window of a train or the deck of a ship, and sometimes from close quarters as she hiked up a mountain. It is an unusual set of notes in the sense that her journey took several weeks but is covered in a single, short stream of text (roughly the same length as this introduction), and although the tone is consistent with her previous notes on geology (other than the occasional aside or observation) they have little scientific value, as she’s describing hundreds of miles of terrain in OF TIME AND THE HILL 7 just a few sentences. The pace and the consistency suggest to me that they are notes extracted from a more detailed diary, written in a manner intended to evoke something of the changing of the landscape encountered at high speed. The reality of the trip would have been entirely different, though. She seems to have been travelling alone, as she mostly uses the pronoun, ‘I,’ only using ‘we’ during the sections in which she is on the move, therefore presumably referring to the mass of travellers of which she’s a part. There would have been some detailed logistical work necessary, because although the major towns and cities were connected by rail, many of the smaller places were not, and some sites she refers to remain relatively remote even today. It is these smaller places that get the most attention – the Viamala and its surroundings, for instance, and the mountains behind the Grand Hotel Hof Ragatz (both in the Swiss Alps) – so she is clearly more focused on geology in these settings.