Sandy Gibbs
âHail the great swimmer! Hail the great swimmer!â the people shouted.
âFranz Kafka, Fragments
When I was young, more than anything else in the world I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. I canât swear to the longevity of this statement for, when I was young, I wanted to be many things. But there was a time I recall longing for the fame, glamour and the sheer watery sleekness that was embodied not just by the swimmers, but also in the magnificence of swimming pools themselves. The size, the scale, the purposefulness of these spacesâthere was no denying it, modernity had me firmly in its grip.
This was back in the late 60s and soâenergetically, optimisticallyâI joined the swimming club at a pool close to home. Home was Hornby, a working class suburb in Christchurch, and our nearest public pool was in Sockburn, a brisk 15-minute bike ride away. Each weekday before school and again after school, I biked to the pool for a training session. I pedalled past the rows of cheap houses and the factories, and held my breath going past the abattoirâthat Bataillean temple to âsupplication and slaughterâ[1] with its reeking stench of scared animals, shit and deathâand past the car assembly plant in Buchanans Road that, back then, offered no foreknowledge of my own impending and dreary fate in that very production line. But this was still the late 60s and life was peachy.
And so my love affair with Sockburn Pool began. Architecturally, it was all form and function manifested in concrete. Its name suggested a singular poolâbut in fact there were three: the main pool, a separate diving pool and a toddlersâ pool. On one side, widely spaced concrete steps descended to the main pool, and a grassy bank on the other side sloped down to the diving pool and the toddlersâ pool. In my youthful memories, I recall it as a space of perfect proportions, one that embodied meaningful intent, never once doubting the purpose of its existence. I was seduced by its sheer confidence, its concrete physicality, its blatant obedience to form and function. Opened in 1965, it was a typical example of our still-lingering belief in modernist municipal munificence, but I was far too busy boisterously leaping into the pool to give a thought to politics or ideologies. And in those days, a young swimmer called Tui Shipston was my idol.[2] Tui had a black and white striped swimsuit, so I nagged my mother to get a black and white striped swimsuit. I adored it. I wore it so much that I ended up with tanned stripes running up and down my naked little body. I was stared at in the changing rooms, but I didnât careâsomehow it made me closer to my idol. It was much later that I discovered Daniel Buren and idly wondered what he wouldâve made of my body-as-site-responsive tanned stripes, a walking-talking-laughing-farting-squealing changing room intervention. The ubiquity of art: found even in the swimming pool changing rooms.
Another intervention: the unspeakable joy of being the first to dive in, to break the surface of the early morning pool. Stretched taut like a reflective skin, yet I was always surprised at its liquid state, how passively the watery molecules parted to allow my entry. But this simple rupture in the waterâs surface masked a joltâthe sudden ontological dislocation from the everyday into the sensual pleasure of complete immersion. Never failing to evoke that old-fashioned word: transcendence. And another: sublime. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant located sublimity as the feeling that arises whenever we become aware of the transcendental dimensions of experience. Kant tells us that whereas âthe beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundariesâ, the sublime by contrast âis to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, boundlessness is representedâ.[3] Certainly, being under water in this pool was the closest Iâd ever come to experiencing anything like sublime boundlessness, where the moving formlessness of water seemingly negated the presence of the concrete container holding it in place. You see, in my imagination, the edges to the pool no longer existed.
But I had two lives at Sockburn: one of freedom and the other of control, both located within the dual tyrannies of space and time. The crisp discipline of training, of following those black stripes endlessly up and down the pool under the panoptic gaze of the coach. Repetition, looping, returning, correction and multiplicity conspired to create an ever-deepening palimpsest of rehearsals, re-workings and erasuresâa constant re-inscription of aquatic travails, as I disgorged watery bruises and trailing bubbles in my wake. Rituals of swimming, training and competing are all performed inside this white concrete structure under the authoritarian gaze of the coach. Here, the swimming pool is vested with authority and controlâfor this space is controlled by the inevitability of time trials, time keeping, and timetables. It was Michel Foucault who observed that the most effective way of controlling any activity in the provided space was to time table it: âTime measured⊠must also be a time without impurities or defects; a time of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise.â[4] For me, this was the time in which linear notions of measured temporality ruled my life. Outside, I experienced time in a more random and diverse way, but within the space of the swimming pool, it was simplified, itâs raison dâĂȘtre distilled to a terrifying purity of time. Space also: the tyranny of distanceâhow far, how many lengths, how many times up and down the pool. And so time and space became conflated, and I learned to decipher time and space in the mute hours I spent immersed in the pool. But, I ask myselfâthe ânowâ me, not the âthenâ meâisnât it always our human desire to impose structure on time? Or, conversely, does the space itself impose structure and time on us?
[Time] is also where subjectivity is produced: over time, in time, with time.
âMieke Bal[5]
The little fluttering flags, the team uniforms and matching swimsuits, the big bosomy bossy time-keeping ladies with their pedantic stopwatchesâI loved it all: the tingling, tummy-flipping, competitive thrill of a swimming carnival. Even though (or maybe because) waiting for your turn to race was always nerve-wracking, and stepping up onto the starting blocks was that stomach-churning moment of No Return. Self-consciousness, self-awareness, exposed alonenessâthe intense painfulness of the subjective moment, overloaded with possibilities. Fleetingly, subjectivity becomes about these possibilities. To borrow from Daniel Birnbaum: âthe subject is not a thing, but rather it is a condition of possibility of things…â[6] Selfhood expressed as possibilities and inevitabilities: winning was sometimes a faint possibility, and finishing was inevitable, but coming last was disastrous. It might elicit some level of sympathy from your teammates, but in reality it cruelly marked you as an outsiderâa bit hapless and pathetic. As kids, everything was seen as black or whiteâwe didnât yet understand the tragi-comic possibilities of failure. The Australian photographer Tracey Moffatt captured this moment perfectly in her series Fourth (2001) of Olympic athletes who have come in fourth place, having just missed out on a medal. Moffatt focused on the moment of their realisation, observing: âYou almost made it, but you just missed out. Fourth means that you are almost good. Not the worst (which has itâs own perverted glamour) but almost⊠Most of the time the expression is expressionless, itâs a set look, which crosses the human face. Itâs an awful, beautiful, knowing mask…â[7] For all athletes face the fear of this moment, the state of having just lost, of having just missed out, this incredibly slight moment-in-time where the fear of failure is made manifest at the exact moment of realization that they are not the best. It was Roland Barthes who turned his attention to the meaning of sport, asking: âWhat is sport? Sport answers this question by another question: who is best?â[8] Astutely, Barthes has provided the punch line to Moffattâs Fourth.
The myth of sporting greatness is rubbed raw; desire to be âthe bestâ grates against quotidian loops of utter boredom and the always-present potential for failure. As Jennifer Doyle has observed: âNibbling on the edges of the experience of boredom, and the experience of being bored, is both the possibility of the discovery of desire and the threat of total failure.â[9] In this, sexual desire is implied and subtly connected to both the state of boredom and the threat of failure. I hadnât yet discovered sexual desire, but I was acutely aware of bodies in swimsuits, of near nakedness, and vaguely inept eroticisms whispered behind hands. Judgments passed, bodies discussed, bodily references that I misunderstood and misquoted in those unruly libidinous fragments that slipped out. In the pool, too, things slipped outâby the end of the day, the water in the pool was murky and dense from the dayâs deluge of bodies: snot, piss, hair, sweat. To swim in the late-afternoon pool was to experience the horrors of coming into contact with these floating remnants. The sublime turned feral: reminders of my own bodily fear and taboos, and the way in which I badly occupied my own adolescent body. This, then, was the abject âinside outsideââfear and failure made manifest, physically and bodilyâeroding the porous boundaries between fear of failure with those opposing forces of desire and inner discipline.
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but rather what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.
âJulia Kristeva[10]
In my quest for perfection, I had entered into a zone of anxiety and fear of the not-perfect, not-controlled, treacherous body. My own body had turned traitor. It was my ears: at first they started to ring, then itch, then ooze, and before I knew it, my ear wax was mingling with the other pool flotsam. Fecund, feral ears dripping into the pool, and onto my pillow at night. Wax-stained, tear-stained, visceral traces more powerful than language: here was presented the unspeakable horror and revulsion I felt at the sight of my own inside-out. At the very edge of my self-knowing, of my self-understanding, there was sudden doubt accompanied by the vertiginous mixture of fear and denial. Hide the evidence! But it was too late: my all-seeing mother was vigilant. I was marched to an ear doctor who poked and prodded. My future was discussed over my head, the edict duly handed down: stop swimming, stay out of the water, keep ears dry. In a single moment, the relationship I had with my own body changed forever; it was now traitorous, imperfect. Face to face with my own monster, my fear of failure, I ran away from Sockburn Pool.
I grew up and then finally I left town.
I returned many years later and, buoyed by a rediscovered joy in swimming, I decided to visit Sockburn Pool. No one told me it had been closed, or, to adopt the language of bureaucrats: it had been rationalized. That terrible word, a sad legacy of enlightenment reason adopted as truth by cost-cutting accountants and applied with unquestioning obeyance, or, to quote John Ralston Saul: âRationalization is to economics what bleeding was to eighteenth-century medicineâ.[11] At first, it was abandoned to sit dormant for 18 lonely, bleeding, deteriorating months. And so within this site that had once ruled my life with its dual tyrannies of space and time, it was time that had exerted itself in its full vindictiveness. Abandoned and marginalized, time achingly eroded the once-powerful concrete structure. In my memories of that space the images are framed by the surrounding concrete steps, bringing to mind the words of Roland Barthes: â⊠the meaning doesnât necessarily reside within these frames: these views are haunted by absence and loss; each confronts us with the trace of an irretrievably vanished moment. But the absence in question here is of a different order; it is framing an absenceâ.[12] Yet many other things also constituted this space: not only the physicalityâthe âthingnessââof the three pools framed by concrete steps, but also the delight of buying an ice cream on a hot day from the little shop at the top of the concrete steps; the squeals of laughter in the changing rooms; the swarms of unruly kids who jostled in the water above the black lines on the bottom of the pool; and thoseâlike meâwho, dreaming of athletic greatness, fell under the spell of those same lines, following them endlessly up and down the pool; and, best of all, the sheer joy of the wonderful, lusty, strutting hubris of youth. The void created by their complete absence is highlighted even more so by the disturbing presence of something else: the invisible yet undeniable traces of economic and political transactions that slithered in through the unguarded fences. For it was all of these thingsâand moreâthat together constituted this site.
Then in October 2007, the Christchurch City Council sent a letter to local residents:
Dear Resident
Machinery was moved on site at Sockburn Pool this morning to demolish the closed facility⊠Council considered options for the use of the land and decided to retain it as open space. Officers have today proceeded to implement this decision, demolishing the main pool and diving pool by perforating the tanks, collapsing the concrete walls and filling the holes with soil from on site. Associated on-site buildings are also being demolished then the site will be leveled, covered in topsoil and planted in grassâŠ
It continued:
The toddlersâ pool and adjacent barbecue area will be retained to create an area for families to enjoy picnics throughout the summer.
In one of those moments of immense absurdity, the toddlersâ pool was the only survivor: a pathetically shrunken, suburban redemption. The rest of the site is now grassed over but the ground is oddly sunken and uneven, in that unnerving way that a shallow grave demands attention, atonement, attribution. And so it is that, submerged under this lumpy soggy ground, Sockburn Pool can never be completely erased as, in the words of Brian Dillon: âErasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface ⊠some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again…â[13] But what we didnât know was that, in the graveyard space between erasure and detritus, there was something even more violent and terrible lurking, for Christchurch was soon to be hit by two powerful earthquakes: a magnitude 7.1 on September 4, 2010, and a magnitude 6.3 on February 22, 2011.
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. Whatâs left us then?
âJames Joyce, Ulysses
The toddlersâ pool is now damaged, derelict and fenced off. Four years after the 2011 quake, the sign on the fence still reads: âThis Christchurch City Council facility is closed due to the earthquakes. The Council is striving to assess and carry out work on its 1600 buildings as quickly as possible as part of its Facilities Rebuild Plan program.â It ends: âWe apologize for any inconvenienceâ. Cynically, I note how the bureaucrats have re-asserted themselves as the agents of delay and destruction; paradoxically, itâs unlikely that they will comprehend how much of this all pivots on failure. And also deathâa kind of a slow, ruinously drowning death and disappearance. In an oddâand yet blindingly obviousâconnection with death and failure, I canât stop thinking about tragic drownings: of Shelley drowning off the coast of Viareggio, âa volume of Sophocles clutched in one handâ[14]; of Virgina Woolf who filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse; and of the artist Bas Jan Ader, lost at sea attempting to sail across the Atlantic and also remembered for crying and falling. But for me, concepts of time and space connect this site to the watery deaths of another two men who are an unlikely couple, and yet arguably they share a common legacy of failure. The damp ghost of Le Corbusier, pioneer of modern architecture, with his desire to transform society through his brilliantly engineered and yet unlivable concrete structures, who drownedâperhaps spitefully[15]âwhile swimming off the beach at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, just below Eileen Grayâs house, E.1027. And the time-madness of Donald Crowhurst, the weekend sailor and owner of a failing electronics business, whose attempt to fake a solo round-the-world sailing race ended by throwing himself overboard, insane, and weighted down by his faulty chonometer. In a darkly poignant way, these two non-swimming drowned men talk to meâand to this ruined swimming pool siteâof the perfidiousness of time and space, of time and timelessness, and the space of concrete things as well as the space of absence.
These are the things I ponder as I stand there, slowly sinking into the soggy grass beside the fenced-off toddlersâ pool. Iâve put aside my swimmerâs snobbery and warmed to this rough-looking, bashed-around, neglected little pool; it invites my swimmerâs thoughts and gives them permission to wander and meander. Even in its dilapidated state strewn with old car tires, I can see now that the ruined toddlersâ pool still has a function. In the words of Jeremy Millar, âThe significance of ruins for me is the relationship they offer between futility and utility, and the idea that itâs important for some things to be useless, to not work, to have no sense of purpose ⊠something that doesnât seem to have any use whatsoever can have a purpose, even if that purpose is simply in being left as an imaginative space, a space for possibility.â[16] Iâm encouraged by Millarâs recollection of John Cage who âloved to quote an early Taoist philosopher called Chuang-tzu, who said: âEveryone knows that to be useful is useful, but nobody knows that to be useless is useful too.ââ[17] And standing here now, I canât help but think this is a pretty decent outcome for an old wrecked pool and a failed swimmer.
Sandy Gibbs, The Toddlersâ Pool, 2014. Image courtesy the artist.
[1] Bataille, Georges. âSlaughterhouseâ, in Leach, Neil (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural History. (London & New York: Routledge, 1997), 22.
[2] Tui Shipston was a 17-year-old schoolgirl from Christchurch when she represented New Zealand at the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
[3] Palmer, Daniel. âOverflow: Tales of the Sublimeâ, in Engberg, Juliana (ed.). 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire. (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2014), 68.
[4] Markula, Pirkko & Pringle, Richard. Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self. (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 77.
[5] Bal, Mieke. âSetting the Stage: The Subject Mise en ScĂšneâ, in Douglas, S. & Eamon, C. (eds.). Art of Projection. (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 168.
[6] Birnbaum, Daniel. Chronology. (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2013), 66.
[7] Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, âTracey Moffatt â Fourth 2001â, 1 August 2001. Downloaded from http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/2001/08/02/206.
[8] Barthes, Roland. What is sport? Howard, Richard. (trans.). (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007), 63.
[9] Doyle, Jennifer. Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p.xxx.
[10] Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Roudiez, Leon S. (trans.). (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
[11] Ralston Saul, John. The Doubters Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense. (Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, 1994), 249.
[12] Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Howard, Richard (trans.). (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Cited in: Rugoff, Ralph, Vidler, Anthony & Woollen, Peter. Scene of the Crime. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 91.
[13] Dillon, Brian. Objects in This Mirror. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 309.
[14] Sprawson, Charles. Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero. (London: Vintage Books, 2013), 76.
[15] Brian Dillon observed that, while Eileen Gray was âalready at odds with [Le Corbusierâs] motion of a âmachine for livingââ, Le Corbusier was an admirer of Grayâs work, and âbecame a regular visitor to E.1027, which he coveted with a professional regard that verged on spite.â Dillon, Brian. âOn Not Getting the Creditâ, London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 10, 23 May 2013. Downloaded from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/brian-dillon/on-not-getting-the-credit.
[16] Millar, Jeremy. âRuins of the Twentieth Century, 2006â, in Frieze Projects: Frieze Talks 2006-2008. (London: Frieze, 2009), 171.
Bibliography
Bal, M. âSetting the Stage: The Subject Mise en ScĂšneâ, in Douglas, S. & Eamon, C. (eds.). Art of Projection. (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009).
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Howard, Richard (trans.). (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
Barthes, Roland. What is sport? Howard, Richard. (trans.). (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007).
Bataille, Georges. âSlaughterhouseâ, in Leach, Neil (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural History. (London & New York: Routledge, 1997).
Birnbaum, Daniel. Chronology. (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2013).
Dillon, Brian. âOn Not Getting the Creditâ, London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 10, 23 May 2013. Downloaded from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/brian-dillon/on-not-getting-the-credit.
Dillon, Brian. Objects in This Mirror. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).
Doyle, Jennifer. Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Cited in Dillon, Brian. âDecline and Fallâ, Frieze Magazine, Issue 130, April 2010. Downloaded from http://www.freize.com/issue/article/decline_and_fall.
Kafka, Franz. Fragments. Slager, Daniel (trans.). Downloaded from http://www.grandstreet.com/gsissues/gs56/gs56e.html.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Roudiez, Leon S. (trans.). (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Markula, Pirkko & Pringle, Richard. Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self. (London & New York: Routledge, 2006).
Millar, Jeremy. âRuins of the Twentieth Century, 2006â, in Frieze Projects: Frieze Talks 2006-2008. (London: Frieze, 2009).
Palmer, Daniel. âOverflow: Tales of the Sublimeâ, in Engberg, Juliana (ed.). 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire. (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 2014).
Ralston Saul, John. The Doubters Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense. (Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, 1994).
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, âTracey Moffatt â Fourth 2001â, 1 August 2001. Downloaded from http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/news/releases/2001/08/02/206.
Rugoff, Ralph, Vidler, Anthony & Woollen, Peter. Scene of the Crime. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
Sprawson, Charles. Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero. (London: Vintage Books, 2013).
Sandy Gibbs is a video artist based in Wellington, New Zealand. She completed her MFA (With Distinction) at Massey University, Wellington, in 2012 and has just been accepted as a PhD candidate at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her topic is âThe paradox of failure: sport, competition and contemporary artâ.