Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis
The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
At the mouth of the cave at Borrowdale, May 2020. Photograph: Lewis Eaton.
On a swelteringly hot day in the North Western Fells of The Lake District, the gaping mouth of a cave offered itself as a refuge and swallowed us mercifully into its cool damp interior. Caves are otherworldly places. This particular cave, set into the hillside of Castle Crag, allows you to peer out at the gently swaying trees and glimmering daylight of the outside world from a viewing point void of light and sound. The daytrip itself had been to seek refuge in The Lakes; an attempt at replacing the stagnancy of a locked-down city summer with a more welcome, less claustrophobic, kind of tranquillity. We spent a few minutes scrambling around on the siltstone, marvelling at the height of the cave walls and exchanging the obligatory comments about feeling small in big spaces. On leaving, I noticed a large, flat stone covered in scrawlings. At the centre in neat, deeply-etched letters read ‘Don’t Waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’ with dozens of smaller sections of writing surrounding this. Each gave names and dates, with many faded with age and dissolving back into the stone’s surface. It was from a frantic Googling during the car ride home that I came to find out we had happened across a sort-of pilgrimage place for hikers: the cave in which a man had lived out his summers for over forty consecutive years.
In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Millican Dalton gave up his life as an insurance clerk in London in order to dedicate himself to The Great Outdoors. Having spent part of his childhood in Nenthead, the North Pennines, he found life and work in the capital stifling in comparison. From then on Dalton split his year, spending the summer months in the cave under Castle Crag and winters in a canvas hut in Buckinghamshire. Far from your conventional hermit, Dalton was an active and sociable member of the community. He organised camping excursions for the outdoors novice which included teaching hiking, rock climbing, rafting and how to forage for food. What I found extraordinary for the time was that these excursions didn’t exclude women, with one of Dalton’s advertisements for a mountaineering course stating his views bluntly: “Ladies are welcome to the camp. There is nothing new in ladies camping, the custom being at least 10,000 years old.” This rare indiscriminate approach led to Dalton forging a long-lasting friendship with geologist Mabel Barker, who over the years consistently recommended Dalton’s courses to women students and friends.
Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.
exhibition review
Social Works II
by Sarah MacKay | 21 October 2021
Tyler Mitchell, Albany, Georgia, 2021, Archival pigment print Ⓒ Tyler Mitchell
Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery Grosvenor Hill, the exhibition Social Works II effectively unites works by 11 intergenerational artists from the African diaspora, bringing to light the thrilling nexus where meditations on space, time, social history and artistic practice naturally meet. The exhibition is a sequel to Social Works, recently on view at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Both iterations were curated by newly appointed gallery director Antwaun Sargent, who joins Gagosian with rich experience as both an art critic and a writer. In this second edition of the exhibition, Sargent brings geography, earth and nature to the fore, revealing how Black identity has been, and continues to be, informed by the history of the land beneath our feet.
Sargent’s curation is coherent and accessible, cleverly showcasing significant connections between artists of different age groups and working in diverse media and styles. In gallery one, two photographs from Tyler Mitchell’s ongoing series I Can Make You Feel Good entitled Georgia Hillside (Redlining), (2021) and Albany, Georgia, (2021) hang side by side. Mitchell, widely recognised for his ‘Vogue’ cover photograph of Beyonce as well as for his utopian images of Black people at leisure, here returns to his native landscape, the rolling hills of Georgia. In Georgia Hillside (Redlining), Mitchell captures a fanciful assemblage of Black families, couples and groups of friends leisurely lounging on a grassy hillside that is siphoned off into sections by blood-red lines painted along the ground. It is clear that the paradisical Georgian countryside that Mitchell holds dear remains haunted by the American South’s racist history of redlining that began in the 1930s. Nearby, in the same gallery, stands Asaase II (2021), a sculptural work by world-renowned architect David Adjaye. Adjaye’s path to architecture was deeply personal; witnessing his brother Emmanuel, who is partially paralysed, struggle to navigate a dilapidated specialised school building inspired Adjaye to work to democratise architecture. He aims to do this by creating physical spaces that provide equitable and optimal access to everyone. Today, he is celebrated for his many architectural feats, including the design for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. With Asaase II, a tall vertical structure composed of four rammed earth beams (a West African building technique) made of British soil, Adjaye ruminates on the idea of the constructed landscape within London. Together, Adjaye’s and Mitchell’s works reveal how people in positions of power – here, white men and the able bodied – have historically used land to disenfranchise minority groups. They ask how members of the Black community can find peace while inhabiting such polarising land, and prompt us to consider how we can best use our supposed authority over the earth itself to create egalitarian spaces and experiences.
Moving into the second gallery, Sargent’s attention to thematic curation becomes apparent. Whereas the works in gallery one feature quite literal representations of earth, the pieces in gallery two suggest a more psychological or cerebral examination of similar themes. Rick Lowe’s Black Wall Street Journey #17 (2021), one of two cartographic paintings included here and in the original show Social Works, depicts a muddled labyrinth of paper collage paths painted in dark hues of red, yellow, green and purple and overlayed with thin layers of black paint. Inspired by the many hours he spent playing dominos as a child, Lowe has created maps akin to domino games throughout his career as a way of visualising and understanding his personal interest in urban development and its social and political implications. Lowe made Black Wall Street Journey #17 to memorialise the horrific Tulsa race Massacre of 1921, where masses of white people attacked the homes and businesses of Black residents of the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. With its chaotic interwoven pathways, the work seems to scream with distressing frustration and sigh with a heartbreaking sense of lostness. Similarly, two works on the abutting wall by Amanda Williams from her series, What black is this you say? are deeply poignant through their use of sombre, dark colour palettes. Reacting to the recent racial upheaval in the United States, Williams created this series as a means of self-reflection in times of tumult. Finally, across the gallery, hangs Haitian artist Manuel Mathieu’s toofarfromhome, which includes two large canvases. The first appears to molt like a snake, shedding thin, ragged layers of splotchy dyed-pink fabric, while the second is coated in thick impasto pastel paints that melt together into a pinguid vortex of pinks, greens, purples and yellows. Through abstraction, loss and destruction Mathieu represents holes in his own memories of his homeland. More generally, though, the work led me to consider where Black history has similarly slipped out of collective memory. In short, this room feels much heavier than the first.
In the third and final gallery, Sargent showcases Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour (2019), a captivating filmic meditation on the life of Frederick Douglass, a celebrated African American who escaped slavery and then went on to become an esteemed social reformer, writer, and abolitionist. Like so many of the other artists in the show, Julien seems focused on Douglass’s fraught relationship with land itself. Towards the opening of the film, Douglass slowly meanders around a large tree in a meadow. As he gradually drags his fingers along its trunk, we begin to hear the bone-chilling whispers of a taut noose swinging in the wind. Later, we see long still shots of endless cotton fields swaying slightly under the hot sun. And yet, scattered between these haunting reminders of Douglass’s horrific past, are picturesque panoramic shots of the lush Scottish countryside; when he arrived in Edinburgh in 1846, Douglass was touched by his warm reception in Scotland, and was mesmerised by the land’s sheer beauty. In gallery one, a still from the film also hangs as an independent work called To See Ourselves as Others See Us (Lessons of the Hour). It shows Douglass’s wife wearing a voluminous brilliant blue dress and red-orange bow – perhaps a reference to the Madonna – as she sits calmly in a wooden chair and poses for her picture in front of a sublime landscape. Throughout the duration of the film, Julien pulls together snippets of a few of Douglass’s most acclaimed speeches including ‘Lessons of the Hour’, ‘What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?’ and ‘Lecture on Pictures’. It is at the film’s last moments, however, that Julien employs the abolitionist’s arresting prose to greatest effect, juxtaposing his impassioned voice with black-and-white videos of contemporary civil unrest, illustrating ominous and foreboding similarities between Douglass’s time and our own. As the final scene closes, we see a crowd of racially diverse people clearly taken from both time periods (some wear modern suits, and others sport 19th century dress) watching eagerly as Douglass gives his fervent speech. At its finish, a heartwarming chorus of raucous applause breaks out – a suggestion, both then and now, that a promise of a better tomorrow lies on the horizon. As a BIPOC woman – my father is Black and my mother is white – I felt that it is in these moments, when the viewer is forced to simultaneously reckon with Black history and celebrate Black experience, that Social Works II is most successful.
Social Works II will be on view at Gagosian Gallery Grosvenor Hill until December 18, 2021.
Installation View
Artworks left to right: Tyler Mitchell, Georgia Hillside (Redlining), 2021, Archival pigment print, Tyler Mitchell, Albany Georgia, 2021, Archival pigment print, and David Adjaye, Asaase II, 2021, Rammed earth, Gagosian Gallery, London, 7 October-18 December 2021. Ⓒ Tyler Mitchell Ⓒ David Adjaye. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
Manuel Mathieu, toofarfromhome, 2021, Acrylic, chalk, charcoal, paper, fabric, ink soil, and tape, in 2 parts Ⓒ Manuel Mathieu. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates
Isaac Julien, To See Ourselves as Others See Us (Lessons of the Hour), 2019 Inkjet photograph mounted on aluminum Ⓒ Isaac Julien