The Urban River and Site-specific Performance

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Notes

 1. This is a corruption of the well-known saying that is attributed to the Ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: ‘One cannot step twice in the same river.’ The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, trans. by Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 53.

 2. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 69. Steve Pile, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 2005), p. 2.

 3. BAE Systems, a global defence, security and aerospace company, is currently the only large-scale manufacturing organisation operating on the upper Clyde.

 4. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41, 49.

 5. Wyllie's work was part of the lead-up programme for Glasgow's year as European City of Culture in 1990. PaperBoat subsequently toured to other locations including the River Thames, London (1989), the River Scheldt, Antwerp (1990) and the Hudson River, New York (1990). For further information on Wyllie's practice see <http://www. whysman.co.uk/index.html> [accessed 3 February 2012] and Jan Patience, ‘George Wyllie: 90 Years Old and as Influential as Ever’, The Herald (31 December 2011) <http://www. heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/visual/george-wyllie-90-years-old-and-as-influential-as-ever.1325300591> [accessed 3 February 2012].

 6. Susan Philipsz's Turner Prize-winning sound work, Lowlands (May 2010) was originally conceived for the Landwehr Canal in Berlin before being re-located to a site underneath a cluster of bridges spanning the River Clyde in Glasgow city centre. It was re-sited once more to Tate Britain, London, for the Turner Prize exhibition (October 2010–January 2011).

 7. Nigel Thrift, ‘Performance and …’, Environment and Planning A, 35 (2003), 2019–24 (pp. 2022–23).

 8. <http://www.astones throwaway.co.uk/indexhibit/index.php?/docks/project-description/> [accessed 13 June 2011].

 9. The lack of integration between Clydeside districts has been widely acknowledged. See, for example, Rowan Moore's review of the Riverside Museum on the Clyde: ‘If the passion for building singular things on the Clyde had been matched by some energy and thought in the way they went together, it would be a much finer place than it is now’. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/12/zaha-hadid-glasgow-architecture-review> [accessed 13 June 2011]. See also initiatives such as Glasgow City Council's recent establishment of a ferry service from Govan, <http://www.clydewaterfront.com/projects/greater-govan –glasgow-harbour/infrastructure/i69—govan-ferry> [accessed 23 October 2011] and artist Matt Baker's public art project working with the people of Govan, <http://sacrificialmaterials.blogspot.com/> [accessed 23 October 2011].

10. <http://www.astonesthrowaway.co.uk/indexhibit/index.php?/the-govan-armada/> [accessed 13 June 2011].

11. The St Kildan way of life, with its unpredictable technology, proved unsustainable in the face of twentieth-century modernisation, and the last islanders were evacuated in 1930.

12. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 49.

13. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

14. Thrift, ‘Performance and …’, pp. 2022–23.

15. George Wyllie's two sculptures, one a full-scale replica of a locomotive made from straw, and the second, a vessel designed to resemble an oversized paper boat, were suspended from the Stobcross Crane before being, respectively, set on fire and launched on the Clyde.

16. Comments emailed to me by spectator, Richard Gregory, 7 November 2010.

17. Thrift, ‘Performance and …’, pp. 2022–23.

18. Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) p. 71.

19. Comments made by spectator, Steve Slater, 6 November 2010.

20. <http://www.clydewaterfront.com> [accessed 23 October 2011].

21. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 146–56.