London Blakeans
摘要
In this chapter, we end our travels in London, exploring some recent work by artists and writers who have taken up the end of Blake’s golden string. The chapter centres on “London Blakean” practitioners—artists, writers, and walkers who model their practices of small and independent publishing on Blake’s example to varying extents, and whose work closely attends to Blake’s mapping of London. A principal dimension of this chapter is its attempt to highlight, via quotations from original interviews with Blakean practitioners, the sheer range of creators who have picked up on Blake’s cartographic imagery. This includes artists and writers such as Iain Sinclair, Niall McDevitt, Max Reeves, Chris McCabe, Louisa Amelia Albani, Jill Laudet, Sarah Cliff, and many others, most of whom have not received due attention from Blake scholars. Their work affirms both the prominence of cartographic imagery in Blake’s work in the first place and the extent to which that imagery has anticipated the direction of much more recent work in creative mapping. This process is here understood in terms of textual “capabilities” (as theorised by Mike Goode), whereby works of art and literature actively afford potentialities that shape and are in turn illuminated by their subsequent reception.