Another Space: Gleaning the Urban Littoral

Abstract

Another Space is a short ethnographic film about artist Antony Gormley‟s installation „Another Place‟ at Crosby Beach north of Liverpool. The visuals, shot on a visit to the beach in Easter 2009, are cut to a mosaic of voices drawn from interviews conducted with visitors to the beach. Respondents are asked what the artwork means to them and what feelings and emotions it evokes. This article, written as an accompaniment to the film, as well as to Hazel Andrew‟s study published in the edited volume Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience, and Spaces In-between (2012), provides an auto-ethnographic reflection on the installation and beachscape as a liminal space. As a marked landscape – the „site of artist Antony Gormley‟s installation Another Place‟ – by what measure is it possible to stake out the parameters that set Crosby beach apart from more routine landscapes of everyday consumption and spectacle? What makes it „another place‟ as distinct from, say, (just) „another space‟? Gleaning the urban littoral that defines this stretch of the Mersey estuary, the film and article explore an experiential framework by which to gauge the performative status of the beach as a liminal landscape.