PAR+RS Blogs

On NVA

Ruth Barker — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:30:53 GMT

Hello,

I met with Kitty Anderson today, for some very pleasant lunch and a catch up on her current work for NVA in Glasgow.¹. Kitty, as some of you will know, also works as Communications Manager for The Common Guild, and until February this year was also at The Modern Institute, so she has a pretty amazing track record working for successful and innovative arts organisations in the city.

NVA are doing some very interesting things these days it seems, so it was great to get an inside perspective on what they’re up to. Two current / upcoming projects interested me particularly. I’ll give an overview of both (they’re very different) and then say a little about why my attention was so caught.

The first project is Glasgow Harvest, taking place at Tramway’s Hidden Gardens on 28th August, and billed as a ‘celebration of urban growing’. Here’s what the flier says:

“NVA invite everyone who grows their own food on whatever scale to take part in Glasgow’s biggest ever open air meal.

Come along for a day packed full of home produce, live music and performance. Get your own edible punk haircut, eat a poke of chips from the Great Scottish Double Chip Challenge, compare Allotment Soups, make a giant Jam Wall, marvel at Glasgow’s most Eccentric Sheds and help judge the Creative Containers competition.”

Visitors are also encouraged to bring food to share, design and plant a creative container, and make a jar of jam. All in all it seems as though the project is highly engaged with its context, sited as it is within the broader SAGE initiative from NVA and ERZ landscape architects.

The other project Kitty mentioned that caught my attention is the plan – still at early stages – for NVA to work with the site of St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, and the neighbouring Kilmahew Woodlands². Much of the discussions for St Peter’s are still tentative and, indeed, the process currently seems poised at a somewhat fragile moment. You can read an old (and maybe a bit out-dated) press release from NVA’s archive here. But I do want to draw your attention to this bit – it’s part of a statement from Angus Farquhar (NVA’s Creative Director) that’s quoted in the release:

“The site [of St Peter’s Seminary] carries a remarkable 500 year history of human intervention, from the mediaeval foundations of Cardross Castle, the survival of natural woodlands and a stunning Victorian designed estate, to the powerful imposition of the 20th century seminary buildings. A creative landscape is driven not by a single focus or perspective on its heritage, conservation, environmental or leisure value, but by an inspired reading of the layers of history that underpin it, that define its complex character and the visionary artistic responses that can expand this narrative into a new century. The plan will allow us to look at temporary and permanent ways to take these ideas forward.”

So, why did these very different projects strike me as so pertinent? I suppose (as always) it’s for a few different reasons. Partly there’s the way that NVA operates. I’m quite fascinated by the way that they seem to have found a new model for art production, and that that model seems remarkably fruitful. From a background in theatre, Angus has brought his energy and sincerity to a wide range of contexts and seems to have charged them all with a spirit of creative endeavour that is quite remarkable.

You can see the results in that here are two projects being carried forward at the same time by the same organisation and which – though they exist at very different scales and with very different intentions – share an overarching ambition that somehow draws them together. And yet there’s more than just a vague sense of approach that links them. Because both projects also share an ability to take an incisive look at humans’ complex relationships to landscape and culture. Together they continue NVA’s remarkable practice of exploring the patterns of behaviour and imagination that shape who we are and how we think. In the proposed project for St Peter’s, that is played out against the grand scale of cultural history and its attendant structures of religion, belief and heritage. In Glasgow Harvest, we discover it at the far more intimate but equally fundamental level of the personal production of food and community. But through both we still see (I think at least) how NVA continue to investigate and illuminate our multi-nodal points of relation to our world and each other. As their 20th anniversary approaches, that suddenly seems like quite an achievement.

Thanks for lunch, Kitty!

More later,
R.

¹ Read a PAR+RS Feature in which artist Anthony Schrag interviews NVA’s Creative Director Angus Farquhar here.

² There are some fantastic pictures of St Peter’s on the Hidden Glasgow site here.

Producers or Consumers?

Ruth Barker — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:26:18 GMT

Hello,

A significant amount of cultural thinking these days seems to revolve around the discussion of binaries – you know the kind of thing: are we at the centre or on the periphery? ; or is something public or is it private? ; are we talking urban or rural? and so on. I recently heard a new one though: are you a cultural producer or a cultural consumer?

I’ll bet it’s something you’d never worried about before, but now it seems that you may be invited to. In a moment of synchronicty I spotted this article in the Guardian today – funny isn’t it when you hear about something for the first time, and then suddenly it seems to be everywhere?

So, the problem I have with this producer/consumer division is that most people I know who produce ‘culture’ (writers, musicians, artists and so on) are also rabid consumers of it. Writers read, or course; musicians listen to music; artists go to shows. But artists also listen to music, and musicians also read books and writers also go to exhibitions. And to make matters even more complicated, I read (or ‘consume’) many many books and articles in order to produce creatively. It’s not ‘just’ a leisure / pleasure activity – consuming culture is itself a creative, productive, act. To split people up into those that consume and those who produce seems a meaningless exercise!

So why have I bothered to bring it to your attention? Two related reasons, actually:

1) sometimes a bad example can invite us to re-examine other examples that we previously assumed. OK, so producer/consumer is a silly division. But let’s take another look at public/private or centre/periphery. Are these distinctions valid? Are they useful?

2) what does the fact that ‘producer/consumer’ has appeared on the horizon of our discourse tell us? I think in essence it reminds us that our world is very complicated, and that we’re always looking for ways to simplify it. As humans, we constantly try to understand human behaviour (it’s vital that we do so, after all) and these binary splits are attempts to contain some of the hundreds of thousands of potential possibilities.

Of course, ‘chunking together’ information or ideas like this can be massively useful as a shorthand for us to notice and communicate trends and generalisations in our world. We might even find it an elegant, economical tool to think through ideas and generate new and creative questions. Like any shorthanding though, we need to remain conscious of the fact that we’re concealing complixity and difference for the sake of simplicity.

Sometimes, as I say, it takes a shorthand that just doesn’t work to remind us of how many of them we casually use. As both producers and consumers of culture, it’s important for us to be aware of the language we use to describe and understand it.

more later,
R.

What’s that?! A picture on the Blog! Hooray! Thanks to an upgrade from our fabulous web designer Keavy McMinn of Minimetre we can now embed images directly into the Blogs rather than having to list them all on a seperate page. Thanks Keavy! This, as I was thinking of those producer / consumer questions, is my temporary studio at CCA Glasgow’s Creative Lab, where I’m having a really productive month of reflection on my practice. Productive, yes – but on the desk you can also see a copy of Vogue and my ancient ipod, testifying to my simultaneous consumer status…

just a quick one

Ruth Barker — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:51:32 GMT

Hello,

Just wanted to send you a link to that article I was telling you about. You can find Maag Mag here. Scroll through the find the article, titled Places of Belonging. Or you can also read the whole thing here.

Let me know any thoughts,

more later,
R

PS: Oh, but I just saw this and had to share it. This is a form of musing very close to my own heart (and practice) but I also think it’s essential fodder for a site like this, which is essentially a forum to verbalise our experiences of contemporary public art. How we discuss and describe art matters. I firmly believe that the languages we use to talk about art influence how we experience, perceive, remember and understand – not just art, but the wider world. As such, finding ways to talk about (and write about, and think about) public art is one of the most important things we can do – other than making it, of course! ;)

Speak soon, R.

Places and Spaces

Ruth Barker — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:00:55 GMT

Hello,

so I just finished writing a Feature article for the next issue of NABROAD magazine, which is due out in August. The subject I was asked to write about was an interesting one, catalysed by the questions behind the project Third Space, a NABROAD Production for the Baltic Bienalle for Contemporary Art in St Petersburg.

Third Space’s curator, Pavla Alchin, wrote the following about the project:

“At the beginning of the 21st century, the Earth has been changed by globalization into a planet of nomads. It is hardly surprising that among the recent waves of immigrants are thousands of visual artists – history after all, is littered with creative people on the move. In the past the reasons for their exile where varied – persecution, a search for the exotic, from the need to survive to the need to be at a place of artistic innovation. Today many of these reasons remain the same.

However, I would like to suggest here another reason why artists find living abroad appealing. According to Czech born philosopher Vilem Flusser, exile and creativity are closely linked. In exile everything around us is new and becomes sharp and noisy. Uprooted people have to be creative to process an ocean of chaotic information that surrounds them, to change it into meaningful messages (1). It is perhaps this heightened state of perception that attracts creative minds.

The title of our project was borrowed from postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha who first fore-grounded the concept of Third Space in his book The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha sees the Third Space as a space of enunciation, where two social groups with different cultural traditions carry out special negotiations, which eventually lead to a displacement of the members of both groups from their origins. However, it is also supposed to bring about common identity, new in its hybridity (2).

Taking the above ideas as a kind of springboard, our project wishes to focus on artists who have decided to make this leap of faith in making their home in homelessness (3) and as a result are benefiting from a similar crosspollination of cultures."

1&3 from V. Flusser Writings, 2002.
2 from K. Ikas and G. Wagner, Communicating in the Third Space, 2009.

It’s an interesting set of relationships that Alchin presents, and it was a useful incentive for me to think around some of these ideas of space and placelessness. One of the most fruitful realisations I made as I wrote was that of a personal paradox, which I’ll try to describe.

We speak a lot, after all, about the need for places rather than spaces, about the need we have to inhabit landscapes that have meaning and memory and association. We often feel that we know as a fact, that spaces with which we don’t connect, or territories that we pass through rather than inhabit, are sterile and lacking in humanity or love. And yet as I wrote this piece about placelessness, I realised that I actually feel a kind of joy about being in a place I do not know, and that I have no connection to.

I travel a lot, and one of my greatest pleasures is to walk the streets of a city that I don’t know and don’t quite understand, feeling my lack of connection and my outsideness. I really relish that sense of wonder that comes with dislocation. Does any on else feel that kind of pleasure? It can’t be that unusual, surely? It’s a great feeling! Or am I just weird? And does this devalue, in a way, our notions of placemaking?

Thoughts welcome! I’ll post a link to the article here once it’s up on NABROAD.

More later,
R.

Cash in Hand

Ruth Barker — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:16:04 GMT

Hello,
Firstly, I’d like to draw your attention to this contribute if you can.

Secondly, I’d like to draw your attention to this contribute if… well this one’s more complicated. If you follow the link, you’ll see that Shetland Arts and Mission Models Money are running a consultation looking at whether artists are likely to be benefited by having the option to take out loans. A source tells me that the loans they’re talking about aren’t too big (around £500) and are envisaged as paying for fairly concrete costs – for example paying to frame a painting that could then be sold.

But loans are still a contentious issue so in a way I’m surprised to see that the survey’s been launched. I’d be curious to know more about its inception. Why the contention? Well, perhaps it’s stating the obvious, but many artists are not in the most stable financial circumstances. What happens to the painter in the above example if the painting doesn’t sell? I hate to say it, but artists sometimes don’t make the most objective business plans!

My own opinion is that loans are never an unproblematic option – not least because of the fundamental significance of one person being in debt to another. That doesn’t mean that they’re not an option though. There are plenty of loans on the market already after all. I know that there have been calls from some quarters for the consultation to be scrapped, but this itself raises questions to my mind. After all, surely artists are responsible enough to make their own views known in a consultation format like this? If loans aren’t wanted or needed, surely people will say so? And, of course, it may be that some people would find a loan of the type proposed by Shetland Arts and Mission Models Money to be useful. It’s never been the case, after all, that all creative practitioners will fit into the same box when it comes to what they want or need to keep their practice going.

So I am interested to know the results of the survey. If Shetland Arts or Mission Models Money want to get in touch we’d be more than happy to hear from you. Likewise if anyone else feels strongly about this issue.

Let us know your thoughts,

More later,
R.

ps. Variant have reminded me that you can read some email exchanges regarding the survey – and an explanation of why Variant would like it to be withdrawn – here

Too Much Talk, Talk Too Much

ruth barker — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:25:55 GMT

Hello,
I’m feeling very technologically adequate, typing this on a train on the way from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Cue ‘oh the wonders of modern technology’. I was in our dear capital to give a talk at Edinburgh College of Art, some of which was directly PAR+RS related, and some of which was more of a digression. I had a small (in numbers, not in stature) but welcoming audience who asked some good and honest questions. I did my best to answer them in kind, so hope they found my wee chat useful. I was asked to talk about some of the different projects and audiences and organisations that I’m involved in at the moment, and so that’s what I tried to do. I spoke a bit more from my notes than I usually like to do, as I’m preparing for a performance next week – for which I’m in the middle of memorising a big chunk of text – so I didn’t quite trust the ad-libbing capacity of my poor abused brain!

As there were a lot of students who couldn’t make the talk, I thought I’d post a transcript here for anyone who wishes to read it. I also thought it might be useful for me to include the rest of the images which were (mysteriously) absent from my powerpoint. Cue ‘ah the curses of modern technology’. Some of the rest of you might also be interested in reading my various brain pickings? I don’t know. I’ll add images and links tomorrow as I doubt I’ll have time today.

My sincere thanks once again to everyone who came along, and to Lucy for inviting me. Hope you liked it.

More Later,
R

P.S. Big Hello to Louise! It was great to finally meet you – keep up the good work. r

Transcript of talk given at Edinburgh College of Art on 27/04/09.

Introductory remarks, followed by:

OK, so I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about my own practice, and also to talk about some of the things I do in addition to making my own work. I’ve decided to split the talk roughly into two. The first half is quite functional, I’m going to talk briefly about some of the roles I have within the art community, and some of the jobs that I do. The second half will be a reworking of a presentation I gave in Akureyri, in Iceland, in 2007, updated to include some more recent thoughts – some of which are taken from an essay called Live Art and Living, published last year in a book called ‘Its Not Hard: [Grammatical Error Intentional] Explorations of Live Art.’

The first thing to say is that I’m involved with quite a few different projects at the moment, and I’ve chosen to participate in all of them because they each interest me in different ways, and because I’m able to learn different skills through being involved in all of them.

The first one I’m going to talk about is my role as editor of the Public Art Scotland website, which is also known by the acronym PAR+RS – which stands for Public Art Resource and Research Scotland. Public Art Scotland was set up by the Scottish Arts Council after quite a dedicated period of research into the field of public art in this country. I’ve work for PAR+RS in a freelance capacity for the last 2 years, and I work on the site 2 days a week.

So what does Public Art Scotland do? All kinds of things, actually. As editor I commission new writing and research; I think about how the site can grow and I implement that; I keep a check on all the news and events that’re happening, and I’m always looking for new artists and new projects that we can cover. There’s also an ongoing archive of public projects that have received support from the SAC, which is actually incredibly useful if you want to know how much things cost to get off the ground, and what kind of commissioners and partners there are out there and things like that.
PAR+RS aims to build the capacity, knowledge and expertise of people working in public art across Scotland; and to do that by (as I’ve said) commissioning new writing, generating new knowledge, and challenging the field. It’s been a great project for me to work on, because I was able to come in before the site went Live and to really work hard to help shape the development of the site as a whole. As part of that, I guess my own attitude towards public art becomes important. Public art is something that I really believe in. It’s a big part of my own practice as an artist, but I think it’s also a big part of the way I think about art, and the way I understand art to function within the world.
The Public Art Scotland website covers a wide variety of work, from sculpture to live art, to non object based practice, to digital media, to everything else, but it does focus on work that operates somehow in the public realm. The working definition that I use for that (because I realise that what is and is not public is a very contentious area) is simply ‘artwork that is not contextualised by an art gallery’. The useful thing about that idea is that it suggests that art can happen anywhere where you don’t expect it –in bus shelters, in museums, in forests, in domestic spaces, in car parks, in swimming pools, in pubs, on top of mountains, online, and on CCTV. Public art is something uncontained; it’s something that is always changing, and it’s something that doesn’t have to follow the rules that are there in a gallery situation. The most amazing thing about public art is that we can’t really define it because it is always growing and changing in response to the ways in which the world we live is growing and changing. That’s because public art is inextricable part of that world, and that world is a part of public art.
Public art can be subversive, it can be celebratory, it can be supportive, it can be challenging, it can be argumentative, it can be ugly, it can be destructive and it can be beautiful, intelligent and inspiring. You could argue – and some people do – that public art can be far more dangerous than art in a gallery. But it can also be far more generous, more insightful, and more world changing and sometimes (just sometimes) it can do all this in the same work.
I could talk about how and why public practice might function in the way that it does, but really what I wanted to stress is the ways that the work I do as editor for Public Art Scotland really emerges from my practice as an artist. My role as editor informs the public work I make myself, but it is also informed by that public work. It’s a symbiotic process that I think is very common in how artists think about their different roles and responsibilities.

The second project I want to talk about is my work for Detours, which is a project run by The Common Guild in collaboration with Glasgow School of Art. Detours is an ongoing series of talks, organised by the Common Guild, which presents views from elsewhere by leading curators, critics and museum directors. Speakers, who are usually from overseas, but always based outside Scotland, explore the connection between practice and context. They’re asked to look at and talk about how different institutions and professional, curatorial practices have taken shape in relation to specific places or situations. The project started in March last year, and the series will continue over three years. Speakers to date have included Jenni Lomax, Vasif Kortun, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Juliana Engberg, Richard Flood, and Polly Staple.
My role for Detours is as a kind of host or guide. While the speakers are in town, I show them around, I make sure they don’t get lost (you’d be surprised), and I talk to them. I take them to see shows and I introduce them to artists and organise studio visits (they usually have a list of people they want to meet up with while they’re here). I also chat to them in a very informal way about the city and the reasons why I love being an artist in Glasgow. I’m very honest about the city – you know it’s kinda poor and kinda ugly and kinda unprofessional, but there are reasons why each of those qualities enable amazing things to happen there. Sometimes when we live in a place we forget just how unique it is. Having people visit from out of town can be a way to remind us of that.
Lots of these people haven’t been to Scotland very often before and so part of my role is to talk about the particular economic, art historical and even economic situation that we find ourselves in as a country. In return they tell me about the contexts they are working within in their own situation – in New York or Rotterdam or Istanbul, and again I’m making contacts and starting to develop that network of people you know at an international level and on an international basis. It serves to really contextualise what we’re doing here in Scotland – not just the work that we’re making here but the way that we’re thinking as well, which is incredibly important. In a way it’s the flip side of Public Art Scotland – looking at international gallery based practices instead of public Scottish practices. There’s an irony there but there’s also a breadth that has been very useful to me as a practitioner, and also as someone who is just interested in the different ways that art is manifested.

The third project I’m involved in at the moment is Washington Garcia Gallery in Glasgow, which I co-founded with Kendall Koppe, who is now the director, and another artist and good friend called Douglas Morland, who’s since taken a step back to concentrate on his own art practice and on his career as a musician. I’m now sometimes a curator and sometimes an editor and sometimes a writer for Washington Garcia.
The gallery started off as a pub conversation in a bar called The State in Glasgow, and it grew very quickly into a peripatetic curatorial project, where we used a variety of spaces to curate shows with a number of artists. We were quite flexible with the spaces we occupied – from residential tenement spaces, to retail spaces, to a working riding stables, just as and when it seemed appropriate. We had absolutely no money, but we had very a very particular aesthetic. We felt that there were already spaces who were working with the low-fi punky aesthetic, and we realised that this just didn’t suit some artists’ work. We felt there was a bit of a gap in provision, and so we thought we’d fill it with a very sincere, very ground up sort of project.
The project was also created as a response to our perception that some artists who live and work in Glasgow had become conspicuous by their absence from Glasgow’s thriving art scene. Claire Barclay for example had not shown work in Glasgow for six years prior to her exhibition with Washington Garcia. And we decided to offer Claire a space that was very difficult in some ways – ‘After the Field’ was a site-specific installation of new works in a barn at Dumbreck Riding School in Pollock Park, although you could see several of the pieces re-contextualised for the show she did just after Christmas in the Fruitmarket.
Another of our initial aims was to represent art from international artists who have had very little exposure in Scotland, which lead to our commissioning the first British solo-show of Kalup Linzy, in a disused Victorian retail space in Glasgow city centre, as part of the last Gi. Kalup is a Brooklyn-based artist working with video and performance, and he produced a combination of works on paper, video pieces, and live performance for the show. For those who missed it, his drag act, singing an R&B song called ‘ASSHOLE’ that he’d written himself, really did have to be seen to be believed.
We’ve recently got a new space where we hope we’ll be based for a while. We’ve been able to get some public funding, and Washington Garcia now occupies a railway arch in Eastvale Place in the West End of Glasgow. We’ll be based here for the next year, and we’re using the more permanent location to be even more ambitious with the works we’re commissioning and the artists we’re hosting. Our next show opens in May, and is a film by an artist called Shezad Dawood, who was part of the Tate Triennial this year. He’ll be showing a film work called Feature, which was recently exhibited at the Tate, this will be the first chance to see it in Scotland, and it’s got zombies, cowboys, and men in leather chaps, and if that doesn’t make you want to come see a show, I don’t know what will.
Settling into Arch 24 is going to give us the opportunity to reflect on Washington Garcia’s curatorial practice without the added pressures of continually being homeless, and I suppose our ability to go through that process will in a way be helped by what I’ve learnt through doing these other projects like Detours and Public Art Scotland. The people I meet and the work I see in these other roles of course influences the work I make myself, and that’s very healthy I think. However, clearly I do also have a much more direct role as an artist – as I’m going to go on to talk about now – and so these other positions in some ways still have to submit themselves to the priority of my practice as an artist; making public work, gallery work, and performances.

That seems like a good place to pause, and to shift gears slightly. As I said, the next part of the talk is a reworking of a paper I gave in Iceland a couple of years ago, combined in part with some notes from a more recent essay on the significance of Live Art. In a way it’s talking more about my own work, and in a way maybe it’s just talking. But I hope you might find some parts of it interesting.

[note: the images for this section appear here. Sorry I can’t link to them individually.]

This is an image of a piece of wax. It’s a material that I’ve never actually worked with, but I like the idea of it. There’s a description in a book called The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, where she says

“His strange, heavy almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures have been eroded by successive tides.”

A waxen face of waxen flesh. Perhaps the reason that makes sense is that wax has been used as a substitute for flesh for thousands of years. The reason I’m so interested in it, is that for me wax represents a point where the social and the poetic meaning of a material is almost indistinguishable from the functional meaning of that material.
The description of waxen flesh makes us feel a sense of the dead-ness in the surface. White wax of the true consistency should have the quality of lily-backs, with the same flat whiteness. Unpacking more than that, reaching the meaning of wax, is much more difficult. ‘Candlepower’, as an idea, is based on measurements taken of the light produced by a pure spermaceti candle weighing one sixth of a pound, and burning at a rate of 120 grams per hour. Spermaceti is found in the head of Sperm Whales, and used to be used to make candle wax.
Wax might be the space between light and time. Wax makes the flesh of candles as they eat up the slow-burn of the night, and it hints at mortality as metaphor. Wax is the colour of church candles, and of unlined faces illuminated only by candlelight. It’s the colour of probing tubers, or tumours beneath the skin. Wax is in the containment magic of seals, and so it can convey the interiority of an unbroken vessel.
Wax is thick, viscous, malleable and insoluble. Wax is used to make waxworks. Waxworks can be heated, melted and re-cast into the shape of someone else. Death masks are also made from wax, recreating the translucent quality of the dead.
In Britain, witches make waxen dolls, called poppets, made of wax. Witches are also supposed to use wax to take the mice out of houses: Catch a mouse and drop him in as much molten wax as will fit into the bottom of a saucepan; Cool the wax and remove it from the pan once it is solid; Keep it in your kitchen with the mouse inside it, and all the other mice will move out.
In 1979 in England, a woman from Plymouth went to her local witch because her daughter had a boyfriend she did not approve of. The witch filled the daughter’s glove with wax, and kept a hold of it until she’d changed her mind, and the girls married a decent navy man instead, six months later.

Some of my recent work has revolved around a couple of ideas; death/mortality, and language/thinking. They aren’t so far apart as they might seem at first. A lot of our cultural thinking about death – certainly in a western, northern European context – comes down to the fear of a loss of recognition. A fear of absence, a fear of the loss of specificity in some ways.
Death is very anonymous because it is a common condition. Thinking and language are clearly related to that idea, as ways of defining and articulating self as well as others and the world. Through definition we are able to challenge nothingness, but the gap between thinking and articulation must also always be questioned.

“Death is both alien and intimate to us, neither wholly strange nor purely one’s own. To this extent, ones relationship to it resembles one’s relationship to other people, who are likewise both fellows and strangers. Death may not be exactly a friend, but neither is it entirely an enemy…
My identity lies in the keeping of others… It is others who are the custodians of my selfhood… It is only in the speech I share with them that I can come to mean anything at all. That meaning is not one I can ever fully possess, since neither can those who fashion it.”

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003

This makes me think of the American writer Susan Stewart, who talks about poetry as a kind of illumination. She talks about light through articulation, because to illuminate is also to see. She talks about words giving shape to darkness through the entry into it of language and metaphor. Perhaps I’d add the language of making as another way to make shape.
So this idea of definition or making is placed as a force that acts against obliteration, loss, death, and darkness.
I heard someone say once that art is a series of acts of witness. That the important thing about art is that it notices. That’s why, when a country or a society is taken over by a tyrant, the first thing to be banned, to be controlled, is art. Art in itself becomes an act of subversion or resistance, and yet it seems as though it can never be stamped out.
Art was made inside the Nazi Concentration camps. It’s made in prisons, in mental hospitals, and in the horror of civil war and revolution. Last year I met a guy from East Timor who invited me to go and make a text on a wall there. I was afraid, and so I turned him down. Then the next week someone shot the president, and now I feel like maybe I should have gone and written something on that wall.

I heard someone else say once that when art is dangerous to make, artists rely on performance – exploiting its ephemerality, its lack of culpability, and the possibility that it may not be art at all.

As they perform, the artists are weighed down by the knowledge that their gestures cannot last, but are blown into the trees to hang like butchered things.

And, as they perform, the artists are buoyed up by the knowledge that their gestures cannot help but be remembered, as they are blown into the trees to hang like butchered things.

Art might be a way for cultures to bear witness to horror and atrocity. I’m talking here about the practice of art, rather than any single artwork. But sometimes you can see that moment of witness in an individual work. Maybe we can think about Picasso’s Guernica, or even Anselm Keifer’s Grane. But even in the most optimistic of still-lives you can still see the transience of flesh. These objects are recorded, here, and fixed. But they will be moved, and broken, and lost. They will decay. The image becomes a symbol of pre-imagined loss.
The reason why I’m telling you all this is that I think that for all artists who make work its actually really important to think about what art might be, as a thing. So often art gets talked about in terms of its function, its cost, its worth, its relationship to private property, to community cohesion, to economic indicators, and to public funding. I’m not saying that these things aren’t important. But I am saying that it’s also important to be able to talk about these acts as art, and not to be afraid of doing that.

This is a piece of work I made last year. Its called The Choir Loft, and it’s an extension to the Cenotaph in Blackpool. It’s a memorial to all those who are killed in war who aren’t part of the army. People like civilians, but also people like resistance fighters, or medics, or journalists. The work is an invitation for a choir to sing. It’s made of white granite, and there’s a text on the back wall, set into contrasting blue granite, that says “SING SOFTLY, BE STILL, CEASE. I wanted to make something that would give people a place, and a gesture rather than offer a representation of something.
I’m very interested in the idea of memorials. Especially civic memorials as opposed to private memorials. You know – when a country or a city decides to visibly remember something, it seems to be an important way of marking a death or a loss, so that it is noticed and visibly described. This is a memorial I was commissioned to make for the Queen Mum, when she died a few years ago. It’s in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow. It’s a poem about growth and decay, in a lot of ways. In some ways its quite anti-royalist, and I think actually it’s important for the memorial to contain those contradictions within it, just as the figure it is representing contained many contradictions.
The piece is made of jesmonite – a kind of resin, and so it’s very hard and permanent. It was a good solution to a very difficult site, because the gardens are very hot and very humid. I also wanted something that would change over time. The blocks are designed so that the letters are lower than the surface of the blocks. This is so that organic material, like algae and moss can start to grow in the letters, and actually begin to define the words. The top surface stays quite shiny. The other thing that will happen is that as the plants surrounding the blocks begin to grow, they will begin to hide the text, and the work will become more and more an implicit part of the plant collection.
My work usually tries to find a tension between the things I can control, and the things I can’t control. In my gallery work I set something in motion, but don’t over-prescribe the end result. In my performative work there is always a tension between the process of writing and the act of remembering. In my public work, I draw very much from the context as well as from the site, to make a work that has some kind of quality of liveness or change within it.
I like my work to be a moment of balance between an intention and a physical certainty.

I know that I haven’t really gone through many pieces in detail, and I hope that isn’t something you’re disappointed by. I think we’re going to have time for a discussion, so if you want to know more about a particular work, you can ask me now. I hope what I have been able to do though is to give you something of a starting point, so that you can put that stuff about the more practical aspects of functioning as an artist into some kind of context.

Thanks.

Gods of the Earth, Gods of the Sea

ruth barker — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:12:06 GMT

Hello,

A plethora of parties this last weekend, with artist Michael Stumpf, gallerist Sorcha Dallas, and craftswoman Bérengère Chabanis among those sharing a birthday. Many happy returns to all (but I don’t think I’ll be eating any more cake for a while…)

So I promised to post some pictures of the Ian Hamilton Finlay piece I went to see in Orkney last year. And here they are

I went to Orkney last summer, to visit the Pier Art Centre in Stromness and meet with exhibitions officer Andrew Parkinson. We spoke about the recent redevelopment of The Pier by Reiach and Hall architects and how the building has helped the centre become embedded in the local community.

At the end of our meeting, Andrew gave me a black and white postcard showing Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gods of the Earth, Gods of the Sea, an epic stone slab of a work, which he told me was sited on the nearby island of Rousay. As I had an extra day before my return to mainland Scotland, I decided to go and see the piece for myself. Andrew drew me a map and, fortified by provisions from the local shop, I set off early the next morning. I would take a bus from Stromness to Kirkwall, then another bus from Kirkwall to Tingwall, and finally the ferry from Tingwall to Rousay. From the harbour it should just be a short walk.

The weather as I set off was optimistically fresh and breezy, with a clean wash of late summer sun. As my ferry drew close to the Rousay harbour however, I saw the ominous low of a rain saturated cloudline approaching from the west. As I would have to walk the five miles or so to the work with no shelter this was a little concerning, but I still hoped I could outrun the downpour. I didn’t intend to be long in Rousay; just long enough to climb the hill, see the work, and return to the ferry. There is supposed to be a fantastic neolithic site on the far side of the island, but I wasn’t convinced that I could make it there and back on foot in time for the last ferry, and I didn’t want to be stranded.

Studying Andrew’s map, I began to plan my route as the ferry completed its crossing in absolute calm. Heading east along the road, I should find that the path would begin to climb. For about five miles I should follow the road round, past the church, the school and the old manse. If I kept going, Andrew had said that I should be fine, but that it was still very possible to miss Finlay’s work, lying as it does just off the road, to the right hand side. If I got to the very top of the hill, he had warned me, I had gone too far.

Once on dry land again I shouldered my light bag and set off, my eyes on the black cloud that seemed to crown the hill that I was starting to ascend. Five miles is a very short distance. Five miles up a steep hill is a bit longer. Five miles up a steep hill when you don’t quite know where you’re going is (mysteriously) quite a long way. The landscape was opaque somehow. I felt that it had it’s back to me, and I couldn’t find a way in to it. Livestock had a baleful look, and the cars that passed me did so at full speed, throwing up patterns of thin mud. At one point I passed a gated field in which stood the concrete ruins of a farmhouse, abrupt and stark as ancient dolmans against the hillside. The structure had a classical look, and, as I passed it, the first drops of rain fell, and an icy wind started.

The road became very steep very suddenly, climbing up to what seemed like the top of the island, and I had to hunch myself against the horizontal downpour. I was far too close to turn back so I struggled on, climbing up and up while the road beneath me became a sudden stream of cascading water. Almost at the brow of the hill, I had a moment of doubt – I could see nothing, and must have come too far. I had got no sense of the scale of the work from Andrew’s postcard, nor how far off the road the work was, and the small pale objects I kept staring at suspiciously always turned out to be distant sheep.

At the very crest, I saw it. Unmistakable, even in the (by now torrential) rain. A break in the low wall by the side of the road led to a cleared area at the very top of the cliffs. Rooted solidly in the earth, suspended against the pressure of the immense sky and the expanse of the Atlantic ocean, was a single pale slab with raised text and a net of dark lines. There was a weight to the work that was not solely due to its mass.

Approaching it from the road, tramping the heather and peat, Gods seems brooding and silent. And yet it is not a lonely work. Completed in 2005, not long before the artist’s death, there is a memorial quality to it that does not sit incongruously. Like all memorials perhaps, event those in lonely sites, the stone seems full – of words, of time, of thinking. Sitting on the brink of the land, it seems stable and complete.

Perhaps my response to Gods of the Earth would be less emotive if I had come across it in less elemental conditions, but perhaps not. Gods is a huge work, which demands to be looked upon as a monument. Unapologetic and uncompromising, it is unarguably a work that does not shirk the problematics of monumental sculpture. It is masculine and didactic, in a sense. It is certainly romantic, and will in time perhaps be thought dated and clichéd. It is true that Gods indelibly imposes itself onto this unique landscape and claims the heartstopping gulf of sky and sea as its own, stamping it’s identity on a place far older and greater and more complex than the work itself could ever be. And yet does it well, and with a certain power. I wont be able to forget it.

Click here for a Times Online article that mentions Gods.

To see more of Finlay’s work, you can visit his garden at Little Sparta: find out how here

To find out more about visiting Orkney, try here

More later,
R

Into The New

Ruth Barker — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:30:39 GMT

Hello,
sorry I’ve been out of touch for a while. I’ve been out and about on my travels, doing a show in Givatayim in Israel, and then a site specific performance at Carrawburgh Mithraeum on Hadrian’s wall. I’ll be updating my CIAS blog with news about these as soon as I get the time, so as I don’t wish to duplicate I’ll move on to other news here for PAR+RS.

So, what else is new? Well I guess Creative Scotland’s birth, after what’s felt like a very long gestation, is a pretty noteworthy item. As most readers of these page will already be aware, the process by which the Scottish Arts Council has become Creative Scotland has been – to say the least – controversial in some sections of Scotland’s art community.

Since 2008, Variant, the free arts and culture magazine, has kept up the Creative Scotland Blogspot as a forum to share their concerns that Creative Scotland is “overwhelmingly seeking to makes artists instruments of government policy – in the words of the bill, artists are to “support the government’s overarching purpose.”

In the interests of balance, this is how Creative Scotland describes itself on its own website:

“Creative Scotland is the new national leader for Scotland’s arts, screen and creative industries. It’s our job to help Scotland’s creativity shine at home and abroad.

We will invest in talented people and exciting ideas, develop the creative industries and champion everything that’s good about Scottish creativity.

Scotland boasts an incredible range of talent, from award-winning directors and writers to widely recognized actors and internationally renowned architects and digital companies. As a result of the wealth of indigenous talent, Scotland produces a huge volume of home-grown productions and products each year.

We think Scotland’s arts, culture and creative industries are worth shouting about. We’ll lead the shouting."

The relationships between arts and politics are – and always have been – complicated. I don’t agree with Leigh French (Variant magazine’s brilliant, vocal, dogmatic, and intractable Editor) that it’s necessarily a corrupt, negative, or destructive relationship. But I also can’t believe that it is a wholly benificent or unproblematic. Is that a cop-out on my part? Am I just sitting on the fence?

I don’t think so, but I’m sure Leigh would probably disagree with me. I guess I think that art is essentially linked to culture, and to the society in which it exists. We can’t divide art practice from the influence or economies of governmental politics, and I don’t feel that it would be useful to try to. But I also believe strongly in a pluralism of practices and models. In the light of this perhaps I feel that we need a push and pull between art and the political systems which (whether we like it or not) partly frame it. Part of that push and pull are the ways that the party in government supports and invests in art practice. But the other side of the relationship also has to involve the ways that artists criticise and contradict and activate themselves against that same government.

This push and pull can only be healthy of course when we have other points of reference and support as well – relationships with other human beings, with the market or the economy, relationships with music or poetry or with meaning. At the moment I feel that the artistic landscape in Scotland is hugely healthy because of the multiplicity of models that exist here. We have artist-run no-budget projects funded by people’s bar jobs and waitressing wages; we have civic institutions funded by taxpayers (and we are also, of course, taxpayers outselves); we have commercial projects well enmeshed in a global art market; we have community-run initiatives and privately funded enterprises and everything else inbetween.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that public funding – whatever the organisation that moderates it – is only one part of the picture. And in terms of artists’ relationships with the government, the funding provided by government agencies are only one part of that relationship. This isn’t to absolve us of responsibility when it comes to defining our own landscape, but rather to remind us of the complexity of that landscape as we try to navigate it. It’s good that there are voices like Variant’s to ring out in warning and remind us of the dangers, the reservations, and the difficulties. But it’s also good that there is investment in the arts, and that there are a variety of models around for artists to make use of in order to make projects happen. And if I’m brutal, then to me, that’s the most important thing of all – that artists are making work.

Incidentally, as I was writing this, I was listening with half an ear to Grayson Perry talking on Radio 4 about creativity. Seems like he’s always on the radio these days. Anyway, two things drifted into my brain from the discussion – both of which were no doubt filtered by the rambling content of this blog. The first was that apparently the Creative Industries make up a whopping 6.2 % of Britain’s GDP. Wowzers. I’m pretty sure that’s what they said, anyway. When asked to elaborate on what kind of organisations made up the cultural sector under this definition, it was things like advertising agencies, the performing arts (including music), digital and online media, and international broadcasting. But they stressed the importance of organisations like art schools and galleries and concert halls as providing the ‘life blood’ of the sector.

The other snippet was the one I want to end on, just because I think its lovely and it returns us aptly to the idea I always like to finish on – namely that of art itself, and its importance in the world. Creative endeavour, the writer Rose Tremain told Grayson, is a series of small “acts of repentance” that we make, and continue to make, throughout our lives. How poetic, I thought.

Homomonument

Ruth Barker — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:02:14 GMT

Hello,

I was in Holland for a couple of days last week, and on Friday I made a trip to see the Homomonument in Amsterdam – something that I’ve intended to do for ages. I wanted to write about it here as, as it turned out, the memorial became a little essay on Temporary and Permanent-ness.

Located on the bank of the Keizersgracht canal, near the historic Westerkerk church, the Homomonument (perhaps the name sounds better in Dutch):

Commemorates all women and men ever oppressed and persecuted because of their Homosexuality.
Supports the International Lesbian and Gay movement in their struggle against contempt, discrimination, and oppression.
Demonstrates that we are not alone
Calls for permanent vigilance.
Past, present and future and represented by the 3 triangles on this square. Designed by Karin Daan, 1987. ¹

And it’s very successful, I think. Read here for a clear description of the work. The most successful element, I felt, is that representing the present – a series of steps leading down to the water’s edge. The triangle here makes a new space within the civic arena, demarcating an area that feels generous, and calm. You might feel a sense of the sacred here. And it seemed well used. In the time I was there several people came to sit on the steps, and others arrived with the clear intention of paying their respects. And at the triangle’s tip, just at the point when it edges furthest over the canal, there was evidence of another kind of use. A wreath of remembrance had been laid there, with candles, and a handwritten note telling a private story of atrocity on a personal scale.

And so there was a delicate moment played out; a permanent assertion of remembrance coupled with a temporary reminder that, though we might intone the words ‘never again’, acts of violence and hatred are still perpetrated, men and women still die in horror, and we must continue to find ways to mark their passing publicly. What does it mean to overlay the permanent with the temporary trace of an individual voice? It’s something about detail, I think. And about humanity. The temporary laying of flowers – a gesture that is nothing if not ephemeral – becomes a powerful statement that drags us back an acknowledgement of the individual, drawn against the background of plural commemoration.

The Homomonument is far more interesting to my mind than the other contemporary Amsterdam memorial – De Schreeuw (The Scream) by Jeroen Henneman, sited in the city’s Oosterpark. De Schreeuw a monument to free speech dedicated to the murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh. But here I feel that the poetry of the abstract’s relationship to the specific (perhaps even the balance between ideas of the whole in relation to the fragment, which are essential to the notion of civic memorial) is unfulfilled. Let me know if you think otherwise – I’d be genuinely interested.

There’s something else I wanted to share with you, because someone shared it with me today. Just a photograph. This is an image of a sandstone barrier in Chapeltown, Leeds, intended to prevent cars being driven onto a grassed area. Someone’s sprayed a single word, which somehow transforms urban street furniture into something far more complicated and inexplicable. There’s a long history of religious graffiti in this sometimes charged area but this most minimal is either the very simplest or else by far the most complicated! As always, if this graffiti is yours, do let us know.

More later,
R.

¹ information from the Homomonument’s dedication signage, on site

Welcome to the Team

Ruth Barker — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 12:18:18 GMT

Hello,

I have exciting news this week, as PAR+RS has a new administrator! Hooray! The lovely Bérengère Chabanis joined the team last week, and is bravely navigating the depths of Public Art Scotland with only me to guide her. So far she’s been surviving admirably. I’ve stolen an image from her Facebook page to show you what she looks like. I’m sure she wont mind…

Berengere’s email address is admin@publicartscotland.com and you should drop her a line with your press releases, news, events, and opportunities. Do keep us up to date with everything public art related that you’re doing, as it’s important that we stay up to date with everything from the biggest to the smallest projects. It’s the only way, after all, that we can stay informed and independent. There’s certainly a lot happening just now, despite the rubbish Scottish summer. Check out our events listings to find what’s going on in your area and further afield.

Lastly I wanted to mention that that most public of temporary public projects The Fourth Plinth is in the news again as the powers that be draw up a shortlist of artists to produce a new work that will occupy the plinth during the prestigious 2012 Olympic slot. Those being considered for what may turn out to be a poisoned chalice are: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla ; Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset ; Katharina Fritsch ; Brian Griffiths ; Hew Locke and Mariele Neudecker

I’d be interested to know your thoughts. Top picks anyone? I think I’d go for Hew Locke, actually. Controversial, I know… What d’you reckon?

More later,
R.

Songs from St Kilda

ruth barker — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:40:59 GMT

Hello,
The news that Saint Kilda in the Western Isles may get it’s own visitor centre (albeit – due to practical constraints – one located miles away from the island itself) reminded me of the opera that was staged on the island a couple of years ago.

For those who don’t know, St Kilda is a small archipelago lying about 40 miles west of the Western Isles of Scotland. It’s often called ‘the most remote place in Britain’ although it was inhabited from earliest prehistoric times right up until 1930, when sustaining a community there finally became untenable and the final 36 people living on the island relocated to mainland Scotland.

The story of St Kilda is one that has often been told, and coloured to suit the teller’s political or romantic persuasion. What is certain is that a combination of emigration, lack of self sufficiency and chronic levels of disease and infant mortality combined to ensure that by the early 20th Century the St Kildan population felt that they could no longer remain on the island. In 1957 however, the 5th Marquess of Bute bequeathed the group of islands to The National Trust for Scotland, at which point St Kilda was designated a National Nature Reserve. These days the National Trust shares the island with the Ministry of Defence, who maintain a missile tracking station of the St Kildan island of Hirta.

In cultural terms, the island has in some senses become an image of loss and regret, or the one hand, balanced a sense of giddy remoteness, possibility, and non-conformity on the other. It has been used as an icon from everyone from Ross Sinclair’s New Republic of St Kilda to Scottish band Runrig’s At the Edge of the World, (sharing a title with the – to my mind – infinitely better 1937 film by Michael Powell [sorry Runrig fans, but there you go; I can’t stand them!]) to Bill Brydon’s 1982 Channel 4 film Ill Fares The Land

It was none of these that my vague train of thought turned to this morning however, but to St Kilda: A European Opera, performed in Gaelic in 2007. This laborious, ambitious, but in many ways groundbreaking international co-production was performed simultaneously on 22 and 23 June 2007 in five European venues: France (Valenciennes), Belgium (Mons), Germany (Düsseldorf), Austria (Hallstatt) and Scotland (Stornoway). The five performances were linked by live satellite connection to St Kilda and publicly webcast live on the BBC. You can read all about it “here.” http://www.stkilda.eu/the-project And it’s worth noting as well, that the Belgian production of the opera (called St Kilda: L’île des Hommes-Oiseaux) will be at the Edinburgh International Festival this year on the 15th, 16th and 17th August. I may even try and get tickets.

I can’t tell you why this project has stuck with me so endurably. Maybe it’s the simplicity of it, though ‘simple’ seems an odd way to describe such a huge work involving so much money and so many people scattered over half of Europe. And yet it is simple in some way. The act of singing, or of writing a song and singing it at the same time as someone else sings their song, seems to me a very simple and essential thing, and all the more powerful because of that. There’s a gesture of ephemerality to the gesture of song that is soft in the way that water can be soft (strong enough to tear down cliffs and gouge out landscapes) or brief in the way that words can be brief (long enough to withstand centuries and change the way we think and live and dream). Maybe it’s just that singing (or listening to song) sometimes makes us vulnerable, and that vulnerability seems a good memorial for a lost society and it’s people.

More later,
R

Procession

Ruth Barker — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:39:33 GMT

Hello,
Jeremy Deller’s most recent public work Procession was staged (if staged is the word) yesterday in Manchester, as part of the International Festival there. I wish I’d seen it (I didn’t), but I’ll present it to you as I’ve been able to reconstruct it from the media reports.

Deller has been working with the multiplicity of Manchester’s publics to orchestrate a parade through the centre of the city, marking space while also marking something far more intangible through the series of self-identifications that are suddenly made explicit and public. For the procession was predominantly made up of groups of allegiance – some organised, like the Scouts; others social, like the Goths; some cultural, like the Shree Swaminarayan Gadi Piping Band; and others still were what we might call ‘single issue’, like the Unrepentant Smokers. Added to these were notes of cultural and social remembrance, the imagination of the city made flesh as decorated floats, as a steel band played the memory of Joy Division, or a factory with chimneys and mill works drifted through the streets on the back of a lorry.

This idea of the heterogeneous public – of many separate related or unrelated groups of people who may or may not be aware of each other – is one that long ago replaced the idea of the public as a mass with a single homogenous identity. And yet I have never before seen it so lovingly or generously made visible, with banners and floats and slogans and carnival.

As expertly nurtured by Deller, Procession is so much more than an essay into the make-up of the British populace. It is a song to the chaotic, personal, contradictory natures of people, both as they are as individuals and as they behave as groups. More than a gesture, Procession comes close to being some kind of celebration of the human condition as well as a tribute to the humanity of our civic spaces.

And, significantly, Procession moved. Trawling down the main thoroughfares of Manchester, it passed assembled crowds who waved and cheered and passed judgement and joined in. And who understood that they too were part it.

More later.
R

Some of the media coverage.

Manchester International Festival

BBC Footage

Jeremy Deller Talk about Manchester Procession

The Guardian

Continuity in Architecture

Here and Now

Ruth Barker — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 19:37:07 GMT

Hello,

So, the temporary-ness of projects… It’s something that’s been in the news lately as the Fourth Plinth has a new occupant – surely this is the most visible example of a temporary public project that has really entered the public consciousness.

And I’d suggest, that that heterogeneous-many faced-multifaceted-uniquely experienced mass of people of whom we are part and parcel and whom we inexplicably lump with the catch-all term ‘the public’; well, they seem to quite like it. Or at least the conversations I read in the media seem now to be able to discuss the perceived merits or failures of the work in question, rather than being too hung up on how long said piece is going to be on the plinth for. It was a brave move, I feel, to use the plinth as a way to show temporary works. And it’s paid off. Partly because I think it’s been able to show something of the evolution of practice that exists in Britain at the moment. Ideas change over time, and the Fourth Plinth reflects that somehow. In a brief, tiny way. Like a ship in a bottle adrift over choppy seas…

It reminds me though, of some of the conversations I’ve been having lately with a range of interesting people. One day last week (or possibly the week before – I’ve been busy lately, and the days seems to blur into one another!) I met with Sorcha Dallas and Jenny Crowe about their project A New Path. We spoke about many things, but partly I became interested in the fact that all of the works they’ve selected for their research focus are permanent works¹. Does this mean that temporary works are less available for subsequent reflection? Is it harder for a temporary work to enter a ‘canon’ of significance? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, directly after this meeting I went up the Glasgow Women’s Library to meet with Dr Fiona Dean and artists Nicky Bird and Shauna McMullan, who were selected to undertake the Making Space for Women: Towards a New Public Artwork for Glasgow project for GWL. Something from the initial literature surrounding the project came back to me strongly. The GWL team had looked at the existing civic statuary in Glasgow – for much the same reasons as Sorcha and Jenny had also been looking at some of the permanent works in the city: reflecting on what exists already in order to learn more about possible ways to make new things in the future. What the GWL noticed was that none of the existing public monuments commemorated Glasgow’s women. They were all marking the achievements of the city’s men. And that realisation was something of a catalyst for action, and for the generation of new works by Shauna and by Nicky, and hopefully – eventually – for the development of a new public work that does something to address this current lack. But it did make me think about the nature of temporary and permanent. Because permanent work (to state the obvious) is still there even after the artist, the commissioner, and the public it was developed for, are all gone. The permanent public works we encounter reflect a particular context, even if that context then changes. They remind us of a time, of a way of thinking, even when that time is no longer the present, and even when that way of thinking seems outmoded or even wrong. Glasgow’s civic statues do not only represent men because only men have lead lives of achievement. Rather, they only represent men because they were erected at a time when the powers the be (certainly the powers that erect monuments) valued the achievements of men more highly than the achievements of women. That time, I hope, has passed. But for me it’s important that we remember that discrimination used to be commonplace. Is it right, after all, to edit our own cultural history? So I believe it is right to point out the fact – loudly! – that there is inequality in our civic record, and to do what we can to correct that now, in the work that is commissioned today and tomorrow. After all if we didn’t have those permanent indelible reminders of the thinking of our forefathers, would we also lose the catalyst to make our own marks on the landscape of our streets and squares?

And the flip side of this permanent evidence of the thinking of previous generations: the memorials (which do exist) to those we would rather not celebrate any more. What about the slavers, the colonialists, the tyrants, who still stand on their plinths with pigeons on their heads? Sculpted at a time when they were thought heroes or statesmen, what do we do with their images now that they are seen as criminals or monsters? Do we erase their monuments in an effort to forget? It’s difficult territory, clearly. My own feeling is that we should retain them as an acknowledgement of past injustice, but adapt or alter or mark them. Maybe we should write new inscriptions for them, or cut off their faces to mark the horrors they perpetrated, or relocate them from their original sites to someplace new that seems more fitting. There are plenty of possibilities.

But what does this have to do with temporary-ness? Well, only this. That the temporary is by necessity fleeting. In a hundred years we will be lucky if the documentation still exists and – if it does – we should be remember that all documentation is an edited version of the truth. It can never be the whole picture. By refraining from making indelible marks, do we risk our perspective on our contemporary world being lost to future generations?

As always, I’d love to read your thoughts.

More later,
R.

¹ of varying kinds of permanence, I grant you. It’s clear that Graham Fagen’s Where the Heart Is for example, uses a different register of permanence that Ian Hamilton Finlay’s pillars. But the work is still one that’s made to be around for a long time.

New Season - Temporary Projects

Ruth Barker — Mon, 24 May 2010 06:46:57 GMT

Hello!

And welcome to the new PAR+RS Summer Season. Over the next few months we’ll be looking at Temporary Projects, in all their many forms and varieties.

The pros and cons of the temporary were first discussed on PAR+RS last year, when Ginny Hutchison’s Seven Sunsets project began a debate that featured on the Blog- Since that time the question of how the question of duration might effect artworks developed for public space has come up again and again, in projects such as The Black Cloud (Situations, Bristol), which was discussed at the recent SpeedWork Symposium.

With the rise and rise of art festivals and biennials (Scotland alone has Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art, Coast, and The Edinburgh Art Festival to name but three) we’ve seen temporary projects in unusual locations enter the mainstream of contemporary curatorial practice. The successes of the growing ranks of graffiti, interventionist, and street artists have also opened our eyes to the possibilities of works that are made for public space and then ‘abandoned’ to the whims of weather, civic obliteration, and public intervention. Shifts in commissioning strategies have also done much to encourage engagement with works that simply aren’t meant to last forever, but whose legacy must depend on the experience of a single moment, day, or season.

We’ve been asking artists, commissioners and other to share their experiences of temporary projects – the problems and the regrets as well as the times of triumph and illumination. We’ve got a whole host of fascinating insights lined up over the next few months, as the conversation will unfold throughout the summer. And don’t forget its not too late to join in the conversation! If the articles here incite you to rage or inspire you to generosity we want to hear about it. Email the editor if you want to contribute, or share your comments on line. We can’t wait to hear from you.

In our first batch of articles for you, we have Kirsty Innes of the Irvine Bay Regeneration Company, discussing beach front commissioning in Opera houses, raindrops and fishing boats – inspiring pupils’ designs on the future…

Most exciting of all, we’ve been working on our first ever PAR+RS commissioned artwork – a public performance / action by artist Shelly Nadashi, which we just can’t wait to share with you! We’ll be revealing the work in the coming weeks, so keep a close eye on the site to read much more on this soon…

For now though, I’ll leave you with a phrase I heard on the radio. A woman, talking about a short story she’d read, opined the following. “Its brevity doesn’t matter” she told her interviewer “so long as its resonance remains.” Wise words, perhaps?

More later,
R.

Central Station's White Bike film

Ruth Barker — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:20:08 GMT

is brilliant. A really great piece of documentation.
Check it out:

Some background here

or NVA