Deep Breaths / Temporary Nature

by Ruth Barker, 21 Sep 2009

Hello,

Two events on this weekend, both of which I’ve mentioned before on the Blog. The first, on Friday night, was the opening of Deep Breaths at the Govanhill Baths. Curated by Alex Wilde, Deep Breaths allowed a range of artists to work on interventions sited within the Baths – a magnificent former public baths in the Southside of Glasgow. The Baths were closed by the City Council in 2001, an act which sparked both protests and dismay in the local community. Since that time a voluntary group of residents and interested others have campaigned for Govanhill Baths to reopen and fundraised for the cash to support a renovation project. Planning permission has now been granted for the Baths’ redevelopment, but the Council are still (it seems) reluctant to fully – and financially – support the project. Deep Breaths was timed to coincide with Doors Open Day, and was an opportunity for visitors to look around the empty building, as well as for artists to re-imagine and reinterpret the space. It was a great success, with (at last count) more than 2000 visitors through the door during the course of the weekend. I’ve posted the text of my catalogue essay for the event below.

The other event on this weekend in Glasgow was Temporary Nature curated by artist Allison Gibbs, and I’m not sure that it was just because they took place at the same time that I started to think about how they functioned in relation to one another. Temporary Nature took place on a patch of wasteground near the new BBC and STV buildings at Pacific Quay, close to the South bank of the Clyde as you travel out of the city centre towards Govan. The spaces all around here have been recently gentrified (pre-recession) with a scattering of media headquarters and stylish restaurants in amongst the Science Museum and SECC. Allison asked a small group of Glasgow-based artists (Stuart Gurden, Anna Mields, Louise Briggs [of Jaaliceklar ] and I) to each make new work for the space, and also made a new sculptural work herself – Crystal Habits – which was installed within the site for the two-day duration of the project. Stuart made a sound installation in which an authoritative voice reads the text from a found poster. The sound centered around a large stone embedded in a stubby clearing which provided a framed view of the nearby BBC building. Stuart I think originally intended visitors to sit on the stone and listen to the piece, with the media hub as a backdrop/perspective. But by midday Saturday a crowd of interested people had gathered, standing around the stone and watching it, as the apparent source of the disembodied ‘voice’. The piece was fantastically effective. Anna produced Sackgasse (Blind-alley) an ambitious, partly illusary, architectural structure that suggested something of a shelter as well as (perhaps) a contemporary concrete folly. Louise had installed a billboard work that perhaps most directly referenced the site’s various incarnations. The land is owned by developers, and so I assume it will be built on as soon as the owners feel that the markets have recovered enough they they can make a profit by selling or building on it. However things go, I doubt this verdant patch of land in such a prime location will remain as it is for long.

The wasteground itself was part of the site of the Glasgow Garden Festival and has since been left to its own devices, becoming an overgrown and tangled space that has developed its own pragmatism, routes and logic. When Allison invited me to develop a new piece of work for the site, I was reminded of some of the places I played as a kid. I grew up in council housing estates in the suburbs of Leeds in the North of England, and there were always plenty of these odd patches of land to explore and lay claim to. There’s something important in the way that these spaces inhabit our contemporary cities, and in the way that they might inhabit us, as well. They are very liminal spaces, neither wilderness nor not-wilderness, neither outside the city nor part of it, which I think are important in breaking down the temptation towards binaries: known / not known; urban / rural; empty / full. As well as a roving population of kids, the available evidence suggests that the wasteground is largely used these days by dog-walkers, cider-drinkers and outdoor-shaggers, which also made me think about the way that my own relationship with these kinds of spaces has changed as I’ve grown older. In the tomboy days of my youth I would have considered any unclaimed patch of beer-can laden scrubland big enough to build dens or climb trees in as my territory, to be explored and summarily conquered. Now I see these spaces as threats to be avoided; places not to walk alongside alone at night, and certainly not areas to enter into by myself, perhaps even in daylight. This is sad, obviously, but also rational, I tell myself. Still, it’s worth remembering that not so long ago I would have been sorely tempted by the possibilities offered by such a landscape.

The connection between Temporary Nature and Deep Breaths is of course that between art (it’s commissioning, its generation, and its positioning) and the physical and social contexts that surround it. Both of these projects function at two levels. The first is perhaps to use art to allow visitors to re-experience a particular space: whether by taking them to a location they wouldn’t normally go to; or by encouraging visitors to re-evaluate or re-perceive somewhere that have seen so many times that it has become invisible to them. The second is to use the opportunities offered by spaces and places we discover and that come to mean something to us (whether poetically or politically) as catalysts to enable art to happen. These strategies – if strategies they are – are clearly not mutually exclusive. And the distinction between ‘artists’ and ‘visitors’ is of course an artificial one. But one thing that thinking about these two projects has enforced in me is that sometimes ‘commissioning’ just comes down to an invitation, a curiosity, and a desire to see something happen. As it happens, that’s what our next PAR+RS season is all about. I’ll be sending our the newsletter soon with details of some of the treats we have in store for you over the next couple of months, but in the meantime do let me know your thoughts.

More later,

R

Deep Breaths: Steps Across The Floor; Ink Across The Walls.

The site of Govanhill Baths [open to the public 1914 – 2001] is a now a world within its own walls; the chipped tiles are home to verdant ferns and tracing ivy, the peeling paint falls like autumn leaves spiralling from lofty heights. And yet the site is decisively not – surprisingly perhaps – one that speaks today of loss or emptiness. Instead it is a space crammed with presence and belief, as the building’s rooms, pools, and corridors are punctuated by the work of more than 20 artists, many from the surrounding community.

Punctuated? Or perhaps Inhabited. Because the artists’ work here seems less to demarcate or define the rooms it occupies than to take on their shapes as we may take on the character or idiosyncrasies of the places where we live, becoming moulded just as we adapt and change them. In a building already so steeped in the lyrical, the meaningful, the unexpected and the out of place (hairs of mud on the pale tiled floors, concrete arches like great red ribs, the lost and found face of a resuscitation dummy) the work takes on a quiet certainty as it reveals rather than discovers, presenting rather than laying claim to this much loved, much contested, once-public space.

There is little unity to be found in the approaches, media, or languages of the artists’ work, and in many ways this reflects the generosity of the Baths themselves. There is much that we can find here, and no single line that we should take. The building is big and sprawling and wears the history of its long use explicitly. Here it is elegant and spacious in its period detail; there it is adapted, truncated, and UPVC-ed. And yet Govanhill Baths consistently overflows with a sense of the human, the personal, and the ergonomic, and it is this very fact that re-assets that palpable sense of variety.

Artists have worked to select and to articulate; to contradict and to celebrate; to memorialise and to embellish; to reinforce; to historicise; to invent; to explore; and to reveal. They have worked at every scale from the monumental to the intimate. They have occupied every corner and run the fingerprints of their consideration over every surface. As visitors, we can vicariously feel the artists’ attention, their thoughtfulness and their decision-making. We might even feel that their care has become an act of love for the building they have chosen to work within, or that Deep Breaths is, in fact, less an exhibition than a series of gifts.

This once-public-ness seems an indelible quality of the Baths as we now experience them through the wholly voluntary efforts of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust. These were after all, rooms that were once well known, frequented, and shared by a whole community. Then, we felt that this place was ours, whether we chose to use it or not. Now the building is no longer public. Now the doors to the Baths are closed and the windows are shuttered to our curiosity. Now we need permission from outside agencies to be able to be here, and today we understand that the artworks have become part of that invitation. We have come to see the artwork but, we admit, we have also come to see the Baths themselves. There is a power in walking these corridors. By coming here we are stating that we have not forgotten the world that waits quietly behind the padlocks.

To make our way through the rooms and subdivisions of rooms within the Baths is to read trace upon trace of human activity. People have walked, thought, made, swum, talked, laughed, lived, tried, learned, believed, wept, remembered, imagined, triumphed, trusted, and breathed here. The artworks in Deep Breaths remind us of that. And although the tone of the individual artists’ responses varies widely, the very presence of these artworks hints at hope for the Baths’ future, as well as regret for their present state. Because Govanhill Baths is inarguably a place of people and a place for people, which is perhaps why its decay seems so bodily as well as so poignant. The peeling paint that earlier reminded me of falling leaves is, on second glance, more like sloughing skin. When the doors close on this weekend, a space that was once a shared and public place will once again be closed and dormant. Not dead we know, but only sleeping.



Glasgow City Council closed Govanhill Baths in 2001, without any local consultation. Its loss is still keenly felt by the Govanhill community.

Ruth Barker is an artist who lives in Govanhill.