Latest articles for The Editorial: The Temporary Projects Season
-
just a quick one
by Ruth Barker 6 Sep 2010
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.
-
Producers or Consumers?
by Ruth Barker 23 Aug 2010
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…
-
Cash in Hand
by Ruth Barker 9 Aug 2010
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
-
On NVA
by Ruth Barker 4 Aug 2010
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.
-
Homomonument
by Ruth Barker 26 Jul 2010
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. 1And 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
by Ruth Barker 19 Jul 2010
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. -
Places and Spaces
by Ruth Barker 12 Jul 2010
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. -
Into The New
by Ruth Barker 6 Jul 2010
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.
-
Here and Now
by Ruth Barker 5 Jun 2010
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
by Ruth Barker 24 May 2010
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
by Ruth Barker 18 May 2010
is brilliant. A really great piece of documentation.
Check it out:or NVA
-
No Mention of the Election
by Ruth Barker 10 May 2010
Hello,
I heard today from Peacock Visual Arts, in Aberdeen, who were providing an update on the ongoing Union Terrace Gardens machinations.For those who don’t know about this (is there anyone left who doesn’t know about this?) ‘The City Square’ is a radical plan to transform Aberdeen city centre by raising Union Terrace Gardens and the Denburn Valley to the surrounding street level, covering over the railway and the dual carriageway. The proposal would create over 5 acres of ground at street level and a further 2.5 acres of all-weather, covered space. You can read all about the City Square Plan here
As it happens, many people have expressed reservations about such a radical building project, with concerns involving the loss of public green space and expansion of commercial and retail space. One of the principle voices in the campaign to rethink the plans has been that of Peacock Visual Arts, who – it turns out – had an existing plan to site a new Centre for Visual Arts on the same site. Peacock’s plan was all going swimmingly, until plans for The City Square were revealed.
The results of a public consultation showed that 55% of participants did not want the City Square proposal. The majority of respondants wanted green space and a contemporary arts centre in any future development on the site. A press release from Peacock at the time stated that:
“Reading carefully through the information released today we are delighted to see that all of the major elements that people want to see – greater accessibility, green space and cultural facilities – can be delivered in Peacock’s existing plans for Union Terrace Gardens.
“At a time of increasing pressure on the public purse Aberdeen can be seen to be leading the way in delivering quality public facilities and value for money by enabling the Peacock plans for Union Terrace Gardens to go ahead. We have a short funding window now until June to get the go-ahead for the new arts centre and we hope that in the light of the results of the public consultation ACSEF, Sir Ian Wood, and Aberdeen City Council will look positively at the Peacock scheme as the first stage of a win-win for Aberdeen.
“However, so far Sir Ian has stated the City Council must decide to proceed with the City Square as it stands or he will withdraw his £50 million.”
Today though, Peacock provided the latest installment of the saga, and appealed again for the help of willing supporters. Maybe you can help them by writing to your local Councillor. I can’t, as I don’t live in Aberdeen. I have signed their petition though.
Here’s what they said:
“Dear all,
“As many of you will know the City Council are due to make a decision on the future of Union Terrace Gardens on May 19th.
“At this meeting they will have to decide whether to give Peacock the green light OR to continue with the development of the City Square project.
“Despite Sir Ian saying that he would withdraw if the Square did not meet with overwhelming support of the public, he has decided to continue with the project and make the City Council decide.
“The majority of people in the public consultation voted against the Square. We really hope that Aberdeen City Council represent the views of their electorate when making their decision.
“We need your help to ensure that they do.
“Every Aberdeen City Councillor will have a vote at this meeting so please do get in touch with yours (you can find them at www.writetothem.com) and urge them to make the right decision on the 19th. Please tell your friends to do the same.
“As ever, thank you all so much for you kind words and support. You have been truly amazing over this period and all of us here at Peacock are extremely grateful.
Elly and the Peacock Team"
As ever, comments from both sides welcome. There’s lots more information here.
more later,
R. -
Susan Phillipsz
by Ruth Barker 5 May 2010
So other people thought Lowlands was pretty good, too…
Great news. Hope she wins! And I’m interested to see what she’ll make for the show. Hope she’s able to work outside the gallery space, as it’d be great to see site specific practice being showcased. And interesting that this comes the year after Roger Hiorns was also shortlisted for a public work. Could public art practice’s star be in ascendant?
more later,
R. -
We're Back!
by Ruth Barker 22 Apr 2010
Hello Hello Hello,
it seems like an age since I saw you last. For those who’ve been trying to access the site over the past couple of weeks I can only apologise. We were forced to take PAR+RS offline while we sorted out some vital maintainance and admin issues that simply couldn’t wait. But I’m now very happy (you don’t know how happy – really) to say that everything PAR+RS-side is now shipshape again, and we’re back with a bang right into Gi!
We will of course be covering a lot of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, but we’re also about to launch a new Spring / Summer Season on Temporary Public Projects so there’ll be lots of new articles to browse – do get in touch if there’s something you think we should know about. Gi is important though, as it’s a time during which a lot of international – and national – visitors come to Scotland to see what it is we’re doing here. Of course, not everything in the Festival has a relationship to contemporary public art, but it’s inarguable that much of it does – not least in the structure of the Festival itself, and the DIY ethos that still permeates it.
We’ll be picking out some of the best projects for your perusal in a public art themed Most Wanted; and we’ll have plenty of coverage of Jodi Rose’s Welcome to Bridgeland project, which is launching with an event tomorrow (Friday) at the South Portland Street Suspension Bridge in Glasgow (that’s the old red foot bridge on the River Clyde, next to Jamaica St Bridge). Please come down for the 8 o’clock start – hope to see you there!
We’re also looking forward to Jacqueline Donachie’s Speedwork Symposium, which PAR+RS has sponsored – save the date now and come down for a fantastic event at House for an Art Lover on April 29th.
For now though, I’ll have to leave you. I’ve got plenty to do getting ready for the new Season…
More later, and thanks for bearing with us through the temporary interruption.
R.
-
"Beyond Doctor Who and dinosaurs even."
by Ruth Barker 9 Mar 2010
Hello,
Just a link this time.
More later,
R -
Homecoming
by Ruth Barker 6 Mar 2010
Hello,
On the train back to Scotland after spending a few days in London (just doing some research for a current project). I went to see the Henry Moore retrospective at Tate Britain, and would heartily recommend it to anyone who (like me) tends to think of Moore in relation to large-scale, contextually conservative, permanent works in front of banks. The show is a great look at the evolution of a sculptural practice that, when seen together like this, demonstrates an incredible articulacy and sensitivity. Completely new to me (probably shamefully) were Moore’s drawings, which I found hugely moving. Also fresh were his war works, and his mining drawings – complicated series of images and forms that still carry an eloquent weight and social power. Good to see.
At the British Museum was a similarly eye-opening exhibition of Mexican printmaking. Titled Revolution on Paper: Mexican prints 1910 – 1960 the exhibition concentrated on lithographs, but it was also good to see the more publicly disseminated side of printmaking represented through the inclusion of posters and book jackets. Coming out of the museum I ran into a friend who had happened upon this graphic intervention. Though very far from revolutionary (!), it was good to see that people are still intervening in their public space.
Other useful stuff I was lucky enough to see included the Chris Ofili show at Tate Britain, and The Kingdom if Ife at the British Museum. It was brilliant to be able to spend a whole day each in both the V&A and the British Museum, studying some of the items in their collections. Amazing but exhausting, a dedicated day-long trip to either one is something that everyone should do at least once, I reckon. I’ll warn you though – you still won’t make it round everything! For the temporary exhibitions though, the Kingdom of Ife is particularly relevant in terms of thinking about the relationships between art-making, culture, and public space. Go see it if you can, and let me know what you think.
While I was away, I was also liaising (cue appreciation of modern technology) with performance artist Shelly Nadashi, who will, I’m very happy to announce be working on PAR+RS’ first ever commissioned artwork. Hooray! As a lead into our Spring / Summer 2010 Temporary Projects Season, Shelly will be devising a series of public performances that will take place in Germany (where she is at the moment), Poland, and Scotland. I’m really pleased that Shelly’s agreed to take on the commission, and I’m thrilled that we’re going to be able to follow her progress in an exclusive Blog. I can’t wait to find out what form her final piece will take!
Anyway, writing this on the train, and great as London always is, I’m also very much looking forward to being back home.
More later,
R -
Swinging
by Ruth Barker 26 Feb 2010
Hello,
just saw this on the bbc website. Seems Christoph Büchel has raised some eyebrows (at least) with his new project at The Secession in Vienna.
In a slight departure from previous works I’ve seen, rather than creating an installative ‘hyper-real’ environment within a gallery (see here for an example of Hole at Kunsthalle Basel ) Büchel has this time re-sited an existing real space within the gallery context. Specifically he’s installed Element6, a pre-existing nightclub (or sex club – accounts vary), which is normally located elsewhere in the city of Vienna, inside the gallery space. The club will be open at night when the gallery is closed. During the day visitors to the gallery will have to walk through the club (which will then be closed, and empty of staff and patrons) to reach The Secession’s basement, where they’ll be able to view the Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt. Beethoven Frieze is the wall painting Klimt produced in 1902 for the Vienna Secessionist exhibition. Intended as a temporary commission, the work was later retained and restored. Significantly for Büchel, Klimt’s mural was originally attacked as being pornographic, but has since become lauded as a civic ‘masterpiece’.
Two things obviously interesting here: One is the switch between a work that was intended to be permanent, which is then kept as a precious object for posterity. Ginny? Any thoughts? 1
The second is the nature of public space. The working definition of public art that I use for PAR+RS is ‘art practice that is not contextualised by a gallery or museum.’ Büchel’s work here interests me because it injects some friction to this idea. What happens when we re-contextualise the gallery itself, and temporarily lend it another function?
More later,
R1 Ginny Hutchison produced Seven Sunsets for Inverness city centre – a temporary commission that was then criticisedin the press for its very ephemerality. See previous Blog posts and comments.
-
Chit Chat
by Ruth Barker 22 Feb 2010
Hello,
pretty busy over the last while, not least as I’ve been gearing up to start a Leverhulme-funded residency (part time, so as to leave room for PAR+RS) at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Artefact Studies at Newcastle University. There’s a bit of info here on the Intersections website. I’ll keep you up to date with that as it progresses, but for now it’s enough to say that I start officially in March, and that I’ll be down in Newcastle (on and off) for the following 10 months. Exciting!
Conversation has been flavouring the zeitgeist lately, as I’ve been chatting to Justin Carter and Neil McGuire at Glasgow School of Art about a cross-departmental St. George’s Cross Underpass project, and attending a few conversations regarding the tentatively proposed ‘Art Park’ in Bellahouston Park.
The latter is at very early stages of development, so it would be wrong to talk too much about it, other than to say that I hope that those co-ordinating the project continue to involve the wider community in the ongoing discussion.
The former on the other hand is almost at final proposal stage, so I don’t mind shedding a little light on how the conversations have been developing.
In 2009, Justin and Neil from GSA were contacted by the fantastic Katie Duffy of Glasgow City Council, to suggest that GSA students might be interested in an opportunity to propose a new work for the Saint George’s Cross pedestrian underpass in the West End of the city. There could be no guarantee that the work would be implemented, but it would be a great chance for students to develop some ideas for a difficult location, and to ‘pitch’ a new site specific project to the Council.
Of course the Artschool jumped at the opportunity to involve the students in such a unique professional practice experience, and Justin (from the Sculpture and Environmental Art department) and Neil (from Visual Communications) took the even more unusual decision to open up the process to all the departments across the schools of Fine Art, Design, and Architecture. As I’m no stranger to pedestrian underpasses and their environs (for my sins, check here ) I was asked to talk to the students at the start of the project – discussing how my own ideas had evolved as well as talking more broadly about contemporary public art practice. There were a lot of people at the talk, and I that time no-one knew really how the Saint George’s Cross underpass project might develop, or who might be involved. Various ideas were suggested – from mass collaboration, to rigorous competition, to a scrupulous division of labour. It was an exciting time, as it felt like a huge range of possibilities were open for discussion.
By the time I returned to the school a week or so ago to discover how things were progressing, a small core group had emerged and were working collaborativey towards a shared proposal. So that at a meeting set-up this month to allow the students to present their work so far, I found 5 (I think? Hope I haven’t mis-remembered) dedicated students from across the departments working closely together to come up with a final design. It was a real privilage to hear the group talk frankly about how they’d found the project by turns inspiring and infuriating, and to see how their ideas had evolved into a proposal that struck me as thoughtful, innovative, and ambitious.
When I met with the students on Feb 11th, there was still some work to be done on finalising their proposal, but the bare bones of it were certainly there. In essence, they’re hoping to plant a garden in the area surrounding the entrance to the underpass, and to contrast that with an installed aspect in the tunnel itself. The group had worked hard to negotiate a fearsomely limited budget and timescale, and I hope that Glasgow City Council appreciates the sincerity and the energy with which the brief has been tackled.
Once the students have made their proposal to the Council, and once they’ve heard whether or not it’s been accepted (I’ve got my fingers crossed for you guys!), I’ll be approaching them to see how we can best cover the work here on PAR+RS. It’s important to say at this point that I think the process they’ve gone through already has been a fascinating one – whether they are able to move onto the next stage of realisation or not. But in the meantime, let me know if there’s anything in particular you want to hear about the process so far. Perhaps we can draw up a list of questions for me to put to the group in an interview?
More later,
R -
Wonderous wonders
by Ruth Barker 9 Feb 2010
Hello,
last week I spent quite a bit of time in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. Not just for Jonathan Bonfiglio’s talk about which I grumbled ungenerously last time, but I’ve also been doing a fair bit of research into The Jeffrey Room, for an upcoming project. And that, happily, has been a wonderful experience. Visit the Virtual Mitchell hereThe Jeffrey Room is a beautiful space on the top floor ot the Mitchell, which houses the personal collection of the late Mr. Jeffrey – an individual with an eclectic but warmly personal taste for the classics, as well as natural history, architecture, and geography. The room itself is ornamented and baroque in its interior, lined with glass-fronted bookcases filled with the rare treasure of the collection. Tantalisingly, the Jeffrey collection has never been digitally archived, and so remains trancribed in ink in a suite of huge leather-bound books. If curious about exactly what the room holds, you can request these books and then lose yourself in them utterly in the hushed environment of the Archive Room, several floors below. From these arcane handwritten lists you can make requests and the books will be brought to you. You place them on cotton cushions in the Archve room, weight their pages with leather pads and straps, and peer inside. It’s addictive.
I made the following longlist of titles that took my fancy. So far I’ve requested and read those marked with a * but I may go back for more…
Cook, Howard T
Studies in Ruskin
1911Costume: A Cyclopedia *
Planche
1879Fashion in Paris
Uzanne
1901Chronicles of Newgate
Griffiths, A
1884Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland
Miller
1860Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches
Carlyle, T
date unknownPuss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk
George Cruikshank
1864Dance of Death
Holbein
(Berwick, T)Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
C Mackay
1841Specimens of Ancient Sculpture
(Society of Dilettanti)
1809The Shipwreck, A Poem *
William Falconer
1858Flagellation and the Flagellants: A history of the rod in all countries
JG Bertram
1896Grecian Legends and Early History *
G Grote
1843The Mythology of Ancienct Greece and Italy
Keightley
1852Ancient Songs and Ballads *
Ritson J
1829History of the Witches of Renfrewshire who were burned on the Gallowgreen of Paisley
John Miller
1809I can’t decide if I’m reassured or dissappointed that most of these texts are now available to either buy as reprints through Amazon or to read online at Google Books…
more later,
R -
On 'On Movement and Memory'
by Ruth Barker 5 Feb 2010
Hello,
so on Wednesday I went to this talk at the Mitchell, organised by Glasgow Sculpture Studios as part of Jimmie Durham’s residency there. Speaker Jonathan Bonfiglio’s presentation was billed as “On Movement (and Memory) is a wide-ranging talk that encompasses all aspects of how we move and how that helps us to create memories, in an ultimately futile attempt to immortalise ourselves. These days, perhaps we have come to regard ourselves as Gods, and death as beneath us. Was it always thus?” I have to say I was disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, Bonfiglio seemed like a good guy as well as being obviously intelligent. But the talk itself was frustrating on a number of levels.
Firstly the room set-up was awkward and un-ergonomic. The chairs for the audience were arranged in two facing rows with a gap in the middle, almost like being on the tube – or maybe also a bit like how the two main parties sit in the House of Commons (although the gap was narrower and the rows were proportionately much longer and thinner, and only two chairs deep). Bonfiglio sat behind a desk placed at the far end – the equivalent of the Speaker’s position (or the door into the next tube carriage. Not sure how long I can keep up these two parallel similies, but I’ll do my best). This meant that not only were you distracted by trying not to make eye contact with people sitting opposite you (very like being on the tube, this. I’ve never been to the H of C’s so couldn’t comment) but also it was impossible for many in the audience, including me, to actually see the speaker and I couldn’t hear him, either! This last was partly because of a bad mic I think as the sound was very muffled, but also because he spoke very quickly and – I felt at least – kind of unclearly. This may just have been me though, as I am a bit hard of hearing.
What I did hear though, I’m afraid didn’t inspire. It felt like a very surface-skimming series of anecdotes, which weren’t either incisive or interrogatory, or esoteric and tangential. Perhaps Bonfiglio misjudged his audience? There were some mighty brains there (I don’t count myself in that by the way) and he could have done with picking up the slack a little. I was left with a feeling as if I’d just read a column in the lifestyle section of the Guardian. It was nice, but I just couldn’t figure out where it was going. Cultural theory it wasn’t.
So I want to finish with an off-the-top-of-my-head list of some Memory and Movement related things I would like to listen to a talk about. If anyone wishes to string together into a lecture for me, let me know!
- Memorials (to be fair Bonfiglio did touch on this, and even began to introduce a few ideas relating place to memory, but he didn’t illuminate the subject).
- The classical Method of Loci (a mnemonic system of memorised spatial relationships that establish, order and recollect stored memories).
- Native American narratological/spatial story structures (in which landscapes are mapped and routes recalled through storytelling).
- The memory theatre of Giulio Camillo (read the wonderful book by Frances A Yates – The Art of Memory) FAY rocks.
- I guess stuff by Miwon Kwon on Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, or even Simon Schama’s canonical Landscape and Memory)
There’s just so much stuff out there – it’s such a vast field which, even though it’s been well picked over by some really interesting theorists, surely has much more still to give us. A few anecdotes aren’t going to contribute much to that though. No matter how much of a nice guy he seems.
Sorry to bang on about it. Usually I prefer to enthuse rather that critique. If it’s any consolation to Mr Bonfiglio and the GSS team, this post reflects my disappointment – a fact which reminds me that my expectations were high.
Ah well, better luck next time. And this is just my personal view after all. If you were there and disagreed, do let me know. Maybe you’ll change my mind.
more later,
R -
So much to read, so little time
by Ruth Barker 1 Feb 2010
Hello,
Nicola Wright, who contributed to the Reflection article you can read here is also Scottish Regional Editor for artartart magazine. As I inserted this factoid into the tiny biog above her review of the Steven Holl lecture, I thought I’d have a browse through artartart to see what they’d been up to lately.I discovered a real treat. This is such a great resource, with some genuinely interesting articles and opinions. Go take a look, and if any writers really catch your eye do let me know and I’ll try to get them for PAR+RS! Particularly interesting for me were Jen Martin’s piece – Your Place Or Mine? An Exploration of Generous Art Within Communities and Vanessa Bartlett’s Leading Or Following, Social engagement and mass participation in the Cultural Olympiad, which raised some very pertinent questions.
Great stuff. My other discovery this week was the fantastic Read Out! Read In! Feminist Lines of Flight in Art and Politics. This is a wonderfully generous archive of starting points and cataylsts for discussion, initiated by artists Kate Davis and Faith Wilding as part of their project The Long Loch: How Do We Go On From Here? at the CCA, Glasgow. Not simply a resource, but also the transcription of a community’s train of thought, I’d encourage you all to dip in and explore.
Happy browsing,
R -
Half the Work
by Ruth Barker 27 Jan 2010
Hello,
ok, so I want to describe a scenario for you: An artist makes a piece of site specific work. It’s a performance. But when the time comes for the public to see the work, something happens – something wholly unexpected – and the work is suddenly relocated, so the audience encounter it in a different location. The site specific work changes its site. What’s the result?
Well, a week ago I would have said that the work would have lost part of itself. Perhaps, thinking of my one-time tutor David Harding, I would have said that the performance had lost exactly half of itself (‘the context is half the work’, after all). Now I’ve been educated, by an unexpected event that suddenly changed the site of my public Rough Mix performance at Dance Base last Friday.
So, what was the result? Not quite what I’d expected, actually – but perhaps I should have known, logically, what the upshot would be. The work was removed from it’s intended site – true. And with that ousting – also true – it lost part of its previous self. BUT. The work was also re-placed in another site. And so developed another context, aquiring in turn another ‘half’ of itself. The work changed – it wasn’t the same work any more – but it was still a whole work. It was perhaps more interesting because it had taken a step away from my explicit intention and moved instead into the realm of happenstance.
Anyway, just a thought. Perhaps everyone else could have told me what would happen, but it took poor old me a little while to figure out!
More later,
R.oh, and do I hear you asking what the most recent image is? Ha! It is of course a Google-grabbed pic of The Poetry Path, by David Harding himself. The piece was developed in collaboration with poet Alan Bold, in Glenrothes Scotland, 1977.
-
Interesting Times
by Ruth Barker 19 Jan 2010
Hello,
Two things I wanted to talk about today. Not sure yet if they’re related: we’ll have to wait and see.The first is Rough Mix related. All is going well at Dance Base, and all the practitioners’ projects are coming on apace. Actually, they’re coming on surprisingly quickly and confidently. In one week, we’ve all developed pieces which are interesting and even powerful, and everybody is on track to present a new work-in-progress at the public showing on Friday. So, how does this happen? What is it that has created this ‘hot-house’ atmosphere in which our 5 creative people (supported of course by our talented team of performers) are thriving?
The first thing that springs to mind is the supportive context – that there’s a strong network here, and that that facilitates our co-operative exploration. But there’s something else going on as well, because it is important I think, that we all come from different disciplines: somehow this has helped us work quickly and fruitfully on the new work. Why? In a sense this seems counter-intuitive. I would perhaps have predicted that the lack of a common language would have slowed us down. After all – we can’t use the ‘shorthands’ we often rely on (I can’t say, for example, that an idea is ‘too Jessica Harrison’ or whatever. The rest of the group wouldn’t be able to translate that). We’re also seeing other’s work out of context. My knowledge of the theories and histories of dance, drama and (to a lesser extent) film is minimal, and so I don’t immediately see where ideas come from, or how they may be related. None of this, in the event, has mattered however. In fact, it may have helped.
Robbed of a commonality of words, we have also been stripped of a commonality of assumptions, and I think this is at the root of our flourishing. Because we have been able to stretch and to play without being overly conscious of others’ opinions. This period of play (coming as it does within mature and in many cases very established practices) has been a little shake-up. A little invigorating mix-around which has produced some very interesting results, which are then – crucially – fed back into the dough to re-catalyse it. The balance of group-work, in which we’re all learning a new discipline together, and the time we have to think about our own individual projects has kept this motion of thinking and learning and doing in constant dialogue. Good stuff. And we still have 4 days left!
The other thing I’m thinking about on my morning commute is a snippet from Radio 4’s Front Row programme, which I heard last night. In it, they interviewed one of the artists who’s working on a project for the Cultural Olympiad – Anthony McCall who’s developing a new public sculpture for Birkenhead. The work will consist of a three-mile high column of cloud – intended to be visible from up to 100km away – and will be on-site for 18 months. The interviewer asked if McCall wanted his work to join the ranks of those intentionally temporary projects that ‘the public’ have fought to keep. I was curious, of course, because our next Theme will be Temporary Projects, and all that surrounds them. The way the interviewer phrased this question was particularly interesting. I’m paraphrasing here, but I think it’s almost right: ‘do you want the public to adopt your work, or are you looking for a bit of controversy?’ The artist seemed to think carefully about his answer. ‘Adopt is a good word’, he said. I think I’d agree with him.More later,
R. -
Please come!
by Ruth Barker 17 Jan 2010
Rough Mix
Rough Mix is Magnetic North’s inter-disciplinary creative development programme. It is an opportunity for theatre makers to collaborate with other practitioners, try out new ideas and introduce them to an audience. We bring together a small group of practitioners from different disciplines and give them time to start developing new projects in a supportive and collaborative atmosphere. The practitioners work together with a group of performers over a two week period before making a work in progress showing at the end. We believe that this project offers a unique opportunity for both established and emerging artists.
The current Rough Mix programme runs from January 11th-22nd 2010 at Dance Base in Edinburgh, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Scottish Arts Council. The artists taking part are:
Ruth Barker – visual artist
Nicholas Bone – director
Catriona MacInnes – film-maker
Linda McLean – playwright
Ian Spink – choreographer/director
Who’ll be working with emerging theatre artist Harry Wilson and performers Catherine Gillard, Veronica Leer, Kirstin Murray, Michael Sherin and David Walshe.There will be a public showing at 5:00pm on Friday 22nd January (Dance Base, 14-16 Grassmarket, Edinburgh) – entry is free, just turn up. All welcome!
-
O The Humanity
by Ruth Barker 14 Jan 2010
Hello,
Ok, so my internet access ‘issues’ haven’t been entirely solved, hence the slightly confusing double posting. The post below was meant to be uploaded yesterday, but God or (more likely) Microsoft had other ideas. Nevermind though, eh? It’s the thought that counts, and you (dear readers) were never far from my mind, promise.
I had an interesting Rough Mix day today, with an afternoon session on object manipulation and puppetry. I was fully astounded at how context (again – I know) had such a massive, life giving effect – a simple shift in an everyday object’s context was able to immediately denote not just animation but consciousness, intent, emotion, and narrative. I personally witnessed a washing-up brush massage and then hump a blue net sponge.
Just something I wanted to share with you.
More later,
R -
In The Rough Mix
by Ruth Barker 14 Jan 2010
Hello all,
Apologies for my late posting first of all. I’m doing a project in Edinburgh just now, and have had some technical difficulties regarding internet access, which slowed me up a little. Back online now though, and lots of thoughts to share. Also plenty of new 2010 events to add to the listing – some great things coming up – so do have a browse to see if any of them are near you.
The project I’m doing is called Rough Mix, and is based at Dance Base – a fantastic new building right in the heart of the city. It’s so central in fact, that I can see the castle walls rising up above me through the glass skylight in the rehearsal studio I’m working in.
Rough Mix is devised and curated by Nick Bone of Magnetic North, who brings together focussed groups of practitioners – all of whom are working with Live practice in some way – for fairly intensive 2 week residency periods.
There are 5 of us:
Linda McLean (playwright),
Ian Spink (choreographer),
Catriona MacInnes (film-maker), along with Nick (Magnetic North’s artistic director), and myself (performance artist).We are also lucky enough to be working with performers Catherine Gillard, Veronica Leer, Kirstin Murray, Michael Sherin and David Walshe; emerging theatre director Harry Wilson; and Shaun Bell, an arts journalism student who is documenting the project through written observation.
As a group of 12, we are spending every morning working on a technique called Viewpoints, which teaches us strategies to consider the body in relation to Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story. Sheila, our tutor, is able to suggest very subtle ideas in a way that renders them wholly understandable but still very complex.
Personally I’m finding the work by turns mystifying, exhilarating, enlightening, and exhausting! It’s been quite a while since I was a student, so the act of spending every day learning so intensively has been a real privilege, but also genuinely tiring. It is amazing how great the cross-overs are though. I’m the only person not from a theatrical tradition, so at first I was quite intimidated and worried about being very out of my depth. My confidence has really increased, however, as I’ve increasingly felt part of the group, and realised that everyone else is learning from each other, too.
The first day we spent learning largely about Space or, to put it perhaps into language I’m more familiar with, Context. Because we were really talking about how things (people, objects) can be understood in relation to other things. Of course anyone can see how this relates directly to ideas of site specific practice and public work. But it was great to be able to examine these ideas from a slightly different perspective, and learn about how another discipline might negotiate them.
The other massive cross-over, and the one I wanted to finish on, was the idea of communication. This is something that has come up time and time again: how can we make our ideas, our intentions, our thoughts and feelings, intelligible to another? Clearly it’s a question for artists as well as for theatrical practitioners, and a fascinating one at that. Is there a single answer? Personally, I don’t think so, but I guess I’d always steer back to that idea of context, or place. What was that about it being ‘Half the Work’?
Anyway, lots to think about, but (as ever) more later.
R -
The Future (and all that).
by Ruth Barker 4 Jan 2010
Hello,
back to work properly, and does anyone else find writing ‘2010’ a bit strange? It feels very futuristic. And kind of looks wrong, if you know what I mean. Hmm.
I feel like this one’s going to be a good one, though. It’s a Gi Year for a start, and the preparations for that are already starting to fill me with a certain anticipation. A new Gi director, and a rejuvinated sense of the ambition and possibility offered by the festival add to the sense that Glasgow will remain the place to be this April. I keep hearing murmurings of fantastic sounding projects, so I can’t wait till the official ‘unveiling’ of the programme when we’ll be able to see exactly what will be on offer. Save the dates, ladies and gents: 16th March – 3rd April. Be there.
Stop Press
PAR+RS will be running a season on Temporary Projects during Gi, and we’re looking for articles! Reviews / commentaries on the Festival itself (a temporary project composed of temporary projects, as all Festivals must in essence be) on things you’ve seen, or done, or been involved in. Let us know! Email me or leave a comment below if you have any ideas of what we should be covering.So what else is happening in 2010? Upmost in the minds of many will be the Creative Scotland changeover, which is scheduled to start this year, although I reckon it’ll take a while before we can guage the full effects. I’m as much in the dark as everyone else seems to be about the detail of this, but I’d be glad to hear your comments, and I’ll certainly keep you up to date should I hear any news (actual news that is, rather than rumours, which I’m trying to stay away from).
What else will happen in 2010? Well lots of things, I imagine, but not least a General Election. Though I wouldn’t like to predict the outcome, it seems certain that there may be political changes on the horizon – no matter which party is successful at the polls. With everybody talking about spending cuts, I wouldn’t be suprised to learn that some cultural budgets may be affected.
On a slightly related note, I did hear at the end of December from Maggie Bolt, director of Public Art Online, who told me (after my previous Blog posting below) that Arts Council England have now confirmed that they will continue to fund PAO at least until March 2011, so that’s a real cause for celebration. Maggie, and all her readers, must be very relieved. As, it must be said, am I.
So, lots to look forward to in 2010, and plenty of changes which may be on the way this year. What are your highlights of 2009? And what are you most looking forward to in 2010? As always, do let me know.
more later,
Ruth. -
And a very Happy New Year.
by Ruth Barker 28 Dec 2009
Hello,
Completely forgot (in my haste to crack open the sherry) to mention the miraculous Berlin Berg! Many thanks go to Jodi Rose for pointing me in the right direction, and now I can say that I’m a total convert – every city should have one!
Start a campaign now, addressed to a local authority near you. What better dream to start 2010 than a world of beautiful Bergs?
More later,
R -
Merry Christmas!
by Ruth Barker 23 Dec 2009
Hello,
So, I’m back from Berlin, and feel like I’m stepping straight into the holiday season.
Berlin was amazing, and proved to be a really interesting trip. I met with curator Christine Nippe, who’s currently concluding her PhD, which has touched on the fascinating languages of cities and urban spaces. Christine is hoping to pursue an upcoming project in Scotland, as well as publishing her research, so expect to hear more from her very soon. I’ll certainly be looking out for her next project after catching her most recent curated exhibition Hardly Anything in the gallery Upstairs Berlin. Investigating how to represent the notion of ‘the void’, the show was thoughtful, layered, and provided much to discuss.
I also met with Mark Sander and his partner Elín Jakobsdóttir who treated me to a great conversation that ranged around language, meaning, and Elin’s sister’s home-made apple pie! All in all a very pleasant afternoon. Mark has been working on a project that I hope to be able to follow on PAR+RS in which he’s been using his skills as a portrait painter to ‘barter’ language lessons in Cairo, via the mechanism of a street cart. It’s a fascinating project, which may extend to a Glasgow evolution in 2010, so I do hope to be able to share it with you.I met many other fabulous people besides – special Hellos to Catherine, and Anna and Alex (of course) but also to Catriona and Fred, and the remarkable Lady Gaby. My own performance (my reason for being in Berlin in the first place) went well, I think, due in no small part to Lady Gaby’s expertise. My only regret was that unfortunately I was unable to meet with Harry Sachs from the Sculpture park, but as I hear on the grapevine that he may be Scotland-bound in the not-too-distant future, hopefully I may be able to catch up with him at some other point.
For now though, it remains only for me to kick off my work-weary shoes and raise a glass of sherry to the good times promised by 2010. Roll on Christmas – have a great one, everybody!
More in the New Year, with very best festive wishes to you and yours,
xR
-
Berlin! Berlin!
by Ruth Barker 13 Dec 2009
Hello,
I’m writing this on Sunday night, because I’ve been working on PAR+RS stuff over the weekend as I may not have much time during the next week (for those who don’t know, I work 2 days a week on PAR+RS). The reason for my curtailed hours is that I’ll be in Berlin Wednesday 16th – Sunday 21st, working on a new performance. How exciting!I’ll be meeting up with lots of friends while I’m over there, so any PAR+RS readers who are in Berlin next week, feel free to drop me an email. I’m also looking forward to seeing Catherine Street, a lunchtime conversation with whom was the catalyst for the trip.
I’m also very much hoping to meet with Harry Sachs, a really interesting artist whose collaborative work with Franz Hoefner seems to inhabit and to question the spaces between art and architecture. There’s a recent book about them: Hoefner/Sachs. I’m particularly interested in the Skulpturenpark Berlin project, of which I’ll paste the details (from the Skulpterenpark website) here:
Harry Sachs
Park Sculpture in Sculpture Park, 2009
Location: Alte Jakobstrasse/Stallschreiberstrasse
The military zone dividing East and West Berlin was the largest park area in Germany during the time of the Berlin Wall. With the only visitors being soldiers of the GDR army, the park had clearly marked routes and a strict dog leash policy. Due to the extensive use of pesticides, the costs of maintainance were low. Lawn mowing and tree care were not necessary.
In the last 20 years, this green belt has received less monitoring and maintainence than in all of its time before. Once partitoned with unavoidable walls, it is now partly edged by fences and structured by random paths, along a spectrum of rank growth of diverse flora and fauna.
As part of the ongoing exhibition series, Landreform, this part of Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum will be declared a public park. To increase the amenity values of the place, the existing matrix of trails will be extended by new footpaths, organically blending in with the existing landscape. The rank growth will be secured and cultivated by circular framing. For recreation and contemplation a new park bench will be provided. People are encouraged to further bed plants and to place additional park benches. This sculpture is dedicated to those who have spontaneously used and developed the land for the last 20 years.Interesting eh? I think so. I’ll be visiting the Skulpturenpark and taking some pictures for the Blog, and, as I say, I do hope to be able to meet Harry himself. If I do (he’s a very busy guy), I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.
Anyone got any tips? What do I HAVE to see in Berlin?
More later,
R -
Plug
by Ruth Barker 8 Dec 2009
Hello,
a shameless plug! Hey, I put all your press releases up on the Events Page all the time…
Anyway, Ahem: Please join me if you can at Aye Aye books, CCA Glasgow, from 6.30 – 9pm this Thursday 10th December, where you’ll be able to pick up your FREE 12” vinyl record of In The Beginning.
In The Beginning was written for and first performed in the third floor offices of 57 – 61 Saint Vincent Street, Glasgow, in May 2009. The work was then recorded at Green Door Analogue Recording Studios, Glasgow. This studio recording has now been pressed as a limited edition 12” vinyl record, presented in a full colour sleeve with documentary photography by Kendall Koppe. There’s some more information about In The Beginning here. There’s more information about my work generally here, and other recent projects are listed over here.
The record will be available FREE at the launch, and afterwards for £7.00 from Aye Aye Books.
It would be great to see you there for mince pies and festive drinks.
Ruth Barker
Record Launch – In The Beginning.6.30 – 9pm
Thursday 10th DecemberAye Aye Books
CCA
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow
SCOTLANDHope you can make it,
best wishes, xRuth
-
A Concern
by Ruth Barker 8 Dec 2009
Last week I learnt that Arts Council England have decided to stop funding Public Art South West – a development agency that many feel has been a valuable resource and an important part of the contemporary public art landscape.
Here’s what ACE said in their press release:
“Public Art South West has provided a very successful service over the last 12 years. It has made a significant contribution to the south west in particular, where the value of public art is now widely accepted by both public and private sectors and increasingly delivered by a wide range of bodies.
“However, in the context of the Arts Council’s organisation review, with the need to save £6.5 million, it has been decided that the Arts Council should no longer deliver this and similar services directly. We will however aim to continue to provide advice around commissioning.
“Public Art South West will continue until the end of March 2010. Meanwhile we will be considering how we ensure the continuation of Public Art Online which was established by and has been run by Public Art South West for ten years.”
It seems that ACE no longer feel that Public Art South West is delivering a service that they are able to support, I assume because PASW no longers fits comfortably into new ACE structures. Apparently there will be an article in a-n in the near future that explores the development, but though it seems already too late to retain PASW, we must also stress the uncertainty attached to the future of Public Art Online.
Public Art Online offers a particular resource in the form of relatively objective case-studies and a wide pallet of available information. If PAO ceases to exist, this unique position will be lost and with it will be jettisoned one of the multiplicity of voices that I believe are needed in order to represent the complexity of contemporary practices. PAO’s Director Maggie Bolt is obviously concerned that a specific perspective will be missed if the site disappears, along with an online tool intended to be accessible to all – not just the artworld.
Do go check out Public Art Online if you haven’t already. It’s a great site, with lots of interesting bits and pieces on it. I don’t have any contact details or a web address you can go to if you want to express displeasure or concern. You could try Arts Council England but I’ve heard they deliver a standard response.
If anyone does know any more, do let us know. I’ll keep you up to date with anything I hear on the grapevine.
more later,
R -
Teaching and Learning
by Ruth Barker 30 Nov 2009
Hello,
busy week here at PAR+RS last week, as I’m trying to organise a PAR+RS-sponsored event that will take place during Glasgow international. I can’t confirm anything yet, but conversations so far seem to point to something quite special – yet another reason (should you need one) to save the Gi dates in Spring: April 16 – May 4th. Very exciting, but also kinda complex logistically…I was also at Glasgow Uni this week doing some teaching that touched on my own practice – working on an undergraduate module in the Theatre, Film, and TV department called Writing for Performance. I was hugely nervous, but the students were without exception brilliant. We had a great conversation about site specificity in relation to performance, and some of their questions and comments have really stayed with me. In particular was the issue of Control. I went out of my way to try and describe all the elements of a context that an artist might want to think about, and to make their work in relation to – things like the economic content, as well as the ergonomic, historical, and so on. But I think I explained this badly, and one student rightly picked me up on it, questioning my need to control every element within the location. I came across as some kind of wierd obsessive intent on manipulating the world to my own advantage. The only way I could think of to try to dig myself out of the hole was to admit my inarticulacy, beg their understanding, and try again, this time talking about the site specific work as a gift that the artist bequeathes to a space, and that that they must know the context intimately to be able to donate appropriately. With I guess the proviso that you’re also within your rights to give a gift that you know might jar the recipient. But that idea of site specificty as an article of control has stayed with me. The student touched something there, and I need to think more about it.
Later I set them an excercise – 15 minutes in which they each had to come up with a performer, a place, and a ‘why’, before pitching their proposal in 5 minutes flat. I was mightily impressed with the stuff they came up with, and the diversity of ideas and associations that were raised. The proposals were by turns funny, disconcerting, affectionate, thoughtful, generous, critical, personal, epic, and revealing. It’s a shame in a way to pick out particular examples, because each and every student deserves a congratulatory mention. I don’t have time to do them all justice though, so instead I will, despite myself, try to cherrypick a few just to give you some idea of the range.
There was the alternative guided tour of Glasgow city centre, with an open-top bus load of passengers treated to a psychogeographical derive composed of both historical and personal legacies – a potent mix of slavery and inebriation.
There was the intimate history of a single bench in Queen’s Park on the South Side of Glasgow, combining the narrative of the bench-maker with the social function of the object during a single summer’s day.
There was the billboard or newspaper ad that asked volunteers to meet at a given place and time. Unprepared, they are then met by John Hurt, who leads them into the darkness of a night-time forest, before telling them suitable stories.
And of course the evocative idea of the performer who walks the length of Erskine beach making visible (or audible) the multiple and contradictory histories of the place as they pause, recount a story, and walk again, all with the shadow Erskine bridge – notorious as a suicide spot – at their shoulder.
Brilliant. Well done all. You make me jealous of your lively brains.
more later,
RForgot to say – went to the CCA on Saturday for the bookfair and launch of 2HB and was wowed by performance work by Sarah Tripp and Katherine Elkin (the latter work scripted by Elkin and abley performed by Shelly Nadashi and Martine Myrup). A real treat!
-
Temporary Permanence / Permanently Temporary
by Ruth Barker 16 Nov 2009
Hello,
I took a deliberate break from the Blog last week to allow some space for the responses to Inverness councillor Jim Crawford’s comments regarding ReImagining the Centre, and Ginny Hutchison’s work in particular.I was interested to read both Matt Baker and Ginny Hutchison’s thoughts, and I’m very grateful to both of them for being so frank.
Both Matt (one of the curators) and Ginny (the artist herself) picked up on the question of ‘temporary-ness’, and raised some intriguing ideas.
I was impressed with Matt’s deftly made point that society does not equate the worth of other cultural activities to their duration – he cites music, theatre, sport etc. This is an interesting one, and for me it suggests that commissioning an artwork is perhaps seen by some public bodies as a process of aquisition, as opposed to investment in an experience. Could this be true? I’d be curious to know what others may think.
Ginny meanwhile, is right to pick up on the notion of Legacy within public art commissioning – a notion that she quickly links to that of the value (or values – as Ginny specifies artistic, implementational, historical, economical &c.) of a work. There is however, another kind of legacy that cannot yet be judged in Inverness. This is the longer term legacy, even that which we might term the anecdotal or associative legacy. How will Seven Sunsets enter the imaginative space of the city? Whether through conversation, recollection, or half-recalled translation, the affective duration of Seven Sunsets may be far longer than the amount of time occupied by the work’s physical presence – and Councillor Crawford is himself contributing to that, for which we may be grateful. There is after all a school of thought that suggests that so-called permanent works in civic space soon become invisible to those who might pass them regularly but who rarely see them precisely because they are fixed and permanent aspects of the urban landscape. Temporary works may actually remain longer in our awareness because they are transient and fleeting. Don’t people say that Familiarity Breeds Contempt?
More on this later, I feel – it’s a big subject that may merit a Season of it’s own. For now I’ll leave you with this, from Huntly, just posted on Youtube by Deveron Arts.
Enjoy!
R
-
Atchoo!
by Ruth Barker 2 Nov 2009
Hello,
feeling rotten this week as I’m down with the flu, and so haven’t done anything interesting lately. I even missed out on the openings this weekend at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Warehouse of Horrors at SWG3 Julia Dottoli at Arch 1, and Ciara Phillips at Washington Garcia. I’m told they were all great, which hasn’t done much to cheer me up, I confess.
I was reading this today though, which was stirring my slimy brain into action. It’s a BBC article in which Inverness Councillor Jim Crawford criticises the recent Re Imagining the Centre event.
The BBc reported that “Mr Crawford said covering the tombstones was in bad taste and claimed people did not understand the wider project.” However, there are several more specific comments that I find very interesting. The first is a subtle thing, and hinges around his apparent dissatistfaction with some of the sites selected for the temporary public works that were commissioned.
Describing Ginny Hutchison’s Seven Sunsets Crawford is quoted as saying “Gold was painted in strips to represent sun rise or sunshine onto a doorway of the Victorian Market. In the evenings the doors are far enough back that local teenagers and alcoholics use it as a toilet, so the gold turned green.”
Initially I was unclear as to why Hutchison’s work in particular had been mentioned, but perhaps Crawford’s reticence can be read in a few of his remarks. Leaving aside the Councillor’s ambivalence regarding the specifics of the work (Hutchison actually gold leafed particular areas in several public locations within the city in a literal mapping of sunlight), Crawford’s criticism seems to be that the artist has made an undesirable aspect of the city centre (a recessed doorway that people urinate in) more visible by siting an artwork there. In addition to this, Crawford also seems to find the work less successful because the gold leaf itself reacted to this undesireable activity by changing colour. This perceived lack of sucess may be because the work acted as a ‘sign’ to the behaviour, or it may be connected to a concern regarding the work itself: that because the work was altered it was rendered ephemeral and so less worthwhile or less value for money; or that because the work was altered it no longer represented the artist’s original intention and so was in some sense flawed.
To take these points seperately, it seems clear in the first instance that for Crawford there is a clear link between the artwork and a sense that it should embellish or describe the aspects of the city that he himself finds pleasant, uplifting, or rewarding. This link between – essentially – artwork and beauty (or even morality) is one I find particularly interesting in the context of public art. Personally I don’t think that such a relationship is a given, though I know that many artists feel that their practices do (and ought to) inhabit a positive sphere of influence. You can read a longer text I wrote about ideas of ethics and aesthetics here although the issue with Hutchison’s work is also more complex because she has undeniably introduced something beautiful and precious into the space, and it is by this act that the pre-existing unpleasantness has been made more visible, and perhaps more public.
That the work may be less successful because of its ability to be affected by environmental impact is tied to Crawford’s final, underlying criticism, which is one that I found suprising in this context. In my first reading of this piece I expected the Councillor to say that the money could have been better spent (which he does). What I did not expect was to read that Crawford wishes that the money had been spent on a permanent public commission for the city.
This is a crucial conversation, and one that I hope the Councillor is able to follow up: the relative value of permanent versus temporary commissioning. It’s not something I can claim to have the answer to, but it is something I hope to be able to touch on during the present season. How do we understand the benefits (in artistic, as well as in implementational, historical, and economic terms) of something that is meant to last forever, as opposed to something that may only last a day, or a year, or even an hour?
I wonder whether Jim Crawford’s regret over Seven Sunsets is partly to do with loss at its passing? Perhaps it is not. Perhaps he feels that public money was spent on something that ended up showing the city in a bad light by highlighting the very antisocial behaviour that he would wish to erradicate. If he reads this, he’s more that welcome to join the discussion on-site. To be clear, I’m not trying to take sides in any debate about whether a permanent work should have been commissioned instead, but only to examine why someone might have found one of the works that was commissioned, problematic. It’s always worth talking clearly about the work that does exist as well as speculating about what might have been, after all. And if it’s true that one of Hutchison’s Seven Sunsets turned green through ill-use, then surely it’s also true that the other Sunsets did not and that they succeeded in bringing light to the luminous potential within the Inverness cityscape though their elegant, poetic, and above all beautiful, urban gestures.
More later,
R -
What Is Commissioning, Anyway?
by Ruth Barker 26 Oct 2009
Commissioning, commissioning commissioning, from the humble invitation to the contractual obligation: when the reach is so broad, what does ‘commissioning’ even mean?
The question may seem to be redundant – after all, we know what it means, don’t we? It means, well… I guess at a fundamental level, I’d suggest that to commission a piece of work may be to act as catalyst for that work. But that itself is an interesting – perhaps flawed – chemical analogy, suggesting as it does a substance that initiates or accelerates a reaction without itself being affected. How true is this of the figure of the commissioner? Significantly, I think that many commissioners are changed by the processes they set in motion, whether they end up wiser, poorer, more cynical, more enthused, or more exhausted.
And yet there is a softer, more poetic (perhaps read ‘less accurate’) idea of the catalyst that may help us here. The poetic catalyst initiates a change that they are then indivisible from – as some have argued that a free press may catalyse an informed electorate, or that belief may be a catalyst for intention. And just as the press may be changed, informed, and evolved by the electorate it has catalysed, so may the commissioner grow, diminish, or change as a result of the process they engage in.
It seems to me that commissioning is an essentially human gesture because it is at base an invitation for another to act. Where that invitation leads is surely multiple, but the desire that underlies it is in some ways a gesture of its own making.
More later, hope you enjoy the new season,
R.
-
Fourth Plinth Empty, Regents Park Full, Turbine Hall Occupied by Nothing.
by Ruth Barker 19 Oct 2009
Hello,
Miserable rain today, and those perfect Autumn days we had last week seem to have been washed away, reminding me that it’s mid October already. On my mind today are the Frieze Art Fair (just finished), the fourth plinth (empty again), and Tate’s Turbine Hall (interestingly full, it seems, of Nothing).
There’ve been good reports this year from Freize, so perhaps the credit crunch hasn’t bitten as sharply as we may have feared. I haven’t had the detail yet (I didn’t go down to London last week) but I was reassured to hear on the grapevine that galleries hadn’t pulled their punches. Any readers have highlights they’d like to share? Let us know if so.
The most recent offering at the Tate’s Turbine Hall intrigues because again (like Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, Carsten Höller’s Test Site and even Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth) Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is is largely being discussed in relation to the reactions of the public. There has been a trend toward the experiential in the annual Unilever commissions, which has in some sense set the series apart, and has perhaps emphasised its ‘public’-ness. this is a contentious suggestion perhaps – the Unilever commissions are not after all public artworks as they are clearly contextualsed by an art gallery – but they are artworks commissioned for a public building and attended by many thousands of members of the public every year. I’m not sure that the visceral or experiential nature of work necessarily renders it ‘accessible’, though this may be put forward as an explanation for this trend towards the shared language of the bodily. Rather it seems that the shift away from the purely visual, the painterly, or an emphasis on craft leads predictabley to the grumpy question But is it art? to be asked by media pundits again and, unsuprisingly again (final paragraph, though check out also the comments, with particular reference to the first one, which opens with “I haven’t seen the work, but…”)
The dreaded question arose again as the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square reclaimed its emptiness after 2400 people have occupied it for 1 hour each over the last 100 days. I’m never sure whether it is only jounalists who are so tied to the question. I suspect so, though I have had to field it myself, most often when I worked for SPIN:, taking groups of interested people round contemporary art shows in the Glasgow.
Often when someone did ask me ‘But is it Art?’, I suspected that the question had already been answered in their own minds with a resounding No. Interestingly, people only seemed to ask the question about work they didn’t like. Also interestingly, people sometimes seemed to be suprised that asking this question did not stop the conversation but could, instead, actually start it. But after all, didn’t Joseph Kosuth himself ask “What is it that is not art that might be art?” Something I’ll leave you with, I think,
More later,
R -
How It Is
by Ruth Barker 13 Oct 2009
Interesting…
And Adrian Searle has some interesting things to say.
more later,
R -
Grizedale Journeys
by Ruth Barker 12 Oct 2009
Hello,
On Wednesday this week I went down to Grizedale Arts in Cumbria to attend the Public Art Needs Outsiders seminar event. This was the first in a series of planned events organised by IXIA and Places Matter! in collaboration with Situations, the research and commissioning programme at the University at the West of England.
There was a good bunch of speakers, I felt, and the focus – on an examination of residency models as ways for artists to engage with places that they didn’t call Home – was both broad enough to touch on wider contexts and focussed enough to keep conversation rigorous. I felt that there could have been a better gender balance at the event, as almost all the attendees were women while all the speakers bar one were men, which I did feel was slightly problematic. That said, I wouldn’t fault the approach or presentations of any of the individuals presenting, as they did touch on some interesting topics.
But who were they, and what did they talk about? I hear you ask. Well…
Alistair Hudson, the Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts was first up, and he gave an overview of some of the projects Grizedale has been involved in. He also deconstructed the seminar’s title slightly, to read it as ‘Public Art Needs Outsiders (from outside of art)’. This was an interesting slant, and Alistair expanded on it to state that art needs ‘outsiders’ (ie non-art specialists or contexts) because that is where works’ ‘bite’ or content comes from. Art cannot (he felt) talk about art forever.
Next Andreas Lang of publicworks talked about his experiences as the commissioned artist working on the Creative Egremont project, in which Grizedale worked within the town of Egremont as a cataylst for a range of artworks, events, and moments of change within this small rural community. This is far too big and interesting a project to do justice to here, so take a look over here to learn more.
After lunch (prepared wonderfully by Grizedale’s current artist in residence, who also washed a great many dirty dishes) we heard Paul Domela, Programme Director of the Liverpool Biennial in conversation with Kark-Heinz Klopf, the current artist in residence on Liverpool’s European Biennial Network Residency. Kark-Heinz talked very generously about his practice and the ways in which he has negotiated the city of Liverpool as a visitor as well as as an artist. He spoke very practically about his preference to have a ‘safe space’ away from the locations he was immersing himself in, and also spoke about the importance for him of the duration of the residency. Over the months, he explained, he has had time to review and evolve his first impressions, and his longer term accumulated experience of the city has offered him a very different footing than his initial response to that same place.
Jeanne van Heeswijk, the only female speaker, gave the day’s last presentation, as an artist member of the well known Dutch project The Blue House, which she discussed as an alternative residential model. Again, The Blue House Project does not deserve a swift paraphrase on my part. Just look at this information. Jeanne’s presentation was well balanced and passionate, though I do sense some frustration on the part of some British audiences when presented with seemingly idyllic Nordic/Dutch/Scandanavian projects that do not seem to face the same challanges that they might meet in this country (see N55 as an example of a Danish project which I have seen inspire fury in a Glasgow audience). In many ways I can understand the root of this ambivalence, though I do also think it’s worth seeing these projects for what they are: culturally context-specific engagements that come – undeniabley – from a particular set of circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. Jeanne made some good points, and made them well. She spoke particularly convincingly about the need for a shift in the language, and so the preconceptions, thay we may use to talk about residential projects. We should, she claimed, stop talking about artists ‘working with a community’. Instead she made the case for us to think about how artists can work with ’ a range of experts on location’; a neat shift in perspective that may just shed some light on our journeys through this complex landscape.
The day finished with smaller group discussions, and my group was set the question What are the challenges and pitfalls of negotiating an unfamiliar context as a visiting artist? We didn’t answer it so much as talk around it, and spoke mostly about the importance of commissioners taking risks with the structure and context of residencies, and accepting the possibility of failure and / or the unexpected. It felt like a good place to end up, and with plenty of tea and cake to prepare me for the journey home, I headed for the train, and home to Glasgow.
In other news? What else have I been doing… I went to a few openings, Bik van der Pol, It isn’t what it used to be and will never be again at the CCA in Glasgow (Check out the Loompanics book collection), and The October Show in Transmission; and on Friday I gave a talk to students at Glasgow School of Art, who are embarking on an intriguing collaborative public commission that i hope to tell you more about later… Intrigued? I hope so.
More later,
R -
La Biennale
by Ruth Barker 6 Oct 2009
Hello,
Back in Glasgow safe and sound from my little excursion to Venice. First of all, a little background: I’ve never been to the Biennale before, and so this trip was a surprise 30th birthday present (back in June, but it took a while to organise) from my husband, my family and my friends, who all chipped in to send me on my way. It was an extraordinary, wonderful, slightly overwhelming gift that I was completely unprepared for, and I honestly don’t know how to begin to thank everyone! I’ll do my best, I think, with a series of fine dinners.
So, as a first trip it was quite overwhelming I guess. The most incredible thing was the sheer amount of visual opulence in the city – a seemingly undifferentiated blur of art, architecture, religious splendour, low kitsch and high fashion. I’ve never seen a city so encased in embellishment. I doubt that there’s anything like it in the world.
And the Biennale itself? Endlessly fascinating, but not (I have to say) endlessly engaging. Some of the work was a LOT better than others – which is to say that some of it wasn’t all that great, in my humble opinion. Still, in a way that was kind of reassuring I suppose. My personal highlights were Scotland’s pavilion (maybe it’s just patriotism, but I thought Martin Boyce’s work was among the best things I saw); Mexico’s (artist: Teresa Margolles); The Netherlands’ (artist: Fiona Tan) and Central Asia’s pavilion, in which Kazakhstan was represented by Oksana Shatalova, Yelena Vorobyeva &Viktor Vorobyev; Kyrgyzstan was represented by Ermek Jaenisch; Tajikistan by Djamshed Kholikov, and Uzbekistan by Anzor Salidjanov. Oh and I also loved Pavel Pepperstein in the Russian pavillion. By far the best work I saw (or, to be more diplomatic, the work I liked best) in the Fare Mondi/Making Worlds surveys in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and the Arsenale was Nathalie Djurberg’s.
Among the most disappointing from my point of view was the presentation by the Denmark and Nordic Countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden). Titled The Collectors and much written about in the art press, this revolved around a single superfiction-like conceit that the pavilions were stage-set like homes of wealthy collectors, the work present being contextualised by its relationship to both an embedded fictional narrative (complete with ‘corpse’ floating in the outdoor pool) and the broader notion of an art market: the business of art business as Warhol might say. Personally I found the conceit limited and contrived, and also somewhat undermined by the physical positioning of the work within the Giardini site. There was something clumsy about it I felt, and almost old-fashioned in a YBA kind of way. Yes, art is part of a market, and it exists simultaneously in multiple, sometimes contradictory economies. But didn’t we establish that already?
Of course I didn’t see everything. In the time I had I think that would have been impossible, and I probably did miss some real gems. An interesting contrast was made however, by two of the off-site pavillions, which I happened to see consecutively. The first was Foreign Affairs the Taiwan pavilion showing work by Chien-Chi Chang, Chen Chieh-Jen, Hsieh Ying-Chun, and Cheng-Ta Yu. This was a disappointing show I felt, in which a serious topic (Taiwanese status, identity, and equality) was tackled in what felt like a very limited fashion. It made me think seriously about the role of the viewer in this kind of work. Much has been written about the multiple roles of artists within society, and the differing kinds of worth that these can inhabit and / or convey. The role of artist as social commentator, mirror, or window into a culture of community is established and inarguable. How though can we reconcile these roles with the experience of viewing the work that is produced when artists take on these roles in an unmediated or untranslated way? How are we to respond as viewers when a territory of inequality or injustice is placed before us? Is it beside the point to critique the size of a screen or the colour balance of a photograph? It seems wrong to do this somehow, and yet because we are encountering the work within an art context, we are primed to notice and respond to its visual codes and qualities. It’s a serious question, and one that I don’t raise facetiously. The aesthetic or ‘artistic’ content of the work in Foreign Affairs took second place to the political stance chosen. For the artists to choose to do this is inarguably their right. Likewise for the curator to choose to show the work. But the question remains, once the work is made and displayed, how and why is it disseminated to an art audience? Am I also expected to judge it in terms of its politics rather than its ‘art content’? And what does it mean if I do this? Where do I go from there, after I’ve decided to boycott Taiwanese goods, for example? The show left me flat, I’m afraid.
Leaving it, however, I made my way to another off-site space – the Mexican pavilion. Here I found another artist dealing with another social injustice. But here I also found real power in the work, and in the significance of a visual art approach and context for the work in What else could we talk about? For years, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has investigated “the exploration of the artistic possibilities of human remains, the memory of the loss provoked by violent death and the institutions that manage human corpses.” Her work is lyrical but undeniable, full of a certain gestural poetry but unstinting in it’s ability to address this forlorn and mortal subject matter. There’s real weight to her practice, whether washing the floor of this 16th century Venetian palazzo in the blood of Mexican murder victims, or replacing the Mexican flag on the front of the building with a flag soaked in mud and the blood of the dead. Set against the statement that 2008 was the year when the most bullets have been fired in Mexico’s recent history, there’s a lot I could say about Margolles’ work, but this probably isn’t the right place. It’s important to say that her practice isn’t unproblematic – I’m sure that accusations of exploitation could be, and have been made – but partly it’s that complication, that tension, which appeals to me. Perhaps it’s that level of friction that makes it far more interesting as art, as well as that level of metamorphosis and gesture, which transforms her work from commentary into something ultimately, qualitatively, different.
More later,
R -
Lumsden and Away!
by Ruth Barker 27 Sep 2009
Hello,
I was up in Lumsden this past weekend, chairing an Art Breakfast event that was hosted by the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (many thanks to them) and curated by the incomparable Merlyn Riggs. The keynote speaker was the fantastic Peter Jenkinson, who gave an impassioned presentation touching on (amongst other things) the death of the audience, the position of the periphery, and the importance of art and our engagement with it. The talk was followed by a breakfast of wholly gargantuan proportions, and a great deal of interesting conversation. Many thanks to everyone who came along and contributed. I hope to get some documentation of the day up the site as soon as possible…
…once I get back from Venice! I go tomorrow (Monday) and back next week, when I will (promise) post a catch up.
more later,
R -
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. -
insideout
by Ruth Barker 17 Sep 2009
Hello,
as promised, here is the essay for Dani Marti’s insideout exhibition.More later,
R
Sometimes We Aren’t Who We Think We Are
The Transgression of Autobiography in Dani Marti’s insideoutIn a cold basement, water drips occasionally from a ceiling that is not so much damp as semi aquatic. I can’t see the walls well, but the surfaces I can make out are pitted and stained. There’s an insistent, bone chilling draught, but the video by Spanish-Australian artist Dani Marti on the far wall is utterly crisp, and the image is perfectly sharp. Viewers drift in, watch, and leave again, mounting the creaking stairs with the scruff of boots and trainers that are trying to make no noise. There’s a hush here, as you might feel when someone says something publicly that is in essence intensely private.
In Time Is The Fire in Which We Burn, we watch for just over an hour as a man identified as ‘John’ lies naked in bed with Marti, the artist, and talks frankly, intimately, about his life. Marti listens, questions, prompts, touches. Sometimes he leaves the bed and disappears from shot before returning. Sometimes he gets up to move the camera. John remains in the bed and is clearly the focus of the film, though Marti never conceals his own presence. John talks endlessly about himself, and at least partly to himself. He is candid about his life as he perceives it, and as he describes it to us and to Marti. His life – John’s life – shifts between the multiple identities of any social being, and we watch him occupy several as the film progresses: as an HIV+ gay man; as a former prostitute; as a drug user; as a homecoming Scot; as a Glaswegian; as a man who has survived the failure of a relationship; as a man with good intentions; as a man who laughs and cries and thinks and wonders. And we likewise understand as we watch that this is not John’s whole life, but rather the life he chooses to present to us, on this day, at this time, in bed with Marti.
The portrait of John as it emerges from Time Is The Fire is undeniably intense and, despite the verbal, emotional, and psychological breadth of the work, the overwhelming sense is of the physical. As viewers our attention is continually rooted on John’s body whether he’s eating, wriggling, rubbing his head, or touching himself or Marti. The projected surface of John’s body is continually both present and available as he physically displays himself to us, the unseen viewer (present to him, we imagine, only as a tripod and camera in the bedroom, with all the overtones of pornography that that implies). This body focus is emphasised as John talks about his experiences of prostitution, describing how his body felt ‘given away’ and the emotional repercussions of that. As viewers we enter into this scrutiny as our perception of John’s physicality changes with what he reveals both verbally and visually – now he is vulnerable, now he is familiar, now he is cold, now he is thirsty, now he is tired, now he is aroused – and in relation to how he positions himself in relation to Marti, revealing and exposing himself emotionally, but simultaneously comparing himself against and even competing with, the body of the artist.
That the body of the artist is visibly part of this play of exchange is, of course, unusual. It is also a shift that is critical to the significance as well as the success of insideout. To render explicit (in several senses) the presence of the artist is a decision that positions Marti alongside his subjects/participants as a gay man living with HIV and making sense of his own sense of self. This is no outsider looking into a community to which they do not belong. Rather, here we have an artist voicing the separate, perhaps contradictory elements of himself through the thoughts and experiences of others – through their bodies, as well as their biographies.
It’s a complex position this, to see ourselves partly through the way others see themselves, but perhaps it is also an important one, as we seek to understand the relationships between ourselves and the social world that surrounds us. And although Marti is clearly not as vulnerable as the other participants in his films (he does, for example, control the editing) the unforgiving poetry of autobiography seems central to insideout as an exhibition. It is brought to the fore in the film Disclosure-Dani, a 14 minute film of the artist, again naked, as he is interviewed by unseen figures: a social worker specialising in HIV, a psychologist and friend; a psychotherapist; a hypnotherapist. Disclosure-Dani is intimate, transgressive, and not always flattering. But perhaps because of this it functions as the heart at the very centre of the exhibition, around which each of the other works are regulated. We genuinely feel for Marti here, charismatic as he is, but we also judge him, particularly as he breaks the taboos of his practice and talks about the strategies he uses in his film-making. This judgement again reinforces the quality of the autobiographical exchange around which insideout hinges. By exposing the anatomy of that exchange we feel that Marti withholds nothing from us, although the same quality of knowing through saying (of verbally articulating something in order to be able to recognise it) seems present in Marti’s interviews in at least as great a degree as in Time is the Fire or in Disclosure, the other epic ‘confessional’ piece in the show.
Disclosure-Dani is devastatingly honest, and placed as it is alongside the longer multichannel Disclosure – in which seven different men talk in fragmented glimpses about their sexuality, illness, and identity – it becomes a solid and inarguable centre. If Disclosure-Dani is the exhibition’s heart however, in Disclosure itself we find something more akin to its soul, for here is the true grief of the series. In Disclosure we find genuine and sincere tragedy on a scale so intimate that it becomes perhaps universal, revealing the very quietest, most broken of narratives as an older man cries. The biography that emerges through the words that this man cannot say as well as those he does, is of an biography composed of regret, and of an understanding of self that has been forged in intolerance and shaped by a blinding or negation of that very self: a selfhood that tries to shrink itself to nothing. And as this single voice is joined by others that surround and reposition it, Marti succeeds in presenting something that is not truly a portrait at all, but an exploration; a questioning of our understanding, as a society, of our own veracities and subjecthoods.
Because what is so significant about Time is the Fire, Disclosure, and Disclosure-Dani as well as the other works in insideout, is that though they are deeply rooted in a particular HIV+ gay identity, they are not necessarily about that identity. Rather they seem partly to talk about the problems of autobiography in its widest sense: the difficulty of knowing who we are; the difficulty of saying who we are; and what happens when, by saying something, we know it to be true. Because not everything we know about ourselves is true, and likewise, what we may know as truth today we may recognise as falsehood tomorrow. insideout is clearly partly Marti’s own autobiography but it may also perhaps be all of ours, whoever we are, so long as we ask ourselves questions to which we don’t always know the answer.
Back in the basement, John is crying, or maybe laughing. At times it’s hard to tell. The water continues to drip. The walls smell of damp, and plaster. I know this is not how Marti originally intended his most recent body of work to be shown in Glasgow, the city of it’s making, and the city in which Marti chooses to spend a significant part of his life. I know that some works in insideout are in this sodden basement because they’ve been withheld from public display in the city’s Gallery of Modern Art. And I know that the decision not to exhibit the work in the publicly funded GoMA was taken because the civic authority feared public displeasure and media criticism. And so I should feel that their relocation here is a compromise, a ghettoising insult to the sensitivity and intelligence of GoMA’s visitors as well as to Marti himself, and his participants in the films. But somehow I don’t, quite. Or rather, though I do feel the censure to be insulting, unwarranted, and even cowardly, I don’t feel that Marti’s decision to relocate emerges as a compromise.
The work here is strong enough to be seen anywhere. insideout is not, as we have seen, a series of objective documents whose validity may be challenged by their recontextualisation. Instead, as we watch this series of nuanced first-person impressions, each video shifts between fragments of unverifiable disclosure and the moments of silence that parallel them. The voices are fallible. They are edited and they are at times self conscious, just as we may be conscious that we are subjects as well as objects in the privacy of our own heads. By displaying such vulnerability in construction as well as content, Marti’s work must inescapably remind us of ourselves.
-
Media Coverage of Dani Marti show
by Ruth Barker 16 Sep 2009
Hello,
Dani Marti just sent me these links to yesterday’s media coverage of the removal of his work from the GoMA exhibition (see earlier Blog articles).
Thought I’d share them with you.more later,
R -
Clanjamfrey and Others
by Ruth Barker 14 Sep 2009
Hello,
Busy week last week, as in addition to my PAR+RS duties I was preparing for the opening of Mark Briggs’ exhibition at Washington Garcia, and preparing my script for a new performance I’m working on at the moment. Then on Friday I went up to Inverness for the Clanjamfrey event co-ordinated by Inverness Old Town Art as part of Re-Imagining The Centre.
The Clanjamfrey was great, a really fantastic couple of days and I was very glad I attended. Most impressive was the way that the discussions surrounding the formal presentations evolved so successfully – something that I’d tentatively attribute to the scheduling of the Philosopher’s Salon event early on in the programme. I missed this event as I was still installing the WG show on Thursday (more about this later), but from all accounts, after a slow start the Salon became a genuinely vibrant space within which a great many ideas were voiced. Having it on the first day of the Clanjamfrey really allowed it to become a catalyst rather than a space to consolidate or close down ideas, which was certainly useful I think. Another successful aspect was certainly the way that short presentations by specialists form multiple fields (not just visual arts) were grouped around particular questions. This again opened up fertile space for rethinking and questioning. I thought it might be useful to just stick up the programme so you can see the range of speakers. The highlight though (not that I’m biased!) for me was certainly the Keynote presentation by Neville Gabie, which PAR+RS was able to sponsor. More on this later, as I hope that we’re going to get a transcript of Neville’s talk up on the site. Remember too that these presentations were framed by the work that we were able to see in the city itself, from Matt Baker’s permanent 3 Virtues, sited right in the centre of the Old Town itself, to Ginny Hutchison’s ephemeral gold leaf Seven Sunsets and many more besides. More informantion, as ever, from the IOTA site
INVERNESSIAN CLANJAMFREY
Town House, Inverness 12.30 – 17.00 Friday 11th September 2009.13.30 Welcome and Introduction: Marie Mackintosh
13.35 Introduction to the afternoon: Alastair SnowSession 1 – How do you draw something the won’t stand still?
13.40 Matt Baker (public artist)
13.55 David Alston (author and historian)
14.10 Philomena de Lima (author, Director of Centre for Remote and Rural Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands, and private consultant advising of race equality strategies for public agencies).
14.25 Panel discussion and questions / comments, chaired by Alastair Snow.15.10 – 15.30 Coffee break.
Session 2 – Am I Standing At The Centre of the World?
15.30 Claudia Zeiske (Director of Deveron Arts)
15.45 Sam Harrison (Director of Open Ground place-based education project)
16.00 Rev Peter Nimmo (Minister of Old High Saint Stephen’s Church, Inverness)
16.15 Panel discussion and questions / comments, chaired by Alastair Snow.
17.00 Close of dayInverness Cathedral 9.30 – 13.00 Saturday 12th September 2009.
9.30 Introduction to the morning: Alastair Snow
9.35 Jan Hogarth (Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association)Session 3 – Whose Voice Needs to be Heard to make it ‘Public’?
9.50 Duncan McLean (landscape architect and urban designer with Land use Consultants)
10.05 Ruth Macdougall (environmental artist based in Glasgow)
10.20 Panel discussion and questions / comments, chaired by Alastair Snow.11.00 – 11.20 Coffee break
11.30 – 13.00 IOTA Keynote presentation: Neville Gabie, introduced by Ruth Barker (PAR+RS). Produced in association with Public Art Scotland.
Phew!
So, other than that, I was also helping out artist Mark Briggs and curator / director Kendall Koppe installing Mark’s show at Glasgow artist run gallery Washington Garcia. I’ve posted the press release below, but would (of course) encourage you to pop down if you can as it’s a really great exhibition. I’ll be invigilating tomorrow (Tuesday) so do introduce yourself if you’re passing. I love Mark’s work for the way it appropriates and transforms fragments and moments, but also seems to endlessly defer them. There’s something almost erotic sometimes in the way that his work never seems to reach a conclusion. Let me know what you think.
I also went to see the opening on Dani Marti’s exhibition in Glasgow on Thursday night last week (timed, I suspect, to coincide with the launch of the new Trongate 103 building). This, you may remember, is the work that was effectively censored from the Gallery of Modern Art in the city, apparently because elements in the City Council feared bad publicity from Dani’s frank depiction of HIV positive gay men (see earlier blog posts for details). I found the work moving, and at times uncomfortable viewing. Perhaps surprisingly, the film I found hardest to watch (I confess I didn’t make it to the end, and had to stop) was the film of Dani himself talking about his own life, and his approach to making work. Dani’s asked me to write a critical essay about the work, so when I do so I’ll post it here (with his permission, of course). Dani’s show is on till the 10th October at the Parnie St venue. Pop down if you can.
I’ve also been working quite a bit on the script of The Deer Woman, a new site specific work that I’ll perform for the first time at 2pm next Saturday 19th September. The work will be part of Temporary Nature, a project curated by Allison Gibbs that will take place on the wasteground opposite the BBC Building at Pacific Quay in Glasgow. Allison describes the site beautifully in her press release, mentioning that “A former fragment of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival, the site, now part urban rambling ground, part social drop out space, exists as a rare interstitial landscape within the city; neither true wilderness, nor tended parkland.” I’ll post details in the PAR+RS events listing as soon as they’re finalised. Come on down! Hope to see you there.
More later,
R
GOOD
LOOKING
LOOKING
GOODMark Briggs @
Washington Garcia
Arch 24 (Unit 13)
Eastvale place
Glasgow, G3 8QGPreview: Saturday 12th September 2009, 7 – 10pm.
Washington Garcia is delighted to present Good Looking Looking Good by Mark Briggs at Arch 24 Eastvale Place.Briggs was awarded the highly competitive Washington Garcia Residency 2009, and has spent the summer months developing a new body of work within the gallery space. Good Looking Looking Good marks the culmination of an intensive period of reflection and production, which we have been excited to support.
During the residency, Briggs has expanded his interest in appropriating the moving image through drawing and video. Responding to his unique surroundings Briggs worked with the projected image, sound and indoor pyrotechnics. Throughout this new body of work, pre-existing source material has been manipulated, re-recorded or transcribed, allowing repetition to become a language that encompasses the acceptance of absurdity. Through glimpses of visual narrative, Briggs offers a series of displaced encounters laced with a blend of nostalgia and eroticism, which he describes as “sometimes confused, often compulsive, mostly disorientating.”A commissioned essay will accompany Good Looking Looking Good from artist and writer Darren Rhymes.
Notes For Editor:
Washington Garcia
Arch 24 (Unit 13)
Eastvale Place
Glasgow, G3 8QG
Preview: 12th of September 2009. 7 – 10 pm
Exhibition Runs: 12th of September – 19th of September 2009
Gallery Hours Tuesday – Saturday 12-6pm or by appointment• *Please note the limited exhibition run *
• * We are no longer open on Sundays unless by prior arrangement. *Artist Biography:
Mark Briggs was born in Colchester in 1977, and resides in Glasgow since the completion of his MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2008. Recent exhibitions have included group shows in Artnews Projects, Berlin; Bezalel Academy, Tel Aviv; and A Vermin, Glasgow. He describes his time as Washington Garcia’s artist in residence as providing “an opportunity to allow for freedom of investigation into working methods and practices.” -
Feminism, Baths, and things to do.
by Ruth Barker 7 Sep 2009
Hello,
I have made a new resolution to be more rigorous in my blogging. I will now try to write a post each week, and have set Mondays as my regular updating day, when I can try and let you know what I’ve been up to. By stating my intention to you like this, I realise I’m setting myself up for visible failure, but that’s ok. I will do my best, at least.
OK, so after a miserable week suffering with a cold, I went to the Subject in Process symposium at CCA, Glasgow on Friday.
Billed as a symposium on Feminism and Art, the day was, I think, a great success. Well curated, straightforward, and perfectly chaired by Sarah Lowndes who kept just the right balance between generosity of discussion and rigour of debate. The structure of the day itself was framed by the inspired decision to screen the 1979 Hegedus / D.A. Pennebaker documentary Town Bloody Hall in the morning, before any of the presentations. I would urge anyone who hasn’t seen this fantastic document – in which Norman Mailer struggles to chair a Debate on Women’s Liberation featuring a formidable panel of speakers Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, Jacqueline Ceballos and Germaine Greer – to get hold of a copy. Mailer’s at times hilarious descent into inarticulate aggression and defensive insult-hurling has to be seen to be believed, forming as it does the centre of a narrative arc punctuated by presentations that are by turns elegant, witty, controlled, and always utterly articulate.
The CCA-hosted discussions that followed were, if more civilised (there was no wrestling on the stage of CCA 5) perhaps more also thoughtful as well as more generous, reflecting the shifts and evolutions that have occurred in the social and cultural context more generally as well as the development within the specifically feminist tradition. It was undoubtedly the best conference style event I’ve been to in while, and I’d offer my congratulations to all of the speakers – Sam Ainsley; Dr. Fiona Bradley; Kathryn Elkin; Adele Patrick; and Sarah Lowndes – for a much needed, and much enjoyed event.Yesterday (Sunday, for those not keeping up) I was given a privileged tour of the “Govanhill Baths” building on Glasgow’s South Side by artist and Govanhill Baths Community Trust member Alex Wilde. A centre of the Govanhill Community from its opening in 1914 till it was closed without public consultation in 2001, the Baths remains a focus of community action and aspiration, and a dedicated group have been trying to get the building restored and re-opened. As part of this ongoing project, Alex has been helping to co-ordinate a series of artistic interventions throughout the (now sadly dilapidated) Govanhill Baths building. The artists have been hampered by the restrictions placed on their access to the building by Glasgow City Council, though when I visited the place was a hive of enthusiastic activity. There seemed to be a huge variety in both scale and approach to the works, all of which were still in development prior to the Doors Open Day weekend on the 19th and 20th September, during which the building will be publicly accessible and the works can be viewed.
I was getting the tour in the first place because I’ve agreed to support the project by writing a piece for the small catalogue that will accompany the exhibition, talking about the building itself and the works that have been commissioned. My condition for doing so was that Alex contributes to PAR+RS an account of her experiences in commissioning 20-odd works for such a challenging site – so fingers crossed she won’t renege on her promise and you’ll get to see some fantastic images of this simply incredible building. I’m working on my wee essay just now, so I’ll post it here when it’s done.My other job today is to draft my introduction to Neville Gabie’s keynote presentation for the Invernessian Clanjamfrey, which I’m heading to on Friday. Neville’s contribution to the event is sponsored by PAR+RS and I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that I finally got to speak to Peter Jenkinson last week, starting the conversation that will allow me to chair Merlyn Riggs’ upcoming Art Breakfast event in Lumsden (hope to see you there!). It was very nice to chat to him, and to get a feel for the very genuine generosity which seems to underpin his practice as a cultural broker, as well as his approach. I’m more than looking forward to working with him, and I think the event itself will be particularly illuminating. Hope to see you there.
More later,
R
-
Openness, Curiosity and Promiscuity
by Ruth Barker 21 Aug 2009
Hello,
today I’m musing on an upcoming event in Lumsden, an Art Breakfast no less, which I’ve been asked to chair 1.
The title is a good one “Make Friends with Strange People: The pressing need for greater openness, curiosity and promiscuity in the world of art.” and offers a great many starting points – but however will I narrow it down to something useful and interesting? And isn’t it strange that when invited to think about ‘openness’, my immediate response is to close that idea down into something more ‘manageable.’ Is that just me, I wonder, and my cowardly brain? Or could it be something more fundamental about the way we order our thoughts?
Hard to say at this point and, as I say I’m only at the beginning of my musings. It’ll prove a good way into a series of conversations I hope, and I hope likewise that some of you PAR+RS readers will be good enough to join us and offer your thoughts? 26th September in Lumsden – stick it in your diary if you haven’t already. Details below.
More later,
R1 Arts Breakfast with Peter Jenkinson and Merlyn Riggs
Village Hall, Lumsden, Aberdeenshire – 26 Sep 2009.Make Friends with Strange People:
The pressing need for greater openness, curiosity and promiscuity in the world of artKeynote Speaker: Peter Jenkinson of Channel 4’s Big Art Project
Guest Curator: Ruth Barker of PAR+RS
10am Saturday 26 September
Scottish Sculpture Workshop is delighted to welcome artist Merlyn Riggs to Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, to curate the latest of her series of Arts Breakfasts.
Devised by Merlyn and hosted by primary arts venues in the North East of Scotland, Arts Breakfasts are a series of social events intended to trigger networking and discussion across the region’s art community.
Merlyn has developed the concept of the Arts Breakfast to fill a gap in arts networking. The framework for these is based on the Platonic vision of a symposium as an active exchange of ideas facilitated through shared dining. In keeping with her practice, these events employ the art of hospitality to facilitate interactive, participatory and dialogical occasions, designed to engage participants in a social situation created around food.
With a simple template – listen, eat, talk – she develops and directs each breakfast individually, setting a topic for discussion and forming a theme suited to venue, place and audience.
Arts Breakfasts aim to raise the awareness of the cultural, economic and social importance of the visual arts and creative industries in the wider community, with the overall intention of creating a more sustainable constituency of influence.
Scottish Sculpture Workshop is pleased to invite members of the arts community to take part in an Arts Breakfast focusing around the issue of artists working in a public context.
We are delighted to confirm that our keynote speaker at the Arts Breakfast will be Peter Jenkinson of Channel 4’s “Big Art Project”.
Peter Jenkinson has worked for over 20 years in the cultural sector, passionately advocating and acting for deep and lasting change across the cultural and political landscape.
Leading alongside will be artist and writer Ruth Barker of PAR+RS, who will chair the event.Date: 10am Saturday 26 September 2009
Venue: Lumsden Village Hall, Main Street, Lumsden
(250 yards south of Scottish Sculpture Workshop)Tickets: £15 per person
*Please note – pre-booking essential is essential for this event. We recommend early booking as this event is expected to be busyTo reserve a place, please call SSW on 01464 861372 or email us at office@ssw.org.uk
-
Bible writing: the fallout
by Ruth Barker 20 Aug 2009
Hello,
thought you might be interested in this, which reveals some of the repercussions from GoMA’s recent difficulties (see earlier post).
I post this because I think Dani’s position is an important one, but also because I think it’s important that Public Art Scotland is able to consider the complex multiple relationships that exist between artists and the public realm which, as we’re reminded, is not always a one way street. For every moment when artists choose to ‘venture out’ into public spaces and contexts, there are also times when public discussion or sensitivity impacts upon the artworld. It’s very interesting indeed (to me at least) that Dani has sought to redress the imbalance he feels by recontextualising the works by placing them in public spaces outside of that gallery context. Would anyone be interested in hearing Dani talk more about why he chose to make this relocation? If so I’ll ask him to comment.
More later,
RSTATEMENT BY DANI MARTI
13 August 2009CANCELATION OF THE EXHIBIT AT GoMA – GLASGOW
Intimacy and disclosure project censored by Culture & Sport Glasgow.
Culture & Sport Glasgow commissioned me, Dani Marti, as an international artist living between Sydney and Glasgow, to create an exhibition as part of the sh[OUT] : Contemporary Art and Human Rights exhibition. As a result of the decision of Culture & Sport Glasgow to cancel 3 out of 4 of my artworks which were to be shown at GoMA (Glasgow Museum of Modern Art) as part of their sh[OUT] programme, I am forced to withdraw my entire exhibition from GoMA and make alternative, independent arrangements. The integrity and cohesion of my work has been damaged.
The decision to cancel the exhibition of most of my work negates the point of the 3 month residency with GoMA and Gay Men’s Health. The point of which was to address key issues such as gay men’s health and wellbeing, social and lifestyle factors, the stigma of homosexuality, and stigma associated with HIV status and disclosure. The project was aimed at reducing marginalization, social exclusion, homophobia, and HIV related stigma. Culture & Sport Glasgow’s recent decision, unfortunately, colludes with these oppressive social forces and quashes the voice of the artist, and does a tremendous disservice to the affected communities. GoMA’s compliance with Culture & Sport Glasgow’s decision, which came about due to pressure from Glasgow City Councillors, is both offensive and disrespectful to those individuals, and the respective communities, which have contributed to the art work and borne witness to exactly this kind of silencing. The participants’ voices, their social inclusion, and their civil rights are now at stake.
The purpose of the exhibition, like all art, is to provoke thought, and in particular this exhibition has been created to invite reflection upon one’s own experience of intimacy and disclosure, one’s own sexuality, and one’s own cultural attitudes to such aspects of human life. The frankness of the interviews contrasts with the often sexually repressed culture in which we live, both within the UK and specifically within Glasgow – an area which has long been influenced by constraining and oppressive religious morals. The art works which have been censored are clearly effective in their purpose – they invite the viewer to confront difficult truths about people, their sexuality, their capacity for pain, destructiveness, hedonism and intimacy. The fact that these art works are a victim of their own success is a testament to the power of the films, and a terrible indictment on the pervasive influence of oppressive values which influenced decision-makers in their choice to censor these films.
There has been a breach of trust as the contract between GoMA, Glasgay, and the artist stated that the purpose of the commission was to bring an awareness of those key issues among the gay community to a wider audience through an exhibition at GoMA and an offsite venue.
As an individual living with the HIV virus for over 20 years, and after spending most of my life living between Sydney and Barcelona before I moved to Glasgow in 2004, I am aware now of the huge stigma that surrounds HIV in Scotland.
Around 80% of HIV infections that occur in Scotland are among gay men. In Scotland by 2012 it is predicted that the number of people living with HIV and requiring specialist care is likely to increase by 5-to-13%.
Culture & Sport Glasgow has decided to move the rest of the sh[OUT] programme and associated residencies and key speakers to an event in Tramway in late November or December 2009 – at an as yet unconfirmed date, but a much later date than the end of the sh[OUT] programmme, presumably to avoid any pressure from the press, so (in their words) _“things can get discussed” in a “safer” and less public context._
The works that Culture & Sport Glasgow cancelled that were to be shown at GoMA are:
the films:
AUSMUSDAD
http://danimarti.com/videos/ausmusdad/
commissioned by Kunstalle Winterthur, 2009TIME IS THE FIRE IN WHICH WE BURN
http://danimarti.com/videos/time-is-the-fire-in-which-we-burn-2/
co-funded by GoMA, Glasgow, 2009sound installation:
PIG
still in productionIt was very important that both films were to be shown at GoMA as we have two HIV POSITIVE men being open, intimate and emotional about their thoughts, fears and dreams. One of an Australian, aged 63, divorced 15 years ago and with two children, and with a very positive outlook on life, and the other of a Glaswegian man, aged 33, who talks about his experience of becoming a prostitute who through the film reflects on his experiences and the meaning of life; a very sensitive, personal portrait. It is a key work to show in a public space like GoMA as there is such a large stigma in Scotland regarding HIV. The work would have helped so many HIV positive people – men and women – and also the general community to become more tolerant and to overcome so many preconceptions about being HIV. All the curators at GoMA, including Mark O’Neill, Head of Glasgow Museums, understood the importance of the work, but orders from “above” decided to “re-schedule” the viewing to one Sunday afternoon at Tramway and to then let us talk about it in a “safer” more secluded environment under the banner ‘sh[OUT] Debate: A Response’.
Culture & Sport Glasgow have objected to the frontal nudity and intimacy in AUSMUSDAD and to the conversations on drug consumption and a fisting reference in TIME IS THE FIRE IN WHICH WE BURN. The films include sometimes disturbing descriptions of life, sexuality, and include experiences of prostitution and drug addiction. It is not the purpose of art to gloss over the stark and often painful realities of life, but to give an alternative reading of it. When I explained to Culture & Sport Glasgow that AUSMUSDAD was recently screened in a Museum in Zurich with public acclaim their response was that Zurich is a much more advanced city for the Arts than Glasgow, and that the public in Glasgow was not educated enough and was not ready for it.
I agreed with GoMA and with Mark O’Neill, to enclose the screening area and to accordingly label it as 15+, and to publicly state some of the nature of the content of the films in order to give people a free choice of whether to enter the space or not. I was called into a second meeting two days later, and I was told, under the instructions of Bridget McConnell, Chief Executive of Culture and Sport Glasgow, that none of the films or the sound installation were going to be shown at GoMA.
PIG is a collaborative sound work with sound designer Diana Simpson: A dark and abstract exploration through sound into a pulsating underworld where echoes of intimate voices challenge the listener’s comfort zone. An abstraction referencing real sounds recorded from a gay nightclub – dance area and dark room – in Berlin. Following contact with Glasgow City Council, Culture & Sport Glasgow decided that it could be problematic and cancelled the work.
As an artist, I see the two films, the sound piece, and the big installation (Orifices, take2) of red blood scourers planned for the balcony area, as representing one single, coherent piece of work. As such it is conceptually impossible, and artistically incongruous, to separate out the pieces and simply remove those which the Council believe some viewers may find hard to reconcile with their own personal life experiences.
It is primarily an artistic project with a social conscience, which, due to other circumstances, now has a political dimension. It is a clear example of a homophobic position, evidently still very pertinent with some individuals of the City Council.
As a result of the current situation, I have decided to rethink the exhibition in response to Culture & Sport Glasgow’s decision:
ORIFICES (take2)
The only work accepted to be shown at GoMA, addressing HIV in an abstract and non-confronting way, which was to be two huge islands of plastic blood red scourer hanging from both internal balconies, of aprox. 4×3m each, involving 6601 scourers as the number of HIV positive cases registered in the last census. The work will now take the form of small red blood islands that will be placed in key locations around the city, from 1st to 10th September 2009. These sculptures will become part of the wider community in Glasgow:
Central Station, George Square, Mitchell Library, CCA, Tramway, Op. Concert Hall, under the statue of Donald Dewer, Trongate…I will be looking for volunteers to carry on the distribution and documentation of the different islands. If interested, please get back to me:
dani@danimarti.comFor further information on ORIFICES, please have a look on http://danimarti.com/texts/ then go to 2000, Ann Finnegan, ‘Thin Wall’
4 Parnie St. – opening on the 10th September 2009
This will be the second part of the exhibition that was meant to run parallel to the exhibition at GoMA, and I hope that we can still run with it.DISCLOSURE a four component video installation
The project consists of seven films in which individuals from a range of backgrounds and with a range of life experiences speak openly and candidly about their thoughts, their values and their life experiences. Some of these discussions naturally make uncomfortable viewing.The three cancelled works that were to be exhibited at GoMA will not be shown at Parnie Street, but will be available for viewing for one day at Tramway, Glasgow. Date still to be confirmed…
ENDS
—————————————————————- -
Right Wing Street Art?
by Ruth Barker 5 Aug 2009
Hello,
Actually a nice little analysis here of what now seems to be called ‘street art’ (back in my day we called it ‘intervention’. ‘Street art’ is more catchy I suppose. The kids’ll love it…).
Is it street art? Tough call seeing it in isolation like this. Propaganda (from right and left) has always had a interesting (sometimes caustic) relationship with other art practices. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a good example of a propagandist image. It’s a bit clunky and there isn’t that ‘grain of truth’ factor – the point at which the image somehow should ‘ring true’ even if (like me) you don’t agree with the sentiment 1.
Still, good to know that people still realise that images can be powerful, and that people still notice flyposting – for a while I was worried that anything 2D in public space was interpreted as a teaser advert.
More later,
R1 After all, the Joker isn’t a socialist, is he? Or did I completely miss the point of that film? Um, and I don’t think Obama is actually a socialist either… Not totally sure where they’re going with that analogy, but nevermind.
-
Taking Over The World
by Ruth Barker 4 Aug 2009
Hello,
Taking over the world? At least they seem as though they are: GANGHUT have made the BBC news today with news that they’re planning to build “bizarre wooden structures” as part of Inverness’ Re-Imagining The Centre programme in September. I hope to see some of you at the Clanjamfrey event on the 11th and 12th of September, which Inverness Old Town Art are working on too.It’s good to see some more positive arts coverage on the beeb, after the depressing stories about GoMA bible project. This has been a massively frustrating tale as it has run and run in the Scottish, national, and even international press, with the Pope releasing a comment last week. For those who have missed this whole painful episode, let me recap: The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow curates, every year, a ‘Social Justice’ exhibition, in which they showcase the ways in which various artists tackle or make reference to social justice themes. in the past, they’ve covered sectarianism (Roddy Buchanan), violence against women (Barbara Kruger), torture (Louise Bourgoise et al).
OK? So far, so good. This year’s curated exhibition was entitled sh[OUT] and featured a large group show of artists making work about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex identities (apologies if I’ve missed some out). To my mind, this year’s exhibition was far less successful than others I’ve seen – not because I’m a rabid homophobe, but because I felt that it was comparatively poorly / unimaginatively curated. Alongside this exhibition however, ran a series of outreach projects intended to introduce ideas of identity or sexuality to various different groups.
It is from one of these outreach projects that all the trouble started. One Glasgow artist was asked to lead some workshops with gay members of faith groups in the city. During these workshops, one of the group members became interested in the idea of the Bible as a personal artifact – as I understand she shared an anecdote about a Bible she’d used during Sunday School as a child, which she was encouraged to annotate so as to make it personal to her. This lead to her idea to ask other people – whom she felt might feel excluded from the sacred text – to likewise annotate (and so, presumably, to make more personal) a copy of the Bible provided for this purpose. The Bible was placed in GoMA, as part of a small exhibition related to the outreach programme. Perhaps predictably (go ahead, call me cynical) during the course of the exhibition, some members of the public decided to embellish the book while it was on display with some less than thoughtful inclusions including swear words and rude drawings. ’That’s a shame’ you may have thought at this point. But you would probably have reconciled yourself to the fact that there were greater tragedies going on in the world at the moment. Perhaps you would be right, but the Daily Mail newspaper might beg to differ.
Because the Daily Mail jumped on this story with lurid enthusiam (reveling in gratuitous headlines like ‘It wouldn’t happen to the Koran!’) and have devoted what seems like many miles of coverage to it. The lead artist is now receiving personal hatemail as the myth of the God-hating exhibition has spread (one Blog lead with ‘Homosexuals and Muslims team up against Christians’). The other media have followed the Mail’s lead, and the story has gone global – with no-one apparently bothering to fact check it. The Chinese Whisper suggests that An Artist is exhibiting a mutilated Bible in order to insult and outrage the Christian community. This is clearly not the case. The lady who devised the gesture is not herself an artist, and is (as I understand) a committed Christian who was seeking to explore her personal relationship to her own faith.
There are a couple of real issues here, and I make no apologies for dwelling on this story, as I think that some of the questions it raises are important for all of us who try to make work in the public sphere.
The degree lack of support / guidance given to the original outreach project could be questioned (and has been by some in the art community), as could perhaps the appropriate-ness of how the materials from the project were contextualised within GoMA’s galleries. A sincere worry however is that the negative coverage given to this storm in a teacup will put people off the gallery – which does a great deal of good work – and may further discourage them from participating in other outreach projects.
Another issue however is clearly the poor reporting of the project – the sensationalising of which those used to the British media have had to grow used to. Sad to say, newspapers need selling, and journalists (and their editors) are there to sell them by pitching juicy tales of moral outrage. However, the broader question this raises is why there is such a low level of understanding of contemporary art held by the general public – and the answer to that has to be a lack of education.
The only contact many people have with contemporary art is through media coverage of projects. in this case, the journalists didn’t seem to understand the project at all. Their editors didn’t seem to understand the project either. The readers of the newspapers certainly didn’t seem to understand the project – which is not surprising since by the time they were told the tale, it had become significantly distorted. With so little rigour to the reporting given to contemporary art, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that this overall understanding continues to be so low. And yet this leads to a vicious circle of attack and condemnation that becomes increasingly hard for we who are ‘in the know’ to circumvent: because if the only time that art makes it into the papers is for negative reasons, then people will start to think that art is a bad thing. If people think that art is a bad thing, then they will be less likely to seek out the truth of a distorted story, and less likely to give the artist the benefit of the doubt. And, as human beings on the whole prefer to have their opinions reflected by the media they read and watch, this means that Bad Art stories are the ones that will continue to grow legs and run. The lead artist in this case, as well as being badly effected by the personal and unpleasant hate mail he’s received, is also worried about his career. As he says, he would be more than happy to defend his own work against attack; however this is precisely not his work and so he doesn’t relish becoming known as ‘that guy who wrote f*ck on the Bible.’
I hate to leave this post on such a negative note, but this whole affair has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I’m not going to put any links to the Daily Mail coverage and it’s ensuing bandwagon, but a quick Google on your part will uncover a treasure trove of lazy reporting should you really wish to delve in the dirt.
Don’t get too muddy now,
more later,
R -
Bad Bahaviour
by Ruth Barker 31 Jul 2009
Hello,
and first apologies are in order. I’m afraid I’ve let the Blog slip a bit lately, and have no-one to blame but myself. Things have been pretty hectic during July (not least because of the sad passing of my much abused laptop – many thanks to BD for the brain transplant it has recently received), and it is the Blog that’s suffered.There have been many things that have caught my attention lately, and though I dit consider ‘saving’ some of them for future postings, I thought I’d give you a scattergun like catch up of some of the things that have been occupying me.
Orpheus and Eurydice
I’m working on a piece for the Edinburgh Arts Festival just now – a podcast performance no less. I’m scripting a reworked version of Orpheus and Eurydice, which I’m performing in a recording studio next week. The audio will be turned into a podcast which you can download from the Arts Festival website, so that you can listen to the text as you walk around the streets of the city. It’s been scripted to be sympathetic to a particular walk, but I think it will work anywhere. It’s designed to fit a walking rhythm, and hes been really good to work on – if a little last minute because I lost the completed first draft of the work when my laptop broke.
A lesson to us all: BACK EVERYTHING UP!I’ll put a link to the work here when it’s done.
In the Beginning
I’ve been finishing the vinyl for a recent work In The Beginning that was performed in Glasgow in May. I just got the test pressing back today, which is quite exciting… When it’s all done I’ll have a record launch (somewhere), so details of that to follow as well.Wheatfields (and the intolerance they inspire)
Frustrating this. I do read the Guardian and admire much of their political reporting (‘best of a bad bunch’, do I hear?), but my sprits always fail to soar when they talk about art. Likewise the Comments section below the main article.Vann Nath
But in the interests of even-handedness, I was deeply impressed and genuinely moved by the coverage of Vann Nath’s testimony during the war crimes trial of Khmer Rouge leader Kaing Guek Eav. Nath is an artist, and one of between 7 and 14 (accounts vary) survivors of the horrific Tuol Sleng torture centre in Phnom Penh where 16 000 people are thought to have been murdered by the regime. The UN backed tribunal took place this July in Cambodia and Nath wept as he offered his unique eyewitness testimony. He attributes his survival to his role as an artist, forced to produce portraits of Khmer Rouge leaders to survive. Now aged 63, he’s still making work, which you can see here.Northern Art Prize
This article in ArtReview was also of interest. Let me know what you think.I waved goodbye last night to Alhena Katsoff of A. Vermin as she leaves Scotland for opportunities in Amsterdam. Good luck Alhena!
And it was the end of an era last weekend as the Glasgow Project Room hosted its last ever exhibition in its current location at 64 Osborne Street. This venerable institution has hosted many fine artists, but ended on a suitable high note with a gnarly Maximalist painting extravaganza from Benny Merris, who coated every surface (and I do mean every surface) of the space in his trademark painterly exuberance. Later in the night there was music and dancing and a touch of nostalgia as well as curiosity about what the future may hold as the Project Room and the Independent Studios to which it is attached moves to the new Trongate 103 building in September.
Lots more I’m sure that I could mention but I’ll save the rest. Before I go I do want to say that I’ve been reading Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde (who also wrote The Gift). It’s a great little book that I’d recommend to everyone and anyone. I’ve been raving about it lately so I thought I’d pass on my enthusiasm. Go read it!
More later,
R -
Procession
by Ruth Barker 6 Jul 2009
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.
RSome of the media coverage.
Manchester International Festival
-
Elevation Station images and thoughts
by Ruth Barker 15 Jun 2009
Hello,
I’m just adding those images, as promised, of the Elevation Station in progress. As I’m doing so, I’m also thinking through a question that was raised by Steve Murray – GANGHUT member and the driving force behind this project.In an email this morning (I’m sure he won’t mind me quoting him) asking if I could send thorugh copes of the images, Steve commented that he’d “Had a few interesting comments from someone yesterday who said they wondered what GANGHUT would be like if it wasnt men in charge. Strange i never really think of GANGHUT being like that, i always think theres so much going on that its neither one thing or the other.”
The gender issue is an interesting one, because it was something that I’d noticed myself. The question I had myself was not so much one of ‘men being in charge’ but that there was a clearly gendered division of labour. Throughout the day, the men tended to take responsibility for the physical construction of the Station, while the women tended to take responsibility for the banner making. It was also the women who made the sandwiches. The issue of being ‘in charge’ is slightly more complex as it may be more personal. From an outsider’s perspective, Steve seemed to be ‘in charge’, but I was aware that he had taken the initiative on this project as had been the contact person for both PAR+RS who offered the initial invitation and the Scottish Arts Council who provided financial support.
I didn’t feel that there was any prohibitive sense to this allocation of responsibilities. In fact, I was not aware of any roles actually being allocated at all. Rather I got the impression that individuals gravitated towards jobs that they could see needed doing, and that they felt they could do well. this was the case for the day volunteers as well as the core GANGHUTers. Should the men have been more ‘empowered’ to take on the more decorative tasks? Was there an implicit inhibition encountered, or was it more to do with having a particular skillsbase (which may itself be gendered)? Or does it really come down to personal preferences, with this particular group of individuals making their own choices for their own reasons?
I’m certainly going to revisit the collaborative experience of The Elevation Station – not least through a Reflection or two that will present some more of the documentation from the day, as well as some background. So I’ll definately be talking to the group again and I’ll be sure to ask them what they think about the gender issue. In the meantime, perhaps after looking at the images I’ve posted here, PAR+RS readers can add their own thoughts.
More later,
R -
The Elevation Station @ last
by Ruth Barker 13 Jun 2009
Hello,
so it’s done. And after all that, what did it mean? I’m not sure.A conversation sticks in my head: at some point today, a small, almost incidental aesthetic decision was being taken regarding the Station. How shall we do this? was the question; what should it look like? We didn’t know. And then somehow someone else said that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were doing something rather than nothing, and that we were doing it together. Is that true? Is that what really mattered? I don’t know. Is is possible that, amongst the group of us, we had a number of different priorities? I don’t know. I didn’t feel any stress or see any tension.
Throughout the day, there was a very genuine feeling of enjoyment and faith in process that I perceived in all the participants – those who’d spent the whole day there, and those who came for an hour or so and then left again. There were also points at which I suspected people felt less involved; when they wern’t sure what they should be doing, or were cold, bored, tired, or hungry. this was a very human interaction, after all.
Does all that emphasis on process mean that the end result is worth less? Does it mean that we have to evaluate the process itself rather than the object, and what does that imply about the fragility of that process? If the weather had been miserable for example, and we’d all had a miserable time as a result, would this have been a less successful work? Perhaps I’m too close to this particular process to be able to answer this just now. I wonder however, about that tower: I wonder about how and why it sits as a relic of our time spent talking and building. It’ll be there for 3 months now, if all goes to plan. That’s a lot longer than the single day that the ‘live’ part of the process took 1. But perhaps that’s always the way with memorials, and with relics.
More later,
R1 although GANGHUT’s planning and preparation obviously took a lot longer.
-
The Elevation Station @ 4.06pm
by Ruth Barker 13 Jun 2009
Hello,
we’ve been very lucky and the rain has held off, and now we’re almost finished. The magestic height of the Elevation Station is surely a new landmark for the city of Dundee, towering as it does over the Mecca Bingo studded skyline. Well, almost towering above. It’s up there, at any rate.The banners are looking pretty fine, too. Very stirring. ‘Teamwork Makes The Dream Work’ has been the motif of the day (a pearl of wisdom coined by Ashley, one of the participants), and it has, I feel, certainly held true. So long as the dream in question is of a big wooden platform on stilts, anyway. Emotive stuff.
I’ll post more later when I’ve had time to digest, but for now, I’m satisfied that a good job has been well done. Look out for a Reflection giving an account of the day, and we’ve taken some video footage as well, which I’ll put up on the Public Art Scotland You Tube channel, just as soon as I get the chance.
More later,
R -
The Elevation Station @ 2.55pm
by Ruth Barker 13 Jun 2009
Hello,
the work is cracking on apace; the Station is up and looking sturdy, with the roof finished and the wall panels almost all attached. Elsewhere, smaller subgroups are designing and making fabric banners, which will hang from the top of the structure.Part of the ernest pace has been set by the weather, which (after a short sunny interlude) has now turned slightly gloomier. The clouds are encroaching, and they are hinting heavily towards coming rain. I’m hoping that it hold out long enough for me to post this and hide the netbook. Water and electricty don’t mix after all.
We’ve had an increasing number of visitors during the afternoon, with most staying for a chat, and many lending a hand. I’m suprised by how much ‘passing trade’ we’ve encountered – the raod by the side of the wasteground is a busy thouroughfare and there has been a constant stream of pedestrians asking what we’re doing. And whether we’re from the council – which we of course deny. Most if not all seem curious about the watchtower, which has raised the question of how what kind of presence the structure will have once we leave it alone. Hard to predict, I think.
More later,
R -
The Elevation Station @ 1.38pm
by Ruth Barker 13 Jun 2009
Hello,
so things are heating up now after the lunchtime lull. We have some more visitors, and the central platform of the station is looking more substantial. I haven’t talked much yet about what the work actually is, so maybe now would be a good time.The Elevation Station will be a kind of watchtower, constructed collaboratively by the GANGHUT team. It will be embellished by banners and signage, also collaboratively devised. Just now, the group intends that the tower will stay here for three months, sitting in some ways as an element of their DAC show, which opens on July 4th.
How collaborations function is always a difficult thing to make explicit. You risk, in some ways, a diffusion of the glue if its components are made public. I’ll risk saying however that so far GANGHUT seems less like a hive mind and more a small village democracy. The group’s members are quick to devolve some responsibility, and to relinquish their ownership of all decisions. Problems are solved through negotiation, compromise, competition. There’s a strong sense of playful experiment to the enterprise, and I get the sense that priorities are fluid and evolving. This is collaboration as choice, as possibility, as process.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
More later,
R -
The Elevation Station @ 1.30
by Ruth Barker 13 Jun 2009
Hello,
Just discovered that I can’t add images just now. I’ll post them as soon as I can though – maybe tonight?
More later,
R -
The Elevation Station @ 12.30
by Ruth Barker 13 Jun 2009
Hello,
welcome to our (almost) live coverage of the PAR+RS / GANGHUT collaboration: The Elevation Station. We’ve been on site for about two and a helf hours now, and we’re starting to settle into some kind of ongoing GANGHUT logic. We’ve set up camp on a patch of wasteground behind the DCA in Dundee, and we’re attempting to build the eponymous structure. Six GANGHUT members (GANGHUT are a longtime collaborative team of artists, who all still have their own individual practices as well – more info here ) have been joined by six volunteers, including myself and PAR+RS documenter for the day Berengere Chabanis, who has been photographing, filming, and sound recording the event.The space itself is an incongruous ‘lost’ space in the centre of Dundee, cut off by the dual carriageway and hidden by the backs of buildings on the Nethergate / Perth Road. I guess there used to be a functioning building here, but I have no way of knowing what it might have been.
We’re all mooching about (apart from me, I’m sitting on a rock to write this) in our hi vis tabards as it’s nearly lunchtime and there’s hunger in the air. A small sub-collective has been deputised to make the sandwiches. We’ve had a good morning, with what seems like fair progress made, and the cloud-drenched sky has given way to sunshine and even a patch of blue. Berengere assures me that it will rain at 4pm, but so far I’m hoping that she may be wrong.
I’ll have my sarnie, and then get back to you with some thoughts about the work.
More later,
R -
Collaboration Was Always A Difficult Art
by ruth barker 9 Jun 2009
Hello,
And welcome to the start of the PAR+RS Collaboration Season. The season will run from June 2009 – August 2009, and somewhere during that time we’ll also be announcing our Autumn Season, so keep your eyes peeling for that.I’ve had a busy couple of weeks making sure that everything is ticking over, and reading the brilliant (as always) submissions that many of you have contributed. Over the next week or so I’ll be starting to upload the first of the new articles, and you’ll also see a Collaborative flavour creeping into the news and opportunities, and the events. If you know of any collaborative projects happening near you, do let us know!
I’ll be using this space as a way to think about some of the questions raised by the articles, and by the idea of collaboration more generally. The Editorial Blog will also provide a focal point for my coverage of the PAR+RS commissioned event that’s taking place in Dundee on Saturday June 13th. I’m hoping (against hope perhaps – fingers crossed for technology) to provide regular Blog updates during the day as a way to record as well as comment upon the collaborative process. Wish me luck on that front…
So, a factual post today for which I’m sure you’ll forgive me. Back to the brain work soon but for now it’s All Systems Go! towards to utopian ideal of collaboration…
Feature – Between Conversation and Memory: Collaborative Conversation-Making.-
Reflection – We Have No Choice: Collaboration as a Place you Don’t Expect
Event – The Elevation Station: GANGHUT Collaboration
Opportunity – The Garden Gallery, Portobello
More later,
R -
Hottest Day of the Year
by ruth barker 1 Jun 2009
It is glorious outside, and I’m indoors working on PAR+RS. Grr. Still, I had yesterday (Sunday) off – a rare treat for me unfortunately as I’ve been very bust with lots of different projects lately – and I spent it sleeping in Queen’s Park near my home in Glasgow. I can’t feel too ill-treated.
I thought I’d post today as I haven’t written for a while, and wanted to update you on what I’ve been up to. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, if fairly hectic, and I hope the results of my labours will be seen on the site over the next while.
Shezad Dawood’s film Feature was the star of his solo show at Washington Garcia gallery in Glasgow (‘I Knew I Should Have Taken That Right Turn At Albuquerque’ runs May 22nd – 13th June 2009). As second in command at WG – the project is abley directed by my friend Kendall Koppe – I spent much of the week before the show painting the gallery walls black is readyness for the arrival of the artist and his assistant, Grant. Techinical issues aside, the show went smoothly, and I was free to think about in what ways the film itself might be considered a public work.
As a finished product, Feature certainly exists within a gallery context – the film has shown in Eastside Projects in Birmingham, Baibakov Art Projects in Moscow, and was included in this year’s Tate Triennial. Dawood is in many senses a ‘gallery artist’ (whatever that means), and he’s even at Venice this year as part of East-West Divan: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.
But the production of the film itself was very public. Produced during a residency at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire, Feature is acted by a volunteer cast of artists and local people – many of whom belong to the variety of local membership groups that Dawood made contact with during the residency. The variety of both the focus and the membership of these groups reflects the degree to which Dawood integrated himself into the multiple communities of Cambridgeshire, as much as it suggests the heterogenity of any ‘public’ of the region. We see the local Chinese football team and we see (and hear) The Fairhaven Singers – a local Evangelist Christian choir. The Outlaws, a Western re-enactment society became key volunteers, but so did the members of the community’s underground leather scene. Members of the community who heard about the project turned up in costume to audition, and the generous, slightly chaotic nature of this participatory element is very much present in the play of the film – at once controlled, epic, playful, and light in it’s touch.
Feature is a cross genre exploration in ways far more subtle that it’s stated ‘Zombie Western’ dimension. Pulling part the leaves between the private and the public it is very much at home in it’s own constructed, adopted, borrowed landscape. Pop by and see it if you have the chance.
I also met with several people who are at the very early stages of projects – always the most exciting time to talk about the possibilties of the work. It’s great to feel that so many things are at the brink of coming into being and perhaps that’s the most privilaged part of my role here at PAR+RS. Good luck to all those I’ve spoken to over the last couple of weeks, on what are an intriguing range of ideas and possibilities. Fingers crossed that all goes well. I’ll report more as and when I can.
Lastly I wanted to mention the visit made by Adam Szymczyk, director of the Kunsthalle Basel, who was in town to give a talk for Detours . I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Adam and was again interested in projects he’s been involved in tht span that divide between the private and the public. The Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum springs to mind as a good example – a sculpture park located within the former military zone or ‘death strip’ that divided East and West Berlin.
As practitioners engaged in the public realm and the possibilities it offers, these projects offer significant insights into the fluidity that public practice is capable of. I don’t have any answers to the undoubtable questions that they also raise, but the confidence with which people like Adam or Shezad operates inspires confidence in me that public art can continue to be a part of the very cutting edge of contemporary art practice.
More later,
R -
The comments are interesting too.
by ruth barker 21 May 2009
Hello,
Take a look and let me know what you think.More later,
R -
Reading List?
by ruth barker 20 May 2009
Hello,
Yesterday I met with my friend Allison, who is hoping to co-ordinate or curate a public project involving a small group of artists and an area of ground which is slated for furture redevelopment.
I waxed lyrical about the power of public art, and in particular the legacy of invention and non-conformity gifted by the work of many feminist, black, and gay artists in 1960s and ‘70s America. Many of these artists, who felt disenfranchised by the gallery systems of the time, moved out into the public realm as a response to that, starting a lineage of practice that we have inherited today. Of course, that’s not the only history of public art – we also have to think about the history of civic sculpture and memorial, and other histories of marking and inhabiting public spaces – but at least it’s somewhere to start.
Anyway, I said I would post a list of texts that I’d found influential or helpful or interesting somehow (even if I didn’t wholly agree with them). If anyone’s seeking but not finding these titles, I would recommend trying Aye Aye Books. Check them out online or in person in the CCA Foyer on Fridays and Saturdays. If they don’t have what you’re looking for in stock you can contact them and they’ll try to get it in for you. And they’re dead nice.
Here goes:
Decadent: Public Art – Contentious Term and Contested Practice
David Harding and Pavel Buchler
Glasgow School of Art
Link to davidharding.netThe Lure of the Local: The Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society
Lucy Lippard
The New Press
Link to Lucy Lippard info.Public Sculpture of Glasgow
Ray McKenzie
Liverpool University Press
Read here.Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies
Sanford Levinson
Duke University Press
Read here.Remove Not the Ancient Landmark: Public Monuments and Moral Values
Donald Martin Reynolds
Routledge
Read here.Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870-1997
Sergiusz Michalski
Reaktion Books
Read here.The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
Rebel Press, London
Read here.The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
University of California Press
Read here.The Production of Space
Henri Lefebvre
Willy Blackwell
Read here.Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Vintage
Link to essayConversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
Grant Kester
University of California Press
Read hereRelational Aesthetics
Nicolas Bourriaud
Les Presse Du Reel
Link to GlossaryEssays on the Blurring of Art and Life
Allan Kaprow
University of California Press
Read here.One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity
Miwon Kwon
MIT Press
Read here.Aesthetics and Politics
Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukacs
Verso Books
Read here.The Politics of Aesthetics
Jacques Ranciere
Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Verso Books
Read here.Image-Music-Text
Roland Barthes
Fontana Press
some extracts here.Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Penguin
Observer Review.The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
Beacon Press
Inevtitable Amazon link here.The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now
Rudolf Frieling & Boris Groys
Thames & Hudson
Link to original exhibition.Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader
Will Bradley & Charles Esche
Tate Publishing / Afterall
Link to Afterall.So good luck Allison! There’s lots in there – tons of interesting ideas, and many arguable arguments. If anyone’s got any other suggestions, stick ‘em in a comment. It’s kind of an endless list, I guess…
More later,
R -
Paralysis
by ruth barker 13 May 2009
Hello Ailsa,
thanks! Glad you like the Blog and hopefully our upcoming Collaboration season will provide lots more food for thought (see comment on ‘how to make a chair’ below).
It’s an interesting point you raise about paralysis, and one which I hope may be taken up by some of those who are contributing articles.You say that you first identified what happens during collaboration with people from other sectors as ‘paralysis’, but then ‘realised it was part of the shift from your usual process.’ I think this is very insightful. It makes me think in terms of physical movement or momentum. When an object is moving in a given direction, for that direction to change it seems like there has to be a point at which the object’s velocity decreases. It looks like the object slows down, or even stops moving altogether for a tiny moment. How can I phrase this better? Perhaps I mean that (and I’m no physicist!) if an object is moving left, then for it to move right there must be a point at which it has ceased to move left but it hasn’t started moving right yet. Something that looks like paralysis might occur at the moment of transition.
Maybe that isn’t what happens to motion at all (like I say, I’ve never been much use at these things), but sometimes it feels as though that’s what happens, and that’s good enough to me. Maybe collaborations can also feel as though they pause creative momentum sometimes. Whether this is true of not, it might be good for us to follow Ailsa’s suggestion that this isn’t paralysis at all, but merely a moment within the changing of directions.
Cheers Ailsa,more later,
R -
How To Make a Chair
by ruth barker 11 May 2009
Hello,
After grumbling yesterday about the injustice of hailstorms in May, I’m writing today from my South facing Glasgow flat with the blinds down so as to see my screen in the otherwise glorious sunshine. Hurray for Summer!I’m off to meet Susan Christie from the Inverness Old Town Art project soon. I’ve arranged to meet her in the Tron for a coffee and a wee chat and catch up on the IOTA project, seeing as she’s in town. After that I have a Glasgow international- related meeting, for which I’ll be wearing my other hat as curator for Washington Garcia Gallery, Glasgow. It occurred that each of these (Gi, WG, and IOTA – bear with me on the accumulation of acronyms here) is in many ways a collaboration, which in turn got me thinking about some of the ideas I hope to be able to raise in our first PAR+RS themed season, starting next month.
Picking ‘Collaboration’ as our first theme seemed important because PAR+RS itself is an essentially collaborative enterprise, which couldn’t live without You, the people who read the articles and use the site. This isn’t to say that it’s a free for all, and neither are the other collaborative examples I suggested above. How can that work, then? – that mix of the egalitarian and the curated, the democratic and the selected. I’m not sure, but perhaps we can aim for the best of both worlds – the open energy of a place where people are free to contribute their thoughts, and the careful structuring of a thoughtfully collected train of ideas.
I’m hoping to start getting the first of the Collaboration-related submissions in to the editorial in-box soon, but this is a wee reminder that there’s still time to put something together if you fancy. Just drop me a line. If Collaboration isn’t quite your bag then don’t worry – the Autumn season will start in September, so I’m already starting to plan for that, with more updates on the Autumn theme to come. Though I don’t enjoy looking forward to the lengthening September nights when I’m only just emerging from the winter, it is useful to think about how Public Art Scotland can continue to enquire into the field that surrounds us, and the many forms it can and does take. I hope you agree with me.
Back to that idea of collaboration, I thought I’d share a quote from a talk I gave a few years ago, when I was part of a collaborative group. Perhaps it goes some way to describing the (perhaps utopian) process of making something together, as well as the ineffability of that process and the way I felt about it at the time.
“The most elusive part [of making a sculpture collaboratively] is how the piece evolves from an abstract verbal sketch to a physical object. A large part of that happens through drawing as the idea moves towards concretion but there’s also a very fundamental play between the internalised image and the externalised production.
“For example, if I asked each person in this room to imagine a chair, the mental images would probably all be quite similar, but still different. We can try and get them closer together – is your chair wooden or plastic? Does it have four legs or a swivel base? Is it painted? Sanded? Varnished? It goes on and on, but eventually through discussion we would all have roughly the same chair in our heads. If we tried to then make that chair together, we would be taking the object out of this very mutable abstract sense and turning it into something that you can feel and see, touch and sit on.
“That’s as close as I can come to describing the process that we go through as a group, but with the added reminder that rather than reproducing a pre-existing object that we have all seen before, we are trying to make a new object that none of us have seen.”
Is this how something like Gi comes into being? Or IOTA? A series of conversations that come closer and closer together in an attempt to reach a point at which they consolidate and communicate a singularity? I don’t know. As I get older, I start to think that perhaps the spaces between the conversations – the points at which the images of the chair diverge – may be far more interesting.
More later,
R -
Seizure and the Turner
by ruth barker 29 Apr 2009
Hello,
So the Turner Prize is upon us once again, with this year’s shortlist announced yesterday: Lucy Skaer, Roger Hiorns, Richard Wright and Enrico David.
I guess I found the selection this time to be quite interesting with one artist in particular – Roger Hiorns – shortlisted specifically for a recent public work: Seizure was developed last year for a site in South London.See images of all the artists’ work in The Guardian here.
The BBC reported the shortlist here.
I’ve put my own images of Seizure here.
Seizure was commissioned by Artangel, the public art commissioning heavyweights who’ve been instrumental in a number of high profile British works in recent years (see list below). Unusually for a commissioning body, Artangel works by identifying a particular artist (or filmmaker, or writer, or composer, or choreographer or performer), who is then supported to develop their work for a specific, often public, context. As an organisation, Artangel are known for enabling artists to make work that otherwise simply couldn’t or wouldn’t happen. Perhaps because of their commitedly artist-centered approach, they’ve been able to time and again commission works that are ambitious, important, and landscape-changing within the public realm. They’ve been doing this pretty consistently since the early 1990’s, and I figure they’ve been a massively important part of shaping the awareness of the possibilities offered by contemporary practice in the public realm.
So, knowing Artangel’s impressive reputation I went down to London last year to see Seizure, which was then their latest commission. This was Hiorns’ first commission on a large scale and (as far as I know) his first urban, public, installation. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the piece, but I did know that the artist had been working with an empty group of maisonette flats in the South of the city, which had previously been part of an inner city housing estate. The flats had been vacated and were scheduled for demolition until Artangel negotiated temporary access to the site. I think the buildings have now been flattened.
When I arrived at the site on Harpur Road, it was busy with people. In a small sunny courtyard area between the derelict buildings, there were queues of people wearing sturdy black wellies, waiting to enter the flat and see the work itself.
Only a few visitors at a time were allowed in to see Hiorns’ startling chemical intervention. The artist and his team of technicians had sealed the entire lower flat and filled it to the brim with liquid copper sulphate solution. Crystals were allowed to form, the liquid was removed, and the former bedsit (now sculptural totem), was allowed to air. The result was literally transformative. The deep blue, almost luminous, crystals coated every interior surface with a thick carpet of intense geometric colour. Floors, walls, ceilings, as wlel as light fixings and a bath were encased in this new and brittle blue skin.
The domestic space was rendered entirely new through this chemical metamorphosis into a poetic re-imagining. The effect on the people who saw it was no less dramatic. I saw people laugh, cry out, touch the walls in disbelief and, above all, steal. Wearing Artangel-provided rubber gloves (like the wellies, these were compulsary for all visitors), people actually pulled crystals off the walls and hid them in their pockets. People really desired the work in a ‘gingerbread cottage’ kind of way. They wanted it for themselves, but it was as if they couldn’t help it. It reminded me of those who rip bluebells in armfuls from bluebell woods, and then take them home to die. It seemed as though visitors compulsively wanted to keep a fragment for themselves, even though to try and posses the space as a whole through the tiny individual parts that made up its shining carapace, was nonsensical.
The poetry of this condemned and lonely flat suddenly becoming so luxurious, magical, and desired, was potent. It’s a work I’m glad I’ve seen, and I’m interested to see the kind of public response that Turner nomination will bring. Likewise with fellow nominees Richard Wright – another artist specialising in the site specific – and Lucy Skaer, whose work with Henry VIII’s Wives (as well as her public interventions) has also both entered and investigated the public realm.
A jolly good showing then, not just for public art (three out of four shortlisted artists making site-specific non-gallery works is pretty unusual) but for Scotland as well: Richard Wright studied in Edinburgh and now lives in Glasgow, Lucy Skaer studied and lives in Glasgow. Hooray! The odd one out has to be Enrico David by that count, but I’m sure he’ll get over it.
More Later,
R
A few past Artangel projects whose names you’ll probably recognise:Catherine Yass: High Wire
Mathew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle
Rachel Whiteread: House
Michael Landy: Breakdown
Jeremy Deller: The Battle Of Orgreave
Juan Munoz / Gavin Bryars: Man in a Room Gambling
-
Too Much Talk, Talk Too Much
by ruth barker 27 Apr 2009
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,
RP.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.
-
Songs from St Kilda
by ruth barker 23 Apr 2009
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 -
How Timely
by ruth barker 14 Apr 2009
Hello,
Well, if it doesn’t happen to literally everyone, at least it still seems to happen to quite a lot of people.
More later,
R -
I guess it happens to everyone.
by ruth barker 9 Apr 2009
Hello,
In the very first blog posting I made, I mentioned a public work I was developing for St Johns Hospital in Livingston, as part of the Functionsuite / Artlink programme. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned it since. At first that was because it wasn’t appropriate to make the work public yet, but last week things became a little more complicated, with the result that the work (or at least my part of it) won’t be going ahead.It was interesting that I hesitated in discussing this on the blog, and so it’s reminded me in a very real way how hard it is to talk about the failure of a project, even in a case like this where there appear to be no hard feelings on either side. There are certainly none on my part, and I don’t think that there are any on the side of the commissioners – Artlink in this case. If they do now hate me, they’ve been very discrete about it!
So what happened? Basically there was a breakdown in communication and, crucially, I had not been given a brief. I know, I know, I know. It was silly of me not to insist! Especially as this is actually the second public work I’ve been involved in where problems have arisen due to the lack of a clear brief signed off by both parties. On the first occasion the situation was saved by a fantastic project manager (I must give credit where it’s due and name Deborah Kell of RMJM architects for her skilled artist/client mediation) and the project in that case went ahead with only a brief delay.
This time, no brief and a lack of clarity at the outset as to the final budget led to my developing a proposed work that was inappropriate. Rather than either compromising the original idea or starting again from scratch, I chose to retire from the project with the blessing of Artlink, who conceded that I had been placed in an impossible position. For me, the situation was made more difficult because the people at Artlink are so great: aside from being personal friends with several of the people involved in this regretable situation, I’ve found everyone involved to be warm, generous and sincere in their approach to both the works commissioned and the contexts in which they’re made.
So now I’m left trying to figure out how I feel about the whole thing. It’s hard to pin down, but essentially I feel foolish, certainly, but also disappointed because I wanted to see the work happen. I feel guilty for making mistakes, but frustrated because my time and energies have come to nothing. I am genuinely relieved because the situation (before the decision to abort was reached) was making me anxious and unhappy. I’m also sincerely regretful because this is the first time I’ve been so deeply immersed in a piece of work that now won’t be realised. I feel like I’ve failed in a very real way and I do feel that I’ve let people down. But I also own that I’m more than slightly intrigued by the possibility of working with Functionsuite again – something which I really hope will still be a possibility.
The end of one project has a habit of casting one’s eye towards the next and perhaps I have to see this purely as a learning experience – albeit an expensive one in terms of time. Artists: learn from the mistakes made by others: Make sure you ALWAYS agree a brief! Even when, as in this case, you’re working with/for really lovely people whom you like and respect. I’ve written ‘even when’ but do I really mean ‘especially when?’ Ouch! That’s hard to admit, but I’ve a feeling it may be true… We may want to believe that our friends are infallible, but perhaps, after all, they’re not.
I’m glad in the end that I’ve told you of my woes. Honesty is always the best policy after all, and hopefully this less than glorious exposure will encourage others to talk about their projects ‘warts and all’. Be brave, bloggers. After all, failures happen to everyone sometimes (don’t they?! Reassure me here!).
More later,
R -
Returning to Tapestries
by ruth barker 31 Mar 2009
Hello,
Just saw this on the Guardian website and thought that Blog readers might be interested. It’s a video clip of Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel, talking to journalist Jonathan Glancey about the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica (as discussed previously on the blog).Oh, and the Public Art Scotland YouTube page is now up and running. It’s still a little clunky, but give me time and I’ll keep adding bits and pieces to it. Go take a look.
More later,
R -
The Strangeness of Knowledge
by ruth barker 30 Mar 2009
Hello,
I recently heard an anecdote which touches on the fabular; a warning tale for public artists of our time.It seems that a well-known British artist was commissioned to produce a new, high profile public work for a scientific educational institution (not based, I’m glad to say, in Scotland). The work was elegant and ambitious, a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of knowledge and the transience of certainty. How do we know what we know? the work asked those who saw it; Do we know what we know at all? But the scientists at the institution weren’t pleased. They didn’t like the work because they found the question it raised to be inappropriate in that scientific context. Knowledge, they implied, is in some senses an absolute: a fact may be proved or disproved, but knowledge is something else, inviolate. We know what we know – and further thinking may underpin or supersede that. Scientists must, after all, stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before them – they stack their knowledge against the growing pile. And so the work was aborted and the artist went away. The institution continues its day-to-day business without the artist’s question hanging inappropriately over them.
There is no moral here as such. Like all the best fables, the story isn’t a tale of right and wrong but rather of difference and tension. Make of it what you will.
More later,
R -
The Importance of Tapestries
by ruth barker 29 Mar 2009
Hello,
I learnt this week that the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica, which has hung outside the security council room at the United Nations in New York since 1985, has been temporarily removed for exhibition in the newly regenerated Whitechapel, London.Somehow, the existence of this significantly located tapestry had previously passed me by. I did an image search to try and get a look at it in situ, and sure enough I found this picture from the Washington Times. Here the tapestry itself is fore-grounded by a figure who is, no doubt, at that very moment discussing the rise and fall of nations, or something of that ilk.
I was surprised at the colour change you can see in the photograph, with Picasso’s original stark greyscale here warmed by the tapestry’s sepia tones. The work is certainly no less strident for that however, and I was reminded just how stark an image of warfare Guernica is, with its brutal fragmentation pressed cheek-by-jowl against that unapologetically visceral image-making.
With that in mind it is surely a brave choice to hang outside the room in which the men in suits (and it is still mostly men I’m afraid with, I own, a few notable exceptions) make such decisions about the inception and resolution of conflicts the world over. What does it mean that the shadow of Guernica hangs over them? Have the denizens of the UN become inured to Picasso’s severed equine nightmare, or does it sit above them like a tan memento mori, chastening their thoughts and inclinations? We may never know, unless worldwide disputes increase during the work’s temporary absence.
Musing on this last question reminds me that the last time that the tapestry was in the news was in 2003, during the build up to the war in Iraq, when Guernica was veiled during a press conference. If the blue curtain had not been tactfully raised to cover the work, John Negroponte and Colin Powell would have had to answer questions on Weapons of Mass Destruction with one of the most iconic anti-war images of the 20th Century as their backdrop. Of course, the drapery was noticed, commented upon, and its significance endlessly discussed by commentators of every creed. Various explanations were suggested, ranging from the squeamishness of the Bush administration to have their comments framed by the legendary image of the Spanish Civil War, to sensitivity on the part of camera-operators, who realised that without speedy visual intervention, TV audiences would see Negroponte and Powell’s stern visages bordered by a striking depiction of a horse’s buttocks.
Naturally, the favoured interpretation depended largely on the political allegiances of the interpreter. However, the sincerity with which the act was discussed points in either case to the power which the gesture of concealing this image, still has. Guernica still presents us with a powerful image of horror, dissolution, and atrocity, which it is hard to ignore. It is challenging, difficult, and in many ways obtuse. No narrative history painting this, with easy friend or foe. The passage of the eye is offered no ease and no respite from the jarring, broken plane. And yet, difficult as it is, Guernica (and even its representation) still seems to impact very directly on a public imagination. People, I believe, feel the integrity of the work and are affected by it. In a very real way, the work represents something significant that people respond to – a something that transcends any traditional fine art commentary and enters a language at once more accessible, more public, and infinitely more difficult to describe.
There is no doubt that the tapestry’s continued presence in this politically significant location has become meaningful to a great many – both to those who see the work themselves, and to those who merely bare in mind its presence when they imagine this place that has seen the making of such momentous and difficult decisions. Public in this a complicated sense, we can see why the temporary veiling of this charged and prominent work attracted comment, outcry, justification, and empathy. Context is still important, after all.
More later,
R -
The Removal of Nakedness
by ruth barker 24 Mar 2009
Hello,
I was going to post this as a News item, but I decided I couldn’t really justify it. After all, it isn’t exactly public art – or is it? I still think it might be. Anyone else have an opinion?
It did make me laugh though, so I thought I’d stick it here instead.It seems that some joker / intervention artist [delete as applicable] has painted a naked portrait of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, and then sneakily inserted it into the Royal Hibernian Academy gallery in Dublin. A similar painting, depicting Mr Cowen on the lavatory, was snuck into the National Gallery, also in Dublin. The latter work apparently went unnoticed in the collection for at least 20 minutes, although the National Gallery has called the police in to investigate.
Squinting at the tiny pic available on the BBC website here, I quite like the little painting, but who am I to judge? It seems that the authorities are taking a dim view.
I know it’s not new – Banksy did it ages ago – but I quite like news of this sort. There’s nothing like a bit of irreverance, I find. And I’m all for painting as a radical medium.
More later,
R -
Gods of the Earth, Gods of the Sea
by ruth barker 23 Mar 2009
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 -
Hopefully the first of many
by ruth barker 20 Mar 2009
Hello,
I’ve decided to start a rolling PAR+RS editorial, with which I can share some thoughts. I’ll update as often as I can, but be warned that it may be erratic… As may, I’m afraid, the content. I’m hoping to keep a public art theme, but please don’t be angry with me if I get distracted along the way. You should of course feel free as always to add your comments below, and to pick me up on inevitable errors, ignorance, or banality.
So today I’ve been trawling Youtube for public art related matter, which I’m in the process of compiling for an upcoming overview for Reflections (look out for this, it will be posted soon). It’s amazing how much is out there! Call me naïve, but I’m impressed by the variety – from artists using the site as a way to document new works, to the folks who are diligently uploading archive material of Smithson, Bas Jan Ader et al. If anyone has any favourites that I should look at, do let me know.
I’m also trying to do a little bit on a small project I’m working on for St John’s Hospital in Livingston (part of the Functionsuite programme for Artlink). Early stages so far, but I’ll post pictures when there’s anything to see. This morning I was listening to audio recordings of people talking about themselves, and was thinking just how lyrical people can be sometimes. One lady recalled a nurse who looked after her when she was a child, remembering her dark blue uniform and white collar. “She was cool and fragrant and all of those things that you feel you’re not when you’re in hospital.” How eloquent, I thought.
So, a short post today because I have lots of other things to get done, but I promise I’ll return soon. In the meantime, send me those Youtube public art links.
Best wishes,
Ruth.p.s. The outrageously sunny author’s photo was taken in Orkney last summer, when I went to visit the Pier Art Centre, and also took the opportunity to voyage out to Rousay see one of the last pieces completed by Ian Hamilton Finlay before his death in 2006. I’ll tell you about it next time…
