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.