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,
R

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

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

Introductory remarks, followed by:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks.