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, which was a rare treat for me unfortunately as I’ve been very busy with lots of different projects lately. I spent it sleeping in Queen’s Park near my home in Glasgow, so I can’t feel too ill-treated.

I thought I’d post today as I haven’t written for a while, and I 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 in 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 apart the leaves between the private and the public it is very much at home in its 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 those projects he’s been involved with that 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 questions that they also raise, but the confidence with which people like Adam or Shezad operates inspires my own confidence that public art can (and must) continue to be part of the cutting edge of contemporary art practice.

More later,
R