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