Impossible Questions and Simple Answers.

by Anthony Schrag, 21 Oct 2007

Its been 2 weeks since I dumped a bunch of councilors and curators and arts administrators in a field in Toryglen. I’m currently wading through the 9 hours of documentation, filtering out the inconsequential and trying to shift it into something that makes sense.

It strikes me as amazing, that a project I’ve worked on so diligently for months and months can be suddenly become something so wholly different, have such a completely different shape, and even though its my work, and I planned it, be almost unrecognizable to me. I’m still happy with it, and it did all the things I wanted it to do, yes, but I suppose (again) it reveals the very nature of any live art event (or, indeed, any public event – something not so hermetically sealed within the confines of a gallery) In these works, there is a collaboration with participants. And in any collaboration, you cannot predict the swell and pull of different inputs. We drift. We fall out of storms into doldrums, and from that calm into swells of something else – these are good signs: it means there is interaction.

I’m enjoying the different ways I’m being pulled, in both this simple project and how that is influencing my whole practice. One of the questions asked in the interview of this residency was “How will you getting this residency affect your practice?” and if I knew then what I know now I would have said “It will make me thing broader, wider and more inclusively. It will make me thing more about people and less about ideas. It will make me remember that public art really does involve the public.”

It amazing, too, to be reminded of that.