Latest articles for Alex Hetherington and Janie Nicoll discuss their Visual Arts Residency at Callendar House, Falkirk.
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The TWINS Calendar
by Janie Nicoll 15 Jan 2009
The TWINS Calendar 2009 has been distributed to every flat in the Callendar Park High Flats, featuring the work of 12 Scottish Artists as listed below. Each artist has been teamed up with a resident or with a member of the Village Voice group. The artworks were photographed in the home of each resident and also contain a selection of Scottish Recipes. We hope the Calendar will be a useful as well as an interesting household item.
JANUARY Alex Hetherington and Judy Beattie
FEBRUARY Amy Marletta and Irene Dickson
MARCH Cath Whippeyand Ann Miller
APRIL Hanneline Visnes and Marion McLuckie
MAY Jim Colquhoun and Dan Mailer
JUNE James McLardy and Mary johnston
JULY Janie Nicoll and Isabel Johnston
AUGUST Kenny Hunter and Helen Young
SEPTEMBER Lindsay Perth and Helen Beurskens
OCTOBER Mandy McIntosh and Yvonne Cieslar
NOVEMBER Rachel Mimiec and Catherine Anderson
DECEMBER Tommy Grace and Chris SmithTo view more information and images relating to the calendar please check out
http://falkirkresidency.blogspot.com/
www.vvgroup-falkirk.orgAngela Kingston has written an article about the project for AXIS Public Realm www.axisweb.org/
Anyone wishing to obtain a copy please send a cheque for £5.00 per copy made out to Falkirk Council; to Gillian Smith, Callendar House, Callendar Park, Falkirk FK1 1YR, Tel. 01324 503788 or email to
gillian.smith@falkirk.gov.uk, along with a delivery address.ARTISTS BIOGS
JANUARY: Alex Hetherington
“Campaign For A Hollywood Walk of Fame In Falkirk 2009â€Alex Hetherington is an artist who uses new media and performance, and has recently completed a year as Artists in Residence (New Media) at Callendar House, Falkirk.
FEBRUARY Amy Marletta
‘Untitled’. Video Projection, Gold Shoes.Amy Marletta is a visual artist based in Glasgow. Her work is multi disciplinary involving video, performance, music and collage. Amy graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee in 2002 and since then has exhibited at home and abroad. She is currently undertaking a Masters of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art.
www.ganghut.co.ukMARCH Cath Whippey
Cath Whippey aims to create magical and fascinating moments. In recent work she has explored metamorphosis, transformation and change through masks, worn items, sculpture and animation and video pieces. These are often experienced as temporary projects in public spaces, including projection and installation, in gallery exhibition and at artists’ film and video events.http://cathwhippey.50webs.org/
APRIL Hanneline Visnes
“The Spoonmakers Diamondâ€
Oil on BoardHanneline was born in Bergen, Norway but lives and works in Glasgow. She gained a BA and MFA from Glasgow School of Art . She has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad and is represented by Doggerfisher Gallery, Edinburgh.
www.doggerfisher.com*MAY Jim Colquhoun *
‘A State of Nature’ Poster workJim Colquhoun is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. His work seeks to negotiate the boundaries between art and life, waking and dreaming, fiction and fact. To this end he produces drawings, installations, performances and texts. He has shown recently in Edinburgh, Copenhagen, New York, Akureyri and Glasgow.
JUNE James McLardy
‘Grand Parallel’ Tufa, Wood, FoamJames McLardy’s work encompasses drawing, video and sculpture, which he combines in order to observe and arrange objects to suggest their gesture, narrative and authenticity. Recent sculptures bring together modern materials like MDF and silicon sealant with traditional methods and materials like wood carving, bronze casting and Tufa
www.glasgowsculpturestudios.org/
www.re-title.com/artists/james-mclardyJULY Janie Nicoll
“Family Historyâ€
Installation, bed and digital projection of slide images.Janie Nicoll is an artists based in Glasgow, and has recently completed a year as Artists in Residence (New Media) at Callendar House, Falkirk. She generally uses photography and installation to make artworks. This digital projection was made using slides taken by Isobel’s late husband during the sixties and seventies. These had been left in a box, unseen for decades. They were scanned and made into a single digital image and projected, imitating the original slides.
AUGUST Kenny Hunter
“Out on the rolling Sea”
Resin, paint, wooden roof shingle.Born in Edinburgh in 1962, Kenny Hunter studied sculpture at Glasgow School of Art between 1983 and 1987. He has exhibited extensively in Britain and Abroad including solo exhibitions at Arnolfini 1998, Scottish National Portrait Gallery 2000, CCA 2003 , Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2006 and Tramway, 2008. Hunter has also created a number of high profile, commissioned works in Scotland including; Cherub/Skull, 1997 for the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Man walks among us, 2000, for Glasgow Museums, Youth with split apple, 2005 for Kings College, Aberdeen and Citizen Firefighter, 2001, outside Glasgow’s Central Station.
Hunter lives and works in Glasgow.SEPTEMBER Lindsay Perth
“Doorways†video workLindsay Perth is a Canadian born artist, who has lived in Scotland since 1986. A graduate from Duncan of Jordanstone in BFA Printmaking and PostDip Electronic Imaging, Perth’s artwork is often motivated by collaborative art processes. Many of her artworks engage with diverse social groups and individuals. Although predominantly but not defined by media based work, her approach is interdisciplinary and includes screen-based work, installation, photography and performance. She is currently artist-in-residence for Street Level Photowork’s Collaborative Arts project, Multi-story.
www.lippi.org
www.multi-story.orgOCTOBER Mandy McIntosh
Tank Top
Mandy McIntosh is a Glasgow based artist who uses an array of media: animation, video and knitting in the development of her projects. Employing a variety of methods McIntosh’s work often responds to particular social, historical and geographical contexts. Mandy has recently been featured in the book “Knit Knit, Knitting’s New Waveâ€.NOVEMBER Rachel Mimiec
“Moon Leaves†Aluminium leavesRachel Mimiec is an artist who works with people in communities, while also developing and exhibiting her own work. Her most recent exhibition was at Tramway in Glasgow and was the result of a residency in The Hidden Gardens.
DECEMBER Tommy Grace
“Fifteen Easy Pieces†Oil on Canvas
Tommy Grace’s work is a play of opposites, balancing tight draftsmanship with messy gesture. Previous paintings present imagined ruins, meticulously drawn from Classical architecture but swimming beneath the random stains of Rorschach inkblots, or exquisite geometric patterns skilfully corralled from a testing combination of red wine and blotting paper. Taking the disposable detritus of our everyday, consumer-driven lives and playfully combining it with historical reference, Grace explores the legacy and lifespan of things, considering current visual culture through that of the past.“Fifteen Easy Pieces†casts a realist eye across the scant remains of a dinner party and a chance display of abstract mini-masterpieces.
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The End
by Alex Hetherington 19 Nov 2008
This is my final, official day in Falkirk. So would like to use this opportunity to thank participants, readers, audiences for an interesting year. The rest is silence. For now. Who knows what happened, it seems eerie and quiet, bar the sound of the workmen cussing as they replace the exterior walls of the House. I am certain Janie will blog the remainder as the calendar is still in the pre-production stage. And on that would like to thank the artists for their time, patience, brilliant work and open-spirit.
Anyway always wanted to do this Comments [0]. Goodbye, I am the weakest kink [sic].
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Calendar Project updates
by Janie Nicoll 16 Nov 2008
On Thursday Amy Marletta came out to Callendar Park again and together with the generous cooperation of Irene and George Dickson, we set up a projection in the vestibule area on the ninth floor of Leishman Tower. Amy has been making a video which she wanted to experiment with, so we blocked out the windows and projected the video onto the doors, walls, and plants in a variety of configurations. I documented this with my digital camera, and got some interesting shots.
Once we had achieved what Amy was looking for we went inside and persuaded Irene to try on a pair of Gold glitter shoes, that feature heavily in the video. George was keen to try these on but found they were too small for him, which was a shame.. I also tried on a pair and very natty they were too. We took more digital images of the video playing on Irene’s widescreen TV, while I left a trail of gold glitter across Irene’s living room carpet, in my quest to get the best shots. All this gold seemed rather appropriate as gold has been a recurring theme through out the residency in artworks Alex and I have both made in “Meddle With the Devil” and “Garlands”, at the Park Gallery.
Mandy Mcintosh has lent us a rather lovely knitted tank-top for the project , which was enthusiastically received by the group at the last meeting on Tuesday. At least four residents wanted to try it on and Lottie who, up-until-now has been unwilling to get involved in this project, immediately pounced on the idea of wearing it. Irene is also a very keen knitter and brought out a huge box of knitted items for a sale of work, at the Community Centre. It was obviously many hours of work involved. For this project Alex has proposed a Falkirk Walk of Fame like the one in Hollywood.. Its making me think of the idea of a “Credit Where Credit’s Due” section for the Village Voice … or a New Years Honours List for Unsung Contributions to the Community. Irene would definitely be on my list.
Lindsay Perth and Helen Beurskens have been paired up and seem to be having an interesting collaboration, as Helen is a really lively character and apparently a bit of a hoarder to say the least. From what I hear Lindsay was having a good old rake through Helen’s record collection and I am looking forward to seeing the artwork that she comes up with. James McLardy has been teamed up with Mary Johnstone, who also seemed to strike up a good rapport. The intention is to get those artworks photographed this week, along with an interesting construction piece by Cath Whippey, a hanging painting by Tommy Grace and a sculpture by Kenny Hunter. Hopefully its all going to make an interesting set of artworks and documentary images.
Inevitably, I need to get my ideas together for my own artwork and as I get more involved in the documentation side of things its all becoming clearer what i am hoping to achieve, but as Alex likes to say “More of that later”......Amy Marletta is involved with the artists’ collective Ganghut, who have just launched a new Project Space, at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. For more information check out www.ssw.org.uk
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Deception/Reception
by Alex Hetherington 6 Nov 2008
Collaborations between Alex Hetherington, Owen Hedges, Mikaela Skosberg, Janie Nicoll; sound, video and music at Republic Bier Halle, Sunday 9 November 2008, from 9.00pm
Featuring video from performances at Callendar House and commencing the Alt-W Award from New Media Scotland. See flyer attached as image. -
Announcing Twins
by Alex Hetherington 27 Oct 2008
A calendar for Callendar Park will feature 12 artists based in Scotland: a group show distributed as a calendar. The artists are:
Alex Hetherington
Amy Marletta
Cath Whippey
Hanneline Visnes
Gair Dunlop
James McLardy
Janie Nicoll
Kenny Hunter
Lindsay Perth
Mandy Mcintosh
Rachel Mimiec
Tommy Grace -
Artists talking
by Janie Nicoll 22 Oct 2008
Things are moving on with the Calendar project and a few days ago we received work by post from Tommy Grace, currently based in London but who trained at Edinburgh College of Art, was involved with the Embassy Gallery and recently featured in the exhibition The Young Athenians at the RSA. He has sent us a lovely piece of work called “Fifteen Easy Pieces”. We also met up with Cath Whippey, who is currently based in Yorkshire, and who has made an intriguing sculptural work that involves a tree, an apple and a wasp that talks, unless I am mistaken….
We have done various studio visits to artists such as Hanneline Visnes and Kenny Hunter and are looking forward to receiving the works. There really is something very special about hearing how and why an artist makes the work they do…. it never ceases to amaze me how the artworks come to life in a new way when an artists explains their reasoning and interests, and the background they are coming from. I am thinking how rarely this actually happens. It has also been really nice doing this with the group, and realizing how much more informed they are and interested when they see the work explained by the person who has created it. As Mary, one of our regulars said on Tuesday “I’m really starting to get into this arty stuff of yours !!” It makes it all worth while, it really does.
Meanwhile back in the studio I have discovered a really great video camera I can access and Alex and I have been creating a Flash animation using Photobooth, a really simple to use application on the Macs. It is becoming an ongoing project, and I am really enjoying the way you can make video from photos, and the way the brain fills in the gaps and makes sense of the imagery even when obviously there’s information missing.. Its quite a punk approach to video, which is right up my street. I am feeling quite fired up with the possibilities this opens up…
On Friday I’m off to the Liverpool Biennial/ Capital of Culture to attend an a-n Magazine networking event called “The Winner Takes It All”. Fifteen artists from the UK and five from Europe have been invited to attend and take part in a discussion about how these titles benefit artists and artists networks. It’s to be based at the Royal Standard and Red Wire Gallery which are both artist run spaces. I exhibited at Red Wire two years ago so it will be good to go back and see what effect the “C of C” has had on the grassroots arts-scene in general. I seem to be representing Glasgow, so today I met with Jean Cameron who has kindly lent me documentation from the last GI (Glasgow International), which i think will be a good way to show the legacy that remains after Glasgow City of Culture in 1990. I am meeting Becky from Lowsalt tomorrow to get some props from the Secret Agent which was an experimental street performance during GI by Raydale Dower and Judd Brucke, that used Glasgow city centre as a backdrop. I thought this really exemplified how the artscene and the music scenes in Glasgow are inextricably linked and continue to throw up unexpectedly refreshing cross-platform collaborations. Long may it continue…. (Have I said that already in a previous blog!
! Well I’ll say it again anyway!!)
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James McLardy and Lindsay Perth
by Alex Hetherington 22 Oct 2008
James McLardy and Lindsay Perth came by to present work and ideas to the group, which was marvelous as both artists really engaged with the group. These two artists are developing work for the Twins project (with subliminal messages) and we’re really interested in seeing what develops from their discussions. I love James McLardy’s pencil drawings and sculpture work, which are intense, witty and elegantly rendered; while Lindsay Perth’s ideas about liminal (threshold) states are at once touching, intimate and intellectually intricate. Anyway “bloody marvelous” in the words of Ms Nicoll and now, back to the PhotoBooth please…
Also James has a solo show coming up in November at the Glasgow Project Room at the Independent Studios. More work on both artists here: http://re-title.com/artists/james-mclardy.asp
http://www.lippi.orgLindsay Perth is a Canadian born artist, who has lived in Scotland since 1986. A graduate from Duncan of Jordanstone in BFA Printmaking and PostDip Electronic Imaging, Perth’s arts practice is engaged with ideas of liminal states, such as the politics of identity via cultural and societal framing. Perth’s intention is to work within littoral art spaces, often those which engage in collaborative art processes. Perth’s approach to art making includes a socially inclusive one. Although predominantly but not defined by media based work, it is an approach that is interdisciplinary including screen-based work, installation, photography and performance.
James McLardy’s work encompasses drawing, video and sculpture, which he combines in order to observe and arrange objects to suggest their gesture, narrative and authenticity. Recent sculptures bring together modern materials like MDF and silicon sealant with traditional methods and materials like wood carving, bronze casting and Tufa. Objects are not always what they at first seem, suggesting an underlying narrative or gesture. As with his drawings and video his sculpture defines a unstable relationship between abstraction and representation, the fake and the real. His pencil drawings represent a more subtle involvement with sculpture through intimacy, memory and history. They create landscapes composed of specific materials such as hair, rock, smoke, hay, bone, tree. The work has a personal quality and narratives are evoked but never spelled out – ultimately the interpretation remains open for the viewer to project their own narratives and fantasies.
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popup films, Hatch
by Alex Hetherington 21 Oct 2008
Popup Films who were programmed into High Rise Cinema, Falkirk and also The Consequence at lowsalt and ESW, Glasgow and Edinburgh announced a new film screening of artists working with found footage. Here’s the gen:
Hatch
Bradford Playhouse
4-12 Chapel Street
Little Germany
Bradford
BD1 5DL
Telephone: 01274 820666
http://www.bradfordplayhouse.co.uk/homeIt includes a video I made which commingles footage of a baseball game from 1968 with a voice-over of The Black Hit of Space by the Human League.
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Tracey Emin and Lucy Keany and Cathy Wilkes
by Alex Hetherington 15 Oct 2008
Report to follow here on the Village Voice’s travelogue to Edinburgh to see the wonderful Emin show; we are pleased to announce the group, in general, were positive about Emin’s stark, confessional, generous and on occasion brutally moving installations, drawings, video and reckless abandon. My favorite included the neons and the roller-coaster. A fuller report to appear from us and the group soon. We also enjoyed the Dean and works from the Collection, including Ed Ruscha, Warhol, Beuys, Richter and much amusement/bewilderment/honor at Douglas Gordon’s List of Names,and of course finding sweet Ms Nicoll’s names among the group of memorializing/memorizing. I was also touched, radically for me from a painting, of Lucien Freud’s Two Men. Off we went to the Dean and Paulozzi, which everyone enjoyed.
Also in Edinburgh later in October is Lucy Keany’s Fools in Print, this time performance. Featuring Beagles and Ramsay, Aline Bouvy and John Gillis, Luke Collins, Shelly Nadashi, Ewan Sinclair, Matilda Tristram and video from Alex Hetherington, Alan Holligan and Catherine Street. It’s at The Collective Gallery, 30 October, selected and curated by Lucy Keany and video selections by Benjamin Fallon. I am also writing a short story for Keany’s project which commingles disco lyrics with a scene from Le Weekend, among other fibs, lies and contrivances.
See falkirkresidency.blogspot.com and www.foolsinprint.com for further information and announcements.
Thanks finally go to the group for their open-minded attitudes and our open discussions on Emin’s practice. The Village Voice #3 to be distributed imminently, and watch this space for Twins, a calendar for Callendar Park, with a dazzling array of artists and projects. To be announced soon.
Review of Cathy Wilkes’ Prices at The Modern Institute here: http://artartartgallery.com/newsitefive/home
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HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME.
by Alex Hetherington 13 Oct 2008
I shall be campaigning for a Falkirk Walk of Fame soon to tie-in with the calendar, suggested names of Famous Falkirk Residents please.
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Amy Marletta
by Alex Hetherington 8 Oct 2008
Amy came to Callendar House to present a talk about her practice and collaborations to the group, which went really well. We would like to thank Amy for her energy and spirit and the project she will undertake with the residency will add a great deal to our work. Tracey Emin soon, expect fireworks. More soon, please standby.
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John Houston
by Janie Nicoll 1 Oct 2008
Yesterday I heard the sad news that John Houston passed away a few days ago. He was one of Scotland’s best known Landscape Painters, having forged a career over fifty years and developed a confident style and a huge preoccupation with the Scottish Landscape that saw him exhibit nationally and internationally. He was my Fourth Year Lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, and definitely one of the best lecturers I encountered during my time there. He was one of the old guard of painters, along with David Michie (son of Ann Redpath), who had certainly found their own voice when it came to painting. He was always quite forthright about his opinions and although I didn’t always entirely agree with him, I always respected what he had to say.
In the years after Art College, after leaving Edinburgh and moving to Glasgow, I used to see him at Glasgow Print Studio where he would come through to make prints, quite often accompanied by his wife Elizabeth Blackadder. They were a very unassuming couple despite the success they had achieved between them, and John still liked to give me words of advice along the lines of “Stick with the painting†which I waywardly chose to ignore at that point in my life.
There are certain people whose star shines brightly while they are on this planet and maybe we take their brightness for granted while it burns. I am thinking of another artist of my own age group, Paul Carter, who died recently and who also taught at Edinburgh College of Art. Both these men have given much to the Scottish art scene through their artwork and their influence. Ironically, maybe it is only when these stars have gone out that we really realise the light from which we have all benefited.
Rest In Peace.
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BBC ARTWORKS Scotland
by Alex Hetherington 26 Sep 2008
You are invited to watch BBC ARTWORKS
BBC 2 Scotland
CLASS ENEMY A Message from Sarajevo
Director: Samir Mehanovic
Monday 29th Sep 10pmwhich includes I believe footage from a performance workshop run by Alex Hetherington, Rebecca Green and Sally Hobson, EIF 2008
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Anne Colvin's The Colony Room, featurette in the San Francisco Chronicle
by Alex Hetherington 26 Sep 2008
Between 7-11 tonight, New Langton Arts in San Francisco will inaugurate a program devised by Bay Area artist Anne Colvin titled “The Colony Room: Anne Colvin and Guests.”
Each Friday and Saturday night through Nov. 6, Colvin will host a different performance event or screening. Future guests will include the band Rubber O Cement, writers Bill Berkson and Emily Wilson, and performance innovators Tim Etchells and Alex Hetherington.
The inaugural evening commemorates San Francisco conceptual artist Tom Marioni’s milestone “relational” work, begun in the 1970s, “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art,” which took the form of sporadic get-togethers among art world comrades and invited guests.
At 8 tonight, Marioni will perform his sound work “One Second Sculpture” (1969) for the first time publicly and will sign copies of his book “Beer, Art and Philosophy.”
The evening will include a screening of Melvyn Bragg’s 1985 television interview with Francis Bacon, who helped to make the Colony Room Club in London famous as a hangout for artists.
Tickets to “The Colony Room: Anne Colvin and Guests” are $5 at the door; a $50 subscription is available for the entire series. Information at (415) 626-5416, www.newlangtonarts.org.
Kenneth Baker
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Twinning Project; A Calendar for Callendar Park
by Janie Nicoll 17 Sep 2008
Now that the website is up and running (www.vvgroup-falkirk.org) Alex and I are getting organized with our next project which is to twin up artists with residents from the High Rises, with the intention of getting artists to make or lend artworks that the residents can have in their homes. These will then be documented and the resulting images will form a calendar that will then be distributed to every flat in the High Flats. This continues the idea of taking Contemporary Art direct into the homes of the residents, taking the art to them rather than them to the art. The calendar will be a functional object that creates a legacy for the residency, over the next year, while acting as an introduction to the work of the artists we have selected.
We are hoping each artist will have a resonance with the member of the group that they are twinned with. Although this could well be “easier said than done”, as we realized during one of the sessions with the group when we first floated the idea. The “Pile of bricks”, “Tracey Emin’s Bed” scenario raised its ugly head as well as the accompanying inevitable question “But why is that art?” … Needless to say an interesting discussion ensued.
This type of situation does remind you that Contemporary Art can often be the elephant in the room, during this kind of engagement. There can emerge a real hostility, no doubt fuelled by the media and a lack of understanding, that creates feelings of inadequacy, which can seem fairly understandable (I’m sure I feel it too sometimes… and I’ve had quite a few years of Art School training !). Having just spent two days attending the ‘engage’ Scotland Conference, where the main topic was on “new approaches to interpreting artâ€, this all seems rather relevant. Sometimes you realize that you are pretty much “back at the coalface†but I suppose that’s all part of the challenge, and part of why we are here. We are organizing a trip for the group to visit Edinburgh and we will be taking in the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, I’m sure it will provoke further interesting discussion!!
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ALT-W, New Media Scotland
by Alex Hetherington 14 Sep 2008
Programme_Alt-w Awards Announcement
Following the exhibition Alt-w: New Directions in Scottish Digital Culture at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, New Media Scotland is proud to announce that the following eight projects are the recipients of the 2008/09 Alt-w awards.
Production Award: Cybraphon
Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby & Tommy Pearman (Found)
found-electronics.netInspired by the nickelodeon this is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a glass display case, Cybraphon will behave like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the bands performance will be effected by online community opinion.
Production Award: Mutsugoto
Tomoko Hayashi and Stefan Agamanolis (Distance Labs)
www.distancelab.orgA communication system for long distance lovers. Unlike mobile phones, e-mail or SMS messages which use generic interfaces in business-like contexts, Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body.
Production Award: The Loop
Wendy McMurdo & Paul Holmes
www.wendymcmurdo.com/Exploring the relationship between digital gaming, fantasy and play examining the nature of interactivity itself. Alt-w will fund the creation of an experimental film which will delve into the psychological state of the player of a kinetic figure-skating computer game.
Production Award: A Short Film about War
Thompson & Craighead

www.thomson-craighead.netA documentary made entirely from information found on the world wide web. In ten short minutes viewers are taken around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by military and civilian bloggers.
R&D Award – project2891
Benjamin Dembroski
www.dembroski.netA system that encourages engagement from less technically experienced artists in the development of both hardware and software solutions for nodal device art installations. The simple user interface will provide control of connected hardware, as well as other nodes via the Internet. A series of free workshops will explain how to use the system and suggest how it might be modified for creative applications.
R&D Award – A Million Lies;
Once and Only Revealed After Death
Alex Hetherington
www.alexhetherington.comResearching the nature, psychology, construction, philosophy and consequences of lying. The work will include the construction of personality, identity and personal truth and will explore cultural forms that employ fakery, sham, scams and deliberate misinformation. This research will lead to exploration of these themes both online and through performance.
R&D Award – Aeolia
Sarah Kettley

www.sarahkettley.comThis project explores the nature of space and place and will examine the concept of a bodily connection with the land through sketch prototyping of stretch sensors in sculptural textile forms. The resulting series of woven pieces for the body will be remotely connected to three-dimensional forms in the Scottish landscape, combining information from each to create unique low frequency feedback to be experienced by the wearer.
R&D Award – Imagine 3D
Emma Tolmie
www.emmatolmie.co.ukAssuming the role of digital voyeur, visionary and creator the artist will explore the potential and the practical limits of a retro-futuristic subversion of the experience and aesthetics of film. Mixing low-tech gadgetry and high-tech imagery she is developing a heads-up display and unique digital content that re-imagines the concept of stereoscopic imaging.
The distribution of Alt-w awards is managed by New Media Scotland and funded by Scottish Screen and Scottish Arts Council.
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Anne Colvin's The Colony Room final program
by Alex Hetherington 13 Sep 2008
Anne Colvin’s The Colony Room, San Francisco, TART at New Langton Arts
Download the full program above, it is sensational and we should all move to California immediately. -
Village Voice Live from Falkirk
by Alex Hetherington 10 Sep 2008
The web site is now live:
www.vvgroup-falkirk.orgwith new content added soon
lots of love
Alex Hetherington and Janie Nicoll
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www.vvgroup-falkirk.org
by Alex Hetherington 7 Sep 2008
Hi chums. The web site for Village Voice edition 3 online will be live soon. The address is www.vvgroup-falkirk.org and currently has one of those annoying hold pages which say things like “under construction” or “come back soon”, so there’s another two minutes of my life I won’t get back soon.
We are all talked out with presentations at the Park Gallery and at Changing Room, Stirling. I take down the show tomorrow and have in mind to photograph its dismantling, I see the nylon and tape becoming quite an ugly sculptural form as its torn, like a skin, from the space. Also it was great to meet Lewis Holleran and his fantastic tattoo; i am now inspired to become heavily inked. I wonder about all the tattoo parlors in Falkirk, (there’s like 6 on the main street, “just off for the groceries, the pension and a huge aztec/celtic insignia darling”), how do they make a living?
We progress with the next editions of the paper. And I am continuing my obsession with this process of giving people’s memories back to them, distorted, shifted through our interpretation. He-who-shall-remain-nameless, (janie you’ll know who I mean) comments have been bugging me this past week and I am investigating the history of art made by committee. Komar and Melamid spring to mind.
On the more personal promotion front, shotgun magazine run by Joseph del Pesco in SF to reprint the Yerba Buena review: www.shotgun-review.com
So fall has arrived, and we are generally facing the final stages of the project.
Apparently there’s an acid house revival going on at the moment. Just thought you should know. So we may finish this with an illegal rave and guest appearances by Altern 8, Baby Ford (oochie koochie), Fast Eddie et al.
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Anne Colvin's The Colony Room
by Alex Hetherington 31 Aug 2008
http://www.newlangtonarts.org/view_event.php?category=Gallery&archive=&&eventId=416
Artists include Anne Colvin, Alex Hetherington, Tim Etchells, Francis Bacon, Tom Marioni, Ryan Tercatin, Tobias Bernstrup and others.
New Langton Arts, The Garage, Folsom Street, San Francisco, USA
Full program announced by the brilliant artist and curator Anne Colvin very soon.
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Web sites
by Alex Hetherington 29 Aug 2008
I have updated my principal web site: www.alexhetherington.com to reflect recent work and further recent publishing, in a-n magazine and forthcoming, Flit in Oregon. The web site, jeez, this must be web week, for the Village Voice is imminent and captures the whole deal in a oner. I will post once its up and tested, it is of course heavy duty so no dial-up at present, though it will have a low band version and text only version in due course. And I’d like to congratulate Lucy Keany and Ben Fallon on the great job they have done on the Fool’s Gold web site: www.foolsinprint.com and to Tommy Grace who designed the print version, these people are spectacular to keep your eyes open for their future and past work.
Have a great weekend, pubic art punters.
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TALK
by Alex Hetherington 21 Aug 2008
Just to remind PAR+RS readers Janie and I will be presenting a talk at the gallery 3 September 2-3 pm; we will also be presenting work at The Changing Room Gallery 30 August for an artists’ networking day. More soon – I have been busy building the web site for Village Voice in Flash and we should be able to announce a URL and launch very soon. More Mineral Park images on falkirkresidency.blogspot.com with a lovely capture of the text for Voodoo Ray. A new twinning project also to be announced in the coming month or so, which we are really excited about.
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Mineral Park images
by Alex Hetherington 19 Aug 2008
I have posted images from Mineral Park on www.falkirkresidency.blogspot.com and will add more selected later,
Happy Birthday Elizabeth Frazer, 29 August,
Image, me as a Cocteau Twins album cover also online at Falkirk residency blog site.
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Remix
by Alex Hetherington 11 Aug 2008
I was emailing Lucy Keany, Edinburgh based performance and video artist, and she articulated something that is central to Mineral Park: the live composition, sampling, remixing, At last I am an art DJ. More on remixes soon.
And guess what? I am to appear on the BBC, interviewed for the performance project at EIF. Is the TV world ready for my overly complicated mish-mash mind? I sense a simplification of materials, methods and outcomes developing. Restraint, a new word has entered my vocabulary.
Thought for the day: Superbad artist/Falkirk Supercollider.
Today, the Village Voice team will work with me on building the web site, suggestions for a web site name are very welcome. Add a comment if you can think of something memorable and extraordinary.
Update
vvfalkirk seemed to have some resonance
villagevoicefalkirk was too long
callendarparkvillagevoice seemed too preposterous
the-voice may already be takenAnyway we built an animation in Flash and a rough layout of the site itself, so hold on and we’ll have the online edition uploaded in double-quick time. It was a computer lab in there with four Macs going and flipping between Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop and Imageready. Quite cool.
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Up
by Alex Hetherington 9 Aug 2008
We had the opening last night, well attended, I guess. Lucy Keany was there and a group of my friends from Glasgow. Andrea said Mineral Park was like my headspace and we had a great deal of fun watching all the scenes, changes, cuts: the backward baseball is really great when it plays with some of the other videos and the LED screen keeps pace with the speed of everything. Anne Colvin’s work makes the space, serene and elegant and then cuts away to the noise of Vitale and Throwell. I like how much the space changes. Janie, Catherine, Andrea and I then went for food and drinks; Janie is now on vacation and needs the time out, while I will now concentrate on a web site version of the Voice. Mineral Park is overloading. I don’t expect it to be well received, it is an experiment; but I think we pulled it off and I would like to thank all the artists for allowing me to screen their work in this way.
Notes
Some indications of a self-portrait and the failure of language, or an object, space or place that cannot be described (Grand Canyon), the system of twinning, the Ford Taurus in Vitale’s work (my star sign), Throwell’s old skool video art, Voodoo Ray, American Voodoo, Falkirk Voodoo. The baseball game in reverse, no longer the game, House/Lights and Carrie Urbanic (from NY) voiceover, Lucy Keany’s pleasure game and meeting her at Margaret Tedesco’s in SF. The terrible Cocteau Twins rendition, a Phil Collins moment. Anne Colvin and Lewis Holleran’s work with film history and a bridge between here and California. It’s all about America in Falkirk again. Robert Dollar’s money and power and his flowered house, full of pineapple wallpaper, full of luck.I was glad to see the artist Anne Elliot there also. We shall prepare for the talks soon, something over at the Changing Room at the end of August and in the Gallery on 3 September.
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Install
by Alex Hetherington 4 Aug 2008
The show is beginning to materialize: I like Janie’s self-generating slides, which create dazzling images in the space. Meanwhile I watched Lewis’ video play alongside backward baseball and a view around Robert Dollar’s mansion. We sought more TVs and have been generously given a set of four by the wonderful people at StreetLevel in Glasgow. Thank you Team StreetLevel. I also watched the ‘female’ and ‘male’ voice describing the plane collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956 and later the footage I shot in Arizona, which somehow becomes really moving by this point and then some guy in leathers appears and make it all very funny and oddly sexualized. Then it’s me SINGING the Cocteau Twins, while their titles scroll along on the LED, with special mention of Sugar Hiccup, a show from Tramway from years ago that featured Sam Samore, Elizabeth Ballet and Richard Wright and a song from the Twins. The two extra TVs appear in the morning and I can report back on this experiment.
The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics a review I wrote for Interface an Magazine to appear in print in their September edition: this was a show from Yerba Buena in San Francisco. You can read the piece online already at Interface or wait for the magazine to appear in store.
More, inevitably, soon.
I watched the reels yesterday and have made some changes to the running order, so am replacing three of the DVDs, Anne Colvin will play now on an extended loop, as will the footage from the Grand Canyon, Lewis’ video has a second loop and there is now a new soundtrack hitting off at the 40 minute mark.
I think I will add the Cocteau Twins images (which are NOW black taped to the wall and makes reference to Jim Lambie); I’ll spend the day thinking about the layout, it’s much more relaxing than I had envisaged, and when things stop it’s quite eerie. Relaxed and eerie? Is this possible? Stay tuned TV fans.
(The option to put a sleeping bag in the space, still exists, I was thinking of how the Cocteau Twins are sometimes described – “dream pop” (I can’t think of a less apt description, but it has a kind of tackiness about it)). Anyway the space also has this campside feeling to it (Campfire Headphase, to reference another Scottish electronica band). I am the King of Reference.
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Black Floor
by Alex Hetherington 1 Aug 2008
The small gallery at the space is now a black floor. Sturdy nylon and reels and reels of black gaffer tape. It’s like a Goth’s bedroom. The LED screen lights cast a red glow through the space, while two black curtains seal the space, making it dark and hot (which is how I remember the real Mineral Park, the ghost town in Arizona). The little red nameplates are almost all in place, like a list of solicitors in practice at a ‘firm’ or the occupants of an office building, it feels quite industrial, utilitarian. The gallery feels really serene this time, with Janie painstakingly organizing her installation, which has color and life, while also suggesting decay and passing. The LED screen as well as having the artists names and titles will probably have a list of Cocteau Twins songs, and some other random language thoughts, each letter keyed in individually.
Anyway I heard today some of the Falkirk video work from Meddle with the Devil screens in Bulgaria. I know nothing of this place, it feels very exotic. It’s part of a program called Videoholica.
Anyway it’s the weekend, it rained today liked the sky was the sea and by the time I got home it looked like I had thrown myself in the river.
I test the screening/installation/group show/show within a show on Monday, I shall then pass out the Paracetamol (which, interestingly, is made from coal tar.)
[Mineral Park Map #A
The Dexter Sinister TWA Clifford Irving Howard Hughes Orson Welles Dollar Synch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Irving
TWA airlines operated and owned by Howard Hughes, flies into the United Airlines Constellation over the Grand Canyon, 1955. Clifford Irving wrote a faked autobiography on Howard Hughes and features in F for Fake by Orson Welles, his other film in the project The Trial has been transformed by Lewis Holleran’s video loop. Dexter Sinister (NY) screen F for Fake, Phantom Rosebuds and the Clifford Irving Show at New Langton Arts, San Francisco, the base of industrialist Robert Dollar’s empire. The feature film The Hoax, starring Richard Gere, relates the story of Irving’s faked autobiography. Mineral Park or How to engineer an artificial contrivance or How to write a fake autobiography of Robert Dollar.]
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Top buzz......
by Janie Nicoll 31 Jul 2008
For this blog, I feel like I sound like I’m constantly either reminiscing/ looking back, with the risk of sounding nostalgic or fretting and offloading various anxieties about something or other. The former probably goes with the territory of this type of residency, especially when working with a relatively elderly group, as for them there’s a lot to look back on, and they want to talk about it. The latter goes with the process of attempting to make art or the attempt at blogging.
Yesterday I went up onto the roof of Leishman Tower, one of the High Rises, to record some video footage. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while and developed from discussions with a few of the women in the group about items of washing getting blown off the washing lines up there.. Anyway I finally got it together to do the filming and was fairly pleased with the results. It’s a great location, and has got quite a surreal feel to it as there is a large grey parapet that goes all the way round and you can’t actually look down at the ground or at the view because of that. Also the light seems different, something to do with being so high up and with the clouds being a lot nearer. Last week I had a bit of what Alex refers to as a Vertigo moment when I was up a set of ladders with my video camera and realised I could easily get blown off, the ladder that is, not the roof thankfully. It would make a great location for a fashionshoot or an event; I keep thinking of a faux beach party or seventies cocktail party, maybe its Ballards “High Rise†creeping in again; either that or a music event like the Beatles on the top of the Apple building.
It can give you quite a buzz to make a new piece of work, a sense of elation, until the initial euphoria wears off and you realise that maybe there are a few things about it that need sorted or changed. At least I now have good footage to work with.. I also shot video footage in the stairwell, fifteen floors of it, which seems to me like the spine of the building but inevitably is a part seldom used by the majority of the residents, or only when necessary. I am interested in the communal spaces and how they are used or not as the case may be. There are two lifts one for even floors and one for odd floors, which seems well thought out and considerate, but these stop at the 12th and 13th floors respectively, so anyone living on the 14th floor needs to walk the remaining flight, not much fun if you are elderly and/or have things to carry. Bad forward planning on the part of the architects – I wonder what happened there?? Maybe the 14th floor was an afterthought, as well as access to the roof??
One of graphic designers for the Art Team showed me an Audio Visual room hidden behind the ‘Green Room’ in Callendar House where a lot of talks and lectures are given. It was like a secret chamber and I would never have guessed it was there. It holds an audio-visual set up that included multi-slide projectors and audiotapes that back project onto a grey screen. It would have been state of the art equipment about fifteen years ago, but is now pretty much made redundant by digital projectors and laptops. It was a bit like a portal into the technology of the recent past.
There I am looking backwards again!!
Also today we did an interview for The List magazine so hopefully that will be featured in the next edition. -
Mineral Park Test results
by Alex Hetherington 30 Jul 2008
The five screens for Mineral Park are rendered now. Each screen follows a corresponding path, with counterpoints, deviation, altercation to each sequence, each artists’ film: I tested the run today on the computer and watched it finally fall out of the first supposed synchronization; one screen is a slightly different length and in real-time playback the work will naturally fall out of sequence, this is the self-generating quality which underscores the whole project, a mass of interlocking materials producing outcomes which are unknown: it will also generate some very difficult experiences where random actions will occur. Lewis Holleran’s loop starts the whole thing off, while Lucy Keany’s dazzling split-screen work allows for a period of glamour and respite in a zone of noise and calamity. The thoughts of twinning run through this: the Cocteau Twins, the twin sisters with their speech-impediment imaginary language, the twin aircraft, Falkirk and San Rafael, the sports teams, Acid House music and a split-personality – and also the problem of language and interpretation, the failings of interpretation. John Sebastian Vitale’s work also twins up with my work with his thoughts on an American Voodoo, which references my Falkirk Voodoo in Meddle with the Devil, and also to Voodoo Ray (A Guy Called Gerald), which appears in the installation. The floor of the gallery will be covered in a heavy duty nylon flooring a kind of protective membrane, while the LED screen plays off numerous texts, names, titles and will gel the space when, on occasion, there is nothing on the screens. I have also the back catalogue of the Cocteau Twins in there, it may appear like a Jim Lambie style wall mounted selection or something else; the show is reminding me a sound, music and art exhibition I saw at San Diego Museum of Contemporary at La Jolla where I first came across Diane Thater’s Jump!… and as Janie says, cycles appear. That show by the way was called SOUNDWAVES: THE ART OF SAMPLING. This show is worth investigating and included some great pieces by Christian Marclay and of course Thater’s 16mm film Jump! showing differing interpretations to Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, the only thing missing now is a group of California teens with skipping ropes and hippy t-shirts.
Just on California and memory loss (see “how my brain works”): Californian Poppy is used in the treatment of patients with memory loss and dementia, as well as people who have memory loss due to drug misuse, like ecstasy and crystal* meth. Just a thought.
More soon.
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Floral-tastic
by Janie Nicoll 27 Jul 2008
It’s the calm before the storm, as tomorrow we start to install the Garlands exhibition and it’s a bit like any sport, you have to “get into the zoneâ€..
I seem to oscillate between mild panic and refusing to feel flustered, although maybe this is actually being “in denial”. The trouble with working with Installation is that you can never make definite decisions about the work until you actually get into the space and start to work with it. Then you can assess the variables that you are dealing with. Its ultimately quite a stressful way of working and its at times like these that I wish I had stuck with painting on canvas, then at least the majority of the formal decisions are already made and pretty much all that’s left is the layout of the hang. I just keep telling myself that I can get a lot done in 10 days, as often I have made installations in 2 or 3 days or less and that’s been in a different city or country even. So time to get things in perspective……Another stress is my decision to use old equipment and to “return†to using slides and slide projectors. It felt good manually loading a roll of slide film into my old SLR camera until I ran into technical trouble, as the shutter was no longer working. Again something did feel good about that sense of anticipation dropping the films off to get them developed and having to wait til the next day to collect them, not knowing if they would be reasonable pictures or not. The digital age has made it all so thoroughly instant and definitely easier and in a way it felt good, almost wholesome, to be returning to the old familiar.
Again the idea of using old equipment in the form of slide projectors initially seemed like a good idea for various reasons, as I presumed that most galleries, and institutions would possess these pieces of equipment that have only recently been superceded by Powerpoint and data projectors. Unfortunately it has been far harder to round up the type that I need (that rotate automatically), so I am having to modify my original idea, and there’s the added stress that the ones I do have may or may not survive a month of constant use.. There is something marvelously reassuring about the sound of the slides clunking up and down, in and out of position as they plod round the carousel. The intensity of the projected colour is lovely, when compared to the pixellated digital blobs that you often get from projected video however, I can understand why people and technology have moved on.
So over and above all the practical and technical issues there also the anxiety about the content, will it all be too morbid, too sentimental, too obvious, too twee ….etc etc
I was reading the catalogue for “Greyscale /CMYK†an exhibition at the Tramway in 2002, with an introduction by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt and she quoted from Dave Batchelor’s book “Chromophobia†written in 2000; where he discusses the innate prejudice towards monochromatic works, to the detriment of colour.
â€there remains a belief, often unspoken perhaps but equally often unquestioned that seriousness in art and culture is a black and white issue, that depth is only measured in shades of greyâ€.
I look back over the last few years since that show and there seems to have been a lot of colour since then. The Art pendulum swings one way and then the other; for every action, a reaction. Oh well, time for some more colour, as long as the equipment doesn’t let me down anyway…… we shall see…..
Anyone reading this with an automatic rotary slide projector they don’t need over the next few weeks please get in touch !! to janienicoll@yahoo.co.uk
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Activities
by Alex Hetherington 26 Jul 2008
Yorkshire and sometime Glasgow-based artist Cath Whippey came to present her work to a much reduced Village Voice Group this week. She has been teaching at the Glasgow School of Art and I thought it a good opportunity as she’s in town to come to Falkirk and speak about her endearing, startling and occasionally frightening performance projects using masks and interaction with the public. She showed us her mask-making work, her animal heads, the Red Riding Hood project from SSW, Lumsden and an artist-in-residence project with Deveron Arts, Huntly. I like Cath’s combination of traditional sculptural work with her performance interventions and I really liked the mask she showed us with the built-in TV camera with its monitor in a handbag.
Elsewhere I have completed a review on Prices, Cathy Wilkes at the Modern Institute for Matt Roberts’ magazine art art art; this should go live in August. I found in the work she showed interesting relationships to Tracey Emin and Barbara Kruger: I Shop Therefore I Am, etc.
Garlands installs during the week: the little name cards for the artists will appear on Tuesday and I have obtained a scrolling LED sign for some texts, names and materials during the show, I have also taken on a sort of pseudonym for the show: Neon John, a fake character whose traits come to life during this show, an alternative me. It also references works by the late Jason Rhoades. I am also trying to find a suitable material to make the floor temporarily black. It will make the space all the more claustrophobic and intense, two words synonymous with my practice. “Manicâ€, as Anne Colvin of San Francisco calls me. The brochure for the show arrived too, the day after I ordered the print run, like it materialized from nowhere. These will be freely available at the gallery.
I continue to explore memory loss , this time on a more personal level as my mother went into a diabetic coma last week (including a dramatic break-in to her house by the emergency services) and is now recovering at a stroke unit in Stirling; she remembers nothing from recent history, so strange, to lose information that seems so fundamental to identity, I wonder where this information goes, it is like losing a file when a computer crashes, it just disappears somewhere. Is Jimmy Carter still the President of the US? I guess somewhere in time he is, or Atley the Prime Minister: gone is my father’s name, gone is my mom’s evacuation to Bute during the War, gone is her time in Bodega Bay, California, gone are my cousins’ names.
On a lighter note I have been approached for a feature inclusion in Flit magazine, based in Portland, Oregon, more on this as it develops. Flit is one of those modern homosexual art/culture/skin magazines (PinUps, Butt, Kaiserin, Kink), so adult content only I guess. This comes out in later summer. I am working on a performance for this using signed fan photographs celebrity-style: and in fact this is the second reference to Richard Prince here, I think. Ok goodbye.
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Garlands information, Janie Nicoll
by Janie Nicoll 24 Jul 2008
Garlands Exhibition, The Park Gallery, Callendar Park, Falkirk, FK1 1YR
Exhibition runs 9th August – 8th September 2008
Gallery opening hours Monday-Saturday 10am–5pm; Sunday 2pm-5pmOpening Reception – Friday 8th August, 6pm- 8pm. All welcome.
“life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life….â€
Comment by Robin Guthrie, formerly of the Cocteau Twins.The exhibition “Garlands†showcases new installations and video works by Janie Nicoll made for the Park Gallery, as a result of a year long residency at Callendar House and in collaboration with residents from the High Flats at Callendar Park. These works combine the use of old and new technology and imagery sourced from Callendar Park, Callendar Woods, and from the Tower Blocks themselves. These new works are derived from ideas that resulted from conversations with the residents, about their relationship with the buildings themselves, and the communal spaces such as the stairwells and the rooftop areas. Nicoll is interested in using these unique buildings and spaces to make artworks that hint at universal themes such as life and death; mortality and immortality; the class system past and present, and as a way to explore the dystopian affiliations associated with High Rise living.
Nicoll’s work often seems quite literal or straightforward, using text within an artwork to spell out familiar phrases or lines from songs, although this interpretation can sometimes be deliberately ironic, allowing for multiple meanings of the work.
“Daisy Chain†is an installation that uses projected slides of vibrant floral imagery to dominate the space. As well as being aware of the subjective nature of colour, Nicoll deliberately uses old technology and redundant equipment to quite literally step back in time. This is mirrored by the action of taking the photographs in the artist’s own garden, in Callendar Park, her parents’ garden, and the onetime garden of her grandmother. These works attempt to link the generations while connecting the artist to her surroundings.
In one video-work, letters that spell out “Carpe Diemâ€* flutter on washing lines; while another video “Upstairs Downstairs†alludes to the history of Callendar House, but could similarly refer to more everyday drudgery and physical struggles. “Forget-Me-Not†is an installation that uses floral displays to deal with the idea of memory, longevity, love and loss.
“Nicoll’s work is involved in the process of translation and conversion – of scale and of materials – to make new stories from old. Her work involves small acts of scrutiny and transformation that uncover beauty, banality and anxiety in the overlooked details of the everyday. Small things, maybe, but not insignificant“ Moira Jeffrey
Janie Nicoll originally trained in Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and graduated from the Master of Fine Art course at Glasgow School of Art in 1997. She has exhibited regularly in Scotland and internationally, most recently in Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop; the Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh; Intermedia Gallery, CCA, Glasgow; the Deviant Arts Festival, Trollhättan, Sweden; Red Wire Gallery, Liverpool; Generator Projects, Dundee; Chapter Gallery, Cardiff; Lowsalt Gallery and EmergeD VSF Gallery Glasgow; The Waygood Gallery, Newcastle; The Changing Room, Stirling; and the Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany. Video works have been shown internationally including South America and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
She has undertaken previous residencies at Self Help Graphics, Los Angeles, USA; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Neonatal Department; Yorkhill Hospital for Sick Kids, Glasgow; Chatelherault Country Park, Hamilton; Shining Cliff International Residency for My House Projects, Nottingham; and Generator Projects, Dundee.
*“Seize The Dayâ€
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Cycles
by Janie Nicoll 23 Jul 2008
Things seem cyclical. Maybe that is just the way of things, the order of the universe, maybe it is human nature to assess and reassess but it seems to be happening to me a lot at the moment. Looking at things with different eyes or a different viewpoint, maybe with the benefit of hindsight…. This is the case with the Jo Spence exhibition currently on at GOMA. I was asked to do a couple of photography workshops with adults and teenagers and I enjoyed having a discussion about the work, especially with the teenagers, being able to talk about the effects of the Miners Strike and Thatcherism, as well as putting the work in a perspective afforded by time passing, seeing its significance in the grand scheme of things.
Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of music from the period before I had children, there seems to have been a bit of a hiatus around that time. People warn you that you’ll lose a third of your brainpower when you have a baby, and it does indeed feel like cotton wool or a frontal lobotomy may be inhibiting things a bit. Most cultural input from then is a bit of a blur. It also marks a change in my going out habits from being a regular club-goer, to someone far more limited in the nocturnal activities department.
I am now working my way through my CD and vinyl collections, re-listening and reassessing a lot of music that had been relegated to a high up shelf. The Cocteau Twins are one such band. Thinking about them takes me back to Edinburgh in the mid Eighties, I went to see a lot of bands back then. From my record collection you can tell that I had a habit of being interested in a band when they were really new, but losing interest by the time they got more mainstream, usually by the second album. I think this happened with the Cocteau Twins as I have their first album and singles but none of the others….. Listening to them again it’s obvious why they were unique and influential. I remember seeing them play and they were like nothing else at that time, with there abstracted lyrics and the wall of sound they created. Its often mentioned how Edinburgh bands never “make it†in relation to the mainstream success of many Glasgow bands, but again it depends on how you rate success. Again with the benefit of hindsight it’s easier to assess the contribution of many Edinburgh bands that didn’t make the mainstream e.g. The Cocteau Twins; the Fire Engines; Joseph K and whose lack of commercial success made their careers relatively short-lived but not without influence.
The next Edinburgh band that caught my imagination was the Shop Assistants, with their double drums and catchy pop tunes. They were much more rough and ready, but they also blew me away. By that stage I had also become involved in the grassroots music scene happening in Edinburgh and Glasgow, with the influence of East Kilbrides’ Jesus and Mary Chain, who had recently moved to London; and Alan Magee’s Creation Records, encouraging the do-it-yourself ethos that produced a whole range of bands including Rote Kappelle, Jesse Garon and the Desperadoes, The Vaselines, The Soup Dragons, The Pastels, and Teenage Fanclub.
Recently there was a BBC Scotland programme “Caledonia Dreaming†that attempted to trace this DIY ethos from Postcard Records (which began in a tenement flat just along the road from where I now live) to the present, ending with Franz Ferdinand. Inevitably this programme managed to omit the vast majority of bands that made up the independent Scottish music scene, side tracked, as all these programmes do, into highlighting the careers of Hue and Cry, and the Proclaimers… another missed opportunity… The grassroots music scene and artscene in Glasgow and Edinburgh are still as interrelated as they ever were… each one as important to the either… and long may that continue..
For the Garlands exhibition I have decided to make things ‘Floral-tastic’, taking the title literally with the intention of creating an installation that is awash with colour and the scent of flowers.. Not just musically, the title of the exhibition has prompted me to reassess areas of my life that I thought were in the past. I have revisited the gardens of both my grandmothers, and photographed the flowers that still remain from when they lived there. I have also created a short piece of writing about my relationship with my grandmothers, who were both very influential to me. I am interested in exploring this generational aspect, obviously in relation to the age group of the residents we are working with at Callendar Park. Throughout the residency it has been a theme that I have been interested in exploring – what you can and can’t do, what is possible, what is not possible. Whether its been dropping things from the tower blocks themselves, a la J.G. Ballard’s “High Rise†or going back in time, metaphorically or otherwise, its all to be explored….
Also out of the blue I received a comment on MySpace (www.myspace.com/janienicoll) from Robin Guthrie about my artworks….
“life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life….â€
Yes, things seem strangely cyclical indeed.
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The Colony Room, New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Coming SOON
by Alex Hetherington 22 Jul 2008
The Colony Room is a celebration of the legendary Colony Room, Soho’s notorious private drinking den conceived by Scottish San Francisco-based Anne Colvin.
Situated at the top of a shabby staircase, near London’s Soho Square, this down-at-heel but welcoming space has been a favorite haunt for British artists ever since it was started in 1948. The club was owned and run up until 1979 by the infamous free spirit, Muriel Belcher who paid the young Francis Bacon ten pounds a week and free drinks to bring in the clientele. He did and Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Henrietta Moraes were among the regulars.
“Her genius was in the ability to mix members. This gave her club more variety and a touch of the unexpected not to be found in other clubs. But above all Colony Room was a success because Muriel created an atmosphere where you could be yourself†– former club member. Anne hopes to follow in her footsteps.
Housed in a raw garage space, filled with Francis Bacon reproduction works, The Colony Room San Francisco will be open three nights a week with each night featuring a guest artist invited to do an informal reading, screening, performance or intervention. San Francisco’s favorite conceptual artist, Tom Marioni will be the guest of honor on opening night paying homage to his Wednesday club where “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Artâ€. Other guests and presentations over the course of six weeks will include conceptual art costume rock band extraordinaire Caroliner; riotous LA collective Sweater Queens; eclectic poets and writers, Dodie Bellamy, Suzanne Stein and Bill Berkson; anarchic Portland-based artist Modou Dieng; temporally conceited Anne Colvin; “Britain’s most brilliant experimental theatre company”, Forced Entertainment; edgy gallerist and boutique owner, Jessica Silverman; manic Glasgow-based Alex Hetherington and more. Screenings will include an interview with a drunken Francis Bacon, award-winning Red Without Blue and Shadazz, Luke Fowler’s Glasgow compilation. A disco night, a Kiki night, hand stamps, a Muriel cocktail and 80’s sounds from Scotland are some of the other surprises in store.
The Colony Room is run by an artist, supports other artists and stands as a haven for artists, exiles and maverick spirits. You are invited!
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Also File 2008 opens in Brazil, 5 August, where a new film project screens alongside a whole host of work: http://www.file.org.brCheerio.
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Mineral Park, more information, opens 9 August
by Alex Hetherington 11 Jul 2008
Mineral Park assembles multiple materials, narratives, video, sound, biography, music, performances and texts that play in and out of sequence and synchronization to generate multiple and differing, evolving experiences from the specifically chosen and researched materials. Alongside this Hetherington has selected a number of international video artists whose work corresponds in different ways to the materials and themes in the show: here he attempts to synchronize his practice to the work of other artists generating further alliances, sequences, disruptions, coincidences, abrasions. The show will be self-generating; the work will change and evolve independently during its installation.
The materials used are: the biography of the twins Jennifer and June Gibbons, the notorious sisters who created a secret language and had a pact not to communicate with the outside world; performance footage re-enacting songs by the Cocteau Twins, a band from Grangemouth who achieved international success with their beautiful and ethereal songs, featuring the singer Elizabeth Fraser who created a difficult to understand language; video footage shot at the Grand Canyon and Mineral Park, a ghost town in Arizona, footage from Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, California, the one time home of industrialist Robert Dollar; two high energy disco, acid house songs: Voodoo Ray (A Guy Called Gerald) and Let Me think About It (Ida Corr & Fedde Le Grand) and the description of a mid-air plane collision and the language psychology of why gay men speak with a sibilant S.
Hetherington investigates the context of the ‘exhibition’, ‘screening’ and ‘group show’ by juxtaposing different disparate materials over multiple screens over the duration of a regular feature film, 90 minutes. In addition the material includes works by a group of artists working with similar, contrasting or disruptive themes central to Hetherington’s practice: the interrogation of the nature of pre-existing images, texts, films, performances and the context of the exhibition as well the tensions revealed in their reworking, their reorganisation, their presentation. Further themes include the nature of language, the construction of gender in cinema and theatre, and the synchronization of assembled materials: live and pre-recorded, improvised and immediate, past and present, incongruous and abrasive and the collage and re-enactment as embodiments of the ambiguities surrounding identity and the self-portrait.
Anne Colvin’s video loops deliver a mesmerizing take on reworked imagery. Re-animated clips coalesce with occasional sound along a carefully edited timeline creating an experience more akin to musical abstraction than a linear filmed narrative; her work “The Audition” throws a scene from Godard’s “Contempt” – one of those quintessential Nouvelle Vague films about film – into a monochromatic (red and black) dreamscape of movement and audio crescendo. The players are stuck in their bit part audition tirelessly waiting for rejection or inclusion.
John Sebastian Vitale screens two video works On it (American Voodoo Wish Machine) and I is Something (Free Band T-shirts). Both are documentation of a performance/installation and an interactive sculpture. Vitale works here with performance strategies surrounding magic, distortion, mystery, sonic vocabularies and a rock and roll sensibility discharging an intense visual and aural interference through the screening space.
Troglodyte by Desirée Holman is similarly charged performative based work and extends its vocabularies to the absurd, the theatrical. In a comic and ridiculous gesture, Holman investigates human emotion and behavior by pretending to be a chimpanzee. The term ‘troglodyte’ describes a simpleton or brute who may live in a hole in the ground or in a cave. A troglodyte is emotionally reactive and potentially dangerous; s/he is without acute powers of reasoning. The video plays with ideas of violence, sex, animism, nurturance and the primal horde.
Lewis Holleran’s double-screen installation The Cupboard Scene is presented here as a single-channel video. A recent graduate from the Environmental Art Department, Glasgow School of Art he works with themes central to Hollywood’s film noir, immersion and the
sensory perception of contrast, rhythm and timing. The Cupboard Scene employs selected sequences from Orson Welles’ 1962 motion picture The Trial. He sets the characters from the feature film into a perpetual dilemma, between light and dark, deliverance and impasse.Lucy Keany, works with performance and video materials surrounding feminine identity, titillation, the gaze and archetypes from glamour. Her video and photographic pieces involve working with performers or people in performance roles: participants become a kind of surrogate material. This new work Is That a Cowboy Outfit features fast editing and a double-screen technique to impress upon a sense of her screen as equipment of empowerment, conflict and challenge. The performance to camera in the work features the artist, and Missy Malone, a Burlesque performer, model and actor.
Zefrey Throwell’s Nausea employs numerous video compositing techniques, tests, sounds, suggestions of possible narratives and confrontational depictions to generate a disquieting space of anticipation, distortion and predicament. It mirrors, recreates and summarizes the intensity of emotions and consequences within miscommunication, misinterpretation.
Mineral Park is accompanied by a limited edition publication; copies of Lucy Keany’s Fool’s Gold publication will also be available.
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Poetry Reading
by Alex Hetherington 9 Jul 2008
The Village Voice group met yesterday to undertake a performance poetry reading in homage to the Poetry Room at Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, California. We’ll have the images and video online in short extracts soon, at the main blog, with longer versions on a dedicated web site electronic version of The Voice.
We had readings from a number of Scottish poets, of course Robert Burns, but also from Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn, WH Auden, ee cummings, Dylan Thomas, and on the table but never read a wonderful work Supermarket in California from Allen Ginsberg.
The women did these poets proud and I think it’ll make an interesting contribution to The Voice.
On Mineral Park, and Garlands, more print to the presses, and me at home today working on the catalogue. I’m really happy to be bringing all the artists productions to this project, I really enjoy all the pieces and I hope it works: commingling and synchronizing so much video and sound from a broad range of practices and conditions. John Sebastian Vitale’s work, the American Voodoo with a car on bottles, has a nice connection to the film for Meddle with the Devil, my Falkirk Voodoo work/performance. I have a feeling though that this video installation will make for some very difficult experiences for the audience, especially since it self-generates on different loops, there maybe times when there is little to see and conversely, at other times, hugely contrasting sound and video playing simultaneously. There is a lot of noise in the show and the descriptions of materials related to the voice, language, misinterpretation and representation. The misinterpretation that led to a plane collision, to a set of crimes and 14 years in enforced hospitalization, speech, gender and sexuality assumptions brought on by pronunciation. Which are all delivered by Michelle, an electronic voice generator on the PC at the studio/office/sounding box (the door, the door, which bangs like a mini-earthquake every time someone uses the corridor between the spaces in the building.)
I am making little signs for the show, Neon John, Mineral Park and Cocteau Twins, little door nameplates. White on red.
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Back at square one ?
by Janie Nicoll 6 Jul 2008
The last few months for me seem to have been punctuated by the various gigs I have been to in an unplanned random kind of way; Arcade Fire and Clinic; Sons and Daughters; The Kills; Malcolm Middleton with Alan Bissett; Edwyn Collins with Roddy Frame; Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan. This week I went to both gigs at the Barrowlands, of My Bloody Valentine, who have recently reformed after 16 years, having been recognised as one of the most significance contributors to indie-dance crossover music from the early nineties. I first met them when I was in second or third year at Edinburgh College of Art, when they stayed at my flat after a Sonic Youth gig at the Edinburgh Venue. Last time I saw them altogether was down in London for three nights of the Rollercoaster tour, in 1992. It was good to catch up but I felt like it was a bit of a mind-f**k in the way that these kind of meetings, after such a long period of time leave you thinking about what you have achieved in the interim, so what have I been doing for the last 16 years??
The parallels between music and art continue with the next exhibition we have at the Park Gallery, entitled Garlands, after the Cocteau Twins first album. The image I have created for the invite card reworks the image from New Order’s album cover “Power, Corruption and Lies†which itself reproduces Henri Fantin-Latour’s “A Basket of Rosesâ€. This artwork is featured in the book “Sympathy For the Devil, Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967â€, published to accompany the show at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago which also features Jim Lambie’s work. For the invite image I have created what I think of as a cacophony of flowers, from Callendar Park, the Hidden Gardens and my own garden, mixed with a bit of Las Vegas neon. The Fantin–Latour rose is still visible at the top of the pile.
Having taken some time out for other commitments, this week is a crucial one where I need to get my ideas together for the forthcoming exhibition. This exhibition seems to have been shunted forwards due to the Mod happening in Falkirk later in the year, and I must admit that I could have done with more time to get my head round things here. Its still feels like quite a tall order to create a worthwhile and genuine collaboration with the residents while still creating cutting edge contemporary art. There still seems to be a divide that needs to be traversed, negotiated, navigated. While talking with Rachel Mimiec about her recent residency at the Hidden Gardens she said that she felt that often it’s the things that go on under the surface, at an invisible level that are often the most important.. This seems to reflect how I feel so far about our collaboration with the residents; it’s the small things that become significant and not necessarily the obvious things.
I have ideas about using photography to bring the park into the gallery, to make works that use the tower blocks themselves as a basis for new works. We shall see…..
As usual, it’s all to play for.
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Silence, away, work, away, edit, away, video
by Alex Hetherington 6 Jul 2008
Consciously taken some time away from writing on this site. I have just finished as lead artist, with Rebecca Green, a drama specialist who lives in Santa Fe, a summer school of performance workshops for the Edinburgh International Festival. The themes surround the play Class Enemy ( I don’t want to describe the content of this drama) but we had input for the group from Owen and Mikaela from Fool for A Pretty Face, since Owen is great at improvising songs, from two actors who remained in character almost entirely throughout the first workshop and from a series of motion pictures that we felt had some kind of relationship to the play: so we had scenes from Donnie Darko, A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club, Mr and Mrs Smith, Reservoir Dogs, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Wizard of Oz… The workshops were great, ideas surrounding improvisation, games with the mics, rehearsed readings, adding disparate materials and performances to camera. The participants were great, open to some very, I would imagine for them, strange ways of working. Edits from the workshop will appear on a large-scale video wall at Rutherglen Town Hall in August, online at the Festival’s site and I believe the Citizens Theatre, where some of the participants engage with their theatre school.
Back at Falkirk, after a tough week. Janie and I are finalizing the print for Garlands and I return to the editing for the video collage for Mineral Park. We will also return to work on the Village Voice which I hope to render as an online publication to include video.
On the writing front, I have a commission to write on Cathy Wilkes at The Modern Institute, more on this soon. It’s for another online publication, this time with the theme of the global art market.
Garlands runs from 9 August until 8 September. More of course on this soon, and more images from the artists.
Here are their biogs:
Anne Colvin is a Scottish artist based in San Francisco where she also runs the project space TART. Her work and exhibition programming have achieved considerable critical acclaim both nationally and internationally. (http://TARTsf.com)
Desirée Holman is an Oakland, California-based interdisciplinary artist. Her process involves fabricating (or, less frequently, appropriating) figurative props, which are manipulated in role-playing games. The work questions what games of make-believe, like the ones created in her work or ones created in multi-user online games or elsewhere, can tell us about our behaviors in the ‘real’ world. Holman was recently awarded a 2007 Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Hessel Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Milan’s BnD, Toronto’s YYZ, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Lisa Boyle Gallery in Chicago. In 1999, directly after completing her BFA in sculpture at CCA, Desirée attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She graduated with her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2002. Her work has been reviewed in numerous times in publications such as Artforum, Los Angeles Times, NY Arts, Artillery, San Francisco Chronicle, and Artweek. Holman is represented by San Francisco’s Silverman Gallery. (www.desireeholman.com)
John Vitale is an American conceptual artist currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown in New York, Chicago, Portland OR, and Miami. John is also the co-editor of ”.......” (Dots& Quotes), a free print/web publication. The first issue was published by the Collective Foundation POD Press and the second issue sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and distributed internationally.
(www.johnsebastianvitale.com)Lewis Holleran is an artist, based in Glasgow, who works with light and video, he recently graduated from the Environmental Art department at the Glasgow School of Art. (www.artreview.com/profile/LewisHolleran)
Lucy Keany is an artist based in Edinburgh, she recently completed her MFA from Edinburgh College of Art; her recent publication project Fool’s Gold features a list of international artists working with themes in performance. (www.foolsinprint.com)
Zefrey Throwell is an artist living and working in New York City. Investigating honest communication, in all it’s varied plumage, is his aim. Working with video, radio and painting, he is exploring the connecting points and underpinnings of social discourse. He is a member of two collectives, Red76 and Thin Ice Collective. He loves them both equally and won’t be pressured into picking a favorite. Zefrey works with Gallery 138 in New York and is a regular contributing member to Art Radio WPS1 (PS1 Contemporary Art Center).
(www.zefrey.com) -
Garlands/Mineral Park # 2 , Tramway, The Hidden Gardens and the People’s Palace
by Alex Hetherington 24 Jun 2008
So summer is almost over. Anyway today the Village Voice team take root at the Hidden Gardens in Glasgow’s southside at Tramway to meet the artist Rachel Mimiec and hear about her project Artist Witch, a partners supported residency that she has been working on for two years. She worked with a child psychologist and developed work from a shed/studio in the Gardens, then exhibited the project work at Tramway’s new exhibition space. After lunch we are off to the People’s Palace in the eastend.
Expect a report on all of this soon and perhaps a feature in the next edition of the VV publication.
Garlands is developing and Mineral Park, the video installation and screening is going well: here’s the information –
Mineral Park assembles multiple materials, narratives, video, sound, biography, music, performances and texts that play in and out of sequence and synchronization to generate multiple and differing, evolving experiences from the specifically chosen and researched materials. Alongside this Hetherington has selected a number of international video artists whose work corresponds in different ways to the materials and themes in the show: here he attempts to synchronize his practice to the work of other artists generating further alliances, sequences, disruptions, coincidences, abrasions. The show will be self-generating; the work will change and evolve independently during its installation. (It’s all about language, relationships to information, interpretation.)
The materials used are: the biography of the twins Jennifer and June Gibbons, the notorious sisters who created a secret language and had a pact not to communicate with the outside world; performance footage re-enacting songs by the Cocteau Twins, a band from Grangemoouth who achieved international success with their beautiful and ethereal songs, featuring the singer Elizabeth Fraser who created a difficult to understand language; video footage shot at the Grand Canyon and Mineral Park, a ghost town in Arizona, footage from Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, California, the one time home of industrialist Robert Dollar; two high energy disco, acid house songs: Voodoo Ray (A Guy Called Gerald) and Let Me think About It (Ida Corr & Fedde Le Grand) and the description of a mid-air plane collision and the language psychology of why gay men speak with a sibilant S.
Alex Hetherington
Anne Colvin
Desirée Holman
John Sebastian Vitale
Lewis Holleran
Lucy Keany
Zefrey ThrowellLewis Holleran’s powerful video The Cupboard Scene is just amazing and I am glad he has agreed to screen it; Anne Colvin’s The Audition uses found footage from a Godard film and is just so hypnotic, it is less ‘angular’ than her other works; Lucy Keany shows the film she made from her degree show, featuring herself and Missy Malone in an exaggerated positioning of female identities. Holman shows her green-screen dance sequences with troglodytes. I have an array of works by Throwell and Vitale and have yet to decide on the final line-up, I may use it all. Anyway it runs from 9 August to 8 September.
I have been in communication with members of the Cocteau Twins so we’ll see what they have to say soon.
Janie will supply her information soon with images, but I believe she is using slide projections and video in the larger gallery space. She is also a featured artist on Art Review’s web site www.artreview.com (sorry I can’t remember how to tag for links, so just copy and paste)
Fool’s Gold (edited by Lucy Keany and design by Tommy Grace) to appear alongside shows at Gasworks and Matt’s Gallery. I will also have copies to be included in Lucy Keany’s screening at Mineral Park for the show Garlands, in August.
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Mineral Park #1/An open letter to the Cocteau Twins.
by Alex Hetherington 17 Jun 2008
For the next show at the Park Gallery I am working on bringing four US-based artists work for a kind of group show commingled with my work, filmed materials shot in the US and voice-overs sourced from a series of materials and writing, reports (more on media, interpretation and relationships to information) and mid-air collisions, the voice psychology of why gay men often speak with an effeminate accent, and the idea to create a sort of new language for which I am referencing the work of the Cocteau Twins. The video materials come from a baseball game, footage shot at the Grand Canyon and the interior of Robert Dollar’s house in San Rafael, now the Falkirk Cultural Center, and a thank you to the very elegant Jane Lange who runs the house.
I also wanted to include a number of artists from here and the US so that this show doesn’t feel like an immediate repeat of Meddle with the Devil, that we have something brand new, that we have made connections to this place beyond itself. I’ll be confirming these artists soon.
In the gallery this week I will be Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins, singing (using voice technologies) versions of her lyric base, her freeform, flexible, mutating song structures and pronunciations, this is all bound to fail. It has a connection of course to the recreation of Kate Valk’s voice from House/Lights. I shall be performing works from Bluebell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas. More on Mineral Park and Garlands from us soon.
Dear Cocteau Twins. Far from Grangemouth now? I love you and always will. I’m glad you’re not doing so much cocaine. I wear your ring. Alex Hetherington
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Tom Marioni/Colony Club
by Alex Hetherington 6 Jun 2008
Anne Colvin, Neil Mackintosh (of Tart, SF) and I went to Tom Marioni’s drinking party on Wednesday; it runs from 5pm through until about 8/9pm at Crownpoint Press on Howard, it’s his studio and gallery space I guess, with an area that looks like a small bar with soft red leather couches and seats at the bar. Tom is a kind of conceptual art superstar with connections to Scotland in the form of Richard Demarco, he has also shown internationally at major galleries, though he describes himself at ‘emerging’. Anyway looking forever like Quentin Crisp with DKNY glasses, he holds this drinking party every Wednesday since I believe 1959. At the bar we see numerous older generation San Francisco artists, a few very big names here; but I shan’t name drop, there’s too much of that already. Artists hand out cards/invites for upcoming shows in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, photographs are taken and everyone signs a guest book that logs your participation in what really amounts to get drunk and talking about art.
Anne was talking about her idea for her project at New Langton asking Tom to perhaps be a guest speaker at what she calls a private club in a kind of update to The Colony Room in the 1960s and 70s. I think it’s a great idea; she also discussed a re-enactment of Marioni’s Piss Piece (and I immediately thought of Jonathan Monk, Helen Chadwick); here he pisses into a large copper container from a high ladder: “it’s all about the acoustics†he explains.
I bring a forty dollar bottle of red wine. Everyone brings booze, and we listen to Jazz. An older man, who looks like Matisse in denims, sits guzzling a beer; he apparently winters in Edinburgh having studied there in the 1950s. Tom and a video artist talk about their time, years ago, in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Tom also talks about the time he, according to Laurie Anderson, spent on a desert island; is this the liquor talking too?
Eventually we also talk to Paul, a writer in his sixties, a kind of academic on pop culture and postmodernism, stuff; he illuminates us with his recent research project: Jennifer, a glamour model from LA, who also uses performance art in her “workâ€. I dunno, the air reeks of mid-life crisis. I liked the man who talked about Duchamp being a chess player and his question of the day: about winning and losing, and his mail art while running a construction business, he also talks at length about the art market, value of art pieces, art tax breaks etc. A lot about money in a country with very little subsidy. He asks me about my work and where I have shown; he thinks I am cool. He has a lovely friendly face, very open and delightful. This is good company. And I think that’s what this is all about.
Anyway back at Falkirk perhaps we can set this kind of thing up too, boozing with your elders.
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Words from California, for Sarah Hollinswood
by Alex Hetherington 3 Jun 2008
I have wanted to write something for a while from here in California, but I have gotten caught up in the sunshine, seeing exhibitions and work. Anyway this blog is for Sarah Hollinswood and her kind words about our online presence here on PARS. Thank you.
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the next show for The Park Gallery and the installation I want to present is called Mineral Park, named after a ghost town in Arizona that fought for years for its status as county seat of the larger district only for residents of the local, larger town Kingman to go in and steal from them all the paperwork related to Mineral Park’s status and administration. It is now a ghost town and was abandoned in 1912 when the US post office pulled out. It is also the site of the find of the world’s largest turquoise mineral stone. None of this history appears in my production; rather I want to concentrate on some of the ideas the site implies. (I went there, tried to camp at the old camp site, only to find it converted into a large quarry and having to avoid coyotes trawling the grounds.) More of this soon: but the materials I am employing include a description of a plane crash, speech psychology and research, footage from a baseball game, a performance using a fake, stolen language and video from the Grand Canyon also of course in Arizona (vertigo central, I had to be physically taken off one of the viewing platforms I was so terrified/compelled to jump off, apparently it’s called Thanatos syndrome/instinct, check out Freud).
I have seen and reviewed a number of shows here: all of which appear on Interface/Reviews Unedited at a-n magazine. You can find the page, you are smart people. I wanted to write on Anne Colvin/Tart San Francisco’s publication series Skank Bloc Bologna, Dexter Sinister at New Langton Arts, Joan Jonas at Berkeley and the new show at Silverman Gallery, after opening their new space at Sutter Street in SF. I have seen a series of other shows, but didn’t want to cover them. I go to Yerba Buena art center tomorrow to look at a large scale show on feminist art, which seems the flavor of the month all over the US.
I have also been following the Robert Dollar story, which has run dry somewhat having been tossed out of his building in California Street without the right photographic permit. I met some people there though who allowed me access to some of the archive material. I may add this into the new work, I don’t know. I also visit his house again in San Rafael, which is now an arts center, to film the grounds and interior. I have had to stay out longer in the US than planned, but I am taking advantage of this situation to get more research done. (Robert Dollar, this industrialist, is extremely fascinating but he remains out of reach at the moment.)
I will follow this up with more commentary soon. Next time around: why I am not a public artist or socially-engaged artist and should therefore stop blogging on this site; what to do when you see four stupid Texans jumping between 6000 ft drop rocky outcrops at the Grand Canyon?; what we learn from misrepresentation; oh and I have seen a tons of movies here.
Finally I have a date at Tom Marioni’s drinking party on Wednesday. He is one of the Bay Area’s principal conceptual artists who has been having this drink gig for years: see Tom Marioni’s 1970 exhibition, The Art of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art. That’s all folks. Sorry to hear of the passing of YSL, Bo Diddley, Sydney Pollack.
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The Village Voice Issue No.2
by Janie Nicoll 20 May 2008
The second edition of the Village Voice magazine is now being distributed to every household in the Callendar Park High Flats and is also available for anyone else who is interested. It’s been printed as an edition of 1000. Anyone requiring a copy please get in touch by emailing a postal address to
janie.nicoll@falkirk.gov.uk or by phoning 01324 506983 or 01324 503788 -
Halfway house
by Janie Nicoll 18 May 2008
Over the last couple of weeks I have been able to kick back and take things a bit easier after the hectic time of the last few weeks, putting up the exhibition, and putting on the Big In Falkirk events. It was good to get it all out of the way, as these are things that have been hanging on the horizon pretty much since we began the residency. The year planner seems comfortably empty in relative terms and that’s almost a relief.
I’ve just realized that it’s exactly six months since we began the residency so we therefore have exactly six months to go. It’s definitely time to take stock, to look back and assess how things have been going in order to get on with the future. It feels like it has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride so far.
We were sent a copy of the video footage from the presentation we did at Praktika and we have had to do our reports for the book. The Praktika seminar definitely seemed to highlight the very differing approaches Alex and I have to socially engaged art practise. Maybe that would have come out in the wash anyway over the course of our year working together but it seems to have been catalyzed by the intensity of the two days there. Whether that’s been a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen but its food for thought anyway. It has been quite hard to sum things up for their publication in a very restrictive 250 words each.
There are a few practical things that I need to sort out in order to push on with my own work, but in general I feel fairly comfortable with the way things stand with regard to the group we have to work with, and the potential for making things happen over the next six months…
As in all situations it’s all in the interpretation whether the glass is half full or half empty, my glass is definitely still half full.
On wards and upwards…!
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Film screening, London//And gone to San Francisco
by Alex Hetherington 9 May 2008
Another Roadside Attraction Gallery’s regular artist film screening returns to The Griffin on Wednesday 28th May.
Starts at 8pm
The Griffin
93 Leonard Street
London
EC2A 4RDNora Adwan
João Biscainho
Christophe Bruchansky
Emily Candela
Disinformation
Christopher Hall
Anton Hecht
Alex Hetherington
Alexander Kelly and Christopher Hall
Robin Kiteley
Claudia Mateus
Claire McArdle
Richard O Sullivan
Camilla Robinson
Mikio Saito and Youngho Lee
David Sherry
Marianne Templeton
John Younge
Also I am away to the Bay Area next week for part 3 of a series of research works in the US; I hope to report from San Rafael (Falkirk twin town) too, as it’s just a little ways from where I will be based. More soon.
House/Lights to appear at Falmouth Live Art 2008, June 6 – 8. More soon
And thank you to all those involved at the weekend.
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Its been a blur !
by Janie Nicoll 2 May 2008
It’s the night before ‘Big In Falkirk’ and everything seems to be ready to go….. Its been a hectic few weeks with an exhibition, a music event, a performance event, an outdoor video screening and a residents magazine to organize. No wonder its all been a bit of a blur.. Strangely enough i feel far less stressed about the coming weekend than I did about the opening of our exhibition. I think when you put your own work out on show it adds a whole extra strata of anxiety… Will it work visually, technically, conceptually? Will people be able to understand it or get something from it? I was anxious in case any of the residents would react badly to their “Empty Portraits”, as they have such existentialist overtones, and could be read as a bit depressing. On the night at least six of the group turned up for the opening and were complimentary and enthusiastic about the show and the portraits, so that was a relief.
I am the type of person who only really seems to get my act together when I can see the deadline staring me in the face. Will I ever learn, I wonder ? It was only in the last few weeks before the exhibition that I realized what kind of work I wanted to make, although I am glad in a way that it has indeed involved the group of residents that we have been working with, in quite a direct way. For me this adds weight to the work, as I know that there has been a genuine interaction, a build up of trust and friendship that is not superficial or contrived and I think the next stage of the residency for me is to build on this.
Another significant development is the fact that during the portrait sessions I found out that there is a video channel linked throughout the flats to every TV set. A few weeks back a fellow artist from Praktika, Rosie Gibson, had suggested to me the idea of creating a radio station as a method of communication with the residents of the High Flats. Not knowing much about the dynamics of radio or sound work in general, I didn’t think this was something that we would be likely to tackle. However, with the realization that there is a TV channel we can hopefully access, and maybe create regular bulletins or ‘shows’ of some sort, it opens up a whole new spectrum of possibilities for us as artists and for the group.
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Invitation
by Alex Hetherington 1 May 2008
All readers are invited to the events over the weekend at Big In Falkirk.
Saturday 3 May is a music event in the Park Gallery, featuring two Glasgow bands, ‘Tut-VuVu’ and ‘Fool for a Pretty Face’ at 4pm.Sunday 4 May is a performance event featuring Jim Colquhoun with Voice Like Bones; and a performance of House/Lights again at 4pm. Please contact the gallery to reserve tickets. It’s free but ticketed, 01324 503789.
The Park Gallery is situated at the Stable block next to Callendar House, in Callendar Park. Parking will be severely limited on the day.
To get to the gallery: take the Edinburgh /Glasgow train to Falkirk High, walk out of the station to the right and down hill to the first set of high rises, and along Kemper Avenue that leads to the Park. Follow the signs passing all the high rises in the park and the gallery is on the left in a cluster of little buildings. It’s about a ten minute walk.Also House/Lights has been programmed for this year’s Falmouth Live Art Festival. More on this soon.
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a-n magazine, May 2008
by Alex Hetherington 28 Apr 2008
a-n magazine have run some of the images from Meddle with the Devil, as well as a mention on the screenings and the installation. They also have a piece from Nuno Sacramento about the Praktika workshops.
The reel is finished and is on a dual layer DVD, it took 18 hours to render and one sleepless weekend, where I had those horrific anxiety dreams (Shark eats live dog, probably picked up from news story about shark in San Diego and all the photographs and jokes about dogs).
The print I designed for the screening comes in today and I’m glad it will be distributed before the screening days. The Village Voice Edition #2 awaits further small edits to then go to the group and the printer Tuesday.
I go to Banana Row in Edinburgh in the morning to check my voice for the performance on Sunday; its the setting on the Vocoder that says: “Betty Boop on Helium”.
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Rendering
by Alex Hetherington 24 Apr 2008
I met with UZ and Paul from Metro Ecosse in Edinburgh who are supplying the equipment for the projection, and building the screen and the scaffolding. So this was great and I’m really glad they are organizing this. The reel is on its third test render and I think it should all fit on one DVD. It’s a very full program, divided almost equally by the footage from the residents and the films and videos by the artists and runs to well over an hour, it is not intended to be viewed at one go, rather it should feature in passing as the audience attend to their domestic affairs, or gaze over the views to the events and see some distracting art films. I really enjoy the Deren film, I also really like Richard O’Sullivan’s Present Tense, but the whole program feels very strong, with a good mix of duration, tensions and approaches.
Metro Ecosse and UZ will be running at test Monday night and another Friday; so the render should be ready by then, the last version took 19 hours to complete. It’s 3.18pm 4/24/2008 now; check back here this time tomorrow to see if it has worked.
The Village Voice proof is also done – so we should be able to get edition #2 to the printers next week. I also made the card for the invite which went from gold to pink in a flurry of color thinking hell; it should be ready this week too for distribution to our audience(s) in time for the event. No word yet on the security system piggy-backing the reel.
My playing card also came in; it’s a giveaway at the show and features four characters from the film, as a Queen of Spades ( I am the Queen to King Kenny’s King) and on the reverse the Ace, which is heroin in boiled wool or felt. Please take one if you come by the gallery.
And if anyone indeed reads this; I want to apologize for being a pain in the *ss for the last six months. I’ll be taking a break now.
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The information...
by Alex Hetherington 20 Apr 2008
This installation, Meddle with the Devil, combines and synchronizes materials that attempt to simulate memory loss and fake memory syndrome employing a series of graphics, The New York Times newspaper logo, a large-scale mirror, black-out curtains and performance materials, as both live re-enactments and on video, which also explore and stage exaggerated public behaviours, personal relationships to the press and exchanges based on wealth and desire. These works make reference to and synchronize an array of materials, including Mike Kelley’s works Memory Ware and Day is Done, the video work of Catherine Sullivan, House/Lights by The Wooster Group, The Idiots by Lars von Trier, The Tenant by Roman Polanski, email scams, hazing rituals, newspapers quotations, marbled paper, explosions and biker gangs. It also references the town motto: Better Meddle with the Devil than the Bairns o’ Falkirk and an ongoing body of research into memory stimulated by working at the House and the High Rises, principally archives, recollections, mementos, etc.
For this installation I have produced a new film: Falkirk Voodoo King Kenny, with email scam and dog jokes (2008). The basis of this film is personal and public transactions, primarily the exchange of money, the exchange of ideas, news, power etc. It uses a scenario from a re-enactment of House/Lights, an experimental theatre work by The Wooster Group, the texts for this work commingles Gertrude Stein’s libretto Dr Faustus Lights the Lights and Joseph Mawra’s film Olga’s House of Shame. In Stein’s text Dr Faustus sells his soul for the power to create electric light while in Olga’s House of Shame, a drug and narcotics ring kidnap a jewel thief, Elaine, to bring her into alliance with the gang’s leader Olga. The second part of the film sees the text from two email scams, suggesting the accumulation of massive wealth from bank accounts from deceased millionaires, which are in fact attempts to steal the identity of anyone who falls for the con, as well as the contents of their bank accounts. The two fictional authors of the emails, Ken Morgan and Emma Bambara appear as absurd characters in a performance to camera filmed at The Park Gallery, 18 April 2008, with the photographer Jennifer Beaton. (Further forms of transactions appear as FOR SALE or FOR RENT signs). The characters also allude to King Kenny and George Washington, two identities from Falkirk’s past. These two men displayed extreme forms of public behaviour based primarily on religious zealousness, mental health issues and financial hardship, they appear in momentary recreations on screen based on a system of absurd interpretations. The work also includes the personality of Jayson Blair, a New York Times journalist who was forced to resign from the paper when it was discovered his news stories were either plagiarized or fabricated, his scandal is used in the film to develop a relationship to his imagination, his false memory syndrome, here re-enacted as a display of the psychosis but not the (traumatic) false event, since the ‘original’ events never took place or were radically different from their ‘public’ presentation. Meanwhile this form also extends my interest in interpretation of events and their siphoning, deterioration and corruption through memory and its imperfections.
The “Bairn o Falkirk” is seen in an image of a female child taken from a Mike Kelley work, she mimics my performance material (make-up etc) as well as displaying a premonition of aging. She also alludes to a character in House/Lights and Dr Faustus Lights the Lights, Marguerita Ida and Helena Annabel, a female split identity who is created by the Devil to deceive Dr Faustus and to the Devil’s promise in the text to reverse time, allowing the old to become young.
An artist edition has been made for the show, which appears in the form of a playing card: one side is the Queen of Spades, the other the Ace of Spades. The card shows some of the absurd characters in the film and the other is a specially-commissioned knitted felt drawing by Lorna Shields which shows the word Heroin in display cases, another form in the show referencing the psychotic, hallucinations, desires, addictions, downfalls. (The felt is my Joseph Beuys moment in the work, we all have them.)
Lars von Trier’s work The Idiots appears as a connection to the email scam as well as the presentation of faked behaviours, the film sees a commune of individuals pretending to be mentally disabled in order to challenge social acceptance and tolerance of the spectrum of modes of public behaviour.
The installation is accompanied by references to gold, a colour and material which appears frequently in Callendar House. This explores further notions of wealth, transactions and value. The work is supplemented by a number of old jokes about dogs, the kind of thing you’ve heard before, a set-up-joke-set-up-punch-line scenario again looking at constructing fictional mental narratives and their surreal outcomes. It also relates to the character of a dog in House/Lights whose only line is “thank you†(a receptive, accepted/acceptable transaction) and the policy of barring dogs in the high rises (a prohibited, unaccepted transaction).
The final character in the film is Roman Polanski (no stranger to scandal himself and still wanted as a fugitive from justice by the US authorities) from the motion picture The Tenant, here his male identity assumes a female one (the previous tenant who died in the apartment) as his mental status deteriorates, mirroring her decline (and the fugitive status of criminals Olga and Elaine). This connects the work again to my live performance of House/Lights which sees, through the use of computer and sound technology, my voice delivered in a feminized pitch. This completes a cycle of traumas and scandals whether real or imagined that commingle through this project.
Of course I also think there is something interesting about gender in all of this.
Also the bowler hat, used in the images: found in the office. Here’s what Wikipedia says: The bowler became a cultural identifier, ironically with two completely different meanings: throughout most of England it was associated with professional servants, i.e. butlers, and so upon seeing a man wearing a bowler in a pub or on the street, it was fairly safe to assume he was a “gentleman’s gentleman,” meaning a valet or butler; in London itself, however, it was associated with professionals, and so a man wearing a bowler in “the City” could safely be assumed to be a lawyer, stock broker, banker or government official.
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Notes on the film, the reel and security cameras
by Alex Hetherington 19 Apr 2008
Falkirk Voodoo King Kenny, with email scam and dog jokes, 17 minutes 14 seconds, silent
The characters in the film:
Jayson Blair, journalist
King Kenny, deceased Falkirk resident
George Washington, deceased Falkirk resident
The Banker, Ken Morgan
Director of Private Accounts, Emma Bambara
The Tenant, Roman Polanski
Elaine
Olga(Jayson Blair is a journalist who was forced to resign from the New York Times in May 2003, after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories.)
I’ll be adding more on this soon. I am putting together the reel today and shot some slides from Isabel’s collection, which I will transfer to video and add in Dan Mailer’s anniversary video. And then the VHS tapes. Then we’ll place in the artists’ video. I’ll upload the full program this week; we had an idea to put the reel in the community room too and are investigating piggy-backing the reel onto the security channel that runs through the apartments. Janie discovered the security door system is viewable on the residents’ TVs so they can see who is visiting. We are looking to see if there is a back-up channel that we can use, so the reel might appear through this, so it becomes a private TV station. I don’t know yet if we can pull this off.
As I was filming Isabel’s collection one of the slides fell into the mechanism and projected this interesting shot, which I’ve added to the photos part of the blog, accompanied by a still from the film for Meddle…
By the way Isabel’s collection is great; it’s a whole lifetime in there, someone in her family was a prolific photographer. I think it was her husband.
Untitled (sexyback, foley artist), (2008) my film about Justin Timberlake, silver foil, Olga’s House of Shame and a whole load of hellish noises is screening in Brazil in August, it’s at File 2008.
Also on the reel; I’ve added San Francisco based Scottish artist Anne Colvin’s piece Cracked Actor (2006) as a connection to the first edition of The Village Voice and to relate its title to the performance in myfilm. It’s also a great rock and roll moment, and will have resonance with the music event at BiF.
The final program for the reel will be here shortly.
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CCA, New Media Scotland, b-sides
by Alex Hetherington 18 Apr 2008
Notice
Screening, including my film A Film Found In A Dump
Upgrade! Scotland
B-Sides Scottish premiere
Wednesday 28th May
CCA, Glasgow
7-9pmIn 2006 New Media Scotland put out a challenge to artists working with video to make a short film using the other bits from their video archive: the off-cuts, bloopers, b-rolls and mistakes. This exciting collection of short films became known as the B-sides.
Since their premiere at Upgrade! International in Oklahoma the programme has toured to Boston, Belgrade, Vancouver, Paris and Melbourne and become the blueprint for other Upgrade! node’s compilations. -
Alchemy
by Alex Hetherington 13 Apr 2008
I just noticed the theme that keeps repeating and repeating is gold. It even showed itself in something we saw at Jonathan Monk at Tramway where the tram lines were painted gold and looked so splendid. I enjoyed Stephen Hurrel and the pre-exhibition by Rachel Mimiec. It has that prototype feel found often in the work of Cornelia Parker. Anyway expect much gold in the show and elsewhere, I am also wearing a new perfume called 888 that is supposed to smell like gold. Who knew? I hope to do some research on alchemy soon. I feel we may have gone all bling; Douglas Gordon’s gold tooth was there too, at the opening at Tramway, in his mouth, not on its own.
So tomorrow we install: I collect work and there is a great deal of transporting to do, so it’s count down. “
Are you aware that in twenty seconds you will be given a lethal injection and die? If you wish to continue please press the space bar. Thank you. Count down will begin now.â€
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Lines and Shadows
by Janie Nicoll 12 Apr 2008
Lines and Shadows
I had food poisoning yesterday and have been reminded how miserable it is to feel incapacitated and bedridden, how quickly you can start feeling depressed and despondent and have been thinking about various members of the group who have spoken about various ailments, operations, afflictions, problems with mobility etc….I suppose it is another aspect of getting older, a part of life that you don’t have to deal with so much when you are young , but it creeps in as you get older. Anyway it’s a relief to be feeling on the mend, and that my glass is half full again and not emptying.
I have been doing portrait sessions with the people in the Village Voice group photographing them in their own domestic setting, and a couple of the women have ended up talking about how their husbands have died very suddenly; one from undiagnosed cancer and another from a brain haemorrhage, they were both fine one day and gone the next. Its back to the “D’ word and the issue of longevity which relates (hopefully not too obviously) to the portrait artworks I am making for the exhibition.
The portraits I am making are not straightforward portraits although I am giving the participants their own portrait in return for their participation, and hopefully this is fair exchange. In the actual artworks for the exhibition I am almost entirely removing the person from the portrait, so they are left only as a line and their shadows. I am removing as much of the image of the person as I possibly can without them actually disappearing. In a way its an exploration of drawing within the context of digital photography, I suppose I am interested in the relationship photography has within Fine Art practice, having coming from a painting background, although I am currently more comfortable with drawing as an actual medium and its versatility, rather than an intermediate step. Ironically the photographs look quite sculptural as they play with space.
During the portrait sessions one of the women in the group started telling me about her life, this was precipitated by the fact that we have been sent a 93 page letter by one of the residents about his childhood growing up in Dublin, and she has volunteered to read it as I have no time free at the moment. This has obviously appealed to her a she has the notion to write about her life own story for the benefit of her grand children, as hers is quite a convoluted one. She was given up for adoption at birth as her mother came from a small town near Fort William, and was forced to come to Glasgow in secret, no doubt, to have the baby and then give it away, in order to return to her life. She remembers ILLIGITEMATE written in large bold red letters across her birth certificate, and never feeling like she belonged to the family she was adopted into, being told not to get ideas above her station and not being allowed to stay on at school despite being the Dux. She feels like the stigma of her birth, in a way has followed her all her life. We also talked about how society has changed over the past couple of generations, for women, for the better hopefully.
On Thursday night at the opening for Glasgow International I met EJ Major who is currently showing at Street Level Gallery, Glasgow and we talked about her photography series that documents the demise of a woman through drug use, using photo portraits. I told her about the projects I had worked on recently for organizations like Routes Out, the Wayside and Aberlour No 1. The phrase “But for the grace of God go you or I†was mentioned, and again the image of a pack of cards comes to mind. In a way we all live our lives with the cards that are dealt to us, whatever they may be.
In a different portrait session, one of the group handed me a pile of old photographs from the Bahamas with Edward and Mrs Simpson, which were very striking and also hand sewn postcards sent from France during the First World War, very poignant when you know that the sender, Uncle Jim, never came home. One contains the phrase “I Don’t Forget You†which seems like a strange use of language, but then I was thinking that these were cards sent by people who didn’t know if they would have a future, by people in limbo, living for that moment. -
Some information on Laura Cameron Lewis
by Alex Hetherington 11 Apr 2008
Laura Cameron Lewis is an actor, director, writer, producer and musician who is probably best known for her work with the theatre collective Highway Diner, who won a Fringe First in 2004 for Works of Temporary Solace, were nominated as Best Ensemble in the Critics Awards for Theatre Scotland the following year and recently worked with the National Theatre of Scotland. She has also worked as a producer for Communicado since 2005, and as artistic director of the theatre company Laboratorium 33, whose show Dig For Fire was widely acclaimed by critics.
‘A terrific erotic and emotional intensity by Laura Cameron Lewis… The commitment is often breathtaking.’ Joyce McMillan, Scotsman, reviewing Dig For Fire, 2005.
Erotic indeed… recent performance credits include appearing in her underpants as the lead vocalist and guitarist in her band, Laura Lewis and the Tea Dance Orchestra at Edinburgh’s Neue Liebe art cabaret, collaborating with visual artist Kirsty Whiten on her ‘Trophy Confidence’ film and also on her infamous ‘Feral Lingerie Model’ project which are both currently appearing in Stolenspace Gallery London. Other collaborations include appearances, films and art projects with the Scottish electro maestros, Swimmer One. Laura also works sometimes as a lecturer, teacher and arts journalist. She likes building sites at night.
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Filming House/Lights
by Alex Hetherington 11 Apr 2008
Laura and I performed House/Lights in action at Forth Valley; it was a wild time and such fun, we mimed the whole thing alongside the screens with all the action and prompts. I had my Comme des Garçons bulge and red tie; favorite part the gun shot sequence when Faust threatens to kill the dog and boy and me trying to do a handstand which failed miserably. Laura is a brilliant performer and I am so glad she worked with me on this. I edit the footage today.
We discussed memory and fake memory syndrome: presenting the psychosis but not the original experience (which has not happened and never existed, it’s faking a fiction). Of not having the memory of a woman. Slotting memory into a time line of failed attempts at recapturing or describing, using House/Lights as an assemblage of difficult memories and synchronizing it to this place and the experiences here. I keep thinking about things that alter memory: drugs, alcohol, trauma, disease, stress, mental health, age; also thinking about forgetting, memory triggers, souvenirs, archives, computer RAM, and how this work is like playing a game with the computer to keep up with it, its perfect memory set against our failing, debilitating, deteriorating memory. I hope on the day of the performance the computer wins. The soundtrack needs dog barking and this connects it to Janie’s dog portraits, then there’s the devil, meddle with the devil. In my case the devil might just be ‘copyright’. There’s the boy and dog in the performance, except in my installation it’s a young girl. I like when the Devil explains to Faust that he can make [Faust] “an old man a young man†. The young girl’s image taken from Mike Kelley looks like it’s a premonition of aging, although clearly the make-up is there to present her as a Goth. So then there’s The Park. Green and lush, it will look splendid in spring and summer and it’s House/Lights again, with the “carpet and the chair and the wild woods everywhere.” The young girl in the show is Margerite Ida and Helena Annabel, newly brought into the world to deceive Faust. (“Paging Dr Faustus, Dr Faustus”) I look at the woods and think about things that go on after dark. You know. Men. And drugs and booze. And late night action.
House/Lights is also such a woman’s piece and it reflects something Janie said about the group being all women. Well they live longer. So it’s about longevity. And not electricity. (The Young Frankenstein connection for anyone who has seen the original House/Lights, which I don’t use in the re-enactment).
-We looked again at glamour; Janie brought in images of Edward and Mrs Simpson taken from a personal collection from one of the group. The images were taken in Bermuda(?). I also found this amazing image of a black woman strolling down the streets looking ever so fine and dandy. How beautiful. I will use this photograph in my Wooster Group Fanzine: Black Model Agency.
Also Gi is now on and I went to Jim Lambie’s show; it was ok. The mirror and eye suspension was great and the chair collection was remarkable, but it was all a bit, well, flat. But it was good to see. It looked like all of Glasgow was there to see the boy off. Actually it was dangerously busy, so Andrea and I left for wine at the CCA. Which was empty. So that was good.
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Bomb!
by Alex Hetherington 10 Apr 2008
Tuesday saw the project go from normality to farce in one easy step: we saw some cops outside of the building, followed by more and a half muffled voice that said “we have to evacuate the building; everyone must leaveâ€. Followed my more cops outside and then, some time later, a head peering round our studio/office/closet door saying, “what are you doing here? (rhetorical question). You have to leave there’s a bomb scare.â€
So these are the things that I never thought would happen at the residency: 1. Involvement in Terrorist Activity. 2. Plane crashes into building. 3. Naomi Campbell and John Galliano take a stroll through the park with their dog, while wearing shell suits. All three of them. 4. Bomb scare. Callendar House must be so off the radar for a bomber, it has no strategic significance. Or do they know something we don’t?
So we’ve been working under an unexploded bomb for two months; a bomb from the Second World War, that had no certificate to prove it had been decommissioned. Half an hour later more cops show up escorting the Bomb Disposal Unit and one of those contraptions on the huge wheels and remote control robot arm; they couldn’t use it. The bomb is upstairs. So the army goes in. And nothing. Of course we’re all outside freezing. More time passes and the army guys re-appear and take the thing away. More time passes and we eventually get let back in. Only to be confronted by a panicked irate caterer accompanied by a demanding, angry security guard saying we have no seats for our meetings; and sure enough entering what we thought was a large meeting space turns out to be another closet with two chairs and a table. (Where were these people when the fiasco was taking place?) We have to fit 12 seniors (who can only think right now of warm tea) in here, two computers and us. And no chairs. I drift by the Xerox machine contemplating suicide, as Janie tries to organize the group. Chairs arrive but it’s too late the noose has been affixed to the CCTV cameras…
I get to work with the actor Laura Cameron Lewis and today, Wednesday, we talked a great deal about the work and why I am using House/Lights. We talked about memory, failure, computers, The Wooster Group, lots of things and are working in a great black box space at Forth Valley College, their TV Studio, I find a poster that says “I sold my soul.†We also talked about Synesthesia. She’s fascinating and I am so glad we are working on this project; I feel I was able to articulate a great deal about the ideas I am having about memory, and witnessing its disruption, corruption, disappearance and in retrospect to last year’s experiences with my mother. Anyway more filming on Thursday, we act out the physical movements of House/Lights for the edit. I have to thank Cathy Snedden for organizing this for me at the College. I owe her a huge bunch of flowers.
The reel is shaping up nicely. More soon. And we started getting print back in. I am thinking about how you simulate gold. And how I simulate a vacation because I am exhausted.
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The film program
by Alex Hetherington 8 Apr 2008
Today I stitched together the film program for the High Rise Cinemas project, bringing in the first works that we are screening; a full announcement will be made very soon. But for a PARS exclusive, the reel will include pieces from Maya Deren, Brigid McCleer, Morag Keil, Carlo Sansolo, Richard O’Sullivan, Kate V. Robertson, popup films, Laura Wilson. More of the program soon.
The reel is silent, ambient noise will create unexpected insertions, soundtracks, noise, and we think we have brought together a body of work that will look at the built environment, the natural environment and commingled work, footage and images that express a tension between public and private activities, it also mirrors and reveals further abrasions within relationships explored in the show Meddle with the Devil and especially codes of value and connections to the press. And of course nobody can see it except the residents of the high flats, so in a way you’ll have to take our word for it. So I feel it achieves a very public/private sensibility. More soon. Please stand by.
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Village Voice Editorial Group visit the Archive
by Janie Nicoll 4 Apr 2008
The Village Voice group meets every Tuesday afternoon with a regular and expanding group of interested attendees. Mostly female, strangely enough, and consisting of interesting characters with stories to tell once you scratch the surface. This week i started taking photo portraits of the participants in their domestic settings, which has added a whole new level to my understanding of the dynamics of the group. Another instance of “the more you give, the more you get back”.
This week we collectively visited the Callendar House Archive where Jean, the Archive Assistant outlined to the group the range of documents, ledgers and information that can be accessed in the Archive. It was good to be reminded of the wealth of historical information there… and the group certainly seemed interested. I was trying to emphasize to them that this session was really just an ice breaker and that it was a starting point if any of them wanted to return to look up or research things at a later date. It was lovely to see Lottie enthralled, looking through one of the log books for Bainsford School, as she read about activities of her former teachers. A genuine trip down memory lane provided through the neat handwriting, wrapped up in a leather bound volume, unwittingly recorded by the conscientious note-keeping of her Head-teacher, circa 1935. Priceless ! ....... the best things in life are indeed free…. unexpected, unrehearsed and unpremeditated….
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Meddle with the Devil #3 Method Acting King Kenny/George Washington
by Alex Hetherington 4 Apr 2008
Alex Hetherington’s installation combines and
synchronizes materials that simulate personal memory loss and fake memory syndrome employing a series of graphics, The New York Times newspaper logo, a large-scale mirror, black out curtains and performance materials, as both live re-enactments and on video, looking at exaggerated public behaviors as a reference to King Kenny and George Washington*, personal relationships and dialogs with/to the press and the notion of events and our connection with them based on personal, local, national and international levels. These works make reference to and synchronize an array of materials, including Mike Kelley’s works Memory Ware and Day is Done, the video work of Catherine Sullivan, House/Lights by The Wooster Group, The Idiots by Lars von Trier, email scams, hazing rituals, newspapers quotations, marbled paper, explosions and biker gangs…- King Kenny was a homeless, mentally-ill man from Falkirk who used to write his opinions on the press/media/local/national/international events using chalk and writing his statements on the streets. Everyone also points out his remarkably beautiful handwriting. He also used to busk playing a banjo at the lines for the cinema and theater. According to the group he died of some kind of poisoning. More on this soon.
- George Washington was an equally famous character in Falkirk (who apparently at one point studied Divinity). He stated that only Falkirk Technical School pupils who would be saved on the day of redemption. More on this soon, if we can find more materials on these individuals. *Ok. And George Washington wasn’t his real name; they called him that because ‘he could never tell a lie.’ *
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Print (the Legend)
by Alex Hetherington 2 Apr 2008
Today is print day: five sets of artwork going out, to a variety of printers and of course the vinyls. This is a headache because I am not really a graphic designer and I’m losing my way with some of the technical aspects.
Also Print the Legend is a fairly good show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, worth seeing for the film Lasso alone; and the Douglas Gordon. For those with a keen eye/ear for these things I produced a voice description of Lasso for The Consequence, which can be seen on my web site, follow the link to the Consequence Screenings.
Meddle with the Devil. More soon. Please stand by.
Janie is on photographic assignment today. I expect we will see the results in the show and here.
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PRAKTIKA
by Alex Hetherington 31 Mar 2008
I wanted to write up some thoughts on the film screening and what we want this to do, but I got distracted because we have some ways to go with the final program, so instead I thought I’d write on Praktika. I also don’t want to disrespect it because it was very valuable, however it has left me restless, agitated, frustrated.
The Praktika workshops are now a few weeks past and I wanted to consider the space between the work presented during the seminars and what we are presenting as the first stage of our work during this residency.
This will help me write up the text we are supplying for the publication, the deadline for which is the 15 April.
I spoke with Sally Hobson, theatre artist and Programme Development Manager (Education) at EIF; she said an interesting thing, “that the language to describe these [socially-engaged] projects has not yet been invented’ and I have to agree with her. I think we struggle to explain or illuminate the workings of the projects or detail the relationships developed or articulate any results they may achieve. I need to spend more time researching some of the texts related to this area of work and perhaps that may give me a base to speak more confidently about this language or its absence.
Some of the projects at Praktika made me angry and its perhaps because I don’t see myself as an artist who works in socially-engaged spheres or arenas; rather I think my work overlaps or touches on narrow areas of this field of work and I find myself spending more and more time working in a position of reluctance. I cannot explain more about this yet since it is in a process of developing. Its also maybe because I have had some bad experiences working with this kind of material or brief.
I don’t want to isolate any of the projects at Praktika, rather I have thoughts and questions on some of the statements made during the event. And I apologize if this seems illogical and scattered. I wonder if the idea and process of fundraising for these projects becomes more alluring than the project itself. Some of the artists considered themselves as ‘social workers’ and I wonder how much this respects/disrespects individuals, their experiences and training who work in this field? I was bewildered by some of the images of individuals involved that seemed to constantly depict them, identify them as victims. I need this explained. I need to understand this process, because I feel it creates a really significant barrier between apprehension and critical dialogs. This was an attempt to empower these individuals and I can’t quite see how this can be. I wonder how some of the projects work entirely without budgets for their artists to make work? I wanted to address some of my thoughts on ownership of other people’s stories, experiences and thoughts and whether or not artists are best placed to re-voice these stories, experiences, thoughts. I was dismayed by a lack of political criticisms and debates on the processes, situations, agendas etc that results in such a huge displacement of humanity, such a myriad of misery, escape, destruction and sanctuary; without criticism we have indifference or acceptance and in that way I sense that we may be taking advantage. Some of the work has this very specific aesthetic that seemed to summarize it as immediately and obviously socially-engaged which means all the work looks the same, it doesn’t differentiate and therefore it doesn’t anticipate more from its audience, it doesn’t conclude or interrogate it just persists, it is able to maintain itself, without evolving. I don’t see how “dead French philosophers†can’t inform these projects; the areas of making art don’t site themselves purely in pockets of easily tagged separation. I just don’t think it’s good enough. I wonder why there was so much agitation about galleries, when the results of the work were presented in galleries. I can’t help thinking that questions of how these 3 month or longer residencies create legacies or long-term change is redundant, in my mind I think it is generations away and also major shifts in other thoughts, approaches, notions of empowerment, self-respect, personal responsibility, enabling. I also don’t think I have the answers. I don’t think I am becoming a Republican (as an almost middle aged half American). I also don’t think I am having a nervous breakdown, but I am not ruling it out.
Anyway back to the purchase orders, faxes, telephone calls, emails, franking machines, I am up to 55 words per minute now.
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Meddle with the Devil #2 events
by Alex Hetherington 31 Mar 2008
OK. We have discussed the screen for the outdoor projections and that looks like its all in place now; we will announce the full program this or next week. It should be a 14ft x 8ft screen on scaffolding and we have still to discuss its final location and how many sight lines there will be for the buildings.
Mikaela from Fool for a Pretty Face came to the gallery today and she said I looked agitated.
More video on Saturday with the photographer Jenny Beaton which should be fun.
The giant mirror is on order as is the huge NEW YORK TIMES text.
I have a problem making a 4m x 2m black curtain… but I hope it will work out…
All the video and sound for House/Lights are now synchronized and hopefully will work together if I have the timings in place; I still don’t know if I have a black box for more of the pre-recorded video work. I need this sorted tomorrow.
We have the design for the print for the events made and will get the print for the video done too. We may also have to design our own poster and invite, since the design team at the House maybe “too busy”.
THE EVENTS ARE 3 & 4 MAY. PARK GALLERY, CALLENDAR PARK. TUT-VU VU AND FOOL FOR A PRETTY FACE PLAY SATURDAY 3RD. JIM COLQUHOUN AND HOUSE/LIGHTS PLAY SUNDAY 4TH MAY. BOTH DAYS START AT 4PM.
Free, but ticketed
Please call The Park Gallery to Reserve
STRICTLY LIMITED TO 50
By Telephone: 01324 503789THE FILM SCREENING RUNS FROM 6-9PM AND CAN ONLY BE VIEWED FROM THE BUILDINGS AT THE PARK, MAYBE WE WILL HAVE A LITTLE MONITOR IN THE GALLERY WITH THE VIDEOS TOO, I DON’T KNOW
More soon. From the voice of starvation.
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Site Gallery Sheffield
by Alex Hetherington 26 Mar 2008
A note here for an essay on Brigid McLeer’s fantastic installation performance at Site Platform; you have to download the essay from a link at the bottom of the page. It’s never easy huh?
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Silence & Praktika
by Alex Hetherington 24 Mar 2008
I have been in New York for a little while now and returned just last week before heading to Deveron Arts with Janie to attend the PRAKTIKA workshops and seminar organized by David Harding, Rosie Gibson and Deveron. More information on the attending artists and their projects can be found on Deveron’s web site. The overall feeling right now is jet-lag and art exhaustion. It’s difficult to know how to articulate all the recent experiences and the conclusion of the seminar. I hope to write more about this here. I realize how much some of the projects make me angry and I want to really consider why this is so and want this Blog to be the place to articulate this since I feel it is the best vehicle to open up the discussions PRAKTIKA commenced. They are publishing later so it will be good to see how this works out.
New York was brilliant and I have to thank my friend Carrie Urbanic for her hospitality and time. I saw more exhibitions than I can describe here but some reviews will be added to a more appropriate vehicle online: AN unedited, for instance. I have to say though the Catherine Sullivan show at Metro Pictures was without a doubt the most amazingly conceived and presented work in all of Manhattan.
I am archived to death and interviewed some interesting artists. (In New York).
Everything now is in sharp relief. (At Falkirk.) The ground has changed and I think it is fair to say that things here are proving more and more difficult for me. I wonder how here we begin to discuss, in this vehicle, how projects are sustained, have continuity, have reason, approach opportunity, deliver?
I never want to underestimate what we are undertaking or be flippant about it; but I need to ask fundamental questions here about what we think we are doing?
Clearly my mind in still in Manhattan.
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We drank too much coffee
by Alex Hetherington 19 Feb 2008
Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk was once hospitalized due an excess of caffeine; apparently the members of the band spend their mornings at their Kling Klang Studios in Frankfurt drinking really strong coffee then hitting their sequencers, keyboards and digital technologies: man-machine-espresso. On the other side of the world David Lynch also has a major caffeine habit sending himself into a frenzy before writing his screenplays. If you’ve seen Lost Highway or Inland Empire I‘m sure this will make a lot of sense. Even if the films –as wonderful as they are – don’t. Janie and I are Ralf Hutter and David Lynch today and we have an excuse: the Village Voice newspaper/magazine arrived, all 1000 copies and today we folded the lot for distribution around the apartment buildings. It’s stuffing envelopes time, interspersed with refills of the black stuff. The newspaper looks quite good but to be honest if I see another copy of it during my lifetime it’ll be too soon. I will feel different with Edition #2 I think. But no more coffee. Ever. I shall now be up all night listening to Autobahn and Computer World watching Inland Empire and the Lost Highway simultaneously.
Anyway the residents have the publication and I hope it generates some interesting materials. Please stand by.
ALSO. If any reader wants a copy of the Village Voice publication, you can get in touch with us via email (send your name and postal address) at alexander.hetherington@virgin.net and we’ll send a copy out.
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Schedule and cinema
by Alex Hetherington 14 Feb 2008
We are now the proud producers of an event series at Park Gallery with a great (hopefully) confirmed line-up: Tut-Vu Vu, Jim Colquhoun, Fool for a Pretty Face and the House/Lights performance. The video and sound work for this piece will be finalized soon. And we are discussing all the work for the installation Meddle with the Devil. We also have to finalize the screens which we need to leave the team of arts officers to organize, we have an interesting set of works in already but it’s trickled away and we’d like to see more work in our in-tray. Communication seems to be an interesting development during this period, it’s difficult to reach some people which stalls and sways the continuity.
The appearance of cinema keeps being a theme, with Dog Day Afternoon, The Shining, Zodiac, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre among today’s long discussions. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s original print belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, and of course Kubrick’s King adaptation is genius. I re-enacted the last few scenes for Janie who hasn’t seen the film in its entirety. I started from the moment Wendy wakes up to see MURDER written on the bathroom door, in reflection, in the mirror, and Danny’s voice getting more high-pitched and quickened as he repeats: “redrum†over and over again. I ended on the long-take as the camera moves towards Nicholson’s face from the Overlook Hotel party. My favorite scene is in the men’s room with Dilbert Grady, the walls of the bathroom bright red. I think Janie is planning a performance to take a tricycle through Callendar House as a re-enactment of The Shining. I wonder where in Falkirk we can get three million gallons of fake blood and a bear costume. All this horror had me adding sellotape all over my face and the images for this will end up in the show alongside a vinyl lettering text – The New York Times. I think we both drank too much coffee today or maybe we just indulged ourselves in far too many references. I recommended Janie read The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed and Men, Women and Chain Saws by Carol J. Clover. I can just see security at the House having a field day as we re-enact scenes from horror movies (with the House in the Woods theme) wielding axes and power tools.
I have also been thinking about horror movies, mainly The Tenant by Roman Polanski and the transvestite identity shift in this film in what is called his apartment series: Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion being the others. (So we have isolated individuals going crazy in isolated places). I think The Tenant has some mirroring with House/Lights and the way I am playing it. It’s also a nice theme for the residency.
We also talked about Zodiac, David Fincher’s brilliant movie and the cryptograms the killer sent to the press. Maybe the new text will be San Francisco Chronicle. I am thinking about how people communicate with the press. We also talked about Ed Gein and of course Robert Bloch’s Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. Later when we show at the Hippodrome some of these film ideas will appear on screen.
What I wonder are your thoughts on horror movies?
More on Meddle with the Devil as it progresses. Please stand by.
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Panorama
by Alex Hetherington 12 Feb 2008
We were given spectacular views from Isobel’s apartment today – 11 floors up with views over the park, over the town, over to the hills, with what looked like smog, a seam across the terrain and then to Grangemouth. Today was bright and clear. The apartment made me have vertigo. I was convinced the building was swaying but it wasn’t. And then it’s so quiet and hot up there. Isobel has one of those enormous flat screen plasma TVs that turn front rooms into cinemas and she is really fascinating with an audacious and poised outlook on life. These views, her personality would fill that TV. She has been very generous with us and has donated boxes and boxes of slides and an old projector to look through what looks like 1000s of images. There was some shame in her voice as she said some of the slides were of Orange Walks. I can’t comment on this yet.
This residency is beginning to reveal some difficult situations. I am thinking about it a great deal and am glad that I am away for a couple of weeks soon. Falkirk is a difficult place I think. There is something about the voices here that I can’t quite explain yet. When I get back I think I should have more to offer here.
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The Eye
by Alex Hetherington 11 Feb 2008
I spent extended periods of the weekend looking at, videotaping and drawing silver foil. I guess it has something to do with Janie’s gold. I found some footage I made a while ago of silver foil that I had sped up to see what it looked like; it looked like I had animated it. It didn’t look real. These flimsy rubbish mirrors will be added to the show at Park gallery and also form a seam in a new video I am developing. Or rather made, because I have edited a work together than I recognize as something I have wanted to make. It looks like I’ve projected found footage onto silver paper. I see it everywhere now: silver foil in cigarette packets, silver foil for the wrapping for the Macs, silver foil used in vacuum packing for expensive perfume. So I added Olga’s House of Shame to this video ‘animation’ of silver foil; I like this surface for its failure to reflect. I always need to synchronize this with something else and all the found sound I have downloaded form the soundtrack for this process: all the gestures, movements, fades, long shots and close-ups in the edits are given specified sounds like a foley artist as a replacement voice-over. I have sounds from video games, hisses, electronic beeps, crows, dogs barking. Also a real voice-over from a lecture Larry Rinder gave at Triplebase in San Francisco in October last year, sped up so it doesn’t sound real. Rinder by the way curated the Whitney Biennale a few years ago and is now the Dean of the CCA in San Francisco. His exploration of a show at Triplebase Gallery in the city during his lecture works perfectly with Olga’s House of Shame. The resulting work is so noisy and visually full it’s difficult to listen to, difficult to look at…It has the effect of a terrible mirror denying any real way to look at and own the images. Kinda what I am all about. Gillian Smith and I talked about this today: all the references and an inability within technology to capture.
Meanwhile in Falkirk the Village Voice went back to the printer. And I have noticed the emergence of the “eyeâ€. A look I am given frequently in Falkirk. I feel like the Man Who Fell to Earth with my contact lenses out and my androgynous alien body glowing in the dark of Falkirk’s gloom. I expect I’ll be looking at Tony Oursler next. His gigantic eyeballs gazing without emotion at these fields of introspection and suspicion. Glasgow suddenly feels like New York here.
House/Lights moves apace as I am searching for a black box and then I have Olga almost in place. More conversations. And the “eye†and the endless CCTV cameras.
Also the B-Sides program of videos curated by New Media Scotland has a new screening in Paris. (It has now shown at sites across Europe and North America). I may go. I need to look at Galliano Dior couture if Tilda Swinton’s outfit at the BAFTA’s is anything to go by. My film in B-Sides is called A FILM FOUND IN A DUMP.
It’s full circle.
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Week
by Alex Hetherington 7 Feb 2008
It’s been a week of extremes as we keep ploughing through what I am beginning to see as the tiers of bureaucracy that you might come to expect on these kinds of projects. I am now wearing an I Am Not An Arts Officer badge, just to keep in mind of the ‘audience’ that we are not employed to be substitute arts officers but indeed artists who need all the time here to research, develop and make work.
I am writing this between times when I am rendering out pieces of edits from Olga. The Mac is ultra-fast and the clip is already made, before I even reached the end of this sentence.
Yesterday was a low point as the woman I was due to meet for the live Olga part didn’t turn up for our meeting in Edinburgh. And I am now thinking of just doing the physical part with Janie and the voice over with Lisa, so I gave Lisa the script this morning and hope she likes what she reads. I need a black box to film our mime of the work, so I need to discuss using a theatre or drama space somewhere in Falkirk unless that doesn’t exist and we have to do it in Glasgow. The other issue revealing itself is how much we have to organize here in addition to making work. I guess we’ll have to keep on with this ploughing act until we demonstrate that the continuity on the project is beginning to slip.
Janie is sighing deeply. We are in a container that has come to this place from another time. And now we see our software as a new emerging void. It’s like that weird camera action they use in horror movies where the background seems to begin to move backwards, the central character moving forward. Except it’s the other way round. Time is disappearing because we spend too much time with pink slips. The honeymoon is truly over.
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Institute of Failure
by Alex Hetherington 5 Feb 2008
It’s Tuesday and I keep thinking today is Monday. I am out of time. We are filling up the Year Planner like two PAs; dates to remember, days planned with meetings and get-ins for the show, dates to work out the performance, dates to send artwork to printers and framers, black paint and black felt curtains. I realize I go to New York in three weeks, and then we are heading North for a scheduled project, I am jet-lagged now. I hate using the telephone, but I have calls to make and as usual I blurt out senseless information to people I don’t know trying to get a point across.
Anyway I have decided to foreclose my idea for a performance group. I have had no interest in this at all and it seems pointless to continue emailing out the flyers and information. I kinda like this though; it’s a good failure, I like the way it dissolved in front of me. I know we’ll just have to bring in outsiders, that it is just spectatorship here really. So without a single audition or any calls or emails or really any form of concrete support I can send this away as a disappearing act. I wonder if I really had the energy in the first place and whether anyone would want to work with such a vague set of ideas. I am still on the hunt for a rehearsal space for my existent cast, so will proceed to investigate this. I may have to rehearse outside of Falkirk entirely. I like Matthew Goulish and Tim Etchells project the Institute of Failure and will research this as an element in the demise of my non-existent performance group that only ever existed in my imagination. I can see them but they are not real. So we have the original House/Lights crowd plus additional cast and crew more on this very soon.
More videos appeared as did some Falkirk archive video footage from Scottish Screen; it is clips of film footage from the 1930s. Dan Mailer came in with his parachute jump videos. The proof for the Village Voice came in with Mr. Printer… We made some more connections and enquires/discussions about the screen(s) for BIF and everything is now covered in gold.
I retrieved House/Lights script from the bag we used at ESW, I found a DVD deck in there! and tons of cables, I also found the original Gertrude Stein book which has Dr Faustus Lights the Lights and other garbage/preciousness that I collect, crappy Cds, a copy of Last House on the Left (Wes Craven), Catherine Sullivan’s catalog for The Chittendens, ancient materials for this moment, autechre CDS, candy from San Francisco. I reference everything and nothing and it’s all covered in gold and dirt.
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Objects of interest
by Janie Nicoll 4 Feb 2008
Alex and I have fairly contrasting approaches to art-making and hopefully this is a healthy factor in our residency. Alex’s approach is fairly prolific, working through ideas at a rapid pace. I seem to be taking a lot longer to work out what I want to create or work with during the residency, I’ve been taking photographs and am interested in a lot of the artefacts that have ended up in the collections in Callendar House. Alex is interested in the cultural links with Falkirk and America, whereas I am more interested in investigating things closer to home, though maybe separated by time, history, and generations.
The archive and the collections at Callendar House are a vast resource that we have barely even begun to scratch the surface of. I have been taking an interest in various random objects, around the House; a sampler made by Janet Livingston in 1858, A Political Reform banner from 1832, a book of handwritten music: these feel like direct links with the people of the past. Today I visited the Museum Workshop in Grangemouth and was shown around by Emma Roodhouse, its like a smaller version of the Transport Museum and the Open Museum combined, with a huge range of objects, from large items like tram cars and many objects representing the heavy industries of the area, the ironworks etc. to smaller domestic items. I inevitably felt far more drawn to the things that are a representation of human interaction, the more feminine side of things. I ended up photographing handbags and purses and lace items, and looking at the clothes that are stored away in cupboards, in acid free tissue paper and boxes, until my camera battery ran out. One of the handbags was a post war number with a fake gold trim that fitted the bill rather nicely. I have started working with the theme of “All that Glitters Is Not Gold†as I am interested in “The Have’s and The Have Not’sâ€, the contrasts within society, a recurring element in much of the work I have been making recently, in particular the “Fake Gold Ring†I made for the exhibition at Intermedia Gallery, at the CCA.
Callendar House is such an obvious symbol of the landed gentry over several hundred years, and the contrasts within it are omnipresent. Tomorrow I am intending to photograph an Archive storeroom that has been restored to its original décor, complete with a gold leaf covered cornice. Its hidden away out of view, in an area not open to the public, but it must be one of the grandest storerooms I’ve ever seen. I’m interested in recording some of these symbols of ostentation and wealth, although it is equally interesting to discover the attic rooms where the servants lived, right at the top of the house, pretty much untouched since they were last occupied, a long while back.
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Weekend
by Alex Hetherington 4 Feb 2008
We sent the launch edition of the Village Voice to the printer, a proof should be back in this week, we report to the group tomorrow and should have all the pages to show them. I’m looking forward to reactions to the Jim Colquhoun text and responses for our call to action. I’m looking forward to what this might mean for us, for them. It’s like waiting for the sky, slow motion. Meanwhile I went to see the Camilla Løw show, Straight Lines, at the DCA. Its such an achingly self-conscious show, fragments of seriality, it is so narrow, I couldn’t breathe, the sculptures looked like they had been manufactured by a machine, given instructions to play out all the possibilities of a limited palette of colors, materials, shapes and angles. Yet its brittle desolate sensibility reveals a kind of wanting, best embodied by a crumpled metal white form leaning against the long wall in the gallery. This motion was its only revealing human moment among all the mobiles, stacks, neon colors, empty, in-between spaces. I kinda thought of Richard Prince’s car hoods in this piece, it might be a reference to her time living in San Francisco, living in America. Two colourful prints are shown in a small annex, I checked the ‘for-sale’ print bins and these seemed to be by Martin Boyce, is this true? Or have they be wrongly attributed to another Modernist economist?
Anyway Straight Lines articulates another set of experiences with the built environment, that might find a voice with our encounter with these High Rise buildings. It might be time to investigate their materials.
This week if I get paid then I am ordering a pair of too short black polyester Comme des Garçons trousers for the performance of House/Lights. It should cheer me up because…
I just finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which had me awe-struck and open-mouthed for large chunks of its meaty yet serene text. Its fluid, comprehensive, coherent tone is in dramatic contrast to its killer accusations, its full and reasoned arguments spilling venom over the disaster capitalism complex that is embodied by the Chicago School Capitalist clean-slate, wealth accumulations in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Falklands, China, the Asian Tigers, Russia, etc. I was particularly interested by her discussions on gated communities, Red Zones and Green Zones, the emergence of districts of wealth and private security, the hollowed out government passing all of its responsibilities into private hands.
Back at the High Rises and the House tomorrow; I like what Janie is doing with gold. I will return to Olga’s House of Shame tomorrow and all the found sound, the noise.
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Double Act @ Project Ability
by Janie Nicoll 1 Feb 2008
Double Act
An Exhibition at Project Ability Galleries 1 & 2
1st February – 28th March 2008Zeynap Arman
Kate Burton
Angeline ferguson
Sandi Kiehlmann
Tommy Mason
Cameron Morgan
Janie Nicoll
Steven Reilly
Gary TurnerProject Ability
18 Albion Street
Glasgow
G1 1LHThe opening for Double Act was last night at Project Ability in Glasgow. This has been one of four sets of collaborations, mine has been with Tommy Mason, one of the ‘Art Trek’ artists. It has been an entirely different kind of collaboration to the one that Alex and I are currently undertaking for Falkirk. I have just posted an image, “Elvis Has Left the Building” and it is quite uncanny how it could almost be an image from the High Flats at Callendar Park.. It’s a digital image but it looks as if it could have been created using a set of projections onto the building itself, which is something that Alex and I are hoping to achieve over the next few months during our residency. I have posted the catalogue essay from this exhibition on our Falkirk Residency Blog, at http://falkirkresidency.blogspot.com/ or check it out at http://www.myspace.com/janienicoll
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Skank Bloc Bologna #1
by Alex Hetherington 30 Jan 2008
SKANK BLOC BOLOGNA, Tart San Francisco
In February 2008 TART will launch an art and poetry journal entitled Skank Bloc Bologna.
Skank is inspired by Semina a free-form journal published sporadically by artist Wallace Berman and his circle in California in the 1950’s and 60’s.
These short bursts of contemporary avant-garde poetry, prose, photography, collage and drawing were augmented by fragments lifted from various visionary precursors, then mailed out to a couple of hundred kindred spirits. With a somewhat irreverent attitude and a DIY, ad hoc approach Berman was able to create his own culture and community.
Skank Bloc Bologna will offer a loose leaf collection of works with each piece able to stand on its own or be re-configured within the collection. Rather than offer a thematic framework the collection will be open to interpretation. This is the first in a series of issues with a view to Skank becoming an extension of the TART program.
Contributors:
Bill Berkson
Sari Carel
Alejandro Cesarco
Ishan Clemenco
Anne Colvin
Caroline Colvin
Jordan Essoe
Graham Fagen
Oliver Farley
Marcella Faustini
Urs Fischer
Alex Hetherington
Nico Ihlein
Fabienne Lassere
Rebecca Miller
Frank Olive/Rudy Shephard
Anne WaldmanLaunch:
Toscas in North Beach, San Francisco, US
Wednesday February 13th
6-8pm -
Editorial Team
by Alex Hetherington 30 Jan 2008
Janie and I decided to ‘exploit’ the Root and Wings Group as our core editorial team, made up of some of the seniors at the Flats, they are already working with the materials we would like to feed into. Lottie’s story about her dentures and the Niagara Falls was hysterical as was her Japanese tourist story from San Francisco. I hope to meet her sister in Manhattan in February. Anyway this team of advisors should be able to help the progress of creating the newspaper and I hope we can get the launch edition to them soon. It’s slow progress I guess.
Meanwhile I developed sound for House/Lights again and am meeting what I hope will be Olga in Edinburgh next week. (the studio was filled with electronic bleeps and that great line from Planet of the Vampires: “And I confess now, to whoever may hear this, that today, now, I am experiencing fear; I must not let my crew know this I must keep them busy. I must not let them know the situation grows more hopeless with each passing day.â€
Tonight I’ll work on the video extracts. But then again it’s been raining a lot and Callendar Park seems like many degrees lower than the rest of the country so I may just sleep. Met Kirsdy from Lowsalt on the Subway tonight; she’s a brilliant artist who, with Becky, runs a brilliant space. Thoughts on galleries and institutions seem to be omnipresent having sent out hundreds of copies of the booklet. I still have in mind my Kill the CCA project, it’s never left me. Janie has been working on her Project Ability work today and missed the cross country runners at the Park, freezing in their nylon sports gear, huffing and puffing in the rain and grey, I smoked a cigarette for effect.
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Olga’s House of Shame
by Alex Hetherington 27 Jan 2008
At last. Today I got a copy of Joseph Mawra’s film Olga’s House of Shame from a local video store that clearly has a buyer who is interested in 60s grindhouse cinema. It was in the racks alongside more traditional cinema, like it obviously has to be in the bins with I, Robot, The Wedding Crashers and Little Miss Sunshine. This feels meant. So it’s going into the show in May. And that’s all I have to say on that, for the moment. I may post stills here; but it’s so not public art.
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TART San Francisco
by Alex Hetherington 25 Jan 2008
San Francisco artist and curator Anne Colvin features our project on her web site as well as details of a publication I am in devised and produced by Lucy Keany. It also outlines Anne’s exciting new publication project Skank Boc Bologna
View the site here: Tart San Francisco
Lucy Keany is an artist based in Edinburgh, who presented her film The Ventriloquist in our screenings The Consequence. Incidentally I met Lucy quite by chance the last time I was in San Francisco at Margaret Tedesco’s gallery space.
Her publication features:
the virtuoso, ad-lib, timing, humour, one-man shows, dancing strategies, desperation, wannabes, Live Art, music and new technologies, audience, glitches, etc.
Contributors include:John Beagles, Simon Bedwell, Dr. Simon O’Sullivan and Dave Burrows, Luke Collins, Anne Colvin, Tim Etchells, Eloise Fornieles, Ryan Gander, Alex Hetherington, Vlatka Horvat, Matt Keegan, Torsten Lauschman, Tron Lennon, Dr. Sophia Lycouris, Dr. Neil Mulholland, Hayley Newman, Graham Parker, Gail Pickering, John Russell, Jamie Shovlin, Prof Atau Tanaka (Culture Lab).
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The Manhattan Band
by Alex Hetherington 23 Jan 2008
I had been looking through the archive again and we read Ian Scott’s interesting book on Falkirk, its surrounding districts and came across mention of The Manhattan Band, a music troupe that played in the 50s and 60s at Falkirk dance halls. This will be the name for my performance group, which is really the same cast for House/Lights as before plus Lisa and some others to contribute. Anyway we are doing the show again: I am thinking of using ear pieces for the script this time and for three women to play the role of Olga both on video and live as well as adding more sound to each physical movement. Lorna will be looking like Susan Sontag and I have to go out and buy more devil horns from a joke shop; I need to get more sound in the work. Anyway we watched bits and pieces of The Wooster Group’s To You, the Birdie after Racine’s Phèdre. It’s astonishing. Our new Macs arrived and this adds to our growing excitement to use the technology and potential they offer; I am in LOVE with the iMac and its powerhouse processors. I’d like to speak with Ian Scott and the historical society he runs. More on this soon; I see gems everywhere.
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New York Times
by Alex Hetherington 21 Jan 2008
Today I received 1000 print-run of a little publication The New York Times that I’ve been working on for a while; mainly from September and October last year from my research trip to San Francisco and New York and to follow through to the next stage in New York in February. This is a set of drawings that will feature in the gallery show at park in April, so it’s good to see them in print form, on glossy art paper, like a brochure, a promo for voicing authority, the press, newspapers, the like. And how it passes, and becomes archive almost simultaneously, how it becomes memory. So it appears and disappears, without thought unless it’s personal, or widespread or huge. This isn’t, it’s tiny and flimsy. It has appropriations of Rose Lesso’s text on my performance in September, and Mike Kelley ’s Memory Ware and Diane Thater’s film Jump that seems to follow me everywhere and some other clues to its inception, the Folsom Street fair being one of them, the leather man gay parades etc. It has some of my thoughts of a teenage gang again, Hunter S Thompson in Oakland with his biker gang that turned on him and smashed him to pieces when they found out he was a journalist, scraps of misinformation: LA Raeven, Lanvin, Amityville, frozen explosions, the powerrangers, curtains. “Curtain”. I love this. It’s the last line from House/Lights, it’s a kind of the end. So the drawings are full of curtain images, full of ends.
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Dub // Virus
by Alex Hetherington 18 Jan 2008
Janie and I put out the call for video and film from international artists a short time ago, we posted the information on a couple of sites and mailing lists as well as our own web pages and the Falkirk residency blog. This is a repetition of the work we did for The Consequence video and film screenings that we presented at lowsalt and ESW during 2007. The process begins again, a slow trickle of works on DVD at first, then a gradual build of brown paper padded envelopes, links to web sites, artists’ work in need of a screen. We also posted to the Flats a set of posters asking for old home movies to commingle with the artists work.
I enjoy watching the process of the work arriving and speculating on how artists hear about the call and an excitement about where they are geographically; so far we have work in from the United States, South America and Europe, an Italian application that we need to find a way to translate. The Call has a kind of infectious nature where it begins to come into view on different web sites, like a symptom. I’ve enjoyed watching a video from Carlo Sansolo that I think we will screen, it moves from the exterior of ultramodern skyscraper in Brazil to the streets below and moves onto a man’s face as he rides the elevator, he speaks to the camera but the soundtrack has been dubbed with noise, with tones, the city’s machine and holler.
I keep in mind something that Lindsay Perth said about her top floor apartment at the flats she is working in; the building sways, sometimes dramatically, in the wind. So much so that people who live there often get ‘sea-sick’. I also remember living in Hong Kong in the early 90s and my tower block facing out onto this enormous electrical storm that lit up the sky like a blast of momentary daylight shocks. So close to the lightning bolts you could taste them.
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village voice
by Alex Hetherington 17 Jan 2008
The Village Voice
It has always been our idea to create a publication to distribute among the High Flats: a kind of magazine/newspaper that follows the activities of closed communities, exclusive residential circumstance, tiered domestic scenarios, mini skyscraper sympathies and synchronisations. I can’t imagine. Robert, a member of the tenants’ association, bon viveur, film star, society figure describes the set of buildings as individual villages. And immediately we transform the site to Greenwich Village and Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and the Town Hall and the Village Voice and the riots and Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver and Driller Killer and Saturday Night Fever and Lenny Bruce and Manhattan and the Performing Garage and Serpico and Cruising and Debbie Harry and Mean Streets and Dog Day Afternoon and Chic and Studio 54. I can’t think of a better name, Village Voice. The publication will be bi-monthly and the launch is Jim Colquhoun, Lindsay Perth, Anne Colvin, Robert Dollar, Janie in Budapest, The Kennedy dynasty, Electric Theatre ( a cinema chain), Manhattan Band (50s jazz band). More soon. Please stand by.
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Fool for A Pretty Face // House/Lights
by Alex Hetherington 17 Jan 2008
We are presenting a performance with Glasgow-based band Fool for A Pretty Face on Saturday May 3 at park gallery in Callendar Park, Owen Hedges and Mikaela Skogsberg who form the band will be playing a series of songs that I have asked them to work as a kind of response to the show Janie and I are presenting at the gallery. I’ve asked them to cover Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan ( I’ve wanted to do this since seeing Diane Thater’s film Jump); I Feel Love by Donna Summer and Computer Love by Kraftwerk among other songs plus their own work. I really enjoy Mikaela’s voice with its Scandinavian twang and its vulnerability and Owen’s more mellow solid rounded intonation. I wanted them to do songs that feel like a shift in sound, a change in sound perception. Well for my world anyway, this is debateable. www.myspace.com/foolforaprettyface
I will also be rehearsing House/Lights now for a performance of the work on May 4. I’ll rework the entire show with more of the original text and more on video; I’ve asked Lorna Shields (who is already picking out an outfit and hairstyle), Finn Hobson, Janie Nicoll to again work with me as well as two other performers for live and on-video appearances.
Janie and I have been discussing other events, which coincide with Big in Falkirk and hope to use park as a kind of workshop of events, a studio of experiments, a confederacy of quotation. We are presenting a show Meddle with The Devil, so I guess House/Lights and Faust/Elaine and Mephisto/Olga will work here. I have a collection of drawings and prints as well as my heroin New York Times carpet and other works in mind to show, Lorna is knitting a Heroine/Heroin Carpet drawing; I am hoping to include a new voice work, so it’s back to the archive at the House for texts and examples of ancient Vocoders.
The PUBLIC show name may change, Janie and I need to discuss the potential of this video and film screening and how its title will make sense to an audience of seniors; the programme will now commingle found footage with artists film and sound work, I saw Dave last night and we discussed a radio broadcast to fill in the sound, create a soundtrack for these silent films. I feel now we are breathing intention onto this site, I feel secure in our willingness to engage with this place.
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The Internationaler, Prologue
by Alex Hetherington 15 Jan 2008
I guess I wanted to write a kind of Prologue to our first blog on Falkirk, an opening of thoughts describing something I saw on the cover of the periodical The Internationaler, published in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield which I bought at Site Gallery’s bookstore (which also featured a great set of artists buttons for losers of the Turner Prize). I was down in Sheffield Friday and Saturday working on an essay with Site Gallery’s Platform projects on the artist Brigid McLeer’s installation and performance Vexations (http://www.sitegallery.org/) which has been running as an open residency/work in progress since December. I am still working on this essay, which will appear at a later date on Site’s site.
The cover of The Internationaler has an artwork announcing a BLOG NOTICE from something called La Critique de la Universalis Institutionalé Europa & C, and Non Prescriptives of the CULTURAL INFERNO, its by-line is a NON-HIREARCHICAL (sic) DISCOURSE AS, AND FOR, VARIOUS REFLECTIONS OF MANNERISMS de CULTURALÉ, the remainder of this is scored out, scored over, unfinished. 12 bullet points, drawn as little boxes, reflecting a calendar or schedule, outlines the intentions, I guess of this Blog, summarizes its purpose. I don’t know. I don’t know who the artist is, I don’t care. I don’t understand what this ‘institution’ fully represents but I have a fever for its list of concepts that somehow seem to synchronize with our intentions for our residency, and for all residencies (I wanted also to mention here BEDWYR WILLIAMS’s publication on artists’ residencies, sieved through his idiosyncratic, cynical autobiographical scrutiny that merge geography, stand up comedy and surrealism that seemed to be read by EVERY resident artist at SSW in permafrost Lumsden, Aberdeenshire because the first line of his book is about artists during their residencies never knowing how the heating works).
I bought The Internationaler because it had an interview with Lars Von Trier, and I have always wanted to use The Idiots in my work, it featured Brigid’s work on an essay about hands and their ‘memory’ (she relearns to play the piano in Vexations, her most recent work) and because it will be used as source material for the magazine Janie and I intend to publish through the Falkirk residency, named The Village Voice in disregard/homage to New York’s more famous publication on art, culture and politics.
The artwork on The Internationaler lists these approaches/themes and I kind of want to memorize them through this project: THE LIGHT, THE DEPARTURE, THE MECHANICS, THE SPACE,THE MUD, THE FRAME, THE STRATEGIES, THE SHIT, THE DIALOGUE, THE OPAQUE, THE THREAD, THE AMPLIFICATION, THE ORTHODOX, THE INTERACTIVITY MINEFIELD, THE VAGUE & INCONCLUSIVE, THE AUDIENCE, THE EXPERIMENTAL, THE SPECIFICS, THE OPEN-ENDED.
I have in mind the creation of a biker gang made up of hazing victims, The Idiots, with these helpful hints as tattoos, as theme songs, as false memory syndrome symptoms.