Urban Rambling

Temporary Nature; (of a) temporary nature, temporary (in) nature. Having the characteristics or qualities of temporariness.

Temporary Nature; brief vegetation, impermanent life, transitory environment or fleeting material world.

Situated on pre-development wasteland in Glasgow’s burgeoning Clyde-side media epi-centre Pacific Quay, Temporary Nature presented newly commissioned sound, performance, text and sculptural works for one weekend in September 2009 by Glasgow based artists Ruth Barker, Louise Briggs, Stuart Gurden, Anna Mields and myself, Allison Gibbs. Temporary Nature was the first, or pilot intervention I initiated under the recently coined banner of Palm Place; a project that aims to activate and engage with the city’s Terrain Vagues and spatial curiosities through an ongoing series of interdisciplinary events, exhibitions and interventions.

A former fragment of the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival, the site upon which Temporary Nature momentarily materialised has since the late eighties existed as a strange interstitial landscape within the city; neither true wilderness, nor tended parkland.
After the privatisation and eventual collapse of Govan’s shipbuilding industry the area lay barren and vast until the Scottish Development Agency won a pre-European City of Culture bid to have Glasgow host the 1988 edition in a series of biannual UK garden festivals. It was hoped that the Festival would remedy the city’s ailing post-industrial economy and apparently battered self-image. So 1988 saw the defunct shipyards obsessively over landscaped with a plethora of hyper-grow planting, Royal-ready carriage ways, a coca-cola sponsored roller coaster, the world’s largest teapot, an historical mock high street facade and a public art programme. Then the festivities reached their predetermined expiry date and despite council plans for rapid development the land was again depopulated and left to it’s own devices. The current status of the land therefore can be read as somewhat ironic, having experienced an almost complete evolutionary cycle from post industrial badland, to bonkers 80’s funfair-garden land, returning again back to it’s contemporary, and simultaneously former, state of pre-development wasteland.

The antithesis of Garden Festival, today’s quietly exploding, self regulating urban wilderness seems mostly invisible or probably off limits to all but a handful of studious butterfly identifiers,¹ adventurous dog walkers and outdoor boozers.

With all it’s anonymity and schizophrenically polarising attributes of unbounded nature and urban transgression, the place offers a sense of expectation rarely encountered in the city and of course, a kind of dizzying frísson. The wasteland is what Ignasi de Sola Morales describes as ‘Terrain Vague: empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place²’. This urban rambling spot come social drop out space with it’s varying complexities was, in itself the starting point for the making of artworks, and a platform upon which to project the overall ethos of Temporary Nature.

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Illusary, Supplanted, Illuminated

The two-day-long project opened with the mesmeric tones of Ruth Barker’s performance The Deer Woman. As the cluster of the audience’s umbrellas and wellies disappeared into the most concealed corridor of established trees – the site’s readymade natural amphitheatre – the morning’s precipitation annoyance wavered then resigned completely. Huddling expectantly the audience of approximately 30 chit-chatted and waited. Then after a short while Ruth appeared and, without addressing the group directly, immediately began the performance. The script, which was recited from memory, described two mirrored narratives of The Deer Woman – a violent, sexually ambivalent female figure from the fringes of both traditional Ponca cultural belief, and more contemporary American folklore³. Fittingly, the uneasy tale of this Deer Woman of mythology and modernity was delivered not so much via the medium of spoken words but almost as song, in rhythmic verse and chorus with precise pitch control, repetition and timing. The narrative of the protagonist and her existence within the margins of mythological place and culture resonated strongly with the site and presented an inverted, vivid projection of gender, power and space.

Skirting the western end of the wasteland a modest traditional timber billboard competes with the backdrop of Clyde-side monumentality to beckon passing motorists and pedestrians to Ronan Keating concerts and national wedding expos. For Temporary Nature Louise Briggs commandeered this advertising not-so-hot-spot with her text piece Where The Wild Things Are. The work sat in poetic opposition to the harshness of the site’s immediate connotations and the blatancy of the appropriated medium of advertising in presenting a narrative based introduction to the land and the artworks⁴. Although not a direct reference to Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s story of the same name, the work did conjure similar narratives of what’s on potential offer within this real site of adult fantasy- monsters, murderers, sex, escapism, intoxication. As a collection of three A0 sized posters, the work was off-centrically framed by, and partially supplanted the larger commercially produced posters that lay beneath; in this instance, UK kiddy punk chart toppers You Me at Six posing seemingly in mock boy band fashion. This relationship between the narrative offered by Louise’s posters, the boy band, the wasteland and the viewer created further coincidental dialogues. The work’s allusion to both romance and destruction, and it’s own inherent transience (although it remained on site, it was in turn postered over within days) evoked a kind of elegy to the site in anticipation of an eventual predetermined destiny.

Working also with an existing feature of the place, Stuart Gurden’s BLOCKS; Live at the BBC utilized a found stone ‘seat’ in combination with an incongruously charged audio piece⁵. With speakers concealed beneath the surface of the ground on either side of the stone, the audio incorporated a radio style narration that lists 14 blocks to creativity from a poster of the same name found by Stuart, and a more abstract soundscape recorded quite literally on the BBC Scotland building. With potential blockages such as “3. Need for Balance ‘Inability to tolerate disorder, confusion or ambiguity’” calmly illuminated through invisible apparatus, the stone trumped the technology and became the arbiter of difficult truths; a humble rock oracle alerting us to our counter productive behaviours. Summed up appropriately by Stuart as a “grubby urban meditation spot” the area presided over by the rock is indeed one of local gathering. The stone was, and probably continues to be the place where the middle-aged man sits quietly smoking his fag and reading the paper, perhaps preferring it to the bus shelter, and appeared to be a convenient place of concealment for many an empty larger can, stashed surprisingly neatly back inside the poly bags from which they came. A group of people gathered in a wasteland over-shadowed by the iconic BBC Scotland staring at, or rather listening intently to a rock speak created an undoubtedly comedic situation, but also functioned on a much more philosophical level……. “7. Impoverished Fantasy Life – Mistrusting, ignoring or demeaning the inner images and visualizations of self and others; Over-valuing the so-called objective, real world; Lack of imagination in the sense of ‘let’s pretend’ or’“what if’”.

My own contribution to Temporary Nature was the sculptural work Crystal Habits.
The light steel framework covered in hand-stitched debris mesh was intended to resemble a mutated form occupying some territory between the natural and the man-made, depending upon the distance from which the work was seen. The large crystal-like structure balanced on it’s smallest face and straddled a dug hole mirroring the proportions of the small triangular facade. From the hole crude, iridescent shards of polystyrene shot forward to almost pierce the porous, elastic threshold of the debris mesh surface. Geologically inaccurate, this not-quite-right crystalline habit aimed to offer a re-imagining of the Garden Festival’s Crystal Pavilion as a hybrid architectural anomaly and absurd natural phenomenon; a pavilion, a growing house and some rather irregular scaffolding arrangement converging as a spurious form of geology, hinting an invitation of use, appropriation or violation.

Anna Mields’ illusory sculptural intervention Sackgasse (Blind Alley) imitated the interstice or gap between two houses and was flanked some distance away by a bright orange one-man tent. The work recreated two dimensional perspective in three dimensional form, in this instance, parallel objects perceived over distance, as receding lines that gradually come closer together the further away they are. Coupled with fastidiously imitated details of brickwork and air vents, the work invited viewers not onto but into the architectural tableaux. Once inside the Blind Alley one was faced with a dead-end that becomes narrower and narrower until there is space for just one standing person, emulating in verticality, the horizontal space of the one-man tent. This highlighting of the dislocated gap, the turning of negative space into something tangible and physical relied on the absence of the Blind Alley’s referent-the houses on either side. The luminous tiny tent stood out within the wasteland as a beacon of incongruous camping and evoked a sense of irrepressible terror, and absurdity, at the thought of spending a night inside there. Not only a stand in for the sculpture’s lost houses the tent could also be read as a signifier of other absentees; the guard, the architect or artist, the lost kid, the romantic sense of enjoying nature, freedom…⁶

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Vague Terrains

The heightening of the gap space, or absence in the rendering of that absence as activated object, brings to mind Ignasi de Sola Morales’ idea of possibility in Terrain Vague – “Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation”.
Morales asserts that Terrain Vagues are not simply open, abandoned places but is space that offers varied forms of potential within these “less precisely defined territories, connected with the physical idea of a portion of land in its potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external”. What Morales suggests is that there lies a fundamentally reciprocal relationship between lack (in use, activity of an official kind) and possibility. In absence or vacancy there is opportunity for fullness, expectation and freedom.

Morales describes also the Latin and Germanic origins associated with the French etymology of vague suggesting “The German Woge refers to a sea swell, significantly alluding to movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation⁷”.
This proposition of the indeterminate, of swell and mobility within the void is quite beautifully and menacingly epitomized by the Pacific Quay wasteland. Without the concrete walkways, peering neighbours, street lamps, patrolling authorities or the 4.2 million security cameras Britain is famed for, the idea of possibility does become multifariously plausible and boundless. One is quite literally engulfed by vegetation that has been left to evolve for the most part of twenty years, leaving only those who may happen to be at the top of Millennium Tower or the Finnieston crane with a pair of binoculars privy the actions taking place beyond the dense scrub. The wasteland, evidently does offer a very real and tangible potential for invisibility and the kind of freedom of action described by Morales, in whatever form that may take.

Although we were granted permission by the site owners to use the land, other industrious and adventurous types who frequent the space, of course do not. The completely unregulated, open nature of this unbarricaded land again brings Morales’ undefined territory to mind. Track-suited teens, artists and general loiterers are lured into the wasteland not simply because it offers possibility and liberty of action, but also by the very fact there is no indication that the land cannot be entered; No fences, no signs, no buildings, no limitation. All of this and the absence of an obvious landlord begs the question “who owns this land anyway”. Of course we understand that it is the property of some obscured person or company but without the immediate signifiers of use, occupation or development the space thus becomes intrinsically available or free. Because the place appears to have the status of free land the regular laws of ownership and territory seem to dissipate and that land becomes inadvertently common. The communal usage of the site, by boozers and butterfly catchers alike, is something that is both aspirational, idealistic even, and problematic. In my mind this tenuous relationship between place and differing users was agitated and brought into question by temporarily locating artworks and events within the context of this now unofficially common land. In the introduction to his influential text Decadent Editor David Harding quotes W.T.J Mitchell’s suggestion that_"Modernism can no longer mediate public and private sphere’s on its own terms, but must submit itself to social negotiation and anticipate reactions ranging from violence to indifference⁸"._
Although this is now common currency for artists, particularly those working outside the context of the gallery, and although we as a group were excited by the potential for interaction that working in such a public space presented, I felt, as the initiator of this project, a certain necessity to reconsider this sentiment.

There were two noteworthy acts of viewer participation that took place during the course of Temporary Nature’s brief existence. The first occurred in the form of a public urination by one boy in a group of twelve year olds who had come to intercept the gathering, at that point around my own work Crystal Habits. Before the pissing provocation, another boy had asked, quite rightly, why we were all there and what the object was for and then, apparently unsatisfied with the answer offered began shaking the flimsy artwork to test its material properties, its strength or perhaps its potential for destruction or removal. The diminutive gang quickly tired of the situation and wandered off with an air of ‘whatever’. Convinced that they would be back to put the work through a more rigorous set of paces than had been possible earlier on, I found myself the next morning cycling excitedly towards Pacific Quay anticipating a mass of charred, liquefied plastic, disfigured metal, holes and ruins.

To my amazement Crystal Habits stood there, all dewy and sleepy and annoyingly unblemished. To my surprise also was my own resounding disappointment at the absence of any visible act of intervention, having made the work with its own death and destruction quietly in mind. Blind Alley alternatively was subject to a more lasting impression of audience interaction. One of the side panels had been knocked off completely and two, perfect foot-sized holes pierced the wire mesh and rendered cement, showering the sculpture’s floor and surrounding area in a multitude of tiny pieces of simulated brick. What was intriguing about the destructive assertion was what Anna and myself perceived to be measured restraint and aesthetic judgment. Quite easily the whole object could have been demolished beyond any recognition and yet it remained structurally intact. Satisfied with this act of creative vandalism Anna’s response to these flurries of pointed force was that they completed the work. In this sense the perpetrator became anonymous collaborator.

The two incidents proved simultaneously humbling and spectacular reminders that no sooner are we able to protect an artwork from intervention than we are able to simply submit an artwork to it.

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To Know In Advance That It Will Not Exist Forever.

Although seemingly disparate and somewhat geographically disconnected, the situation and relational nature of the works aimed to mirror the way in which the wasteland is now used, as an ambiguous, disorientating common land with pockets of activity and volatile occurrences. The legacy of Temporary Nature, because of the work’s intrinsic and deliberate ephermerality and relation to a specific location is largely dependent on it having been experienced, in what Miwon Kwon describes as “the here and now, through the bodily presence of each viewing subject, in a sensory immediacy of spatial extension and temporal duration⁹”. When the two words are placed together temporary nature denotes things fleeting in and of nature. In tandem they suggests ephemeral engagement, transient wanderings, momentary speculations as well as short-lived land and a brief material world. To say that a thing is temporary is to know, in advance that it will not exist forever. And yet temporary is not a year, two weeks or twenty-seven minutes. It’s an unspecified and imprecise amount of time accepted simply as not ever lasting. Again, I think of Morales, space and the indeterminate in relation to the extended idea of the temporary and that “this absence of limit precisely contains the expectations of mobility, vagrant roving, free time, liberty”.

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Notes

¹ On one particular visit to the site I met two men seeking out living specimens of the Common Blue butterfly. Despite apparently being, as the name suggests, Britain’s most common and widespread blue, the Pacific Quay butterfly catchers were adamant that the Common Blue was in decline. I was informed that the males are often very obvious as they defend territories against rivals and search out the more reclusive females, and that Glasgow’s titling as 1990 City of Culture was a bit of a joke.

² Morales, Ignasi de Sola. Quotation cited on Parole, a website that functions as a dynamic dictionary of the contemporary city. http://parole.aporee.org/work/index.php3?char=t

³ Ruth Barker, via email, 09/09/09

⁴ Louise Briggs, discussion via email, 15/02/10

⁵ Stuart Gurden, via email, 09/10/09

⁶ Anna Mields, discussion via email, 15/02/10

⁷ Morales, Ignasi de Sola. Quotation cited on Parole,. http://parole.aporee.org/work/index.php3?char=t

⁸ Mitchell, W.T.J, Art in the Public Sphere, University of Chicago Press, 1993,cited by Harding, David, Decadent, Foulis Press, Glasgow, 1997, pg 12.

⁹ Kwon, Miwon, One Place After Another; Site- Specific Art and Locational Identity, MIT Press, 2004, pg 11.

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