What art have I seen?
Robert Stone’s Polka Fever at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park
Trees
Jen Clarke’s PhD tentatively entitled Working between art and forestry in Scotland
Ayr to Zennor
Talk entitled Soil 2.0 addressing context, and various projects I gave at the BOSarts Seminar, part of This Weekend.
What Art?
Ginny Hutchison on Radio Scotland’s Highland Cafe talking about the Inverness Old Town Art Project. She described the movement of the sun through the town, from hitting the church at 8am to creating a geometric shape, a triangle, under a bridge at 11am.
Paying attention to the movement of the sun. Marking the shapes it makes on the urban landscape. Creating new shapes in gold leaf, capturing the sun.
Goethe vs. Petronius and also de Certeau
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative (and creation).
There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definately commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occured.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones favor all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no person could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.
Goethe
vs.
We trained hard; but it seemed that every time that we were beginning to form into a team we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating an illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
Titus Petronius
and
“In him, the productivist law that requires a specific assignment (the condition of efficiency) and the social law that requires circulation (the form of exchange) enter into contradiction. To be sure, a specialist is more and more often driven to also be an Expert, that is, an interpreter and translator of his competence for other fields. … They do it through a curious operation which “converts” competence into authority. Competence is exchanged for authority. Ultimately, the more authority the Expert has, the less competence he has, up to the point where his fund of competence is exhausted, like the energy necessary to put a mobile into movement.”
de Certeau
Reading
Forest Tunes, The Library, 1995-2008 by Shai Zakai
Can remember when I was reading this. Think it was 9 months ago when I was trying to persuade Rozelle Maclaurin to show this important work. Located as they are in parkland, it seemed to me an interesting and worthwhile exhibition around which a stimulating series of events could have been organised, a sort of arborischool, with speakers like Richard Mabey, David Haley and Thomas Pakenham, as well as local rangers, academics from Auchincruive, etc.
I think its at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World this autumn.
What Art have I seen?
RAQS Media Collective at the Frith Street Gallery in Golden Square
The gallery as a trading floor for evoking human experience. A series of clocks correlated with places (New York, Lagos, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, etc.), the faces modified by changing the numerals for emotions (epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, awe, fatigue, nostalgia, ecstasy, fear, panic, remorse). So the ‘time’ in Kabul: the hour is between panic and remorse and the minute at anxiety. In amongst the real locations are some imagined ones, Macondo (the town in Marquez fictions), Shangri La, etc.) Here the clocks go backwards.
In the middle of the room circling (on four screens) around a pillar is a face, still in the context of a global emotional roller-coaster. The sounds are an inscrutable background.
Anne Douglas, some time ago, introduced me to the Rasas, an aesthetic structure of emotional expressions (love, mirth, sorrow, anger, energy, terror, disgust, astonishment) for theatre in traditional Indian culture.
What Art have I seen?
Imaging the Forest at the British Museum
Dinabandhu Mahapatra’s Trees of Orissa. A painting on silk representing all the trees of the region of Orissa. Some are very much icons, others are more representational. This work, made in the early 1980s, was as I understood it part of a response by a particular patron to the loss of traditional crafts. It is a response to the 12th Century poem, the Gitagovinda, which tells the story of Krishna and Radha. The forest is a place where the social rules are more relaxed and Krishna can carry on with his favourite female cowherds.
Reading
The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto
Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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