CHRIS FREMANTLE

At the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. Art made from the everyday. I think that resistance affects how long a piece of wire can connect a socket to a bulb?

Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern

Lorraine O’Grady, ‘Art is…’ (detail) 1983

Compelling exhibition bringing together many distinct groups of artists (East Coast, Los Angeles, Abstraction, Graphic Design, etc) tackling vital and complex questions starting in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Aspects such as self organising galleries are common to many artists groups. Addressing lynchings and the bombings of churches not so much. You couldn’t have a more complex exhibition on ‘representation’.

I was one of David’s amenuenses in the late 80s also living in Greenlaw Court for nearly 3 years. The obituary in the Catholic Herald pretty much says it all.

Piero Gilardi’s ‘Nature Forever’ at MAXXI, Rome http://www.maxxi.art/en/events/piero-gilardi/

The ambitious programme for the new Children’s Hospital in Dublin here highlighted in the press with the importance of maintenance, “If you can’t clean it, you can’t have it”. Clearly this strategy aims to focus on the needs of the patient and is being led by the Youth Council. They want a building that doesn’t look like a hospital, but can they use the constraints of cleaning and maintenance creatively? For more on that thought read my blog on the London Arts in Health Forum.

Dreamers Awake must be the largest exhibition comprising only women artists that I’ve ever seen – good on White Cube for mounting it. As the reviewers have said, Surrealism is very much associated with men but this shows that it’s a thread running through the 20th and into 21st Century.

Random Archive at Bury Art Museum – excellent, challenging and provocative installation including the rant above. 
Drifts into the permanent collection, elegantly curated mix of new and old including Paul Scott’s ceramics. One wall has work from a life drawing class which would appear to take place in the space (evidence in the form of easels). In fact there are tables for art classes pretty much everywhere intimating a very used and animated space.

Patricia Cain’s Seeing Beyond at Gracefield Arts Centre and the Seeing Beyond the Immediate seminar in partnership with Upland.
The exhibition emerges from a residency and includes works by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. It explores the relationship between figuation and abstraction through the eyes and hand of the artist. 

Touring to Hawick and Glasgow.

Abstract accepted by Oxford Futures Forum (2-3 June 2017). Heading there now.

What is the role of artists in relation to land use?

Lucy R Lippard says in her recent book Undermining (2014) that she finds ‘landscape’ to be a difficult word, trapped in the art domain, and that living in the American West the term ‘land use’ is more relevant.

This affirmed a line of research and writing I’ve been engaged in for more than 18 months, concerned particularly with artists whose work addresses land use and could contribute to Land Use Policy. This is only one aspect of artists’ working with environmental and ecological issues, but it is an area of key relevance to the Oxford Future Forum agenda. ‘Land use’ directly describes the current construction of human use of land as a resource, with all the implied contradictions. Whilst artists and designers are sometimes involved to support ‘public engagement’ through creative approaches, I’m interested in the work of artists who also work strategically imagining different futures and sometimes work to deliver them. Practices such as Collins and Goto, Stephen Hurrel, Kate Foster, John Wallace, Anne-Marie Culhane and internationally Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are drawing on social/cultural histories as well as scientific disciplines (eg Forest Ecology, Soil Science, Coastal Defence or Marine Biology) to synthesise new understandings of specific places at a range of scales. This can be understood as the formation of scenarios, albeit presented as artworks.

The development of Ecosystems Services Assessment makes this work more significant given that it specifically includes the Cultural dimension, an area which the sciences and environmental management find challenging to move beyond obvious designations of scenic beauty (spiritual value) or path networks (leisure value). But it is worth noting that the artistic practices cited above , through cultural approaches, can also address the Provisioning (i.e. products obtained including food and fuel), Regulating (e.g. water purification) and Supporting (e.g. soil formation and photosynthesis) aspects of Ecosystems Services Assessment. An apparently cultural approach to river ecology might envisage interventions which affect water quality and flow management. A good example is the Harrisons’ Atempause Für Den Save Flüss / Breathing Space for the Sava River (1990) which proposed an ecosystemic approach to cleaning the Sava River which was also implemented on the nearby Drava River.

Artists are in some cases able to go beyond representing landscape to create value in areas not previously perceived as valuable through conceptual, policy and practical interventions produced with communities, environmental managers, engineers and scientists. In doing so they demonstrate complex skill sets including social engagement, collaboration and interdisciplinarity as well as the production of process and object-based art.

The challenge is to engage policy makers (as well as curators) at regional and national level in understanding the value of these practices. Another challenge is to understand how to extend this type of work, which currently exists as unique projects, across multiple different administrative regions.

I work as a researcher and producer across arts & ecologies and arts & health. I was the producer for the Harrisons’ Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom and have recently co-authored two chapters on their aesthetics. I’ve worked with a number of the artists mentioned above. I established ecoartscotland as a platform for research and practice in 2010. ecoartscotland is multi-dimensional, collaborating with the Land Art Generator Initiative on a major project for Glasgow, participating in exhibitions at Edinburgh College of Art and Summerhall Arts Centre, publishing ‘occasional papers’ under an ISSN, and connecting a large network of practitioners through a blog.

REFERENCES

Harrison, Helen Mayer and Harrison, Newton, Atempause Für Den Save Flüss, Ljubljana: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Moderna Galerija, 1990
Lippard, Lucy, R. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, New York: The New Press, 2014

Souvenir by Victoria Bianchi on Ayr Beachfront. A journey back to the heyday of Ayr Beach, reminiscing without being corny or stereotypical, this was physical, engaging and touching by turns.

The Things That Make You Sick: East London Health Campaigning, 1977-1980 by Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn at the ICA until 2 July.

Brilliant to revisit the serious radicalism of these artists work with local Unions and Trades Councils to support local campaigns against hospital closures as well as raise issues of ‘health over profits’ and women’s rights. The issues are the same today though I’m not sure the art practices have the political alignment or intention. These artists put themselves at the service of local people’s needs as part of campaigns – they felt that it was better not being instigators (as they had been in a previous project). Lots to learn.

Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors at Gagosian 

Good lessons in working in series, good lessons in not caring about mixing styles, fabulous sheets of bulls preparatory for making ceramics.

Cerith Wyn Evans Commission for Tate Britain

Can taking ‘no maintenance’ as a creative challenge inspire new approaches to art in healthcare settings? This is the challenge I posed in a blog for the London Arts in Health Forum based on a paper published in the new Design for Health Journal.

The intention is to provoke new approaches to making public art (or sited work) for hospitals and healthcare settings. Having considerable experience of managing the commissioning process, it seems to me that we need new ways to think about the challenge and the particularly difficult requirements of ‘no maintenance’ in a high ‘wear and tear’ context like a hospital. But the intention is to raise deeper philosophical and theoretical issues around ‘care’ and ‘maintenance’, and underlying questions of value.

One of the artists who has responded is interdisciplinary artist, composer and researcher Chris Dooks. In 2014 Dooks completed The Fragmented Filmmaker, Emancipating The Exhausted Artist, his Phd on his art practice in relation to his Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS-ME). The Phd took the form of three vinyl records (yellow, blue and red) and an autoethnographic text. Despite this condition Dooks has undertaken residencies in Berlin as well as with Woodend Barn, Aberdeenshire; Timespan in Helmsdale; and made work in response to the Dark Skies Park in the South West of Scotland.

Dooks’ research proposes that making art could be a way of coping with his CFS-ME even though the very character of the condition limits the ability to do the things normally associated with making art.

Dooks proposes that ways of making art, in particular ‘bricolage’, defined as ‘construction achieved by using whatever comes to hand’, are compatible with ‘low energy’ generally and his condition specifically. Dooks says, “The Holy Grail is to make something with conceptual value without actually ‘making’ anything at all.”
Each of Dooks three works for his Phd addresses a different method and a different challenge. He describes each of the three projects as experiments within a personal arts laboratory. One is focused by cosmology, another by the limitations of a broken harmonium and the third by what you can record from your windowsill.
In each case they address specific challenges of CFS-ME, such as not being able to leave your house, or the need for aids to sleep. Dooks says of this last challenge, “…one aspect of that is to create ‘soporific sonics’ – where tones to aid sleep and rest are cherished prizes, when found.” But each is also much more. Each demonstrates the potential of making art from whatever comes to hand, including broken instruments, conversations with strangers and ambient sounds.

In the sleeve notes for Ciga{r}les (the yellow album) Dooks explores the relationship between his own “predicament”, the “unpleasant and inconvenient limitations” he lives with, in relation to the wider importance of limitation and context in the making of any artwork. He juxtaposes these limitations with the necessity of limiting oneself when making an artwork, selecting what to work with and what to leave aside, editing and in the end knowing when to stop.

The question that I’m raising is asking artists to shift ‘no maintenance’ from an external limitation into a self-imposed creative constraint. Dooks’ work also explores using his illness as a part of his creative process, both for his own wellbeing and as part of cultural projects.

Of course one of the sharpest aspects is that whilst Dooks constructs sound with care for his own wellbeing and for our pleasure, most healthcare environments, and in particular hospitals, are characterised by monitors and alarms, a constant barrage of random noise. Although most work made for hospitals and healthcare settings is visual and applied art, Dooks’ work makes a compelling case for needing to address the sonic environments.

Forms of Action at the CCA Glasgow

Collins and Goto Studio’s exhibition at the Intermedia Gallery in the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow http://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/the-centre-for-nature-in-cities-presents-a-caledonian-decoy

Sketch of the Universe: Art, Science and the influence of D’Arcy Thompson and Peter Randall-Page at the City Arts Centre and William Kentridge at the Fruitmarket. The D’Arcy Thompson exhibition is work collected by and commissioned for the Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee. Excellent.

“To fail meant we took a risk, and because we did it with intention, knowing what we were aiming for and what went wrong, we could immediately go back to the drawing board and approach it again.”
https://hbr.org/2009/05/how-artistleaders-do-things-di

‘A collaboration in wave form’ at the Merz Studio in Sanquhar. Who knew Jencks painted?