CHRIS FREMANTLE

Anne Douglas produced Calendar Variations as a project amongst a group of researcher artists including Reiko Goto, Georgina Barney, Fiona Hope, Jono Hope, Janet McEwan, Chu Chu Yuan and myself. Anne took Allan Kaprow’s Activity entitled ‘Calendar’ as a starting point, asking all the participants to respond individually to the text. We then came together for two days to negotiate a collective response. As a collective we explored what might be considered the minimum intervention – walking a square into long grass. We did this at The Barn in Banchory (above). My own work with ‘Calendar’ is documented here and below are a pair of works that resulted from an analysis. Other drawings explore wet and dry (proxies for life and death) in various ways.  I also did a curatorial exercise documented here.

Calendar Variations publication More recently I discovered that Jupiter Artland had also invited some artists (Andrea Büttner, James Hoff, Peter Liversidge, Cinzia Mutigli, members of ORBIT Youth Council and the Wilson family) to respond to Kaprow’s Scores and Activities. You can see their work here. Kaprow’s Scores and Activities are one of the inspirations for a book coming out of the ecoart network to be published in 2022 by New Village Press. The book, entitled Ecoart in Action, comprises contributions by 67 artists. The contributions are all exercises, recipes or instructions for activities; case studies of activities; or provocations towards developing activities. Some are more literal than Kaprow’s, with obvious pedagogical outcomes. Others are elliptical and open-ended like Kaprow’s, leaving those undertaking to work out what might be learnt or done for themselves. Kaprow continues to inspire.