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.
Chris Fremantle, CV, Acrylic and Pencil (2015) installed as part of Staff Outing exhibition, Look Again Space, 2018.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.
This is a diary recording exhibitions I've seen, interesting arts & health projects and my own failures and interesting references to failure. If you want to know the types of work I do please look at the About page here.
#eoi: Deadline 9am Monday 1 March #arts4cop26 Creative Carbon Scotland are seeking expressions of interest for science, climate advocacy and cultural organisations interested in forming consortia to deliver programming focused by COP26. The aim is to deliver collaborative public programming across Scotland before, during and after the COP. What is the messag […]
Robin Wall Kimmerer helps us to understand how humans can be important parts of living systems in our interactions with other living things (Braiding Sweetgrass). Gary Snyder discusses ‘reinhabitants’. Barry Lopez identifies three qualities that are for him critical in indigenous peoples’ ways of living. …three qualities – paying intimate attention; a storie […]
. . . plant seeds in the ground compost continues to grow apple falls to earth . . . Editor’s introduction: The Barn, Banchory, has always had an environmental dimension, including allotments, a wild garden, biofuel boilers and shares the site with Buchanan’s, a slow food bistro. But as the largest rural multi-arts centre in... Continue Reading →
This is an excellent discussion using Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book The Great Derangement. He explores the role of arts and culture with and around the environmental crisis, its entanglements and forms, from an Asian perspective as well as a European one, problematising the dominance of the scientific in the discourse (not questioning science, but questioning... […]
It’s time for reminiscing! And what better topic to think back on than a year’s worth of trashy insights? Here are the top ten posts from Discard Studies in 2020 as determined by our readers! Top 10 Discard Studies articles of 2020
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