ecoartscotland library as bing
‘ecoartscotland library as bing’ will be included in the Staff Outing II exhibition of works by Gray’s School of Art Fine Art staff at LookAgain Project Space, Aberdeen
A colleague challenged me, suggesting that imagining the ecoartscotland library as a bing – a spoil heap of waste from an industrial process – is anti-intellectual.
The ‘ecoartscotland library as bing’ series of works explores the claim of British conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) that education can produce waste in the same way as other industries. Latham names certain forms of education as the ‘Mental Furniture Industry’. At the time the MFI chain in Britain supplied flat pack furniture. Latham proposed that the Mental Furniture Industry has produced three centuries of undetected tipping.
‘ecoartscotland library’ as bing is firstly an exploration of the materiality and aesthetic. The bings, defined as waste, have over time become sites of significant biodiversity – waste can support new lifewebs (see Barbra Harvie’s report). This provoked me to question how ecological thinking can lead to a healthier web of life. What sort of actual relationship is there between the ecoartscotland library and the web of life? What forms of understanding can the library create? Are some of them material? Aesthetic? We value relationality, but we also need to value difference. Conceiving of the ecoartscotland library as a bing is a way to experience it as a ‘strange stranger’ (in Tim Morton’s sense). It is not anti-intellectual, but rather an inversion of values to provoke an exploration of relationality and difference.
Staff Outing II is open from 15th October – 20th November 2022.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
Dear Chris
Totally amazing this and you! ❤️
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