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.
What art have I seen? Stories Real and Imagined, Research and Practice, OMOS
Sam Ainsley’s exploration of relations, body to world, micro to macro, pattern to image… One of the really important figures in Scottish art as artist, teacher and leader.
The exhibition resulting from RSA Residency Awards:
Victoria Clare Bernie – exploring an 18thCentury donation of three works by a woman artist whose biography was unknown
Samantha Clark’s ambient works on water and space
Joel Dixon’s experimental photography
Flore Gardner’s and Robert Powell’s variously quirky works
MV Brown’s snapshots queering and challenging our understanding of countryside, nircely complemented by the OMOS installation of video and photography taking drag into the Scottish landscape.
What art have I seen? In the eddy of the stream
Cooking Sections and Sakiya’s exhibition at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh is as good an example of putting the wellbeing of the web if life first – the challenge Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) set themeselves in the early 70s and which is now clearly the challenge for all of us.
Cooking Sections “is a practice that examines the systems that organise the world through food, and how food can be used to explore, trace and advance climate justice.” Sakiya “is an academy, a residency programme, a research hub, and a farm located in Ein Qiniya, a small agricultural village seven kilometres west of Ramallah, in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory… By grafting local traditions of self-sufficiency onto contemporary art and ecological practices, Sakiya seeks to create new narratives around relationships to land, knowledge-production, and commoning.” (Sakiya are also working with Arts Catalyst and have a residency opportunity at the moment.)
Cooking Sections have been working in Scotland and in particular on the Isle of Skye for some years now – Emma Nicolson first worked with them on the Climavore project when she was the Director of Atlas, and she has curated this in her role of Head of Creative Programmes for the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. This enduring connection is significant.
The exhibition “…draws attention to the breakdown of ecosystems through the removal of plants and the ensuing long-term harm to people, communities, and other species.”
There is an important set of proposals around commoning which directly relate to Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland. Where that work proposes understanding the soil, water, air and forests of Scotland as commons that we are dependent upon and asks for a ‘commons of mind’ to commit to putting back more than we take out, the proposals around commons in this exhibition include that the whole intertidal zone of Scotland should be established as a commons and that a Scottish Office for Commoning should be established. This proposal needs published as a full page pull out in the Highland Free Press or another widely distributed publication.
This forms one part of a series of installations focusing on salmon and forests, mussels and muscles, oysters and terrazzo. Each reveals an aspect of an ecology and a different way of imagining exchange and reuse rather than extraction. Some like the work on seaweeds and shellfish is being developed to a functional scale to offer alternatives to industrial fish farming which is destroying coastal waters in the Highlands.
Deborah Bird Rose talks about the two violences of colonialism – the violence to people and the violence to the environment. Sakiya’s installation focuses on the violence to the environment done by British colonial rule of Palestine even before the imposition of the state of Israel. The British colonial administration ruled that a large number of culturally significant plants were weeds to be exterminated. The main display is of botanical specimens of 33 plants, their cultural significance and their ecological role. Another remarkable creation in the exhibition is a carved wood frieze of these plants, reminiscent of a plaster cornice. Throughout Inverleith House we can hear singing. The installation in the final room echoes through the whole space, lamenting ecological and cultural loss.
In the eddy of the stream judiciously uses whimsical and suprising installations as well as scientific data (highlighting what we know as well as what we don’t know) and beautifully crafted elements – these works hold the challenging evidence of human ignorance of and violence to ecosystems in a way that draws us into careful attention through an experience that is rich and rewarding.
What art have I seen? Köln Skulpturen Park
Köln Skulpturen Park makes evident several key moves used by sculptors creating outdoor works
- Reflection – we have an Anish Kapoor mirrored disc, a Dan Graham pavilion and a Tom Burr work of black reflective panels
- Fairy tales – two of the pieces added to the collection recently (video here) evoke traditions and archetypes Mary Bauermeister’s arrangement of tree stump seats into a space for a different way of spending time in nature and Guan Xaio’s Old Eggs and the Catcher which seems to allude to folk stories
- Repurposing – Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc, two fir tree mobile phone masts, take a piece of infrastructure and repurpose it to tell a different story, in this case of loss.
- Buildings – the focal point of the park is Suo Fujimoto‘s white concrete structure. The ‘building’ surrounds a tree. The act of looking in and looking out both create frames with which to appreciate the leafy environment. Of course, much like the Farnsworth House, you need a certain level of privilege to appreciate the views without being concerned about the functionality of the building.
Mies van der Röhe said
When one looks at Nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed – it becomes part of a greater whole.
Fujimoto’s piece is the sculptural version, framing and organising nature. It even has works installed in and on it.
Lois Weinberger‘s intervention made a few years ago is one of the more radical ‘pieces’. Very much in contrast with the formality of much of the work (di Suvero, even Fischli and Weiss), his trench, in reality a bulldozer driven in a straight line for 100m cutting through paths and leaving spoil heap at the end of the line, offers a different aesthetic. Related to Robert Smithson’s various experiments with entropic processes, and with Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, but this is negentropic – it is focused by emergence, its aesthetic is what happens when we stop controlling nature. Its counterpoint is Karin Sander‘s piece of plastic grass inserted into the equally managed grass.
The curatorial approach is in some respects more radical than some of the artists’ works. As I understand it each new exhibition, comprising some temporary works and some new permanent installations, is focused by a previous work. This year’s exhibition refers back to the Weinberger’s piece. This iterative accumulative approach forms a nice counterpoint to novelty as a curatorial approach.
What art have I seen? Nothing’s Guaranteed, Ecologies of Displacement, Balance
‘Nothing’s Guaranteed : Exhibition of Bosno-Futurism‘ curated by my colleague Jon Blackwood. Artists: Igor Bošnjak, Mladen Bundalo, Lana Čmajčanin, Lala Raščić, Saša Tatić, Maja Zećo.
‘Ecologies of Displacement’ curated by Sana Bilgrami, featuring Michele Marcoux and Farrukh Addnan
‘Balance’ works by Iain Patterson
All at Summerhall.
What art have I seen? We are Compost
We are Compost at the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, part of the programme put together for the World Congress of Soil Science.
The exhibition features the first UK showing of Asad Raza’s work Absorption, in which cultivators create and nurture 60 tonnes of artificial soil created from recycled and other waste materials. This neosoil is then offered freely to visitors to use for their own domestic and community projects. Gaia Glossary, a research installation curated by Alexandra Toland and Lea Wittich brings together literature, resources, tools and objects encouraging a composting of knowledge into the soil for the growth of new ideas. Finally, Eating the Ancestors, is an interactive installation by artist Désirée Coral following her Colonial Seeds research with the Glasgow Seed Library, focusing on what we inherited from generations past to further understand what can be generated from what already exists and what we can do for the collective WE.
Over the week being an interpreter for Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland, also had a chance to check out documentation of Soil and Soul, a project by Propagate across seven communities in Glasgow. This really sets a standard for engagement by a major international environment conference – very different from the usual ‘fly in fly out’. The team from Propagate working with the British Society of Soil Scientists engaged and connected with communities across Glasgow on the importance of soil, making compost, seed bombing, etc.
Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth was really well received by the Congress attendees. The responded to the maps and the text often reading the whole work. Colin Campbell, Chief Executive of the James Hutton Institute, interviewed Newton in advance of the Congress and that recording plus more information on the work is available on The Barn’s website.
What art have I seen? Katie Paterson’s Requiem
At the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.
Brilliant evocation of time and existence. If as David Antin said,
The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world.
ANTIN, D., 1970. Art + Ecology. ArtNews.
This is surely a genuinely ecological work, drawn out beautifully in Zalazewisz’s accompanying notes.
It also speaks to changes of state – each small vessel is only able to represent a facet of the materiality of time because of the technoscientific processes of isolation, but what is fragmented must eventually come back together, and so it does. Robert Smithson would have told the story of this work through the idea of entropy. The end result, much like the final end of the solar system in billions of years is a bowl of mixed up dust, all the energy dissapated.
Exhibiting: Come Together 2022
Had two works in Come Together 2022 at the Arkade Gallery in the Anatomy Rooms in Aberdeen. Brilliantly curated, the exhibition included works from local and international artists, all in some way connected to collage. Fabulous work by former students, colleagues and artists from other parts of the world, totally new to me.
My two pieces arose from the problem of what to do with life study drawings that I did mostly at a class in Battersea in the early 1990s. I’ve been carrying them around for 30 years from place to place. Destruction in art and the process of ripping into a stack of drawings generates new unexpected configurations.
What art have I seen? The Rooted Sea: Halophytic Futures
Sonia Mehra Chawla’s exhibition, one of the outcomes of 3 years’ work in Scotland. I remember going to the marine research station in Aberdeen to hear a talk at the beginning of the process.
What art have I seen? lightly, tendrils
Annalee Davis and Amanda Thomson’s exhibition at CCA Glasgow.
What art have I seen? The Circle of a Square and The Effect of a Butterfly
Henrik Håkansson’s exhibition with The Modern Institute.
Strange exhibition including video of butterflies flying in Håkansson’s garden filmed using a very high speed camera. The huge structure holding the not very large screens is a curious installation. The wall-based works use historic Joseph Albers’ prints composed with butterflies captures and preserved by Håkansson as a young man. Donald Judd is also present in another wall based element.
I remember Håkansson’s piece in Radical Nature – a tree tipped over on its side. In the end whilst Håkansson engages with living things in different ways, it doesn’t feel like he draws attention to interdependence (other than perhaps ironically). As David Antin put it,
“The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world” (David Antin, ArtNews Nov. 1970 p. 90).
What art have I seen? Fluctuations in Elliptical Form
James Hugonin at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. Had the good fortune to sit and talk with James in the gallery with his works. We discussed the pattern, the system and the hand. He mention that someone has just written about his work in relation to AI. We talked about Sol Lewitt and in particular Sentence 28
Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
Sol Lewitt Sentences on Conceptual Art 1969
We discussed the propositional (ie not deterministic) character of this sentence in relation to the role of the hand, including in Lewitt’s wall drawings.
Now I’m discovering the work of Julius Eastman.
What art have I seen? Women’s Work
Maria Macavana’s exhibition, Women’s Work, comprising work developed during the pandemic with healthcare workers. It explores the relationship between women who have worked within the NHS and the tools that are important to them to deliver their work.
Two rooms comprised drawings, two with works made or contributed by people working in mental health and wellbeing – Cristina Logan, NHSCT Governance Lead Radiographer; Dr Lindsey Macleod, Independent Clinical Psychologist; Kasia Zych Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist; Angela Bialek Art Therapist; and Sarah McLean Social Worker.
Macavana’s drawings are captioned with texts explaining their significance to these women.
Macavana has been working in dialogue with Dr Macleod for a considerable period and this extends the work. It also links with work Macavana has done in Sri Lanka with craftswomen working with coir rope and palm leaf cocoons.
Macavana’s work, careful and subtle, evokes other women’s work, both physical and caring. It is based on conversations over long periods. It pays deep respect to these care workers with its care.
What art have I seen? Dislocations
Group exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery Glasgow.
“Dislocations was developed in dialogue with The Hunterian’s online exhibition Old Ways New Roads which details the production of Scottish landscape through military, touristic and Romantic representations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Dislocations traces the contestation and revision of such canonical representations.”
Went with Gill and Aaron Ellison, currently on an international fellowship at St Andrews. Aaron was very struck by the relationship between Jade Montserrat and Webb-Ellis’ Peat and JWM Turner’s Peat Bog, Scotland.
What art have I seen? Code Red and Forever Changes
Peter Kennard’s raging photocollages railing against oil and extractivism, pollution, nuclear weapons.
Hydro infrastructure juxtaposed with fabric covered glaciers.
Tim Collins reckoned this was the best of the exhibitions on during the Climate Talks.
What art have I seen? The World’s Edge
Thomas Joshua Cooper’s exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is of his emptiness and extremity works.
Over the course of the last three decades, the American-born photographer has travelled around the globe, making photographs of the most extreme points and locations surrounding the Atlantic Ocean.
The result is an episodic journey that covers five continents: Europe, Africa, North America, South America and Antarctica. Cooper has set foot on uncharted land masses through his work, contributing to cartography and earning him naming rights of previously unknown islands and archipelagos. The only artist to have ever made photographs of the two poles, Cooper refers to this body of work as The World’s Edge — The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity.
The photographer, who was born in California but who has lived in Scotland for many years, having founded Glasgow School of Art’s Fine Art Photography Department in 1982, first exhibited The World’s Edge at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His first monographic exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland is based upon that presentation, with 35 pictures featuring i
Fascinating because Cooper mostly looks down to capture the edge of the land and the sea. The long exposures mean that the land, the rocks are crisp, whilst the sea is blurred, in motion, of a different visual quality. But curiously there is a sameness to the images, largely without human features. The extreme edge of land and sea isn’t made characterful as in tourist photography. The Carribean and the North most Scottish Isles are similar. Perhaps you can tell the colder places from the warmer. For a project about travel there is no touristic characterisation. The three walls of polar works, really mostly white with some revealed rock texture, are exquisite and meditative in a particular way.
What art have I seen? A Portrait Without Likeness
Alison Watt’s new body of work on show at Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Hot off the easel. All based on Allan Ramsay portraits of women. All details. I love the cabbages but they are slightly flat? The paintings of books channel Michael Craig Martin? The lace is a-maz-ing. Conceptually and curatorial rigorous.
What art have I seen? In Relation to Linum
Christine Borland’s exhibition at Climate House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh
What art have I seen? The Glasgow Girls & Boys
At the new Art Gallery in Kirkcudbright.
Interesting to discover the multi-generational story as well as links to Arran, France and other places.
Working with Allan Kaprow
What art have I seen? Tendency Towards’ Haunted by the ghost of a flower
The resonating thought
Haunted by the ghost of a flower an exhibition by the collective Tendency Towards at The Barn. Tendency Towards are all graduates of Gray’s – an evening with students in discussion with the collective. The work is in the ongoing conversation with a curator, in the appropriation of materials (theatre flats) and in the composition of the space.
Making an exhibition as a collective, as another identity from all the individual identities, is a particular exercise in negotiation, and in working out how to speak with a single voice. Each personality in the collective is important, and the whole can be better than any individual if the collective draws out the best in each other.
What art have I seen? Ironstone Prize
Visited Banbury to see the Ironstone Prize with Gail Anderson and Mark Bigelow, who had a piece included. Local open competitions are such a good thing – a community should periodically have a chance to see what the artists living there do. This included a mix of the pleasurable, the rigorous, the experimental and the enquiring.
What art have I seen? Eco-Visionaries
Eco-Visionaries at the Royal Academy. Quite a mix of work, old and new; video, sculpture, performance, architecture; addressing energy, interspecies communication, extinctions, pollution, waste, and other ‘ecological’ issues.
The final element was a performance – we entered a room and sat facing a mirror. We put headphones on. We were addressed and asked questions about our perception of our own mortality. Then the light changed and the mirror revealed itself to be a tank containing jellyfish with another group sitting on the far side. There was some discussion of how they were also experiencing the same performance, albeit ‘offset’ so our actions were seen by them, and then their actions were seen by us.
However the most provocative element was the jellyfish who are doing very well as a result of climate change – I know this because I see a lot of big ones washed up on Ayr beach. The elements that asked us to consider our lives and the changes we might need to make, in juxtaposition with the jellyfish and their thriving, were powerful. The two audiences was a bit ‘over egging’.
Overall the exhibition demonstrated the many ways artists, designers and architects are to a greater or lesser degree succeeding in wrestling, some for more than 50 years, with the issues of the climate and biodiversity emergency. Each work makes sense as an attempt to grapple with all the complexity that Timothy Morton highlights in Hyperobjects – the nonlocality, the phasing, the stickiness and so on. As an exercise in curation I’m not sure it made sense beyond ‘look at all the ways…’ It also didn’t quite address the lameness and hypocrisy that Morton also highlights.
What art have I seen? Hamish Fulton
A Decision To Choose Only Walking at Parafin.
Fine selection of work – the itemisation of walking around many Kora suggests more committed Buddhism. Fulton talks about the time it takes to get into the ‘quiet mind’ at the start of a walk.
The statements “I am a contemporary artist, not a mountaineer. I have no knowledge of Alpine-style climbing and I see no reason why I should paint a ‘good likeness’ of any mountain. I employ words but I’m not a writer. I am a walking artist and I record all my walks in word form…” 60 years of clarity…
What art have I seen? Max Ernst on the first floor and Richard Serra on the third
Max Ernst: An Invitation To Look
The Artist’S Career Surveyed In A Private Collection
Un/fortunately only three of the fifteen works because of another event, but came away with the catalogue.
The show features fifteen works from an exceptional private collection, covering Ernst’s entire career from 1925 to 1971, acquired largely in the 1950s and 1960s by a prominent Italian collector and friend of the artist.
Of course the question of ‘how to look’ is vital. All the works in the exhibition involve different methods used by Ernst in addition to drawing and oil on canvas – frottage, collage, grattage, and gesso relief.
Upstairs in a different dealership is a selection of Richard Serra drawings – examples of several different series. These test the edge between drawing and sculpture; the surfaces are as dense as Chestnut tree bark. The one exception, a looping line spiralling across the page is more like a stream and banks of accumulated sediment.
What art have I seen? Nick Cave’s ‘Until’ and Red Note improvising
We were at the evening organised by ArtLink Edinburgh where, as part of their Altered States programme in association with Nick Cave’s ‘Until’ installation in Tramway, Red Note Ensemble improvised for a mixed ability audience.
ArtLink is an ‘arts and disability’ organisation, and this immersive experience was amazing, taking an already stunning installation and creating a moment where an audience spent time together just being … in our bodies, in the environment, in the light and glitter, in the sounds…
What art have I seen?James Richards ‘Migratory Motor Complex’
More collage today (bit of a theme) this time sound. At Collective on Calton Hill. Video from original presentation with other works by Richards for Wales at Venice Biennale.
Migratory Motor Complex is how your digestion works. Slightly ironic since I was discussing ‘diverticular’ with a colleague over coffee this morning!
What art have I seen? Ade Adesina, NeoNeanderthals
Ade Adesina, After the Questions, linocut, 2018
Ade Adesina’s linocuts.
Robbie Bushe and Jeanne Cannizzo’s collaboration NeoNeanderthal. Bushe said Neanderthals didn’t wreck the planet in 250,000 years. Maybe if they came back… Cannizzo is an anthropologist and maker. Brilliantly in one case are objects she has made, provided interpretation for, and the contested the validity of aspects of the interpretation. Bushe’s paintings and drawings have aspects of children’s books with cutaways to show ‘how it works’, but what’s going on is genetic extraction and the reproduction of an extinct species.
What art have I seen? Collage
Collage exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
What art have I seen? Fife Arms
Louise Bourgeois, Spider
Had lunch and a bit of a look around
What art have I seen? Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers
At Somerset House – threaded by Harold Ové, including music, sculpture, photography, painting, writing, poetry, music, carnival, fashion, design, activism, anger and politics.
What art have I seen? Walid Raad’s To be honest the weather helped
Walid Raad makes work that blurs with everyday life, but coming from the never ending conflict of the Middle East. His images are often banal, but the stories that he wraps them in are sharp – the ‘first job’ photos of shop fronts which are later discovered to be put out of business because they wouldn’t pay the extortion. Above the discovered artist who made works on the backs of paintings in a museum.
How do you deal with (adapt to) living in a state of continual low intensity war?
Para-fictions.
https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/walid-raad-2
Also saw Welkom in adjacent rooms a totally factual documentary photography exhibition on mining communities in South Africa. The implementation of Apartheid, the connections with Dutch culture, the impact on young people. Very strange because the aesthetics intersect.
What art have I seen? Rijksmuseum
Medieval and Asian art.
Saint Elizabeth’s Day Flood (1490-95) amazing record of a flood in 1412 caused by storm surges in the North Sea https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/155667–r-s/collections/elisabeth-panelen-dordrecht?ii=0&p=0
Also ‘A Lohan’, carved wood from China before 1400AD. “This is Ajita. He concentrates fully on listening to the reading of a sutra, a scripture that conveys the Buddha’s teachings.”
(and we thought Masaccio was good) https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=wood+figure&s=chronologic&p=1&ps=12&st=Objects&ii=10#/AK-MAK-1727,10
What art have I seen? Faith Ringgold
The activism sits alongside the storytelling. The humanity alongside the anger. The imagination, the stars of the lights on the bridge, the girl floating.
The consistently acknowledged involvement of family in the making of various of the works, particularly the influence of Faith Ringgold’s mother, must be pretty exceptional in contemporary art.
American People Series #6: Mr. Charlie, 1964 (from Faith Ringgold’s website)
What art have I seen? Cindy Sherman
A lifelong conceptual project.
What art have I seen? Energy Objects
Hannah Imlach’s Energy Objects at WORM in Aberdeen comprises works made over a number of years resulting from an ongoing enquiry into the infrastructures of renewable energy, on Eigg, on Orkney and at Donside in Aberdeen. These carefully crafted objects are no less beautiful than the Archimedes Screw newly installed in the community hydro project in Aberdeen, or the OpenHydro units at EMEC on Orkney. Imlach also touches on the relationship with Community Land Ownership, the critical connection between energy and political evolution.
What art have I seen? My Own Private Bauhaus
David Batchelor’s exhibition at Ingleby
Circle, Square, Triangle. Colour, Play, Repetition, Variation.
What art have I seen? Placing Sound
Maja Zeco performing her work ‘Hold In/Breathe Out’
Maja Zeco opened her exhibition ‘Placing Sound’ at Gray’s School of Art where she is just completing her practice-led PhD with a performance of her work ‘Hold In/Breathe Out’. This work might be a meditation on the experience of immersing yourself in everyday life and stepping out into perhaps your own mind, or in some sense private space. Zeco filled a large bowl with water and as she immersed her head completely in the water, triggered a soundscape of an urban environment with associated imagery. As she came back out of the water about 30 seconds later she ended the audio imagery. She breathed in silence. Her urban included images of streets and buildings and I’m pretty sure I saw an artillery piece.
Spead across three rooms, this exhibition represents nearly 10 years of work exploring sound and performance. One room is quartered and composed of sounds from the North East of Scotland (Aberdeen and Banchory) and from Bosnia Herzegovina where Zeco was born. Voices and bird song, trees and traffic all layer over each other drawing you to different points in the room as different elements come forward.
The middle room has video and physical documentation of two performance works. In one case, One Thousand Pomegranate Seeds’ bringing the action in the video into another form of presence with the physical evidence of the event in front of you whilst watching its making. Below is the promo video from Horsecross, Perth, where the work was originally performed.
The first room you encounter (I started with the last) again brings together different forms of documentation, physical remains and video, of performance – in this case ‘Silencer’ and in another part of the room the space in which Zeco performed ‘Hold In/Breathe Out’.
What art have I seen? The Asset Strippers
Mike Nelson’s The Asset Strippers at Tate Britain transforms the Duveen Galleries into some part of Govan or Clydebank, Paisley or maybe East Kilbride.
The structuring of the dignified neoclassical spaces into a series of workshops, lacks only the suspended fluorescent lights to fully realise the conceit. The partitions’ materials, structures and even adornments are all evocative of industrial spaces across the UK.
The assemblages in the first space seem more ‘found’ whilst some in the rear spaces are more contrived or absurd and more poignant, particularly the giant diesel engine on a bed of sleeping bags.
It might be trite to say there’s poetry in the everyday of industry, but in truth you can find it easily.
What art have I seen? Victor Pasmore Gallery
View of Victor Pasmore Gallery
Small selection of works by Victor Pasmore who lived in his later life on Malta.
Very clear sense of Pasmore’s Modernist understanding of the way the artwork is a thing in itself, not a representation or derivation. Curious if this links to ideas of Object Oriented Ontology?
Pasmore says, “Once independent, a painting becomes the sole visual object so that its content becomes totally immanent in its form and image, a condition which renders its meaning essentially potential. Emerging in anonymity, therefore, the new painting can become a sign or symbol of infinite extension, directly finding its place in the eye and mind of the spectator” (Images of colour 1983).
Harman says, “By ‘objects’ I mean unified realities – physical or otherwise – that cannot fully be reduced either downwards to their pieces or upwards to their effects.”
And goes on to say, “But for the arts, as for the social sciences, the greater danger is the upward reduction that paraphrases objects in terms of their effects rather than their parts. For it is dubious to claim that objects are utterly defined by their context, without any unexpressed private surplus.”
Obviously an artwork is a thing in the human world, but for Pasmore it is not a communication, a message, between the artist and the spectator. It is a thing in itself, not reducible to a representation.
What art have I seen? ‘Dora Maar’ and ‘Prehistory’ at the Pompidou
After the Picasso Museum and also the Tate’s Dorothea Tanning exhibition (with it’s continual reminders that she was married to Max Ernst), this was more interesting and better judged. Includes Dora Maar’s early commercial work, her social investigations, move into Surrealism, connection with Picasso, later abstract photography… rich and diverse.
The ‘Prehistory’ exhibition is a huge survey of art and archaeology, taking inspiration from Lucy Lippard’s Overlay. Interesting that France has its own history of geological ‘realisation’ parallel to Hutton in Edinburgh.
Giuseppe Penone
What art have I seen? Picasso Museum, Paris
Permanent collection and the temporary exhibition bringing together works by Picasso with works by Alexander Calder. Came away with a renewed respect for Calder’s judgement and elegance. Some of the Picasso works… less so.
What art have I seen? Love at first sight
Morag Myerscough’s installation in collaboration with poet Jo Gilbert encompasses the Mercat Cross. Commissioned by Aberdeen’s LookAgain Festival (based in Gray’s)
Lovely story connecting Myerscough to Aberdeen, and Gilbert is a powerful voice for Doric poetry.
What art have I seen? AMBIT: Photographies from Scotland at Stills
AMBIT: Photographies from Scotland at Stills in Edinburgh. Kieran Dodds’ talk for University of Aberdeen Alumni, particularly on his work on Church Forests of Ethiopia.
What art have I seen? Everybody in the Place
Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place, an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 at The Modern Institute
Busy for a sunny (taps aff) Saturday in Glasgow – lots of artists sitting in the dark being reminded of their youth (Ally Wallace, Rowena Comrie).
Interesting proposition that Social Media has replaced music as the mode of existence of young people…
But seriously, compelling argument for the role of late 80s music in the counter culture flowing from Europe to the US and back again. Continued relevance in the ongoing rise of the Right.
What art have I seen? Chick Chalmers
Chick Chalmers An American Roadtrip at Gallery 10, Edinburgh. On the recommendation of Alex Hamilton.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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