What art have I seen? Trembling Museum and Silent Archive
Two ambitious exhibitions which basically challenge territories and disciplines.
Trembling Museum at the Hunterian aiming to unsettled the ethnography collection of Glasgow University by bringing it under the glaze of Eduard Glissant and into relation with contemporary practices.
The most interesting thing was the idea of threadyness, that the emergence of jazz and blues and hip-hop are all grounded in partial memories of cultures in parts of Africa where people were transported from into slavery. Something really powerful about that cultural continuity, potential becoming something new but still also connected.
Silent Archive at Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh brought a number of artists into relation with aspects of archives, both of specimens and collections but also of for example endangered species. Works were grouped around issues, the palm cut down to enable the restoration of the Palm House, endangered species, species grown industrially and the industrial production processes.
Both exhibitions were perhaps not only across practices and disciplines, but maybe deep mapping, exploring power relations, ‘archives’ in the Foucault sense of “the fundamental formations that determine what is seeable and sayable as history.”
Interestingly both were problematic in their associated interpretation. Trembling Museum had a reading room, but the narratives of individual objects tended to fall back into their conventional disciplinary forms. So items from the ethnography collection were still accompanied by ethnographic texts.
So curious that having taken Glissant as a guide, none of his concepts, particularly opacity, were employed. At the object level everything reverted to clarity and specificity. As noted above some actual ‘interpretation’ or allusive storytelling was evident (thready connections), but the powerful metaphor of volcanic trembling didn’t result in the promised confusion of ethnography and contemporary art, let alone a confusion related to life, a full working out of blurring (Kaprow) as a form of opacity (Glissant). It was Gill, my otherr half, who pointed this out.
At RBGE Gill overheard a lot of frustration at the interpretation too, though in this case because it wasn’t adjacent to works – curatorial keeping space for the work meant hunting for the interpretation. That in turn was only lists of creator, title, date, material, lender. All text was accessible via QR codes. There is maybe more work to think through the digital physical relation.
What art have I seen? Yoko Ono and Yinka Shonibare
Yoko Ono at the Tate: lots of open participatory imagination focused works… plus her and John Lennon in bed talking about Peace
And Yinka Shonibare at the Serpentine remaking famous figures and buildings of power in British history with textile patterns which are ubiquitous in West Africa but come through Indonesia…
What art have I seen? Fourth Plinth proposals including Ruth Ewan’s ‘Believe in Discontent’
Love the image of the cat with its hackles up, the reference to the suffragists, the whole thing …
Take a moment to vote for radicalism
What art have I seen? Frank Auerbach – The Charcoal Heads
Two rooms of the most compelling charcoal drawing. What if you keep working on a charcoal drawing for a week or a year? There is a comment about the improvisation only coming at the end, adding a stoke or two of vivid pink or blue to something monochrome.
It seems trite to say there is an unstintingness to this work. If you are looking for experiments in medium or form, or the notion of craft, the tedious act… see recent review from Washington Post, thank you Tim Collins… This is those things. It isn’t an exhibition about ‘now’, the anthropocene, and it isn’t elevating an overlooked group. It isn’t ecological or social but it is creating a world in common.
What art have I seen? Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology
Overwhelming, moving, shocking, humorous and irreverent. Last hours of the exhibition (16.30 on the last day). So much I didn’t know as well as many I did but hadn’t seen other than in books.
That being said a very significant proportion of this is documentation of one sort of another – documentation to record site specific performance (eg Ukeles and Shaffer) or documentation to enable or make us see real life exclusions (eg Godwin), or activism such as anti-nuclear protests, and resistance to mineral extraction. Some work did documentation in other ways such as using existing media (eg Bethônico’ use of newspaper documentation of mud slides),
The entrance juxtaposition (above) of Simryn Gill’s work, on the one hand smaller images of plastic bags stuck in vegetation after water levels recede or on the other larger images of open cast mining sites in Australia, kind of sets the stage.
There are multiple explorations of being other or dissolving – Aguilar, Corrine, Hammer, Huggins, Mendieta, Miracles, Neo Naturists, Shaffer, Urya, Woodman (and others).
There are long term explorations of multiple dimensions of reality in huge places (eg Chloe Dewe Matthews’ ‘Caspian: The Elements’).
Not all the work is activist, some is simply sensuous and vivid such as Carolina Caycedi’s ‘Multiple Clitoris’ (below) made from kaleidoscoped images of a river.
What’s missing though?
The ecosexuals…
Anything living…
The manifestos…
The ‘public artists’…
Whilst the New Naturists and others are doing something along these lines, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle amongst others are reimagining Earth as lover and their various ‘marriage ceremonies’ would have added a distinct dimension.
And along those lines there is literally no living material in the exhibit… I know the Barbican can do it .. they had the Harrisons’ Full Farm in ‘Radical Nature’. What about Jackie Brookner’s work which might have brought water from the roof into the gallery and purifies it flowing over a mossy tongue – look it up, it’s great!
I didn’t see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto of Maintenance Art which is a foundational document in this field, not any of Agnes Denes’ Manifestoes. And I bet there are many others, the inclusion of which would have also troubled the curatorial authority. Which raises a thought about how conventional the display is – largely framed works arranged nicely with neat labels. What if the Manifestoes had been printed on the walls behind or adjacent to the works? Layering up meaning…?
Finally the ‘public artists’, though that is too neat a category for Betsy Damon and the Keepers of the Waters or Aviva Rahmani and her Trigger Point Theory or Bonnie Ora Sherk and ‘The Farm’ or Patricia Johansson, or Jody Pinto, or ffs Loraine Leeson and her project with the Old Geezers just up the road on the River Lea creating renewable energy…
The review in the New York Times highlights many of these concerns, concluding with questions for the institution around how it engages with what the works in the show are raising and drawing attention to…
Great exhibition, really glad I saw it, definitely buying the book…
What art have I seen? Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots
Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla
What art have I seen? Ellsworth Kelly photographs
‘Shape, Ground, Shadow’ at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
What art have I seen? LACMA
‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction‘. Such an interesting genealogy from Albers, Hoch et al through to Rosemarie Trockel.
Judy Baca extending the The Great Wall – museum becomes Muralist’s studio
‘Vincent Valdez and Ry Cooder: El Chavez Ravine‘ brilliant indictment of land grab, gentrification as we’d call it now.
And before all that the La Brea Tar Pits
What art have I seen? Made in L.A. Acts of Living
All the right words in the various texts (and also ‘hybridity’). And yet the presentation of the works in the gallery couldn’t be more conventional…
Clearly the artists are in better, and stranger, and frankly worse ways, engaging with complex lived reality but the exhibition design and curation is like every other big group show. Actually the work in the last British Art Show was marginally more provocatively presented…
The Hammer’s periodic look at what’s going on https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2023/made-la-2023-acts-living
Citing the Watts Towers as a metaphor for the exhibition, the Intro panel goes on to say “…art is an endeavour that is transformed by those who inherit encounter, steward, reinterpret and continue it.” I don’t really see how this is true of this exhibition or any of the works in particular…
What art have I seen? Tulare
Pleasure to visit the office of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and see their current investigation into the industrial agriscape of Tulare in California’s Central Valley, flooded in 2023.
What art have I seen? Wenders’ film Anselm
At Glasgow Film Theatre.
Wenders’ ‘Anselm’ is a very good equivalent of an exhibition catalogue for Kiefer’s installation in the Doge’s Palace, Venice 2022. All the background, the development through two versions of a younger Kiefer.
‘Anselm’ is more biographical than Sophie Fiennes’ ‘Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow’. That film as I remember it is more focused on the Studio at Barjac (discussed here Aesthetics of Uncivilisation). Wenders’ is more interested in what it is to be German.
‘Anselm’ discusses the relationship with Nazism and Heidegger (spoiler Wenders’ seems to think Heidegger was silent on Nazism, which he wasn’t, but Kiefer’s work, in particular a book featuring Heidegger’s brain succumbing to cancer, is totally clear… the last pages are all black…).
The question of what you would do as a German in 1930 or 1939 was left hanging. Putting on your Dad’s uniform and going places acting it out salutes is reopening the wound.
What art have I seen? Helmut Lemke
How do you respond to clear felling of plantation forestry where you live?
You can hear the silence, just the whirring of machines.
Outside on the wall of the Byre is another artist’s work, somewhat relevant
What art have I seen? Alasdair Taylor
Very grateful to Malcolm Dickson for reminding me to go to the Alasdair Taylor retrospective on my doorstep at the Maclaurin. Fascinating body of work – I particularly liked the collages incorporating text – but came away feeling deep sympathy for Annalise his wife who brought up kids in a house with no electricity right under Hunterston Nuclear Power Station and died of cancer aged 54…
What art have I seen? Never a Joiner
Andy Cranston’s exhibition at the Ingleby in Edinburgh. I could stare into this pool all day.
What art have I seen? Hung Liu
Two rooms in SFMOMA. Brilliant. Greeted by a revolutionary soldier, a cut out painting of the artist herself. Made, as with many of her works, from an old photograph in this case taken during the Cultural Revolution. But the revolution is what she does with the gun as it protrudes from behind her back. It becomes a sliver of a Money painting of the sun over the Thames.
There are large paintings, some three dimensional, but the multiple small paintings are in some ways the more radical part. The caption says every day she would travel to the edges of the City and paint. It makes a wall of practice. It was a form of resistance against the requirement for socialist realism. See ‘My Secret Freedom’ at Hung Liu.
What art have I seen? Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Web(s) of Life
Three groups of work:
Cloud Cities: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces the outdoor sculpture above features homes for 23(?) species. This has a second indoor element including a play room for kids that adults can’t enter.
Indoors, a film installation about Extractivism and the green economy which is focused around the Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the People of the South (which will be read aloud to you if you hop on one of the stationary bikes outside and peddle).
And the other inside element is arachnophilia, an installation comprising various webs created in Berlin by spiders who live with and in the Saraceno studios. No spiders travelled to the UK, just vitrines of webs.
When I first saw the Cloud Cities I thought ‘here we go’ but by the end I was completely absorbed by the intelligence and aesthetic of this exhibition. It speaks to exchange and the importance of understanding the ecosystems of which we are part. My conclusion on the Cloud Cities is that they are like a circle in geometry, wholly different from any circle in real life. The Cloud Cities are like a 3d catalogue, a sort of habitat or IKEA display of all the forms of inhabitation we could include to enable a multi-species coexistence.
Also saw the Alchemy show at Thaddeus Ropac and the Sarah Sze installation The Waiting Room at Peckham Rye.
What art have I seen? London Design Biennial
Comments made to friends in a group chat when asked what we were doing in London
So we’re in the London Design Biennial which is gougingly expensive to get into and not all that…
Hoping for really good examples of design thinking but actually either over-explaining on lots of text boards or mostly showy without substance.
Polish display on how to recycle window units for Ukraine was on point.
Taiwan display was really a political promo for Taiwan, small, large, clever, diverse, etc.
The USA display juxtaposed photos of national parks with vr renditions from pokemon (?) They made a book, claiming it’s the first of its kind, which you could look at thru your phone. The National Park image would then appear as the other one and vice versa… My explanation has lost interest in itself… 😂 🤣 😂
What art have I seen? Raw Material
Kerry Morrison’s Open Studio as part of Spring Fling in the Byre at Corriedoo.
Anne Basley and Lewis Robertson were with Kerry Morrison talking to visitors about art and peatland restoration. All three work for the Critchton Carbon Centre’s Peatland Action project. They are all involved in practical work which needs both art and science. You’d have difficulty being sure which of them is the ‘artist’ and which is the ‘scientist’. The love of peatlands and the importance of making them matter, as well as making them healthy, means there is a common purpose. It’s brilliant to see such mutual solidarity and willingness to stand together in the context of collaborative practice.
Up until perhaps 20 years ago peatlands were considered wastelands, valueless unless drained and made productive, usually for forestry. There is no landscape the perceived value of which has changed so rapidly. Now we are spending very large sums of money on removing drainage and restoring peatlands. We are taking out forestry planted on peatlands. Kerry and her colleagues even have a ‘Spruce Plucker’ championships. Sitka spruce ‘self sets’. It may be commercially valuable and highly regarded by foresters, but for peatland restorers it is a dangerous invasive.
The peat core which is in the upper space of the Byre is sitting on paper quietly creating an image of itself as the water is absorbed by the paper and then evaporates leaving an ‘image’ very much like a vertical section cut through peatland as was done when peat was cut for heating fuel.
In the main Byre space is the large wall work I’ve become part of in the image above. It’s another ‘section’, this time of an erosion gully in a peat landscape.
There are samples of water from different sites and outside there are two demonstrations. A lot of this focuses on aspects of levels of organic carbon in water resulting from erosion.
We look in art for things that move us and the small self-set Sitka in its bed of sphagnum moss, an invasive alien to some and a productive crop to others is striking and kind of sad – whether you subscribe to the ‘right tree in the right place’ this is clearly a young tree in the wrong place. One of the other things art can do is engage with contradictions in provocative ways. The complexities of inherited cultural values (peatland as ‘wet desert’); new scientific research, being done as all conservation is, in the midst of crisis; and art as exploring ways of knowing and being (not just as communication).
There were lots of ways in which the human-peatland dynamics were present, contradictions sharply drawn, and matter made to matter. In retrospect the living otherness maybe could have been more in focus? I still focused on the single sitka self set rather than the moss it was in. Martin Avila in Designing for Interdependence talks about some fish and a fungus and points out that in exploring interdependence we still need to think about whether we are going to create conditions which are propitious for the fish or the fungus affecting the fish… It is harder to imagine caring for the fungus at the expense of the fish… and trees and much loved and easily anthropomorphised…
What art have I seen? Merz
I’ve never seen Kurt Schwitters’ intact MerzBarn on the Cylinders Estate in the Lake District. The wall on which Schwitters was working had been removed before I was born. I’ve been to a couple of events at the empty Barn and memorial to Artists considered degenerate by the Nazis, organised by Ian Hunter (who sadly died earlier this year,)and Celia Larner. I saw the reconstruction of the Barn in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London and I’ve seen the ‘artwork’ installed in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.
At MoMA, Sanquhar, in a former butchery, I saw the MerzBarn when Schwitters was working on it. Dave Rushton’s models are stunning and this is particularly shocking in a way. You are sitting on a chair looking into a largish shoebox shaped object through a slot and you are transported – I meant genuinely transported.
Thanks to Simon Beeson, we were there and also experienced Florian Kaplick’s performative lecture on Schwitters, a Dadaist performance by the local youth theatre, a collaborative rendition of ‘Kaa Gee Dee’ by Florian and the Youth Theatre, and a collage of a piece writing of Schwitter’s called ‘Kreig’ with Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ performed by Florian at the piano and singing. The whole event was compered by Daniel Lehan and masterminded by Dave Ruston. Dave’s brother Phil says he doesn’t understand Conceptual Art. His wife Kathy was clearly enjoying herself. Alan who was at Art School with Dave had just installed a stunning piece of Merz Stained Glass for Dave.
The next question is which of the following two images was I standing in, and which is actually a model in the image?
Dave Rushton’s work has a level of recursiveness which is so intelligently and humorously executed it is a joy. You have to ask ‘What is a model for what?’ and ‘Where is the reality experienced?’
There is also the question of value. Dave’s perhaps masterwork (though the whole Merz project in Sanquhar might be the work) is installed in the meat fridge. It is an installation of Conceptual Art, by Art & Language in a gallery in Pripyat accidentally preserved by the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster which means that the work is preserved and unable to become a commodity.
Merz is alive, kicking and recursive in Sanquhar. It is providing a positive feedback loop for cultural development whilst providing a negative feedback loop against simplification and value extraction.
What art have I seen? The Love of Print
The Love of Print: 50 Years of Glasgow Print Studio at Roselle House Gallery.
What art have I seen? Talented New Scots
Pop-up exhibition at Gallery Sometimes in Largs featuring Mark Bigelow, Guillaume Fraboulet, Rene Johansen, Hannah Mackintosh and Olha Yolkina.
What art have I seen? Beuys drawings and Robert Longo works
At the Gallery Thaddaeus Ropac. Beuys Drawings from the family collection (honestly some found down the back of the fridge). https://ropac.net/exhibitions/652-joseph-beuys-40-years-of-drawing/ and https://ropac.net/exhibitions/653-sense-beuys-gormley-a-conversation-through-drawing/
This quote associated with the one room of Longo works (I think an extract from an exhibition in Paris) has had me thinking a lot about artists and research.
https://ropac.net/exhibitions/637-robert-longo-the-new-beyond/
What art have I seen? Tramway
Several exhibitions at the Tramway including:
Norman Gilbert paintings https://www.tramway.org/event/4abdfe69-2eea-4921-a9f4-aee500f041af
Amazing installation channelling agriculture and technology by Iza Tarasewicz https://www.tramway.org/event/d0c95f0d-cec7-4467-beed-aef300fb7d34
and the Koestler Arts exhibition of works by people in Scottish Prisons and other institutions https://koestlerarts.org.uk/exhibitions/regional-exhibitions/scotland-2023/
What art have I seen? Hinterlands
At the Baltic
https://baltic.art/whats-on/p-hinterlands/
Drawings from Laura Harrington’s Hags Series
What art have I seen? Peter Randall-Page
What art have I seen? Maud Sulter at Pollok House and Weemin’s Wark at GWL
Day visiting exhibitions and talking with Tim Collins
Works by Maud Sulter (1960–2008), Glaswegian-Ghanaian artist, artist, photographer and playwright whose work address colonialism long before it was a mainstream subject for Museums and Galleries. Selections from Zabat and Hysteria as well as photographs and poems from Memories of Childhood. https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/maud-sulter-exhibition-at-pollok-house
And Weemin’s Wark at Glasgow Women’s Library (Co produced with Gaada) comprising new artists’ work looking at the her story of feminist organising on Sheltand. https://womenslibrary.org.uk/event/weemins-wark-2/
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? Tracy Emin at Jupiter Artland
‘I lay here for you’ https://www.jupiterartland.org/art/tracey-emin/
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.
Neurodiversity promotion on Exhibition Road
Came across this inspiring installation on Exhibition Road in Central London. It highlights neurodiverse researchers in the leading institutions (Imperial College, Science Museum, V&A, Royal College of Art) along this key street. The graphics are engaging and the individual examples highlight the importance of neurodiversity in research.
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.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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