Ayr to Zennor
Talk entitled Soil 2.0 addressing context, and various projects I gave at the BOSarts Seminar, part of This Weekend.
Radical Nature at the Barbican
Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 is an important exhibition. Much has been written about it in the papers and on the Eco Art Network. It is a really valuable opportunity to see seminal works by a range of artists and architects. I hadn’t seen Beuys’ Honey Pump, nor the film of Ukeles‘ Touch Sanitation, nor Smithson‘s film Spiral Jetty, nor any of the Harrisons’ Survival Series (1970-1973).
But I finally worked out the essence of my problem with the exhibition. The title frames ‘art and architecture’ and there are works by both artists and architects included in the exhibition. The artists and architects included, particularly the works from the 60s and 70s are radical, there’s no question about that. But the real radicalism of some of the artists and architects is in the scale of their work, and in the exhibition this is only really conveyed in the Center for Land Use Interpretation work The Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Even the film of Touch Sanitation doesn’t convey the eleven month performance of shaking 8,500 sanitation workers’ hands and saying to each of them “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” The exhibition feels like its driven by a curatorial focus on artwork as object, rather than artwork as question or consideration of context.
The real shared territory between artists and architects is in thinking at scale about boundary, organisation, information, energy, metaphor, systems and people; not the superficial similarity of objects.
Think about Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, shown at the Tate’s exhibition Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 a couple of years ago where he focused on the ownership of tenaments in New York by one family through a network of businesses. This would have been as relevant an introduction to social ecological concerns.
Think about the Harrisons’ work Peninsula Europe (2001-2003)which presented the European peninsula as single entity considering the role of the high ground in the supply of fresh water to the population.
Think about Tim Collins and Reiko Goto’s work 3 Rivers 2nd Nature (2000-2005) which involved the strategic planning of the whole Pittsburgh river system area. Goto and Collins “addressed the meaning, form, and function of public space and nature in Allegheny County, PA.” They developed the Living River Principles which were used as a tool for lobbying public officials. They worked with a team of volunteers to develop monitoring systems documenting land use, geology, botany and water quality.
Or PLATFORM’s work Unravelling the Carbon Web (2000 ongoing) which asks us to understand the social and environmental consequences of oil through multiple iterative works drawing attention to the oil industry and its associated networks to Universities, Government and other corporates, working with inhabitants, NGOs and Unions along BP’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, and in Iraq. The purpose of this work is social and ecological justice, but it is also to relate this distant business to the lives of people living in London and the UK.
Or even Peter Fend, one of the most interesting artists, whose work with the Ocean Earth Development Corporation actively seeks to challenge the relationship between art and business by developing approaches to ecological problems through the means at the disposal of artists – colour theory, conceptual synthesis and the use of emerging tools such as satellites.
All of these works:
- Are of a scale which touch on or encompasses whole political, social and ecological systems.
- Involve communication between artists, scientists, politicians and inhabitants (i.e. in multiple and complex ways, rather than from singularly from artist to audience).
- Foreground the connections between living and non-living structures, such that the work is relevant to our daily lives, rather than objects for aesthetic contemplation.
- Blur the idea of the artist, raising the question “is it art?” because the work and the artist are also economist, environmental scientist, planner, etc..
- Raise the question, “Who made the work?” breaks down the idea of the artist as individual, because the work is made through the input of a range of people.
- Embody diversity of description (something very problematic in museum contexts).
- Embody and make relevant all phases of the life-cycle of the art.
Whilst much of the work in the exhibition is also characterised by the above points, it has not been chosen to emphasise these points. Rather it has been chosen because it meets a different set of criteria, criteria of objectness. Thus there are at least five works that involve plants in the gallery – Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s Farm, Hans Haacke’s Grass Grows, Simon Starling’s boat for Rhododendrons, Henrik Håkansson, Fallen Forest, 2006. But the differences between these works, between ironic comment and practical application is lost. The Harrisons’ work is of a practical character “What can we do in these circumstances?” where Starling’s work has an ironic purpose, raising questions about nativeness and protection. Haacke’s work Grass Grows is a work that demonstrates the Manifesto he wrote in 1965,
…make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable…
…make something indeterminate, that always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely…
…make something that cannot “perform” without the assistance of its environment…
…make something sensitive to light and temperature changes, that is subject to air currents and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity…
…make something the spectator handles, an object to be played with and thus animated…
…make something that lives in time and makes the “spectator” experience time…
…articulate something natural…
Hans Haacke, Cologne, January 1965 republished in Art in the Land. A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, ed. by Alan Sonfist, (New York: Dutton, 1983
The off-site project in Dalston, which I wrote about earlier, is a more interesting work than some in the exhibition, precisely because it was not curated, but rather made.
Sculpture Parks and Gardens
International Directory of Sculpture Parks and Gardens
New resource developed out of Cameron Cartiere’s research. The section on Scotland includes Galloway Forest, Glenkilns, Jupiter Artland, Little Sparta and Tyrebagger. No reference to those that are gone, including Cramond and Glenshee.
The category Sculpture Parks and Gardens raises a few conceptual challenges and complexities. Because ‘public art’ is associated with regeneration and the creative city, it has gain far more bureaucratic currency and also funding. Is a group of work by a number of artists in the landscape a public art project or a sculpture park? Is a landscape made by artists a sculpture park?
So some other possible inclusions:
Place of Origin though I’d say its a park as sculpture rather than a sculpture park? see essay in writing.
Place of Origin
Kemnay
Aberdeenshire
Yet to be completed is Arthur Watson’s Reading the Landscape, a collaborative scheme developed with Will MacLean, Lei Cox, Stanley Robertson and others for CairnGorm Mountain. All the works are intended to contributing to a cultural understanding of the landscape as lived in and used.
CairnGorm Mountain Ltd,
Cairn Gorm Ski Area,
Aviemore
PH22 1RB
tel: +44 (0)1479 861261,
I was very pleased to see Glenkilns included, but I wondered why Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick’s Gardens at Portrack House, Dumfries were not included? Best reference I can suggest is http://www.gardensofscotland.org/garden.aspx?id=c2a160c8-f9fc-4306-95d0-9c0300966100 It’s only open once a year for Scotland’s Gardens Scheme, usually first weekend in May.
Portrack House
Holywood
Dumfries
DG2 0RW
And you cannot leave out the Hidden Gardens behind the Tramway as a new and award winning ‘art garden.’ The Hidden Gardens are a project of NVA, and are a focus for intercultural dialogue and shared experiences. Very much driven by community focused activities in a brilliant space.
The Hidden Gardens
Tramway
25 Albert Drive
Glasgow G41 2PE
0141 433 2722
http://www.thehiddengardens.org.uk/
There is a group of works by Ronald Rae in the grounds of Roselle House/the Maclaurin Trust in Ayr. I understand that they were made as part of a Manpower Services project in 1979 http://www.ronaldrae.co.uk/
Roselle House Galleries
Roselle Park
Monument Road
Ayr KA7 4NQ
Finally the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Aberdeenshire has a Sculpture Walk
Lumsden
Aberdeenshire
AB54 4JN
01464 861372
See also thoughts on Sculpture Parks after visiting Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière.
Pecha Kucha: 6 mins 20 secs
If you start with the sentence “My practice is focused by place,” then the next sentence that logical follows is “I’ve been working in … Ireland, Palestine, Siberia.” Whereas if you start with the sentence “My practice is focused by context,” then the next logical sentence can be any one of a very large number of things… [more]
This text and the associated slides were presented at the Pecha Kucha held at the RSA in Edinburgh.
What art have I seen?
Don’t go and think about Dalston Mill as a whacky eco retro art project. Think of it as architects working very hard to imagine a future for us all. And bear in mind that they are sleeping in this structure, above the bar cafe, next to the seminar room and adjacent to the toilets.
The bus dropped me on Dalston Lane and I towed my wheelie suitcase over the uneven pavement. Leaving Liverpool Street and the skyscrapers we’d passed through Little Nigeria on Shoreditch High Street. I’d seen the main Radical Nature exhibition at the Barbican a few weeks ago, and Dan Gretton had said this “off-site” project was really worth seeing. I’d caught a glimpse of the mural you are meant to look out for and seen a black painted wooden wall with words hand painted in white saying Dalston Mill, but it looked closed. So thinking that there was another entrance I walked through a yard, caught sight of a scrubby patch of wheat, went through an opening in a builders temporary fence and wandered around. It was 2pm and a few people were casually doing stuff. One guy in a t-shirt and shorts was sweeping up fag butts whilst smoking.
Going to Nils Norman and Michael Cataloi’s University of Trash at the Sculpture Center, my mother’s comment “I saw this in the 70s” is still firmly with me. She’s got a point.
And the answer may lie in the blurb about the show Into The Open currently in Philadelphia. This was the official US representation at the 2008 Venice Bienniale of Architecture. The sixteen groups represented are at the cutting edge of thinking about the urban, the landscape, the recycled and the social. I immediately recognise Center for Land Use Interpretation, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Project Row Houses and Rural Studio as landmark initiatives. I have a collection of CLUI and CUP materials, the book Rural Studio produced on my shelves and I’ve been to Project Row Houses.
The blurb goes:
“Critics noted the exhibition’s unusually sober assessment of the challenges America faces, as well as the inspired attempts by grassroots architects to mitigate these conflicts.”
But I do have a problem, and it was hell of an easy to walk in look around and walk out – to do the artworld strut – and say “seen that”. I did end up talking to the guy clearing up the fag butts and he turned out to be one of the architects. I nearly voluntarily got roped into making dough, and I really should have (no strutting making dough) but in the end they were just getting organised and I was heading for a train. Vidokle does address this so directly and effectively: The Martha Rosler Library as well as the Video Store and the Night School are all about stopping (or tripping) the strut. And I wish the University of Trash and Dalston Mill had, in addition to the events programme, something which when you walk in off the street, sucked you into ‘the sober assessment of the challenges,’ whatever time of day it was.
Because in reality, these architects and artists have created a structure which is lightweight, adaptable, portable, generates energy, supports social activities, addresses questions of food and land use, and therefore embodies some very serious issues. And I loved the scarecrows with milk containers for heads. And I hope that as they take it all to pieces and move on, that they clean up the site, including the archaeological trash from the periphery, which has clearly been there longer than the three weeks of this exercise, and leave the site better than they found it, whether they have left us wiser or not.
Eco-thinking?
Paul Kingsnorth in the Guardian 1 August 2009
Technology and hubris. What is the role of technology in solving the huge challenges that face the world (i.e. all the species living on the planet earth)? Watching the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s slide show of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline in the Radical Nature Show at the Barbican, I was struck by the scale and sophistication of our engineering (technological) capacities. I came away feeling that it was not optional. Yes, I might use the car less, walk more, fly less, use the train more, recycle more, reuse more, eat more vegetables and less meat, grow more potatoes. I might also be political working on projects which raise environmental issues, join the green party, read the latest thinking on green issues. But the idea that we, as unspecialised animals, don’t use technology to solve our problems, is impossible. Kingsnorth rightly highlights the real problem about the application of existing assumptions to the new challenges: they are not ‘wind farms’ they are ‘ wind power stations.’ But pride is a great driver of human development, technological as much as philosophical. How do we apply our technological imaginations and skills with modesty and humility and a respect for all the other lifeforms on the planet?
What Art/Reading?
Chris Biddlecombe’s book when visitors appear produced as part of his work with the Arthur Conan Doyle Richard Lancelyn Green Collection and the Aspex Gallery which resulted in the exhibition Between Worlds, 2009.
Biddlecombe explores his own interests through the cypher of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Richard Lancelyn Green Collection held by Portsmouth City Council.
Conan Doyle’s public persona as author of the Sherlock Holmes stories is entwined with his less well known involvement in Spiritualism. Richard Lancelyn Green obsessively collected anything to do with Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Biddlecombe has, in turn, obsessively explored this material during an off-site project co-ordinated by the Aspex Gallery.
The book is a juxtaposition of the moments when Holmes and Watson first meet their ‘clients,’ drawn from the stories; and a number of psychic research photographs found in the Richard Lancelyn Green collection. Biddlecombe has made drawings of an almost anthropological or illustrative character from the photographs. Each photograph appears to contain both people and spirits, not always human. Interestingly Biddlecombe’s drawings apply the same mark making techniques to both subjects, and therefore emphasise an equality of reality. The spirits are as real as the sitters.
As is highlighted in the text for the exhibition, trickery does not necessarily preclude truth. Visitors may be the product of the imagination, but that makes them no less significant.
What Art?
The unacceptable face of Britain
Aesthetic of European stag party culture
Blue Cowboys out of Newcastle rebranded to maximise market penetration take Gdansk by storm
Find them on youtube under the name StudioSzkic
Explore Polish bars
Tree climbing, table Squennis, arm wrestling,
begging bankers
Sexercise disco on a streetcorner in NY in PLish
Who is mixing the beats? They should be on iTunes as well.
What Art have I seen?
The University of Trash at the Scultpure Center
Art space become alternative pedagogical space. Quote “I saw enough of this sort of thing in the 70s.”
So are we revisiting the 70s? If so, why? And what is the difference between now and the 70s?
What art have I seen?
Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
What sticks in the mind?
Fifty bums raised in the air: yoga in the Park.
A giant doilly suspended in the trees
(Jennifer Cecere, Mom, 2009)
Looking across to Manhattan’s volume.
A series of physical challenges modelled on an exercise assault course
(Risa Puno, The Big Apple Showdown Spectacular, 2009)
A carnival wagon with artefacts displayed
(Dana Sherwood and The Black Forrest Fancies, The Ladies Society of Alchemical Agriculture, 2009)
A black barn of jig-sawed patterns
(Bernard Williams, Socrates Ply- Teck Barn, 2009)
A small garden, the most valuable space for urban-dwellers
(Jeanine Oleson, Retribution, 2009)
Socrates Sculpture Park reinvents itself as a cross-over public space between art and temporary amusement park. Away with formal sculptural concerns: roll up, roll up to the crazy summer Saturday on a field in the sun. Is it New York or is it somewhere in Kansas? Is it Little House On The Prairie or is it socially engaged practice? Even without the specific ‘dialogics’ intended to captivate the art audiences, Socrates is busy.
Re: LANDWORKERS
Whilst working at the University of the Arts Berne, had the opportunity to meet and speak with George Steinmann. His work From-To-Beyond highlights what was missing from the discussion at LANDWORKERS. We heard about wonderful cultural projects in Samiland, in Dogribland and in Scotland. All these places continue to suffer the environmental and social impacts of extraction. Steinmann went to the Kola Peninsula in Russia (part of Samiland) and saw the massive environmental destruction:
“In the autumn of 1995, after thorough preparation, and having contacted scientists in Norway, Finland and Russia, I headed for Murmansk to travel the Kola Peninsula with a Russian Guide. The itinerary included a visit to Severomorsk and the nuclear submarine base there, as well as excursions to the nickel smelting works in Montsegorsk, Apatity, and Nikel, and a trip to Teriberka on the Barents Sea. I have never travelled in a region so scarred. It is one huge pathogenic zone caught between primal nature and industrial exploitation. This vast region is fatally polluted and damaged by the huge amounts of nuclear waste in the Barents Sea and on the island of Novaya Zemlya, and by the gigantic sulphur-dioxide output of the smelting works. “
(p.166, George Steinmann: Blue Notes, Helmhaus Zurich, Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nurnberg, 2007)
There is a real danger in focusing on the art, and the art focusing on aspects of the cultural, and thus missing the real environmental, social and economic dimensions of extraction and pollution in these remote places.
Berne, Switzerland?
Working at the University of the Arts, Berne
Presenting The Artist as Leader and doing a workshop with 2nd Year Graphic Design students.
Two visits. In the first (27 May) I find:
“Calculation and work. Trial and error, first on paper, then as a model, then eventually as a prototype on a scale of one to one, that is the method of the practical scientist Renzo Piano and his people. The design process oscillates between tinkering and totalling, the simplest hand drawn sketches and the most high-tech computer drawings are used. The search party takes side turnings, longer routes, gets itself out of dead ends, but every step takes them closer to an as yet undefined goal. The detours are necessary – they ensure that no short circuits, no apparent short cuts, lead to a rash, un-thought-out result. Anyone who commits himself too soon, locks himself in. Piano’s people approach their task like a team of researchers on thin ice.” p.24 Benedikt Loderer, Monument in Fruchtland in Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Short Guide. Hatje Cantz, 2005.
Also Dream and Reality: Contemporary Art from the Near East. The curatorial concept is very strong comprising firstly, contemporary works; secondly, elements of material culture chosen from an anthropological collection; and thirdly, a selection of works by Paul Klee. But in practice, as an experience, its not very successful. It’s not that the Klee works aren’t relevant. It’s not that the anthropological works aren’t relevant. Some of the contemporary art is very good. But in this category there are too many video works. But let me tell you about the three really good pieces. Firstly The Walid Raad/Atlas Group work that seems to be called either Untitled 1982-2007 by Walid Raad, or We Decided to Let them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice by the Atlas Group. Secondly the series of carpets by xxx variously titled. When you first walk down the stairs you see a collection of four carpets which are not quite hung in the same way as for instance the carpets in the Burrell in Glasgow. Then you start to question what you are looking at and you realise that they are modified, reconstructed into new forms, subtley different from the normal. Finally, the chair. I thought it was simply a chair with a small booklet chained to it which might elucidate one of the videos. The book started with a short text which explained that in both Europe and in Cairo there are lots of plastic garden chairs, but where in Europe, when they break they are thrown out, in Cairo they are repaired. A sequence of approximately 20 images of various repaired plastic garden chairs followed. The text suggested that visitors to the exhibition should treat this chair very roughly because the museum had agreed to repair any broken chair in the same way that the Egyptians were repairing their chairs.
For me this work articulated the potential for the arts to highlight the infection of one culture by another culture, and the potential for that to work in both directions. Asking the museum exhibition, conservation and curatorial staff to firstly assume that a piece of plastic garden furniture is an important cultural object, and then to suggest that it should be repaired in a very explicit way, is just great. Asking the people visiting the exhibition to treat an artwork roughly (though sadly it was not showing any significant signs of wear and tear), is brilliant. Definitely a sort of Fluxus Score or an Allan Kaprow happening, read through a post-colonial distorting mirror.
Kunstmuseum Berne (28 May)
Tracey Emin (I missed it in Edinburgh, so it was great to see it in Berne).
“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Guerrilla Girls 1989.
If women are going to be naked in the museum then Emin tells us something about her experience of being a woman.
Walking through the gallery away from a video about being in a band, suddenly I heard screaming, screaming that hit me in the solar plexus. My immediate reaction was that someone in the next gallery was in deep, deep anguish. The pop music and the screaming.
In the sequence of polaroid or photobooth works it seems that Emin is saying “If you are going to look at my body, then you are going to see it as I see it, feel it as I feel it.”
There is a display of small images of early, post art school work that Emin destroyed. The pictures are presented like a collection of family photos. You can see that she has been deeply influenced by Edvard Munch. Someone also mentioned Egon Schiele. There is a work which reminds me strongly of Louise Bourgeois.
Conclusion: it’s a game of consequences – the statement is ‘if’ ‘then.’
Kunsthalle Berne (29 May) Zhang Enli
Second visit to the Zentrum Paul Klee (30 May)
Paul Klee: Carpet of Memory
It didn’t feel like an historical exhibition. It was overwhelming, both in the beauty of the images and in the variety of tactics of the visual. It’s not just a lot of squiggles. The one image which was apparently simply a series of dabs of colour on a dark surface was infact a broadly applied impasto, overlayered with watercolour, and the dark colour was used to heighten the shapes of the watercolour dabs.
Conclusion: he asks which tactic will I apply here?
The sculpture park behind the Zentrum – five works – twisted and beaten coreten steel and cast bronze.
Fred Bushe, RSA OBE
Frederick Bushe. Born 1931 died 17 May 2009.
One of the foremost of a generation of Scottish sculptors, Fred Bushe also founded the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.
Both his drawing and his sculpture were monumental in scale and concerned with the physical of the environment around him. He was a modernist through and through, engaged with material and form and dismissive of the fads in sculpture that came and went. His strong sense composition in three dimensions resulted in work drawing on the industrial as a primary source. You would naturally connect his work with that of Anthony Caro.
In 1979 he had been teaching art teachers at Aberdeen College of Education, and was looking for a studio. He found an old bakery in the village of Lumsden, with a flat above a shop front, and a range of buildings behind. He took these on, establishing the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) initially under the auspices of WASPS (Workshop Artists Studio Provision Scotland), and later as a ‘client’ of the Scottish Arts Council.
Fred was part of the post-war sculpture symposium movement participating in symposia in eastern europe and in turn hosting a number of international symposia at SSW. This movement was about cultural communication in the context of political division, and Fred played an important role. In the Bothy at SSW there is a big kitchen table, and that probably epitomises his spirit.
Over the fifteen or sixteen years that he ran SSW, more than one generation of young artists found a place to explore their interests in a working studio. At the same time artists from something like 40 countries came to work. When it was good, SSW was a hothouse with artists working and talking, supporting and helping each other. When it was bad, it was freezing cold and very isolated.
Fred also established the Scottish Sculpture Open at Kildrummy Castle. For many years it provided an opportunity to see large scale work by established and emerging artists, again both Scottish and overseas. It is difficult to image the importance of this biennial when there are now so many opportunities for large scale work (temporary and permanent), but at the time it was critical.
Fred had studied at Glasgow School of Art, 1949–53. In 1966–67 he attended the University of Birmingham School of Art, where he gained an Advanced Diploma in Art Education. He was a long standing member of the Royal Scottish Academy and received his OBE in 1997 (I think).
He exhibited in group shows from the Camden Arts Centre in London to the Pier Arts Centre on Orkney, as well as many of the Sculpture Opens, and his works are to be found in various locations in Scotland as well as in odd corners of Eastern Europe.
Hopefully the RSA will put on a good retrospective of his work.
A characteristic large sculpture, “Grave Gate”, in Corten steel and wood, can be found in the Hunterian Sculpture Courtyard.
Other links to images:
Chatham Street North Extension Relief
T-Fold, Highland Council
LANDWORKERS
Twice this week I have been confronted by the importance of thinking about the rural as a thing in itself, rather than by what it is not. The Scottish Government defines the rural in negative terms; it is that which is not urban. But, and it has to be said, sometime around now according to the UN Population Fund humanity is crossing a threshold into (statistically speaking) more than 50% of us living in cities.
And it is precisely at this point that it is increasingly clear that we need to pay attention to the cost of our beliefs, and our belief that the rural is backward, dependent and boring compared to the smooth, fast and creative spaces of our cities is one we need to question.
On Thursday 14th May 2009 the Geddes Institute at the University of Dundee, as part of the Annual Conference of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland held a symposium entitled Landworkers. We were taken on a journey into a space where the indigenous and the vernacular and the rural and the remote were foremost. I have a slight reservation even using the word rural in the context of work around the Great Bear Lake in the North West Territories of Canada, or of Samiland stretching across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Rural suggests the space of western agrarian cultures, not the space of travelling folk and nomads.
So I’d like to start by suggesting several things Scotland can learn from its own rural:
The international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently reported that Scotland’s rural schools provide the best education in the world.
As noted previously, the result of more than 20 years of community development through the process of land claim on Eigg (amongst other remote Scottish estates) has resulted in the Eigg Trust introducing a renewable energy system which makes the island an exemplar. Moreover the fact that this renewable energy system incorporates a means to limit any individual from taking too much is something to be celebrated. It means that social and environmental justice are manifest in the infrastructure.
Rural Scotland also has the potential to generate 25% of Europe’s wind energy, as well as a very significant proportion of wave and tidal energy. In the context of climate change it is imperative, not that we cover every square mile of the Scottish landscape with wind turbines, but that we develop a robust politics to maximise the production of renewable energy by pushing all the technologies to commercial viability, and by re-designing and re-engineering the grid to support this. The key words for such a policy need to be a mixed economy of means across both technologies and scales – just as rural life is characterised by mixed economies and complex interdependecies.
This moves from the overused word ‘sustainability’ to the more imaginatively rich concept of a ‘stability domain’ as articulated by the eminent ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. A ‘stability domain’ is a region, whether a watershed, or another geographical entity, which achieves ecological and economic stability. In human terms this means having the necessary interdependencies, structures and limitors embedding social and environmental justice, for life to thrive. It also means ceasing to be dependent on the extraction of, and consuming of, limited resources beyond the carrying capacity of the ecology. We might also want to ask what a cultural stability domain might be?
If we want to challenge beliefs, then we might want to imagine the situation where our energy needs are met from the energies already in movement around the planet, rather than those embedded beneath our feet. I can understand why miners in St Helens in Lancashire are proud of their motto ‘Ex Terra Lucem’ and it’s a wonderfully resonant phrase, but we need a new motto.
These are all pragmatic and practical lessons we can learn from the rural, but we can also learn in a different way, and returning to the Landworkers symposium I want to highlight the cultural things we can learn from the rural.
Four, if not more, presentations focused on vernacular and indigenous projects:
Gavin Renwick working as cultural intermediary for the Dogrib in their land claim negotiations with the Canadian Government, andnow moving on to the process of designing and developing a new vernacular for housing in the new nation.
Juhani Pallasmaa creating a museum of nature and culture with and for the Sami.
Then two wonderful presentations flowing into each other by a process of playing ‘tag’ starting with Arthur Watson, handing on to Will Maclean, handing on to Fergus Purdie, handing back to Will Maclean handing on to Marion Leven.
Watson was talking about Cairn Gorm: Reading a Landscape in which he is collaborating with Maclean and Purdie, amongst others. Maclean then talked about the works Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach (Commemoration of our Land Heroes) on Lewis where he is collaborating on the fourth site with Leven.
These projects are more than just art in rural places. They speak to a very specific and different understanding: one the places priority on the vernacular and indigenous. T.S.Eliot and others were quoted on the relationship between tradition and innovation but Renwick provided some of the key phrases that structure thinking this through. The first, probably derived from reading MacDiarmid, in “Being modern in your own language.” The second is the dictum of the Dogrib elders which is to educate young people to understand both Western culture and their own traditional culture: “to be strong like two people”.
The cultural projects all demonstrate that it is absolutely critical in the context of rampant urbanisation to express the value (richness, complexity, duration, immediacy, experimentation and repetition) of the rural. And that the expressions of value and meaning we saw help us understand, if nothing else, that the rural is more than just a lower density of population.
The issue of the vernacular seemed quite opaque in the event. What is vernacular? Is it of the everyday? In relation to architecture it can seem like an aspect of the aesthetic realm or a stylistic device. But it struck me that the terrace I live on with 20 houses the same and two at the end which are larger (for the builder/developer and his family at a guess) also describes a vernacular – yes in the ‘character,’ but also in the economics. There is a real danger that the vernacular is a lifestyle choice rather than an aspect of imagining our ‘stability domain’. It seemed to me that the artists’ projects evidenced a clear operation within a complex idea of vernacular which comes back to Renwick’s ‘modern in our own language’ and ‘strong like two people.’
Scotland's Futures Forum – How to re-perceive our understanding of 'rural Scotland' in the 21st Century?
Willie Roe, Chair, Skills Development Scotland and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, focused this event on an idea of equivalence and interdependence. He drew on the example of Denmark where, in law, the urban and the rural have to be dealt with in equivalent ways. This means that within any planning cycle rolling out services the rural is dealt with in parallel with the urban. The case in point is broadband which has apparently been rolled out in urban Scotland but is still only just reaching the islands. He perhaps highlighted interdependence through the example of very functional ferry services in the Shetlands versus the rest of the western and northern isles ferry services. He observed that in Shetland these had been designed to be the most effective for the islanders by the islanders, whereas the rest seemed to have been designed from the urban centre outwards. He also highlighted the importance of renewable energy in rural Scotland.
It therefore felt a little like the invitation had been made to come to Edinburgh to consider what could be done for rural Scotland which was obviously ‘dependent’ but that by the end the question was quite different: and might end up something like: ‘What are the key priorities where the rural has a specific role to play?’ When we ask these questions we begin to see a different set of answers: certainly renewables, but also education (apparently the OECD recently found that education in rural Scotland is actually the best in the world), probably community development, and I am sure the list goes on. Our priorities would come out looking different: re-engineering our electricity grid from one which distributes from the centre to the periphery, to one which also enables the periphery to distribute to the centre, might be a metaphor for quite a lot of other re-engineering. We would move away from assuming that the ‘rural’ is ‘dependent.’
But, if I had a reservation about the event, it was the lack of the use of the word sustainability in relation to the proposed core concept of equivalence. Equivalence could be interpreted in very wasteful ways. Rather I’d like to imagine Scotland in 20 years time being equivalent to Eigg, certainly in relation to energy if not also land ownership. I say this because Eigg is now wholly renewable, but also because there is social and environmental justice built into the system. Eigg does not have an unlimited volume of electricity available, although it is free and not consumed in the process of use. Therefore they have implemented a 5kw limit for households and a 10kw limit for businesses in the form of a trip on the supply. This way noone can take more than their share. To me this is an important model for a sustainable future for the planet, not just one utopian island.
The Artist as Leader
The Artist as Leader programme: I have been Research Associate since 2006 working closely with Professor Anne Douglas, in a partnership between academic research and practice. We have recently published the final report from the first phase of work, and are in the process of developing new initiatives.
See Research and Writing > The Artist as Leader
What art/reading?
The Martha Rosler Library (and Anton Vidokle‘s talk) at Stills, Edinburgh.
Vidokle, founder of e-flux and Producer (?) of the Martha Rosler Library as an e-flux project, explained the origin of the circulation of the Library. Vidokle described being in Texas, visiting Marfa, seeing Donald Judd’s library (below) of some 10,000 volumes, and not being allowed to pick one off the shelves because everything has to be kept exactly the way Judd had it – a ‘permanent installation’ in his terminology. So Vidokle is talking to Rosler about another project and relates this story. She offers Vidokle her library as a public resource. Vidokle gets excited about the idea. The Martha Rosler Library opens in the e-flux storefront in New York. Stills, Edinburgh, is the last venue, the seventh stop, in what has become the circulation of the Library.
Vidokle referred to the difficulty in thinking about authorship in relation to the Library. It is curated by the venue – obtaining shelves, setting them out, accessorising; it is his idea and he thinks its art; it is Rosler’s Library and she doesn’t think its art; and of course each of the books is authored in the literary sense. We enter a dialectic between form and content. It certainly offers the possibility of a Borgesian treatise, but I think something else is also going on.
Vidokle located his recent projects (unitednationsplaza, Night School, Pawnshop, etc and his involvement in the cancelled Manifesta) in creating an ephemeral/transitory and mobile/ circulating space for attention. He understands contemporary art as constantly drifting into the spectacle whilst striving to ferment political/social change. He noted the underlying current of social change in art going back over 150 years – he referenced Manet and Courbet inheriting the radicalism of the French Revolution. The aesthetic is increasingly a powerful force, whist participation in the political is weakening – Vidokle is concerned with art that can operate differently.
The Martha Rosler Library evidences the importance of politics to some contemporary artists – you will find distinct slabs of literature on marxism, women’s issues, theory, philosophy, architecture, radical history, and so on. But more to the point it would appear that Martha Rosler is an artist who understands reading, thinking, informing, research, theory, intellectualism, radicalism, to be part of what it is to be an artist.
In fact I would go so far as to propose, and I think Vidokle hints at this with the title Martha Rosler Library, that this is like the Presidential Libraries, and in fact Artists’ Libraries should be recognised to be of equal importance and value to the life of nations. We certainly need to recognise the importance of the artist as ‘public intellectual’. To know why this is a bad idea you only have to look at the Artist Placement Group Archive recently bought by the Tate, and now functionally inaccessible. You need to register as a bona fide researcher; make a booking to use the Research Centre, and then you find that because this Archive isn’t catalogued you have to request specific items in advance – how can you request specific items in advance if the archive is uncatalogued? You have to know what you are asking for before you ask for it – the unexpected, the exploratory, the serendipitous is impossible.
But this Library, some 7000 books, is different and does something important, and maybe it does exactly what Vidokle set out to do. It is a spectacle but it draws you into spending time, paying attention and even having conversations. Vidokle has constructed an experience out of a couple of tons of matter, matter which is so fascinating that, more than gold or diamonds, it stops you in your tracks, draws you in, sits you down, and takes you into the heart of what really matters.
Deirdre McKenna and Kirsten Lloyd at Stills both commented on how long people were spending in the Gallery (far more than they would with photography exhibitions). Vidokle said that in Berlin there was a hard core of people who spent 3-4 hours every day in the Library for weeks. Now, of course all Librarians will tell you that people spend hours libraries – some of them old people keeping warm, some doing research, some just hiding. So people coming to the Martha Rosler Library get sucked in, pick up a book, sit down, start reading. Even if they pick up a sci-fi novel (and there is a shelf of them too) they are spending time in a cultural experience. And the same is true of a public library.
This is a particularly good library for those interested in contemporary art and the political – its probably better than most individuals have, and it may be better than most art schools have. Its very clear that it is an individual’s library and has that particular degree of focus. So the person spending time in the Martha Rosler Library might be radicalised. But I suspect most of the people visiting will be arts professionals (just as Vidokle acknowledged that the 50,000 subscribers to e-flux probably amount to a list of those seriously (professionally) involved in contemporary visual arts).
So if this Library does what other libraries do and keeps people for longer, and if it is a radical collection being looked at by people who are by and large au fait with a radical agenda, then why is it important?
Maybe its important precisely because it does exactly these things. Because the ‘event ‘ of the Library being in Edinburgh draws people concerned with contemporary art and social issues to spend time paying attention – reading and having conversations with colleagues, acquaintances and strangers you run into. And exactly why is this important?
I think it comes back to ‘elitism’. The more a group develops a common language, a shared set of ideas, an iterative discourse, a cliquish mentality, the more powerful it can become, the more likely it is to change the world, to take over, to mount a coup, to become a junta.
I spent two or three hours in the Library – I read two of Rosler’s book works, an essay by Lawrence Alloway on Feminism. I looked at a text on aesthetic education and on engaged artists in California. I talked to a guy from the Arts Council, Deirdre and Kirsten, Becky, Rachel and watched others. I met lots of people at Vidokle’s talk. It seems to me that art does not have to be something uniquely different: it can be something already well known, but do it with great attention. Why is this art, not just a library? Actually its a library made by an artist for other artists.
Notices on e-flux documenting the circulation of the Martha Rosler Library
Stills (Edinburgh), Site (Liverpool), Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), unitednationsplaza (Berlin), Museum for Contemporary Art (Antwerp), Frankfurter Kunstverein, and at e-flux (New York)
Others thoughts:
Cluster Blog
Letterature di svolta
Artopia – John Perreault’s Art Diary
What art have I seen?
Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière
Some images at Flickr
Vassiviere is listed on the ISC‘s web site as one of the few sculpture parks in France. It describes itself variously as ‘a centre for art and nature’, ‘art and the counryside’, and ‘a centre for land art’. It has a few internationally known artists (Goldsworthy, Pistoletto and the Kabakovs) and many French artists; I found a work by Brad Goldberg, who collaborated on Place of Origin, and work by Roland Cognet who had worked at SSW and seems to have had a one person show at Vassiviere,
This place is interesting; having come about as a result of a major hydro-electric scheme, it conceptually raises issues of our relationship to our environment and our tendency to manipulate it in order to extract benefit. It has real character, but it suffers from neither owning its history, nor clearly adressing its apparent mission.
It has a mixed bag of sculptures that make up the park – some the result of a sculpture symposium in the early 80s. More recent and jokey post modern works are also incorporated. The gallery seems to work in partnership with some high profile institutions like the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The building by Aldo Rossi is striking.
But there is a lack of clarity – there are cornerstone international works, but I couldn’t discern a curatorial strategy. Likewise I guess that the works by French artists are significant, but I didn’t get a sense of a collection of work of significant French sculptors (or artists working in three dimensions on an outdoor scale). This would be a good project in itself.
The work by Samakh is a good response to a natural event, but the replanting of an area of forest to promote biodiversity is not radical.
Thinking about the work of Littoral in particular, but also of PLATFORM, and others involved in dialogic practices, there are so many ways in which this amazing place could speak of itself. Funnily enough it is Goldsworthy who draws attention to the drowned land, but for instance the larger ecological landscape is not drawn out.
But as it stands it clearly has a history of being a centre for sculpture during the second half of the 20th century, and is trying to redefine itself. Using the gallery to do this is OK, but in the end it remains in conflict with the permanently sited work which speaks of a previous project.
Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom
Greenhouse Britain: (2006-2008). I had the pleasure and honour to work with Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison and David Haley, . The project developed new thinking about the impact of climate change on the island of Britain.
Producing and Project Managing > Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom
What art have I seen?
Gavin Renwick‘s Home Office at the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee.
Gavin invited me to participate in the last discussion in the series.
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty threatened
Some of the many histories of Spiral Jetty
One
20 years ago a massive campaign led by Nancy Holt, and supported by cultural activists across the world, saved Spiral Jetty from a plans to pump oil from under the Great Salt Lake. Arguing that Spiral Jetty and its context were of international importance, a swift and successful international action was mounted. The UN declared Spiral Jetty a World Heritage Site, putting it in the same category as Machu Pichu and the Great Pyramid of Giza. On the back of this campaign, the Dia Foundation secured donations in excess of $1 billion. With this funding they were able to secure land around all the major Land Art sites – De Maria’s Lightning Field, Heizer’s Double Negative and Holt’s Sun Tunnels. They joined these parcels up to create Entropy Park which now forms a complete ring around the State of Utah. Arguments continue to rage amongst art historians and critical theorists.
Two
20 years ago a spoof email and web site initiated one of those brief flurries that characterised the early 21st century internet. The email suggested that Spiral Jetty was endangered by a proposed energy development which would involve pumping oil from beneath the Salt Lake. Although it did not come from Nancy Holt, it intimated her involvement in a campaign. The net result was that Jonathan Jemming, a Planning Official in Utah State, received approximately 1,500 emails within a one week period. These emails, from artists and academics, museum directors and critical theorists, were in turn abusive, erudite, impenetrable, passionate, and in every case objected to a planning application that did not exist. In fact Jonathan Jemming had never heard of Robert Smithson or Spiral Jetty. Meantime arguments raged amongst art historians and critical theorists.
Three
20 years ago, despite protests by Nancy Holt and others, they started pumping oil from under the Great Salt Lake in Utah, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Unfortunately no one realised that, due to a lack of maintenance, pressure would build up in the underground pipes and explode on July 20th 2033. The blast made a crater nearly a kilometre across and caused a tidal wave to travel across the lake. No one was killed. Spiral Jetty ceased to exist. This caused outrage in the art world. The Dia Foundation secured donations of $1 billion to reconstruct the work as well as undisclosed damages from the ExMoBphell conglomerate operating the installation. In the past 5 years no work has been done to reconstruct Spiral Jetty. The Dia Foundation have bought additional parcels of land encompassing the whole of the crater and its surroundings. They have designated this Entropy Park. Arguments continue to rage amongst art historians and critical theorists.
What art have I seen
Half-Life by NVA and the National Theatre of Scotland
Collaboration
Oren Lieberman, at a dinner during Wendy Gunn’s Making Places workshops in 2002-03, offered an interesting analysis of collaboration. I was reminded of this and encouraged to actually note it down by Tony Beckwith (from Gunpowder Park) phoning up and asking me to remind him about it – I had offered Oren’s thought up during the Bright Sparks Seminar (9 March 2007).
So back to the point, Oren’s analysis of collaboration. He said there is Multi-disciplinary practice. This might be characterised by a group of different disciplines (architects, engineers, planners, perhaps even artists, sitting around a table, each addressing their area of responsibility within a project. Having them round the table is useful, but collaboration is functional. Then you have Interdisciplinary practice. I would understand this to be when the people around that table are interested in understanding each others roles, skills and tasks. I might further suggest that they draw on each others roles skills and tasks through interest. Finally Oren offered Transdisciplinary practice – when people change roles and start doing each other’s jobs. I would offer Michael Singer and Linea Glatt’s 27th Avenue Waste Transfer Station project in Phoenix Arizona as an example – as I understand it they had been employed as artists to decorate the building, found their were decorating a basically bad building and persuaded the commissioner to allow them to redesign the building as a public space which in the documentation, looks like the hanging gardens of Babylon (case study at publicartonline).
The first thing to say about Oren’s analysis is that it is not an increasing scale of good: Trans- is not better than Inter- which is not better than Multi-. They are different. Trans- is more difficult than Inter- which is more difficult than Multi-.
Given that they are more difficult, and probably in the context of any form of collaboration, we need to think about how to achieve collaboration. To achieve collaboration you cannot start around a table in an office. You can only do it by constructing shared experiences, relevant to the project and characterised by conviviality.
Here I would point at John Maine’s tactics at the beginning of Place of Origin (for more on this project follow this link). He insisted that we (himself, Brad Goldberg and Glen Onwin and myself) go on a road trip. We went to Lewis, via Clava Cairns and Assynt. Ostensibly we went to look at the interpretation centre at Callanish, but in fact we went to get to know each other and to develop a shared visual language. Interestingly, though John and I had been to Kemnay Quarry on a number of occasions, this road trip happened before either Brad or Glen saw the site. I suspect the result was that when they saw the site, at the end of the road trip, we all had a shared experience to interrogate it from. What was averted was each artist arriving at the site and immediately going into a singular “what do I do here?” and instead, what occurred was “what do we do here?”. I think this latter point may be very important – it certainly resulted in an amazing collaboration over 10 years.
Sokari Douglas Camp – Sweeping
Sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp at
Camberwell College of Arts, London
26 July – 13 September 2006
Nigeria comes to London. Well actually Nigeria and London have been together for many years. Sokari Douglas Camp CBE! Sokari Douglas Camp is an artist, and more precisely a sculptor. Sokari Douglas Camp lives in London. Sokari Douglas Camp was born in Nigeria, and more precisely in the Niger Delta. We need to be precise to avoid confusion.
The exhibition Sweeping is a group of recent work across a range of scales.
Positioned on the forecourt of the College, and visible to passers on the Peckham Road, is Asoebi Women (2005), made as part of the Africa05 season and shown at the British Museum. Of course its also the eponymous ‘water feature’ for Ground Force – thus essentially and at once Nigerian and British.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in Purple Hibiscus, describes the women at Christmas in rural Nigeria: “They all looked alike, in ill-fitting blouses, threadbare wrappers, and scarves tied around their heads.” (p91) This sheds a light across the work, one confirmed by Sokari in the text in the catalogue. Poverty and making do are key.
Inside the Gallery are two larger than life size works – a pair of figures, Accessories Worn in the Delta (2006), and a single figure Teasing Suicide (2004). Various other smaller scale works are also included – at least one of these is a maquette, but all stand on their own.
Sokari Douglas Camp works in welded metal. She is immensely skilled as well as provocative and reflective in her work. She addresses Britain and Nigeria, Peckham Road and Port Harcourt. The exhibition is full of life and death.
The statement offered with the exhibition illuminates this.
‘Sweeping is about management, order, facing up to the truth. As we sweep, we whisper things to our chores – I think I do that with my sculpture. I work on things that disturb me, take ordinary experience and turn it into a surreal picture. But life is surreal.’ (Press Release)
But this statement is more interesting if you read it in the catalogue. It goes on:
‘…and women take it in their stride. We tolerate the most extraordinary things.’ (Catalogue)
The last statement, missing from the press release, adds a completely new, feminist perhaps, dimension. It becomes less ‘art world’, less distant, more present, more personal.
The process of making sculpture is about telling, or perhaps admitting, the truth. What results from telling the truth as you make art is a new understanding – a heightened awareness.
The Bus, the maquette for the Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa states ‘I accuse the oil industry of the genocide of the Ogoni’ Its a very unsubtle statement. Other works in the exhibition open up the personal psychological experience in much richer ways. The Bus speaks to the public shared space. It asks “Which bus are you on?”
The figure, Teasing Suicide, that confronts you as you enter the gallery is holding an AK47 pointing in its mouth. I interpreted it as a female figure. I interpreted the pink paint covering the head and shoulders as the consequences of squeezing the trigger. But the work is also one of the most beautiful. Sokari Douglas Camp is immensely skilled at working with metal, and the imagery cut into the body of the figure is just stunning.
The large pair of figures, also I think female, entitled Accessories Worn in the Delta, are loaded down with AK47s and ammunition. They face each other, but they are like caryatids rather than in a personal confrontation.
One of the smaller works, the Coca-cola Ladies (2004) also is a curious configuration. A group of perhaps eight tall figures of women surround a slightly more vulnerable figure in the centre of the group. The figures are made from mild steel, the head dresses red, crushed and cut coke cans. The eight are linking arms, and the whole assemblage is moving purposefully. There is almost a praetorian sense to the group. Making sculpture out of found materials such as coke and beer cans has become a ‘traditional’ activity in Africa, but the psychological strength of this work is huge.
Sokari Douglas Camp’s work is infused by her cultural inheritance. There is no possibility of failing to recognise the colours, patterns and shapes in the work. The short film Sweeping, perhaps just a ‘study’ of the idea, highlights the action focusing on repetition and pattern in the dust. In the background is a house. The front wall of the house made from concrete blocks pierced with a simple repeating pattern – you know – the sort also used for garden walls. In that, as much as in the patterns left in the dust by sweeping, you can see the importance of the cutting and drawing through the steel.
Each work contains a psychologically complex situation – standing, protecting, confronting, crying, killing – genocide. They are personal responses to human experience. My instinct is that the human experience is rooted in Nigeria, and it stands as a challenge to London – Nigeria is conflicted, but Nigeria is strong. It also asks the person in Peckham “Have you experienced anything like this?” to which the answer is probably “Yes.” Just as the Bus, and PLATFORM’s whole remember saro-wiwa project, aims to make what happens in the Niger Delta a reality to people in London, so all Sokari’s work seems explore the idea that ‘ We tolerate the most extraordinary things’.
What art have I seen?
John Latham: Time Base and the Universe
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton
An opportunity to see more of Latham’s work (having previously seen the show at the Tate Britain in 2006 and the show at the Lisson, God is Great, in 2005).
Work I had not seen before about the West Lothian bings and the skoob towers. More films including one that explores the same territory as eames power of 10. The film ‘Unedited Material from the Star’ which I had seen at the Tate is also included. I see the sea shore. Gill sees minerals. I particularly enjoy as Latham gets into the process and begins to play around with sequences of colours – there is humour and inspiration.
In a way that the obituaries failed to do, this exhibition does justice to the scale and complexity of Latham’s vision. Once again we are left uncertain and challenged, with moments of clarity, and others of incomprehension.
In ‘(Rephrase) Zero Space, Zero Time, Infinite Heat’ once again the idea of the minimum possible event is explored. In this case a linear sequence of sheets of paper with short typed texts explain the presence and absence of spots. In this case not sprays, but single spots. The final ‘frame’ is a stack of pieces of paper all assumed to have spots and to represent certainty after the sequence of uncertainty (Gill liked this one).
Research and Writing > John Latham
John Latham
Several years ago I made a pilgrimage to Livingston to visit the Five Sisters, a bing on the edge of the town. I understood it to be a major, unsigned, piece of land art associated with that elusive artist, John Latham.
I documented the work of art on a slide film. Although I did not climb on the work at the time, I did view it from a number of perspectives. That documentation resides in the archive of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, with no associated texts of explanation.
I was caught up in myths, in part of my own making, that surround Latham. I connected some limited knowledge of the Artists Placement Group (APG), through picking up that there was a connection between Latham and these large bings, legacies of an industrial landscape in the Lothians, to the land art of artists such as Smithson. I assumed that Latham had been involved in the shaping of the Five Sisters.
I have since discovered that the connection between Latham and the bings in the Lothians is of a different sort. Latham had proposed the re-imagining of the bings as monuments. His work involved re-conceptualising the bings as valuable aspects of the landscape, rather than as huge problems.
His work consisted of photographs and plans. This work was exhibited as part of a survey at the Tate in 1976.
John Latham developed work in response to the bings that mark the landscape of the Lothians. This work asked us to consider the bings as other than simply blots on the landscape. This work related the bings to other major man-made landscape monuments.
Latham neither engaged in the physical shaping of post industrial landscapes as American artists were doing, nor did he engage in the form of work of other English artists moving out of the gallery during the same period through strategies such as walking.
The former entered marginal post industrial spaces and used the processes that had scarred them to shape them again. The re-shaping of the landscape also implied a re-valuing of those landscapes.
The latter adopted a ontological position: exploring what aspects of being can be shared with others. This exploration of the nature of individual human experience and the limits of sharing was interpreted through an ethic of take only photographs and leave only footprints.
Latham’s work is of a different order again. His work proposes that we can choose to see the landscape differently by an act of will. This is made easier if it is undertaken in the context of a broader reading of man’s marking of the landscape.
His work related to the bings, and other projects undertaken with Steveni under the heading of the APG have had a very significant, if little documented, impact on the visual and other arts in Scotland.
David Harding, founder of the Environmental Art programme at Glasgow School of Art, amongst others, acknowledges the seminal importance of Latham’s work.
It is timely to highlight the work of Latham, Steveni and the APG. Their archive is being given to the Tate this spring (2005). It is proposed that works relating to Scotland should be revisited.
© Chris Fremantle 2005
Postscript
For a coherent and researched discussion of Latham’s work in Scotland see Craig Richardson’s article for Map Magazine Autumn 2007
What art have I seen?
Ettie Spencer at the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock
Oh! Mother…. what the hell are we going to do about this? The birds are shitting on the floor and the Japanese knotweed is taking over. Even the hoovers can’t cope with the mess and are floating out to sea.
Ettie Spencer’s show at the Dick Institute Kilmarnock makes a pretty clear point. To what extent can man control nature? Has the enlightenment project of imposing rational order finally run its course?
Each of the works juxtaposes a made structure with an element of nature. The cage for the birds is a huge arrow, constructed from angle iron and mesh, pointing out of the gallery towards the open air, but tethered by concrete blocks. It mixes the aesthetic of the delicate birdcage with the scale and material of industrial fabrication. The birds are content enough to inhabit this sign, and yet the irony is that the very symbol of escape is their cage.
Equally the Knotweed racked up in hospital laundry trolleys forms a wall of green in the gallery, also inhabiting the industrial scale of human management systems. Knotweed is described by conservationists as an alien and threatening species. Any fragment of root will generate another plant. Thus it is described as the largest female in the world.
Spencer’s video work, upright hoovers, shaped out of polystyrene, are floating out to sea. They might land on distant shores – a sort of desperate housewife’s message in a bottle.
Going back to see the exhibition again, I was strangely disappointed that the knotweed had not completely filled the gallery. I don’t know why, but I had hoped that instead of the same gallery installation, the living elements would have broken free from the made constraints and that coming back to the gallery would have been like entering a new and natural world.
I found the text below in a folder on my laptop – according to the properties it was modified 23 June 2006 so it must have been written right about then. I had been freelance since February of that year. I had been helping Helix Arts with an evaluation of the Climate Change: Culture Change project and must have just been in the development phase of Greenhouse Britain, probably having been to Shrewsbury and met the Harrisons. It’s a curious piece of history and I’m posting it pretty much as a curiousity.
It’s a very good question – why am I interested in Climate Change?
There are a number of answers – firstly I acknowledge that it will have a significant impact on my life, and the life of my family and friends, and it is having an effect on the lives of other people who I don’t know, and other living things on the planet. But that requires me to reduce my ‘carbon footprint’ (in the jargon) – to travel less by plane and car, to reduce energy consumption in my house, etc. It does not require me to make it part of my work as a cultural historian/curator/person involved with contemporary art.
I became interested in issues of art and the environment through a number of experiences and observations – I used to be Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, and this is located in rural Aberdeenshire – it was a ‘modernist sculpture factory’ dislocated from its natural urban habitat to a rural one, by virtue of the inclinations of the founder director. I heard Declan McGonagle, then Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), speak in Dundee about the challenges of transforming a building which was part of the British colonial history in Ireland into a space for modern art. He highlighted and emphasised the importance of engaging with the cultural history and the surrounding communities. IMMA places its relationship with its locality as a key thread of work.
I also began to look at the work of artists who worked within the environment across a range of strategies and tactics – I invited John Maine to work with us and a quarry company – this resulted in an 8 year project constructing a new landscape on the rim of an historical quarry in Aberdeenshire, and in passing involved 8 years of research and exploration of the prehistory and history of stone in the landscape of Aberdeenshire.
I commissioned Nina Pope to explore the interface between the rural and the digital with a group of young artists.
I commissioned Gavin Renwick to explore buildings in the rural environment of Aberdeenshire again with a small group of artists and architects. This opened up a political dimension and resulted in a series of events looking at Devolution in Scotland from a (rural) cultural perspective. The work with Renwick developed into another project looking at cultural continuity and human settlement in the context of the village and Aberdeenshire.
Another tack over this territory was the Making Places residency with Wendy Gunn – she brought in Craig Dykers of Snohetta and Tim Ingold, Chair of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Tim in particular spoke about movement in the landscape – knowing places and finding them. We explored Aberdeenshire through a multi-disciplinary team including artists, architects, archaeologists, anthropologists, land-use researchers, and inhabitants.
I ran a programme of visiting speakers on public art – Penny Balkin Bach from Fairmount Park Art Association in Philadephia, Anna Pepperall from Gateshead in the North East of England, and Stefanie Bourne from the Sustrans organisation. I commissioned or acted as the commissioning agent for quite a lot of public art – this did not take thinking forward, but it is always interesting to work with artists. Where it was interesting was when there was an opportunity to for an artist to develop work of their own, or where a commissioner was willing to take risks and be very open.
Helen Denerley’s Craws at the Safeway in Inverurie simply addressed one of the characteristic aspects of the area, and David Annand’s Aberdeenshire Angus was the best possible thing that could be done on the basis of the ambition of the village of Alford.
But more interestingly, George Beasley and Helen Denerley’s collaboration over the Boundaries project brought the whole population of Glen Deskry into making a work of art, and the CairnGorm Mountain landscape initiative has resulted in a truly significant work by Arthur Watson in collaboration with many of his colleagues. In this work he is addressing hte multiple cultural histories of the Cairngorms. The first phase of work involves dangerous drawing – exploring the naming of rock climbs – the dotted lines that overlay the cliffs and crags of the mountain.
But as to climate change – all of the above is characterised by
1. rural and inhabited
2. artists with other disciplines
3. reflection and action
Now I have been involved in Practice led research for 6 or 7 years, initially as a partner and collaborator, now probably as a researcher, and in the future as a PhD candidate. This has only been possible because of my colleague Anne Douglas and On The Edge, her research project into a new articulation of the value of the visual arts in marginal contexts. Whilst On The Edge does not speak to climate change directly, it addresses the idea of ‘life as art’ and the reposition of art within the everyday. It also is a hugely important space for thinking rigorously and creatively across such a wide range of issues in partnership, not just within the core team, but much more widely.
I’m not interested in climate change because its a new theme in the endless cycle of issue based work eddying through contemporary art. I’m not interested because there might be funding. I am interested because it is an evolution of the work – it asks not just how do we live here? How do artists respond to this place? How can we look again at where we are?
It goes beyond that to ‘we have to live differently. How can we do that creatively?’ Climate change is therefore not the only driver. There are also social drivers and ethical drivers and aesthetic drivers.
My dissertation for my MLitt in Cultural History was all about Utopia, its underpinning of the Humanist project and the embedded structures of power and social organisation – it was a critique. I think perhaps I am still involved in the critique of the humanist project and the idea of utopia.
What art have I seen?
Launch of Phase I of Arthur Watson’s work at CairnGorm Mountain. Great to see this project coming to fruition. I still think it is a shame that Winifred isn’t part of it: pacem.
I think I first went to meet Bob Kinnaird in March 2001.
It all started with a phone call from Judi Menabeny, then the visual arts officer for Badenoch and Strathspey (?). Bob had contacted her looking for help to develop the arts as part of the development of the funicular. At that time the Funicular was a big story attracting a lot of negative press. Anyway, Judi called me and I went over to see Bob. I was immediately struck by the landscape – who wouldn’t be? But to me it was the bulldozed airstrip that you can see from 10 miles away. That is the first visitor experience.
Quickly we set aside the idea of the sculpture park on the mountain, and looked to do something that addressed the relationship between the organisation and its context. Clearly Bob’s thinking about the living mountain has developed in the process as well.
Infobabelise by Ben Woodeson
Review of Ben Woodeson‘s show at the Jerwood Space over Christmas and New Year 2005/06.
What was a technical exercise for a bunch of engineers – getting mobile phones to send text messages to each other – is just another innovation that has pushed the development of culture in a whole new direction. Short bursts of characters. Innovative use of punctuation. It has all happened in ten years and even grandparents are using it. We live in an ‘information age’. We are skilled navigators and interpreters of a complex visual and auditory world. Another generation seduced by the white heat of technological development.
In Woodeson’s work everyday human concerns are made the object of an art that behaves as interference. He describes this as “primitive attempts to re-use and re-examine that which is commonplace and everyday.” It is the only way to explain this group of work. Its the everyday made into nonsense. Where in Wallace and Gromit or in Heath Robinson the madcap machines are intended to produce benefits for their inventors, Woodeson makes these contraptions for our benefit – so that we can begin to become sensitive to the extent to which what we think is communication is almost always noise.
The exhibition is made up of three works – one in the café and one each in the two gallery spaces. ‘Herbalgerbilverbalisor’ collects speech from the reception desk, filters it through voice recognition software and then ‘types it out’ in light boxes in the far gallery. The work contains all the key issues – remoteness, indecipherability, use of the everyday human, complexity and randomness.
Woodeson avoids trite judgements and does not rely on the trendy to carry the work. The far gallery could have been cluttered with computers and screens running Linux. Rather, the alphabet stands alone blinking at you from the light boxes. The clue to the computer function is in the one box in the bottom corner, like the blinking cursor in DOS, waiting for action.
Where Gallery Three blinks, Gallery Two taps. A series of jaunty electro-magnets tap out an apparently abstract pattern. The electro-magnets are thread-sized spindles of copper wire in pairs. Power pushes them apart, release results in a click. Controlled, this results in old-fashioned Morse code. Woodeson has programmed these automated distress beacons with short extracts from self-help texts. The title gives away the attitude: ‘Chicken soup from Mars’. Texts which deal with leadership merge with texts on wealth and with relationships. There is one pair clearly together on the right hand wall – one is titled ‘Low-down on Going’ and the other ‘Blow Him Away’. Electro-magnetic sex therapy if only I could decipher it.
(De)cipher is a key concept for Woodeson. He ensures that the work cannot be deciphered exactly. His work creates circumstances in which people cannot understand each other, characterised by misheard conversations, misunderstood texts, unintelligible telephone messages – definitely not handwritten letters or quiet face to face conversations.
Woodeson’s work involves considerable technical skill – electrician, programmer,
cabinetmaker crossed with hobbyist. The irony of unintelligible self help texts, and the complexity of first using speech recognition software to overhear conversations with the receptionist (“Where is the toilet?”) and then have them typed out too fast to be read, all speaks of enormous effort for negligible reward – in his words “technical investigation with maximum effort for minimal achievement.”
The art exists in a liminal space between the real and the virtual. There is the physical presence of the electromagnets in the gallery, the light boxes, the microphones, but the meaning is attenuated through the virtual. Meaning is stored and modified as electricity.
In the gallery there is a shared experience of the physical, but the meaning is not accessible. By inference our own constructions exclude us from understanding each other.
Jane Jacobs 1916-2006
Obituaries: Toronto Star, Washington Post, The Guardian
Anne Douglas and I used Jane Jacobs The Nature of Economies as a means of interrogating the first phase of On The Edge Research in “Leaving the (social) ground of (artistic) intervention more fertile“, a paper presented at the Darwin Symposium, Shrewsbury; Waterfronts IV, Barcelona; and Sensuous Knowledge 2, KHiB, Bergen.
On The Edge Research is a practice-led research project based at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. OTE has, since it was launched in 2001 with a major award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, focused on developing new articulations of the value of the visual arts. In 2005 Anne Douglas, the principle researcher, and I wrote a paper which started out with the question – what is sustainability in the visual arts? This is a particularly tricky question especially in the UK because of public subsidy. Any discussion about sustainability will normally veer off into a discussion of the Arts Councils. Jane Jacobs book the Nature of Economies seeks to set out the fundamental rules of development looking at developmental processes in natural systems. She argued that the same rules that govern the development of ecosystems also apply to economies, and we explored the application of this thinking to ‘arts development’.
- What is really important is to recognise that development occurs at multiple levels simultaneously (ie fractally),
- that all development requires co-development (ie nothing happens in isolation),
- that all development requires various forms of governors (ie feedback loops, bifurcations and emergency adaptions).
- Development occurs qualitatively and quantitatively.
- Development occurs in a cycle of differentiation from generality.
I am very sad that such an important thinker, who I only recently learnt so much from, has died.
Originally posted 1 May 2006
Carron, Ravenscraig, Glengarnock
Starting at the only remains of the Carron Works, looking at the stone tower with carronades in the gateway. Finding the blue gate (a triumphal arch) from the Edinburgh International Exhibition of 1886. Going to the cemetery and seeing family graves, crying.
Through Ravenscraig without stopping (Gavin was not there to ground us).
Ending in Glengarnock, seeing Lorna’s gate, finding all the different bricks telling a story of industries drinking in the Masonic Lodge.
Photos by Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, George Beasley
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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