Project Ginsberg
Project Ginsberg highlighted in the Alt-w mailing from New Media Scotland
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
Howl Part 1, Allen Ginsberg 1956
Project Ginsberg’s vision is a future where every Scottish citizen who experiences common mental health problems has a wide range of interventions available to them.
People with common mental health problems may look like they are coping – they walk the dog, look after their children, go to work – but the reality is that for those with common mental health problems the experience is chronic; resulting in months and years of feeling like they aren’t coping with life.
Project Ginsberg is about helping to define, design and prototype the vision of a range of effective interventions for the people of Scotland, with a focus on exploring the role of everyday web and mobile technology, and alternatives to the traditional patient-clinician model.
We think there is a huge opportunity to improve people’s life experience through rethinking our approach to common mental health problems, especially by using technology in ways that fit around people’s everyday lives.
The work is driven by Scottish Government’s Mental Health Strategy 2012-2015, which commits to developing a Scotland-wide approach to improving mental health through new technology in collaboration with NHS 24.
What art have I seen?
Schwitters in Britain at the Tate Britain.
Schwitters after Duchamp yesterday evoked a further set of relationships. Fascinating to see these two masters of the 20th Century, one sometimes derided and the other not well known. The Duchamp exhibition, well described here, is explicitly about influence. The Schwitters exhibition is a more traditional historical narrative shaped by geography and war. It has two contemporary responses Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko attached at the end. There are also interesting similarities in the exhibition design, though the Barbican is perhaps more compelling.
Peter McCaughey reminded me, Schwitters’ interest was achieving the smallest, shortest, gap between idea and realisation (“Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork” Merz Painting, 1919 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters). What is the relationship between Schwitters and Latham? One second drawings?
Brian Eno’s new work for a hospital
Beautiful piece on Radio 4’s Today programme Friday 19th April talking about Brian Eno’s new work for a hospital in Hove. It absolutely captured all the thoughts about our experiences of hospitals. It was also reported in the Independent here.
What art have I seen?
They saved the hill. But can they save forgotten Scotland?
Dalmellington is one of a series of villages and small towns including Cumnock and New Cumnock, Auchinleck, Beith, Kilbirnie, Glengarnock, Drongen, Muirkirk, perhaps Patna and Tarbolton, certainly South as far as Dailly, which are part of a post industrial rural landscape which is distinctive in Scotland. It runs across Central Scotland and up into Fife.
Kenneth Roy’s short comment on the demise of Scottish Coal Ltd, just put up on the Scottish Review, highlights the undoubted determination of the people living in these towns: they value their places and fight for them.
Glasgow may be onto its fourth major international event next year, but the whole discourse of regeneration and creative cities has pretty much bypassed the issues of the post-industrial rural landscape. The development of Dumfries House and the associated new settlement of Knockroon are perhaps an element of a rural story, as are Booktowns, though as Roy notes Dalmellington was meant to be Scotland’s before Wigtown grabbed the mantle.
If Creative Scotland has a challenge today, it’s to develop a Place Strategy that speaks to this set of challenges.
What have I been reading?
Tim Etchells’ piece Moon Story for the Arnolfini is a beautiful call to arms for performance.
Methodologies of Failure
Justin Langlois put a set of questions (a self-evaluation toolkit?) directed at artists engaged in social practice on Portland’s Art and Social Practice Masters blog. It’s humourous, provocative and pointed.
Ghost of Water Row on RIAS shortlist
Edo Architecture‘s Ghost of Water Row has been shortlisted for the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland’s Award, as reported in Scotland on Sunday. For more information.
Andy McAvoy of Edo said in an email,
we tried something, we failed, we burnt it down
“How you can be doing that work, how you can be this radical alternative, and those oppressive structures return so unconsciously?”
Transcript of a discussion about collectives and failure. Collectives, which are meant to be a radical alternative to the marketisation of the individual in the art economy, end up sliding unconsciously into patriarchies, or being co-opted by institutions and failing in the ambition to be radical.
Two views of participatory art
Eleanor Heartney’ review in Art in America provides a useful comparison of Kester and Bishop’s new books which continue the argument between these key theorists of socially engaged and participatory arts practices.
What art have I seen?
Peter Howson‘s exhibition From Death to Life at the Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr
Open Studios Ayrshire 22-24 March
A group of artists has gotten together to organise the first Open Studios in Ayrshire over the weekend 22-24 March 2013. The brochure can be downloaded osabrochure2013.
Fail better | e-flux
Fail better at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (not a case of What art have I seen?)
“Try again / fail again / fail better,” is an inspirational quote by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. During his visit to Germany around 75 years ago, Beckett made a number of extended visits to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and now—in keeping with his famous motto—the Kunsthalle is presenting a diverse selection of films and videos on the theme of failure. In works dating from the 1960s to the present day, internationally acclaimed artists explore this complex phenomenon, highlighting not only the playful, amusing and surprising aspects of failure but also its mournful and tragic dimensions.
Imagining Possibilities Conference | Public Art Scotland
This piece just went out on Public Art Scotland,
This Participation was the focus of the Imagining Possibilities conference at the University of the West of Scotland, but the conference is only a manifestation of a wider concern. The conference is part of the Remaking Communities project funded as part of Connected Communities. The Connected Communities programme embraces all the Research Funding Councils in a broad alliance to engage communities and thus increase impact. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation is currently funding four strands of the ArtWorks programme, including one in Scotland. The Scottish Government is currently working its way through a new bill on Community Empowerment and Renewal and the Westminster Government has already legislated on ‘localism’. All of these programmes put community participation at the heart of, respectively, academic research, arts practice and local democracy.
Ideas for Ayr Beach
Lianne Hackett and I, under the banner of Ayr Converses, have been thinking about Ayr Beach. We’ve set up a Storify to enable us to pull together ideas and examples. If you have any, please feel free to send me a link or add a comment below.
Legacies of British Slave-ownership
UCL have just put a new database online which allows searching for owners of slaves by name and address. So put ‘Ayrshire’ into the search field and you’ll find the addresses in Ayrshire, the Plantations in the British Carribean, Mauritius and the Cape. The last item is a sum of money. It’s the compensation paid to the slave owners.
What art have I seen?
George Wyllie: Scul?tor and Navigator at the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and Critical Dialogues: Scotland + Venice at the Lighthouse.
What art have I seen?
Alexander Hamilton’s notebook. Photo Chris Fremantle
Alt-photo at Edinburgh College of Art.
The Essential Monument Pt. 1 | Public Art Scotland
First part of a report on The Essential Conference in Edinburgh,
“I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I’m not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don’t do it. I’m not crazy about categories.” Barbara Kruger
Working artists and curators don’t tend to talk about monuments as part of the contemporary public art. Not sure they’d be considered essential. The recent conference, The Essential Monument, held at the Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh (8th February 2013), proved everyone wrong. The provocation clearly worked.
Before talking about the conference I need to say that the new monument to Patrick Geddes installed in the Garden of Sandeman House is one of the finest pieces of sculpture I’ve seen in a long time.
Grupo Etcetera on failure
From Grupo Etcetera presentation at CCA Glasgow.
Errorism: practice philosophy that bases its actions on error
Errorists: multitudes, subjects or groups that practice errorism
“The Movement also opens ways to consider the notion of error as a fundamental human condition in the capitalist world that eschews mistakes and failures.”
see also http://actipedia.org/project/international-errorist-movement
What art have I seen?
A Different Way of Working: The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and St Ives Painting, at the Dick in Kilmarnock. Particularly interesting images of glaciers and broken trees.
What art have I seen?
ECONOMY at the CCA in Glasgow and Stills in Edinburgh.
My uncle wrote a book entitled God and Money.
His book is about the Italian Renaissance. I’ll send you a copy if you are interested (let’s just say you’ll owe me). These days fewer people believe in God, more believe in art, and money involves more in the way of belief. IS there a big difference between indulgences and Hedge Funds? But it’s too easy to slip into that trope.
David Haley says,
“…economy need not be limited to monetary concerns, but may carry the virtues and the values of efficiency, good management, good housekeeping, and dwelling correctly, or ecologically. And this meaning, also, imples the profoundly simple/complex aesthetic when describing the ‘economy’ of Shaker furniture, the profound simplicity of a Zen brushstroke, or the Bauhaus term, “the art of the highest utility”.
There are two parts to the exhibition Economy, one in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh. I saw them on pretty much consecutive days (I then got a e-flux announcement about “It’s the Political Economy, Stupid” at the Pori Art Museum in Finland). We in the arts need to acknowledge our complicity, even our role as the avant garde in global capital and mobility.
Economy has a subtitle – work, sex, life, enclosures, crisis, spectres, exodus. David would like the inclusion of the Project Row Houses – they might be in the life category. Theirs is a minimal contribution: a poster highlights the resistance to the encroaching gentrification of the Third Ward in Houston where the Project Row Houses are located. David would appreciate the elegance of 21 shotgun houses used, seven as afterschool clubs, seven homes for single mothers and seven for artists residencies plus an office. Check it out – its growing.
Irony is also a useful tool for exploring economics. Hito Steyerl film (which is also part of a survey at the Art Institute of Chicago at the moment) deserves time spent with it. The film follows Steyerl’s search for one set of bondage photos taken of her whilst she was in Tokyo studying film some 10 years previously. She doesn’t know the name or location of the studio, magazine, photographer or ropemaster. As the ingenue she is able to visit and explore this strange world. Everyone wants to help. They are proud to be asked.
Who is he?
Cullen House 16th Century tempura painted ceiling (detail of Mercury)
I use this image (or an even smaller crop) , rather than a photograph of myself, when asked for one by websites.
It is the figure of Mercury from the Scottish Renaissance tempura painted ceiling in Cullen House, Aberdeenshire. Sadly it was destroyed by fire in the late 80s. If you are looking for more information on the Cullen House ceiling get hold of a copy of ‘Celestial Ceiling’, the publication of the On The Edge Research project. The book documents the process of remaking the lost ceiling as a digital projection, and commissioning Robert Orchardson to make a new painted ceiling for the house.
What art have I seen?
In pursuit of the Question Mark – a retrospective exhibition at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. A really packed exhibition of the work of George Wyllie.
Collaboration
Billy Klüver again,
The “expertise” that artists bring to the collaboration comes directly from their experience in making art. The artist deals with materials and physical situations in a straightforward manner without the limits of generally accepted functions of an object or situation, and without assigning a value hierarchy to any material. The audacity of Picasso’s collages in his time, Meret Oppenheim’s surrealist objects, and Rauschenberg’s combines and cardboard pieces all illustrate this quality. The artist makes the most efficient use of materials, and achieves the maximum effect with minimum means. Surplus of material leads to decorative work. The artist is sensitive to scale and how it affects the human being. From cave drawings to Persian miniatures, cathedral frescoes, or Christo’s Running Fence, scale has been a consistent concern of the artist. The artist is sensitive to generally unexpressed aesthetic assupltions, which are based on subjective preference masquerading as “objective,” practical, economic, or social factors. The artist assumes total responsibility for the artwork. The artist knows that a work is the result of personal choices: this sense of commitment and responsibility gives the artist and the work a unique quality.
Artists, Engineers, and Collaboration (published in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Bender, G. and Druckrey, T. (Eds) Dia Center for the Arts, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 9. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994).
Collapse
Billy Klüver reminds us of Jean Tinguely’s work on collapse in Artists, Engineers, and Collaboration Klüver-Billy-Artists-Engineers-and-Collaboration (published in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Bender, G. and Druckrey, T. (Eds) Dia Center for the Arts, Discussions in Contemporary Culture Number 9. Seattle: Bay Press, 1994).
Jean Tinguely came to New York City in early 1960. On seeing the city for the first time, he decided to build a large machine that would violently destroy itself in front of an audience in a theater, throwing off parts in all directions. A protective netting would save the audience. When the Museum of Modern Art invited Jean to build his machine in the garden of the museum, he asked me for help. I took him to the New Jersey dumps, which in those days were not covered with dirt. He found bicycle wheels, parts of old appliances, tubs, and other junk, which we hauled to the museum and threw over the fence into the garden.
Enlisting the help of Harold Hodges at Bell Laboratories, we built a timer that controlled eight electrical circuits that closed successively as the machine progressed towards its ultimate fate. Motors started; smoke, generated by mixing titanium tetrachloride and ammonia, bellowed out of a bassinet; a piano began to play and was later set on fire; smaller machines shot out from the sculpture and ran into the audience. In order to make the main structure collapse, Harold had devised a scheme of using supporting sections of Wood’s metal, which would melt from the head of overheated resistors. The whole thing was over in twenty-seven minutes. The audience applauded, and then descended on the wreckage for souvenirs. Jean called the event Homage to New York. During those three or four weeks of the construction of the machine I learned how to listen to the artist, and to give him as many technical choices as I could – as quickly as possible. And as Jean has said repeatedly since, it couldn’t have happened without our collaboration.
For information see http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=33838
Body Pods podcast
Each podcast in this series, co-produced by Fuel and Roundhouse, has been made by an artist in collaboration with a scientist, exploring a different part of the human body.
What art have I seen?
The Artist and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-1979 at Raven Row. Extensive documentation of a significant number of placements in industry and public service including correspondence on setting up of placements, feasibility studies and reports as well as films and other documentation. Films from ‘I am an archive’ (see Laura Trevail’s website for more info).
Ayr Common Good workshop
ayr converses (Lianne Hackett and Chris Fremantle) have organised a free workshop on Ayr Common Good for Saturday 8th December, 10am- 1pm, in the former courtroom at Ayr Town Hall. Please follow the link for more information.
Booking is required. Places are limited to 30 participants & will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Please email ayr converses info@ayrconverses.org.uk with “Ayr Common Good Booking” in the subject line.
Failures
I’ve started adding examples of failure into my blog. I’ve tried to put them into the blog at the time they happened. This will probably mean that there is a clump retrofitted into the time before I started actually keeping the blog. And to be honest I’m not going to be able to put anything that’s going on right now that might constitute failure for obvious reasons, so this will be a backwards looking exercise.
The first I put in is a misunderstanding from the late 90s. I was running SSW and trying to learn about artists working in the landscape. I was picking up on references to John Latham and his work in Scotland. I had heard that it had something to do with the bings of West Lothian. So I was down, probably visiting with relatives and went looking. I came across the Five Sisters near a now defunct retail park. I took a load of pictures. I thought at the time John Latham was an important largely unknown British land artist in the American sense. I thought he had literally shaped this monumental earthwork. It took a while for me to understand what was really going on. I did write about that a while ago here.
I think this is typical for me. Often I’ll misunderstand something to start with, and it will take a while for me to get it the right way around, sort out what’s important. Interestingly Johan Siebers recently highlighted the Slow Science movement and in their manifesto they say,
We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.
The next example is a piece I was asked to write as an introduction to a catalogue. This would be around 2001. The catalogue was for the exhibition Common Place at The Lighthouse in Glasgow. I was living and working up in the North East of Scotland and I got completely obssessed by farm bothies, bothy ballads, Bob Dylan and the way that these were connected. I wrote the piece. It definitely wasn’t what was wanted. There is a model for writing an introduction to an exhibition catalogue and I missed that model completely. It’s taken me a very long time to work out that models are important. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. I like starting with a blank sheet of paper. Not everyone else does. You can read it here.
This brings me onto another failure – if being made redundant from a local authority is a failure (could it actually be a badge of success?). Before I went freelance I worked as the Arts Links Officer for South Ayrshire Council. They made me redundant at the end of the contract in 2006. I went freelance and have not looked back. Even in South Ayrshire, where I still live, I think I’ve achieved more since than I ever did during. But I do think there was a conceptual failure on my part. I don’t think I understood that I was simply there to deliver on existing models. What I should have been doing was networking with other Links Officers to find out what was being done in other Local Authorities across Scotland and simply bring those programmes to South Ayrshire. I was doing some of that, but I was always looking to make it distinctive, specific to that place.
Another much earlier failure, again at SSW, was not managing to deliver the tenth edition of the Scottish Sculpture Open. That should have opened in 1999 in early July. I had a number of meetings with SSW Board members and we discussed and or approached a couple of people to be guest artists (I remember Martin Puryear and John David Mooney). I remember writing to Puryear and sending him some images of Kildrummy Castle. He didn’t want to do it. The Sculpture Open had been done on a shoe string in the past and we had, with the ninth edition, tried to do it properly with at least some fees and production expenses. It has to be said that there were a few other things going on at the time, but essentially I definitely failed to keep the programme going.
So why put examples of failure into my blog? Failure is something we don’t talk about enough. There is Beckett’s brilliant quote,
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try Again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Failure is about taking risks. There seems to be a bigger and bigger gap between the public sector and the private sector in terms of risks. It is talked about a bit in terms of design and innovation – fail fast, fail frequently. On the other side the requirements in the public sector for clear identification of outputs, outcomes and risk assessments are all limiting the bureaucratic exposure to risk and pushing it onto individuals and organisations.
Working with staff at Gray’s School of Art on a research residency last year we discussed failure a lot. The staff highlighted how difficult it is to promote failure as an important way of working for art school students. All the staff were quite happy to talk about failure in their own practice. Most said that failure was a more common experience than success. No one had any problem talking about failure.
But they described the situation where students need to be prepared to make works that fail, but they are constantly worried about grading and being failed. How can you develop a practice that has a healthy relationship with failure if the structure you are working in constantly threatens you with failing the course?
Failure is about learning. By listing failures I am also listing things I have learnt from (or should have learnt from). Talking to Chris Hewson from Manchester School of Architecture, who’s doing research into multi-faith spaces, he said that the Planner on the research team is always wanting to visit spaces that don’t work, rather than the ones that are exemplary. He says you learn more. People can tell you exactly why spaces don’t work, but find it more difficult to explain why things do work.
There are some good books on failure:
Antebi, N., Dickey, C., Herbst, R. (Eds). (2007). Failure! Experiments in Aesthetics and Social Practices. Los Angeles, CA : The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/ accessed 26 November 2012.
Hope, S. (2011). Participating the Wrong Way: Four Experiments by Sophie Hope. London: Cultural Democracy Editions. http://culturaldemocracyeditions.sophiehope.org.uk/ accessed 26 November 2012.
Le Feuvre, L. (ed). (2010). Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art). London: Whitechapel Art Gallery.
What art have I seen?
Heliotrope, Botanic Gardens, Glasgow. Intense 12 minute experience of light and sound whilst lying down in a tent in the Kibble Palace.
If you are interested in the experience of the seasons, SADS, or public art as performance then you should experience this. If you have a venue, then there is a tour being planned.
BONFIRE: Open International Architectural Competition. Papa Westray. Orkney
Interesting brief – architecture of a bonfire. Deadline 12 December 2012.
BONFIRE: Open International Architectural Competition. Papa Westray. Orkney.
What art have I seen?
Donald Urquhart’s Sanctuary for the Chaplaincy at the University of Edinburgh.
What art have I seen?
Detail of Peter Fend’s installation, Photo Chris Fremantle
Oilscapes at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen
What art have I seen?
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Sullivan Galleries
Tamms Ten Year Campaign Office (detail). Photo Chris Fremantle
Tamms Ten Year Campaign Office – Tamms was a supermax prison designed to hold individuals in solitary confinement and sensory deprivation. Amongst the Tamms Ten Year Campaign initiatives to get people to use their airmiles to send inmates magazine subscriptions.
Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture – more than 70 proposals for a memorial to the victims of the Chicago Police Department.
Preview: A Segment from Natural Life (a work in progress). Imagine having been put away for life aged 15. Actors narrate the experiences of middle aged men as well as the their victims.
Scotland vs The USA
Scotland vs The USA: Who has agency in public art?
Panel session at the ISC Sculpture Conference, Chicago.
Moderator: Chris Fremantle
Panelists: George Beasley, Mary Bates Neubauer, Jana Weldon
Presentations can be found on issuu.
What art have I seen?
Of Natural and Mystical Things, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
What art have I seen?.
The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-1979 at Raven Row, London.
Review of The Time Is Now: Public Art of the Sustainable City
There is no question that energy generation impacts on landscape, both urban and rural. It always has. The current re-engineering of systems towards renewable energy is, on one level, not different. Wind turbines are just one example around which there is a very polarised debate. As a result there has been considerable work done in Scotland on the visual as well as environmental impact. Sophisticated modelling of proposed installations in landscape contexts has become a normal part of public consultation processes. There is now for instance a mobile virtual landscape theatre, developed by The James Hutton Institute. Behind the issues of visual and environmental impact there is a significant public policy commitment in Scotland. This public policy commitment drives funding and decision-making to deliver on the targets. It is intended to shape or focus the…
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Artists’ fees: “The cost of labour must be paid for.” | News | a-n
Reposting the report Artists’ fees: “The cost of labour must be paid for” carried on a-n about the W.A.G.E. event in Glasgow earlier this week.
It’s a pretty good summary of the presentations, and once again highlights the real challenges of working in the visual arts. The Scottish Artists Union campaigns for better conditions and has guidance on Rates of Pay for workshops and residencies.
Corin Sworn highlighted the situation in Canada where CARFAC has secured legislation for exhibition fees – based on what was presented (which might be out of date) these would probably work out as about £750 for an exhibition is a public gallery with a turnover of less than £300,000 per year, and perhaps £1,400 for a larger institution. It’s adjusted for group shows, etc.
The principle is regardless of any budget for production, travel, per diem, installation, publication, the institution pays the artist in effect a copyright royalty payment for the right to use their work for the show. This applies to institutions, not (legally anyway) to self organised events. It’s not intended to hinder grassroots activity, although it does establish a principle to aspire to.
That principle seems like a sensible one on which to determine exhibition fees, i.e. not on how long did it take, was it new work or existing work, did the work take manual work to produce, etc. Simply the institution is gaining (financially as well as in terms of profile) from being able to present the artists’ work, it is literally using that work, therefore it should make a payment for the use of the work.
Interestingly Lise Soskolne had done an analysis in relation to one organisation in NY where the exhibition fees were costing the organisation 1% of turnover and adopting the CARFAC model raised that to 3%. Not a big difference for a respectful and appropriate recognition of the use of artists’ work by institutions.
Thanks to Corin and Charlotte for making this happen.
Northern Perspectives Arctic Art Education and Arts Based Research methods
Professors Timo Jokela & Glen Coutts, University of Lapland will be speaking at Northern Perspectives: Arctic Art Education and Arts-based Research Methods at this UWS seminar 2-4pm Saturday 22nd September at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. Alison Bell and I are respondents
Sensory Maps by Kate McLean
Sensory Mapping of Cities – a smell map of Glasgow is a must.
Glasgow’s smells are of movement, of reinvention, of rebuilding, of regeneration. A city of renewal. Researched with contributions from author Michael Meighan (author of “Glasgow Smells” and “Glasgow Smells Better”) as well as commuters, residents, workers, tourists, the Glasgow City council. To be displayed and sniffed at the Glasgow Science Centre from September 2012.
It’s worth exploring the website – City of the Eternal Itinerant, Sensory Map of the Barras, Glasgow and the smelliest block in NYC this summer.
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