What Art have I seen?
Ed Ruscha, On The Road: An Artist Book of the Classic Novel by Jack Kerouac, Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street, London
Beautiful. Needs careful reading to see the relationship between the images and the text. More info at Yummy Ink.
Did also see Glenn Brown.
Reading
Nat Tate, An American Artist: 1928-1960 by William Boyd, 21 Publishing, 1998
Turtle Island by Gary Snyder, New Directions, 1974
…
aimless executions and slaughterings
are not the work of wolves and eagles
but the work of hysterical sheep
The Demonic must be devoured!
Self-serving must be
……………………. cut down
Anger must be
……………………. plowed back
Fearlessness, humor, detachment, is power
…
from SPEL AGAINST DEMONS
What art have I seen?
Ed Ruscha at the Hayward. I was sorry that none of the early photo/book works, nor some of the experimental works were included. The paintings are great, but it reads as a one trick show. There is so much more to Ruscha.
What art have I seen?
I travelled up to Cairngorm Mountain for the official opening of the second phase of Arthur Watson’s Reading the Landscape.
There are many parts to this, developed in collaboration with a number of other artists.
The first phase works in the base station (images below), Drawing Dangerously, were installed some time ago. This is a series of images and texts created out of the mountain climbing culture. The huge screen prints were developed from photographs taken by Andy Rice, one of Watson’s collaborators. The words surrounding the images are the names of climbs. As climbers explore the rock face and discover a route, they give it a name, subsequent climbers discovering variations of the climb, in turn use variations of the name.
The image below introduces another dimension, collecting Scots and Gaelic words for snow. I have a small contribution to the first publication on Reading the Landscape and it focuses on this aspect.
The new works include several viewpoints and the Camera Obscura.
At the western end of the site a structure, designed by Watson and Will Maclean, has been built channelling a mountain stream through a platform and down three buttresses. Within the structure, poems and texts draw attention to the outlook. This is a development for Maclean from Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach (Commemoration of our Land Heroes) on Lewis.
Images of construction of viewpoints on CairnGorm Mountain’s Flickr Photostream
Nearer the base station, at the top of a set of steps from the carpark, is a seat built into the wall. Sit down and Stanley Robertson‘s voice comes out of two speakers built into the walls starts to tell you folktales. Robertson (1940-2009), certainly one of the foremost traveller storytellers of the North East of Scotland, and a longtime collaborator with Watson. This is an outdoor version of works that Watson made for Singing for Dead Singers.
In the mountain garden Fergus Purdie, architect, Lei Cox and Mel Woods, artists, have created a Camera Obscura.
This is a built structure sitting over and along a path. There is a small bay, something like a side chapel, which you enter through heavy curtains. Inside the landscape is laid out before you on a table, turning gently. Periodically you move in giant steps along cardinal lines to the sea. These latter steps are the art introduced by Cox and Woods, a series of videos taken at regular intervals of distance (12 steps to the sea in each direction) and time (going north is winter).
The rangers are already using this particular feature when the weather is bad and the school kids can’t do anything outside. Lay a piece of paper on the table, show the pupils all Cox and Woods images, let them choose one, and then they can collectively draw the image superimposed on the paper. Suddenly landscape drawing is both incredibly literal (the image is projected on the paper) but doesn’t come out looking literal – mark making takes precendence.
Images of construction of Camera Obscura on CairnGorm Mountain Flickr Photostream
It was great, eight years after my first journey’s to Cairngorm Mountain to meet Bob Kinnaird, to go back and see something so good. I suppose my job at the outset had been to suggest what might be possible, to help Bob see that something really interesting might emerge. I remember writing the application to Scottish Arts Council with the help of … and then being involved with the selection, which by then was being organised by Susan Christie, to whom I had handed the project when I left SSW.
Studio International on Arthur Watson
Previous post.
Designing Environments for Life
For the next event we have been asked “…we would like to invite and encourage you to prepare a very short presentation (5mins max) on a single reading. Please choose one text which has had a profound influence on your thinking and/or practice, and review it with the very specific brief of Designing Environments for Life in mind.”
So I’ve been thinking about texts…
Jane Jacobs’ Nature of Economies is a definite possibility
Helen and Newton’s piece for Structure and Dynamics pdf
Looking through books:
Vivienne Westwood’s Manifesto
Merle Laderman Ukeles Manifesto of Maintenance Art
(actually I have a lot of manifestos and statements by artists)
James Turrell talking about needing to continue Ranching whilst making Roden Crater
Robert Smithson’s Collected Writings are always good.
Renwick’s report “The land we live on is our home” pdf
Patrick Scott’s Stories Told about the impact of the Berger Inquiry on First Nation Politics and the importance of storytelling. Or Alistair McIntosh‘s Soil and Soul.
I could also suggest Distance & Proximity, a book of Thomas A Clark‘s poems, and then I could just read a few!
(e.g. “In the art of the great music, the drone is eternity, the tune tradition, the performance the life of the individual”
or “”The routines we accept can strangle us but the rituals we choose give renewed life”
or “A book of poems in the rucksack – that is the relation of art to life”
And I should certainly consider Gary Snyder who I was reading over the summer.
Designing Environments for Life
The Designing Environments for Life programme at the Scottish Institute for Advanced Studies.
How can we address the gap between the two distinct meanings of environment: that which surrounds us as haptic, somatic and experiential; and that which is planned, managed and described as an ‘urban environment’ or a ‘learning environment’ or a ‘fragile environment’?
Drawing together anthropologists, architects, designers, artists and other disciplines, we are exploring this complex double meaning particularly in relation to practices.
What art have I seen?
Robert Stone’s Polka Fever at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park
Trees
Jen Clarke’s PhD tentatively entitled Working between art and forestry in Scotland
Ayr to Zennor
Talk entitled Soil 2.0 addressing context, and various projects I gave at the BOSarts Seminar, part of This Weekend.
What Art?
Ginny Hutchison on Radio Scotland’s Highland Cafe talking about the Inverness Old Town Art Project. She described the movement of the sun through the town, from hitting the church at 8am to creating a geometric shape, a triangle, under a bridge at 11am.
Paying attention to the movement of the sun. Marking the shapes it makes on the urban landscape. Creating new shapes in gold leaf, capturing the sun.
Goethe vs. Petronius and also de Certeau
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative (and creation).
There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definately commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occured.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones favor all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no person could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.
Goethe
vs.
We trained hard; but it seemed that every time that we were beginning to form into a team we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating an illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.
Titus Petronius
and
“In him, the productivist law that requires a specific assignment (the condition of efficiency) and the social law that requires circulation (the form of exchange) enter into contradiction. To be sure, a specialist is more and more often driven to also be an Expert, that is, an interpreter and translator of his competence for other fields. … They do it through a curious operation which “converts” competence into authority. Competence is exchanged for authority. Ultimately, the more authority the Expert has, the less competence he has, up to the point where his fund of competence is exhausted, like the energy necessary to put a mobile into movement.”
de Certeau
Reading
Forest Tunes, The Library, 1995-2008 by Shai Zakai
Can remember when I was reading this. Think it was 9 months ago when I was trying to persuade Rozelle Maclaurin to show this important work. Located as they are in parkland, it seemed to me an interesting and worthwhile exhibition around which a stimulating series of events could have been organised, a sort of arborischool, with speakers like Richard Mabey, David Haley and Thomas Pakenham, as well as local rangers, academics from Auchincruive, etc.
I think its at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World this autumn.
What Art have I seen?
RAQS Media Collective at the Frith Street Gallery in Golden Square
The gallery as a trading floor for evoking human experience. A series of clocks correlated with places (New York, Lagos, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, etc.), the faces modified by changing the numerals for emotions (epiphany, anxiety, duty, guilt, indifference, awe, fatigue, nostalgia, ecstasy, fear, panic, remorse). So the ‘time’ in Kabul: the hour is between panic and remorse and the minute at anxiety. In amongst the real locations are some imagined ones, Macondo (the town in Marquez fictions), Shangri La, etc.) Here the clocks go backwards.
In the middle of the room circling (on four screens) around a pillar is a face, still in the context of a global emotional roller-coaster. The sounds are an inscrutable background.
Anne Douglas, some time ago, introduced me to the Rasas, an aesthetic structure of emotional expressions (love, mirth, sorrow, anger, energy, terror, disgust, astonishment) for theatre in traditional Indian culture.
What Art have I seen?
Imaging the Forest at the British Museum
Dinabandhu Mahapatra’s Trees of Orissa. A painting on silk representing all the trees of the region of Orissa. Some are very much icons, others are more representational. This work, made in the early 1980s, was as I understood it part of a response by a particular patron to the loss of traditional crafts. It is a response to the 12th Century poem, the Gitagovinda, which tells the story of Krishna and Radha. The forest is a place where the social rules are more relaxed and Krishna can carry on with his favourite female cowherds.
Reading
The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto
Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas
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.
What Art have I seen?
Timo Jokela: Northern Traces: 1999-2009
Collins Gallery, Glasgow
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?
Pecha Kucha
Edinburgh Volume #5 at Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture
The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL +44 (0) 131 225 6671 http://www.royalscottishacademy.org
On 7 August 2009 START 19:30 END 21:30 DOOR £5, £3 concession (includes refreshments)
Places are limited: to book e-mail studiodub@mac.com
To compliment their two “Lyrical Abstraction” exhibitions of sculpture (see http://www.culture24.org.uk/spliced/art69969) in the interiors and gardens of William and Robert Adam’s Mellerstain House 14th June – 30th Sep. 2009, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House 15th Aug. – 31st Oct. 2009 as part of the Japan UK 150 Festival, Kate Thomson and Hironori Katagiri of Ukishima Sculpture Studio, in association with architects Gordon Duffy and Rebecca Wober of Studio DuB, have organised a pecha kucha on the theme of relationships between Art & Architecture.
Pecha kucha is a great fun idea started in Tokyo a couple of years ago by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein – two architect friends of sculptors Kate Thomson & Hironori Katagiri. It has gone viral and is now on in over 218 cities around the world.
Participants show 20 slides for strictly 20 seconds each, meaning that the audience experiences an exhilarating high speed journey through a kaleidoscope of inspirations, ideas and work, with the concise nature of the presentations keeping the interest level high. 6min40 seconds each means there is the opportunity to introduce more interesting speakers and still have time to move around and talk to each other over a drink during the interval and afterwards.
See http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/edinburgh/5 for more information.
Featuring presentations by…
Jock McFadyen, painter http://www.jockmcfadyen.com
Hironori Katagiri, sculptor http://www.ukishima.net
Kate Thomson, sculptor http://www.ukishima.net
Calum Colvin, multi media artist http://www.calumcolvin.com
Charlie Sutherland, architect: Sutherland Hussey http://www.sutherlandhussey.co.uk
Gordon Duffy + Rebecca Wober, architects: Studio DuB http://www.studiodub.co.uk
Dan Brown: Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop http://www.edinburghsculpture.org
Alastair Clark, Assistant Director: Edinburgh Printmakers http://www.edinburgh-printmakers.co.uk
Michelle de Bruin, sculptor http://www.artist.org.uk
Elaine Alison and Pat Bray, sculptors http://www.allisonandbray.com
Chris Fremantle, environmental art producer and researcher
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.
Resources on the history of climate change and science
A timeline of the development of the science of climate change (1800 to the present), part of a much larger site and educational resource created by Spencer Weart (author of The Discovery of Global Warming) and hosted by the American Institute of Physics.
An article on the history of Climate Change science from the Guardian in 2007
Reading
Gary Snyder
Endless Streams and Mountains
This web site has the first section of this book length poem, and juxtaposes it with the visual work it refers to – very interesting to see the two together. The poem is a deceptively simple description of the contents of the images.
What Art have I seen?
Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Painting from Jodhpur at the British Museum
Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. at the ICA
Radical Nature at the Barbican
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.
What art have I seen?
Art Sites in Riverhead. I noticed a sign saying art + architecture. It’s a gallery with an outdoor sculpture space that also seems to be involved in local green developments. The building looks like it used to be a light industrial unit and is really well converted, both the building and the landscape.
I’d have liked to see the exhibition Called to Action, curated by Lillian Ball, on Restoration projects.
Outdoors there was an interesting mix of large scale sculptures – some made of very permanent materials (steel)
and others clearly very temporary tent structures.
The relationship of the tents to the ground, the way they protected an area of grass and weeds, was interesting.
There was a small patch of plants with a sign indicating that this was based on work done by Cornell University Extension programme: Weeds and Your Garden.
Sag Harbor Whaling Museum
The Whaling Museum at Sag Harbour, Long Island, is a remarkable cabinet of curiosities. There isn’t a hierarchy and there isn’t a narrative or simple message. Located in the former Masonic Temple, a remarkable building originally built as a home, it contains a wide range of products of 18th and early 19th Century whaling industry as well as aspects of town history. From a cabinet of walking sticks with ivory handles, to memorials made of whale vertebrae, to the tools for carving up the carcases, all the ephemera of the industry is represented – and it’s not all scrimshaw. But in amongst this is also the stuff of seafaring: the medicine cases, the shackles for punishment and the ships logs. There are even Inuit artefacts collected by sailors, and a display indicating the relationship between the indigenous Americans, their own whaling, and the Europeans arriving on the Island. We are so used to the managed learning of museums, that this looks like an installation by Mark Dion. In fact the Museum should contact other museums to do with whaling and make a publication of whaling ephemera from different parts of the world – I found a list of museums connected with whaling at Whalecraft (there are a number in Scotland).
Rural and city
Martin Wolf in the FT (3 May 2006) summarises Jane Jacobs’ arguments for the importance of cities (not countries) and their role in relation to regions.
Eco thinking?
I like William Boyd’s writing and he highlights something quite accurately, which is inherently problematic about the relationship between the urban and the rural. The assumed dichotomies of creative v traditional, noisy v quiet, dirty v clean, etc need to be challenged.
Furthermore he acknowledges the constructedness of the landscape as a characteristic, but he doesn’t analyse the meaning of constructing landscapes as a human activity.
William Boyd’s It’s all too beautiful in today’s Guardian Review
What art have I seen?
This Land is (Y)our Land at CCA, Glasgow
Walking with a pepper plant, free with the exhibition, but actually a specific responsibility, in the smur, going right left right left right left…
Sauchiehall Street
Pitt Street
Bath Street
Douglas Street
across Blytheswood Square Garden
West George Street
West Campbell Street
St Vincent’s Street
Wellington Street
Bothwell Street
Hope Street
into Central Station
I like the zig zag, knowing its not actually any shorter than straight down Sauchiehall and onto Hope, but the pattern is more interesting.
Is it psychogeography, a derive, or systems thinking?
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.
Liam Gillick quotes Peter Fend
“Art is an investigation by human animals into constructable or alterable aspects of the material surroundings. It is prior to technology or the invention of tools. It is therefore a seedbed of economy. Of course this is not how it is usually perceived at least in society today. Which explains how society – that is, modern civilisation – is so unresponsive to its divergence from ecological cycles, or to basic human needs for shelter and food. Any failure in material culture results from a failure to adopt the lessons, the probings, the investigations of art.”
p.38 Gillick, L. Proxemics: Selected Writings (1988-2006) Zurich: JRP Ringler and Dijon: Les Presses du reel
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
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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