6th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art
“Come for the Fire Stay for the Art”
“Meet Melt Make”
These are the strap lines on T-Shirts in July in Kidwelly, Camarthenshire: more than a hundred artists taking over an industrial museum to live and breath casting iron. Hard hats, leather aprons and jackets, work boots, gloves, face masks, lots of moulds being made and poured…[more]
What art have I seen?
Leonora Carrington, Guardian of the Egg, 1950, Oil on canvas
Surreal Friends, Pallant House, Chichester
I wondered why this exhibition wasn’t also visiting Edinburgh, given that the Dean Gallery has Roland Penrose’ Surrealist Library amongst other materials. Then I discovered they are having a big exhibition about male surrealists at the Dean this summer. This exhibition would have been an excellent counterpoint: male/female, domestic/public etc.
Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Spanish painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna ended up in Mexico because of the war – all of them would have been dealt with ruthlessly by the Nazis if they had stayed in Europe. Moving to Mexico gave them space to develop their art in a context of friendship and a conducive culture: just look at Horna’s photographs of sugar skulls. Mexican culture is closer to death and of course has its own Surrealists (Frida Kahlo’s ghost is present, but does not diminish this work).
Where a lot of surrealist work emphasises the artists’ unconscious in quite a dream-like landscape (think of de Chirico’s piazzas), for these artists the surreal is also the personal – the internal personal is also the external personal. Settings are often houses and gardens. children and animals belong to families, not just to dreams.
The curatorial approach has a personal dimension not normally seen in public retrospectives – many of the essays in the catalogue are by relations and friends. Individual connections are foregrounded – Joanne Moorehead is related to Leonora Carrington. Edward James lived just down the road at West Dean as well as in Mexico and was one of the foremost collectors of the work of these artists as well as part of the social circle.
The personal iconography is of cooking merging with alchemy and families with tethered animals. Strangeness is in the opening up of the basement of everyday life as part of a complex, but lived reality. Carrington draws on the language of Italian and Dutch Renaissance painting, and there are moments where her lover Max Ernst is also referenced, but these are the interpretations of an artist with her own language. If the male surrealists draw on the aesthetic of the Barque and Classical ages, where history painting is the highest form, these artists find their inspiration in the painting of the Renaissance. Looking not only at Breugel, but also at the backgrounds of images by artists such as Leonardo, Botticelli and Raphael, Carrington populates her paintings with vignettes and scenarios. She also explores abstraction and still-life. Knowing more of Jung, Gurdjieff and hermetic writing would enable a more detailed understanding of these complex works.
AAAARG.ORG is gone
I think aaaarg left ten days ago. I didn’t notice until I wondered where the daily emails had gone. At different times I have opened them every morning, or they accumulated punctuating my inbox for a while until I worked my way back through them. There are still some in my inbox now, but they are suddenly meaningless. Now I wish that they were all still there, hundreds of them, a history punctuating my life. But change is often a new improvisation, a reconfiguration, rather than an abrupt break (those exist too: before aaaarg was not abruptly different. It took a while to come into existence, and now it has gone it exists as a possibility and a memory).
What can I say? “Sorry. Goodbye. If you come back let me know.”
Louise Bourgeois 1912-2010
Thinking about Radical Nature
I wrote a piece on the Radical Nature show but since it hasn’t been published anywhere else, I’m putting it up here…
What art have I seen?
Bishops Court quilt, Unknown, 1690-1700. Museum no. T.201-1984
Quilts 1700-2010 at the Victoria and Albert.
What art have I seen?
(s˘m-po’ze-m) sculpture, music, performance by Sarah Tripp, Ruth Barker, Martine Myrup, Kathryn Elkin in the Jeffrey Library at the Mitchell during the Glasgow International.
Ayrtime
Chris Dooks eclectic Ayrtime programme of Literature, Alt-Folk (and Alasdair Roberts was so good last night), Astronomy and Theatre taking place in Ayr at the moment. Season 2 in the Autumn.
Listening to Alastair Roberts I kept thinking about Martyn Bennett and was reminded how important it is to tell those strange and brutal stories of death.
Next is Wounded Knee.
New South Glasgow Hospitals Strategy Artists
New South Glasgow Hospitals
Ginkgo Projects is working for Brookfield Construction, in collaboration with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, to develop and deliver an arts strategy for the new Acute and Children’s hospitals for South Glasgow. As part of the development of the strategy we wish to recruit two artists to work with us, between May and September, to explore and develop two interest strands based on the healing environment and waymarking / orientation.
Expressions of interest are invited from artists who are willing to collaborate with us and work to develop a grounded yet innovative strategy for the new hospitals.
Deadline for submissions: 5pm 19th April. Interview date: 27th April 2010
Project brief is available to download from here in PDF format.
What art have I seen?
Frances Walker’s Place Observed in Solitude at Aberdeen Art Gallery.
Health, Nature and Art: the GROVE project at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s New Stobhill Hospital
New Stobhill Hospital Sanctuary, Photo: Laurie Clark
Invited paper as part of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Theory in Practice programme:
“Health, Nature and Art: The Grove Project at NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s New Stobhill Hospital”
2 March 2010.
Abstract:
This paper sets out the Art & Architecture collaboration resulting in the GROVE project for NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde’s New Stobhill Hospital. This project, based on a strong conceptual framework, uses artworks as part of the construction of a environment where the experience nature plays an important role in healthcare. The paper discusses the practical aspects of this major new public art work and looks at the theoretical ideas of the artists, architects and NHS Arts & Health team.
The author, as part of NHSGGC’s Arts & Health team, has worked closely with Thomas A Clark, lead artist-poet; Reiach & Hall Architects; four other artists, and NHSGGC’s Capital and Commissioning Teams to deliver the project. The project was conceived and developed by Thomas A Clark and Reiach & Hall over a 6 year period prior to commissioning, and has been funded by Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Public Art Fund, NHSGGC Endowments, NHSGGC Staff Lottery, as well as a wide range of community groups. It forms one of a series of Arts & Health developments as part of NHSGGC’s Modernisation programme.
What Art have I seen?
Three American Artists at Glasgow Print Studio in the new Trongate 103, Glasgow
Language of Sculpture
Invited panellist, Language of Sculpture, International Sculpture Center Conference, London, April 9 2010.
Antony Gormley, Lucy Orta, and Peter Noever will headline the International Sculpture Center’s 22nd International Sculpture Conference, “What is Sculpture in the 21st Century?”, being held in London, UK, April 7-9.
This monumental event will explore topics including: The Languages of Sculpture; Public Perception and Investment; and The State of Education. In addition to the keynote speakers, conference highlights include an international roster of presenters, opening reception at Tate Modern, free admission to Henry Moore Exhibition at Tate Britain, daily ArtSlam sessions for attendees to show their work, workshop demonstrations at Chelsea College of Art & Design, and a gallery hop, as well as pre and post event optional activities.
Registration Deadline: March 16, 2010. Find more information and register online @ http://www.sculpture.org. Questions? Contact events@sculpture.org or USA 609.689-1051 x302.
Working in Public Seminars
Published on the PAR+RS Public Art Scotland website, an introduction to Working in Public (2007) by Prof Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle. This includes links to essays written by Prof Douglas as well as Wallace Heim‘s evaluation of the project.
Reading
ARTWORK, a project by Chicago-based Temporary Services. Well worth getting a copy of this newspaper which challenges, documents, proposes and otherwise stimulates thought about alternative economies in the arts. With essays, personal stories and re-presentations of historical artworks, this is excellent food for thought, arising as it does out of the current climate which in the US is seeing the collapse of the art market, and in the UK a significant shrinking in public-sector investment in the arts, whether the government changes or not.
Reading
How not to Commission by Ray McKenzie on the PAR+RS web site.
Well articulated challenge to assumptions about public art, both against works which are simply corporate posturing, regeneration ‘place-making’, or artist’s ego, and also against the overblown claims of socially engaged art.
McKenzie makes use of Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, but I wish he had also taken into account Grant Kester’s work, a more nuanced and subtle argument. In the end the projects he discusses are compelling, and I am persuaded by his argument that the 19th Century monuments in our cities are not so far away from some contemporary public art, being focal points for community activism, celebration and memory.
An artist reports on COP15
Read Aviva Rahmani’s reflection on attending COP15 in Copenhagen. She sees hope, not in transnational engineering of negotiations, but in all the NGOs and projects seeking to make a difference on the ground. It strikes me that the increasing attention focused on the periphery, whether it’s Eigg or Tuvalu, might be indicating a very basic shift (see posts on Landworkers). The sharpness of the challenges faced in remote edge locations is matched by the imagination and energy brought to bear on them. What is interesting is the extent to which these examples, of crisis or initiative, become visible and in turn become benchmarks and potentially become models.
What Art have I seen?
The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing
A Hayward touring show seen at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Naoyuki Tsuji’s animations using charcoal, leaving the trace of each previous frame, were stunning. Wonderful, magical and fantastical episodes. Fernando Bryce’s work forms a catalogue created from newspapers, maps and photos drawing attention to colonialism in Africa and Europe. David Haines’ works were frankly scary groups of boys, the recurring theme of trainers and voilence. But there was something quite strange in the selection: whilst drawing is something done for many different purposes, frequently not art (e.g. engineering, architecture, anthropology, archaeology) none of this work was anything other than art. There was no aspect which blurred any boundaries between art and any other purpose for drawing.
Inspace – first exhibition in the new partnership between New Media Scotland and the Informatics Department at Edinburgh University. Went having seen the video of the Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus, I was more interested in the One project.
Bike Bloc and Environmental Crisis
Having been busy busy busy ticking off items on my to do list of project management, fundraising and research this morning, I decided to go and see if there were any pictures on Bike Bloc Blog “Put the fun between your legs” (I’m just dying to see these sculptures!) I followed a link and found the Great Indian Sale blog all about the crisis of environmental rights in India. I don’t know any more than you can see, but its interesting, and we might further extend our understanding out of a Euro-centric perspective.
Bike Bloc
Brian Holmes writes very well, and his piece Into Information on Productivist strategies suggesting informationist strategies is very provoking, but for sheer compelling, articulate, quality writing, read The Decade to Come. He ends with a link to the Bike Bloc video.
You can also hear something tantalising in the Guardian podcast from the Arnolfini where Bike Bloc is being tested.
Cybernetics (human machine interfaces)
The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus is a work by Julius von Bismark and Benjamin Maus. It explores the possibilities of drawing as copying, as semantic, as mechanical, as technical, as legal, as durational, etc..
What art/science have I seen?
Ex- at the Zoology Museum, Glasgow University.
First, you have to go and find this gem of a museum in Glasgow University, proper old-fashioned place, not over-interpreted (though not quite sure about the size of containers for the live snakes).
This exhibition is the result of a field trip to Payamino in the Ecuadorian part of the Amazon Rainforest by a group of zoology students accompanied by Kate Foster, environmental artist, and Martin Muir, a photographer. The students were documenting and recording bird and amphibian biodiversity as well as learning about the life, culture and change.
The exhibition includes work by the students as well as Foster and Muir. The students have presented photography and drawing.
Foster’s sketchbooks seem to capture some sense of interconnectedness. Few of the drawings set out to isolate and analyse a single ‘thing’ in a ‘scientific way’. Rather they explore relations, interactions and situations. A small sketch at the back of one book of a ‘luggage jam.’ Tyre marks on the runway. Most pages have text in amongst drawing. Across two pages she has drawn a stream of ants some carrying cut pieces of leaf and others returning for more. The quality of drawing: suggesting movement by lightness of touch, suggesting pattern, suggesting context without providing one.
One of the students raises the issue of value. They are documenting and recording biodiversity under threat from oil extraction, soya farming, etc. What is the value of the biodiversity? And is it measured in monetary terms? This was crystallised for me recently when, on the radio, I heard a spokesperson for Natural England discussing the economic importance of bees. They said bees were worth £200 million to the UK economy. The next item on the news was about the commitment of £4 billion to some aspect of the financial crisis.
We say that we can’t put a price on life, but we are only talking about ourselves. We don’t understand that we can’t put a price on ecosystems, or on biodiversity. NGOs try and get us to make donations by showing us pictures of ‘charismatic mega fauna,’ but, and its horrible to say, the loss of polar bears or tigers will have a limited effect on ecosystems (as I understand it), where worms, bats, ants, small birds and especially bees have dynamic and exchange based roles. Our image of hierarchical food chains makes the big animals look like the most important, but if you begin to think about the other operations taking place at the ‘lower levels’ then your perspective changes.
The student was asking what to do: one answer is to think about what connects Scotland and Ecuador, now economically, and also in the past colonially. Bring forward the connections, make them visible. Make us aware of, not distant jungle lushness, but the ways our lifestyle in Scotland is implicated in the changes taking place there.
Art and Regeneration
Sophie Hope’s sharp questions about artists involved in regeneration projects.
C words at the Arnolfini
Nina Möntmann’s essay for the e-flux journal, (Under)Privileged Spaces: On Martha Rosler’s “If You Lived Here…” is a useful analysis which could almost be written about the C Words show at the Arnolfini. Many of the same issues are raised.
This essay was commissioned on the occasion of “If You Lived Here Still…: An Archive Project by Martha Rosler,” an exhibition of the archives of If You Lived Here… running from August 28 to October 31, 2009, at e-flux in New York.
The essay sets out the context of homelessness in New York in the 80s and 90s (for which we could substitute our own circumstances of climate change in the first decade of the 21st Century). It is precisely the market, as unquestioned driver, which is challenged by both exhibitions.
It discusses the role of the institution, then the Dia and now the Arnolfini, and the decisions leading to this form of work being programmed, concluding by linking this work to wider discussions of ‘institutional critique’ or ‘new institutionalism’.
If You Lived Here… was, like C Words, initiated by an artist/artist group, and drew in work by a number of other artists, through a cluster of linked elements. The character of documentary art raises questions about the role of art in public life, the reference to things that have, or are, taking place outside the gallery, and the questions that need to be raised about presence and absence, about knowledge and the senses.
One of the precursors to If You Lived Here… is evidently Joseph Beuys’ Free International University at Documenta 6 in 1977. In each of these cases, from Honeypump in the Workplace, through the Reading Room as Asylum Seeker’s home, to PLATFORM’s tent/boat/quadricycle, each seek to make the pedagogical space also a visceral, somatic space. Each of these works disrupts the artworld production/exhibition/distribution structure.
“Art that can not shape society and therefore also can not penetrate the heart questions of society, [and] in the end influence the question of capital, is no art.” Joseph Beuys, 1985
Of course the question of time plays a role, and we must be careful not to fall into a narrative structure that values avant gardism, making Beuys the greatest because he is the earliest, and PLATFORM an afterthought, as if it took 30 years for an idea to travel from Kassel, via New York, to Bristol. Furthermore, whilst Möntmann’s essay provides an effective ‘art history’ of a work, it also leaves many questions hanging, such as the inability of members of the ‘artworld’ attending events during If You Lived Here… to do other than sit silently.
What art have I seen?
C Words: carbon, climate, capital, culture, How did you get here and where are we going?
Arnolfini, Bristol
The collaborative practice PLATFORM articulate their work as research, campaigning, education and art. As a result of their long-term project Unravelling the Carbon Web (2000-) PLATFORM have been quoted in the financial and environmental sections of newspapers on subjects including hydrocarbon legislation in Iraq, and Shell’s role in the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. At the same time their opera And While London Burns… (2007) was widely reviewed and they are currently the subject (perhaps) of a major retrospective at the Arnolfini.
But this is not a solo show. PLATFORM have, in microcosm, demonstrated the Movement of Movements: simultaneously inhabiting the Arnolfini (at their invitation) are Ackroyd & Harvey, African Writers Abroad, Hollington & Kyprianou with Spinwatch, the Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, the Trapese Collective, and Virtual Migrants. Plus Amelia’s Magazine, Art Not Oil, Carbon Trade Watch, The Corner House, Feral Trade, FERN, Greenpeace, Live Art Development Agency, new economics foundation & Clare Patey, Sustrans – Art & the Travelling Landscape, Ultimate Holding Company and others. In parallel Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea Files, Peter Fend and Barbara Steveni are also exhibiting.
The PLATFORM aspect touches on several key points in 25 years of work – the walls have been lined with recycled timber and this frames a tent, a boat, a quadicycle, an image of a strategy game on a burning world stage, and a discussion. There are a lot of words in the Arnolfini at the moment, but this is an exhibition, not just a pile of documentation. This is activism brought into the gallery, but it is as animated as activism. There are events going on regularly, and between the many different contributors and the team of co-realizers, I don’t think you can just walk into the gallery, walk around and say “Seen it” without someone engaging you. It fights against being objectified, whilst still acknowledging the need for something aesthetic to engage with.
At the Friday afternoon Critical Tea Party there was an interesting discussion about combative art. Is this exhibition trying to tell you what to think? Is it propaganda for a leftist agenda? It certainly wants to say: you are complicit in all of this. Do you the world to be like this? Just because you are comfortable, is it ok that everything goes to hell and damnation? Is this what you call justice?
Underlying PLATFORM’s work is a deep understanding of radical educational theory. Yes, shock tactics are applied, but to the end of making each of us think for ourselves. Propaganda is about one truth, and there isn’t one truth here. Here there is one question: what future?
But we can also ask the question “Where is the art?” For me, I can’t answer this by saying that the installation of the boat, with the chairs placed next to it like a bow wave, is the art, though that has formal aesthetic elegance (and I do like a bit of formal aesthetic elegance). Of course the art has been taking place in public over the past 25 years, and this is a gallery. The danger is that all you can put in the gallery is the evidence of something that happened somewhere else. So, for me, it is important that what is in the gallery is something which is present, here and now.
And is this a PLATFORM show? Or a group show? Are PLATFORM curators? Is their work the most important?
And what about the education, research and campaigning? To discount them from the aesthetic of the practice is to fail to understand its roots in the work of Joseph Beuys. His idea of social sculpture is central here.
Or to put it another way, Hal Foster says that there is a fault line travelling through the term ‘art history’ because he says that art is judged on its own terms, not, as with history, enmeshed in the world. If we accept that art is only judged on its own terms (some strange connoisseur’s estimation of PLATFORM vs Beuys vs Kaprow vs APG) then we dismiss the world. Whereas PLATFORM want us to understand that life can be art and art life.
So we are left with more questions, but they are in sharp focus.
What art have I seen?
Fleming Collection exhibition from Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
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.
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