I found the text below in a folder on my laptop – according to the properties it was modified 23 June 2006 so it must have been written right about then. I had been freelance since February of that year. I had been helping Helix Arts with an evaluation of the Climate Change: Culture Change project and must have just been in the development phase of Greenhouse Britain, probably having been to Shrewsbury and met the Harrisons. It’s a curious piece of history and I’m posting it pretty much as a curiousity.
It’s a very good question – why am I interested in Climate Change?
There are a number of answers – firstly I acknowledge that it will have a significant impact on my life, and the life of my family and friends, and it is having an effect on the lives of other people who I don’t know, and other living things on the planet. But that requires me to reduce my ‘carbon footprint’ (in the jargon) – to travel less by plane and car, to reduce energy consumption in my house, etc. It does not require me to make it part of my work as a cultural historian/curator/person involved with contemporary art.
I became interested in issues of art and the environment through a number of experiences and observations – I used to be Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, and this is located in rural Aberdeenshire – it was a ‘modernist sculpture factory’ dislocated from its natural urban habitat to a rural one, by virtue of the inclinations of the founder director. I heard Declan McGonagle, then Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), speak in Dundee about the challenges of transforming a building which was part of the British colonial history in Ireland into a space for modern art. He highlighted and emphasised the importance of engaging with the cultural history and the surrounding communities. IMMA places its relationship with its locality as a key thread of work.
I also began to look at the work of artists who worked within the environment across a range of strategies and tactics – I invited John Maine to work with us and a quarry company – this resulted in an 8 year project constructing a new landscape on the rim of an historical quarry in Aberdeenshire, and in passing involved 8 years of research and exploration of the prehistory and history of stone in the landscape of Aberdeenshire.
I commissioned Nina Pope to explore the interface between the rural and the digital with a group of young artists.
I commissioned Gavin Renwick to explore buildings in the rural environment of Aberdeenshire again with a small group of artists and architects. This opened up a political dimension and resulted in a series of events looking at Devolution in Scotland from a (rural) cultural perspective. The work with Renwick developed into another project looking at cultural continuity and human settlement in the context of the village and Aberdeenshire.
Another tack over this territory was the Making Places residency with Wendy Gunn – she brought in Craig Dykers of Snohetta and Tim Ingold, Chair of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Tim in particular spoke about movement in the landscape – knowing places and finding them. We explored Aberdeenshire through a multi-disciplinary team including artists, architects, archaeologists, anthropologists, land-use researchers, and inhabitants.
I ran a programme of visiting speakers on public art – Penny Balkin Bach from Fairmount Park Art Association in Philadephia, Anna Pepperall from Gateshead in the North East of England, and Stefanie Bourne from the Sustrans organisation. I commissioned or acted as the commissioning agent for quite a lot of public art – this did not take thinking forward, but it is always interesting to work with artists. Where it was interesting was when there was an opportunity to for an artist to develop work of their own, or where a commissioner was willing to take risks and be very open.
Helen Denerley’s Craws at the Safeway in Inverurie simply addressed one of the characteristic aspects of the area, and David Annand’s Aberdeenshire Angus was the best possible thing that could be done on the basis of the ambition of the village of Alford.
But more interestingly, George Beasley and Helen Denerley’s collaboration over the Boundaries project brought the whole population of Glen Deskry into making a work of art, and the CairnGorm Mountain landscape initiative has resulted in a truly significant work by Arthur Watson in collaboration with many of his colleagues. In this work he is addressing hte multiple cultural histories of the Cairngorms. The first phase of work involves dangerous drawing – exploring the naming of rock climbs – the dotted lines that overlay the cliffs and crags of the mountain.
But as to climate change – all of the above is characterised by
1. rural and inhabited
2. artists with other disciplines
3. reflection and action
Now I have been involved in Practice led research for 6 or 7 years, initially as a partner and collaborator, now probably as a researcher, and in the future as a PhD candidate. This has only been possible because of my colleague Anne Douglas and On The Edge, her research project into a new articulation of the value of the visual arts in marginal contexts. Whilst On The Edge does not speak to climate change directly, it addresses the idea of ‘life as art’ and the reposition of art within the everyday. It also is a hugely important space for thinking rigorously and creatively across such a wide range of issues in partnership, not just within the core team, but much more widely.
I’m not interested in climate change because its a new theme in the endless cycle of issue based work eddying through contemporary art. I’m not interested because there might be funding. I am interested because it is an evolution of the work – it asks not just how do we live here? How do artists respond to this place? How can we look again at where we are?
It goes beyond that to ‘we have to live differently. How can we do that creatively?’ Climate change is therefore not the only driver. There are also social drivers and ethical drivers and aesthetic drivers.
My dissertation for my MLitt in Cultural History was all about Utopia, its underpinning of the Humanist project and the embedded structures of power and social organisation – it was a critique. I think perhaps I am still involved in the critique of the humanist project and the idea of utopia.
What art have I seen?
Launch of Phase I of Arthur Watson’s work at CairnGorm Mountain. Great to see this project coming to fruition. I still think it is a shame that Winifred isn’t part of it: pacem.
I think I first went to meet Bob Kinnaird in March 2001.
It all started with a phone call from Judi Menabeny, then the visual arts officer for Badenoch and Strathspey (?). Bob had contacted her looking for help to develop the arts as part of the development of the funicular. At that time the Funicular was a big story attracting a lot of negative press. Anyway, Judi called me and I went over to see Bob. I was immediately struck by the landscape – who wouldn’t be? But to me it was the bulldozed airstrip that you can see from 10 miles away. That is the first visitor experience.
Quickly we set aside the idea of the sculpture park on the mountain, and looked to do something that addressed the relationship between the organisation and its context. Clearly Bob’s thinking about the living mountain has developed in the process as well.
What art have I seen?
Climate Change: Cultural Change at the Globe Gallery:
Michael Pinsky, Peter Rogers and Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison.
I’m evaluating this project.
David Harding
At the end David Harding quotes from Bertolt Brecht, About the Way to Construct Enduring Works.
It seems relevant
1.
How long
Do works endure? As long
As they are not completed.
Since as long as they demand effort
They do not decay.
Inviting further work
Repaying participation
Their being lasts as long as
They invite reward.
Useful works
REQUIRE PEOPLE
Artistic works
Have room for art
Wise works
Require wisdom
Those devised for completeness
Show gaps
The long-lasting
Are always about to crumbleÉ.
…..
2.
So too the games we invent
Are unfinished, we hope;
And the things we use in playing
What are they without the dentings from
Many fingers, those places, seemingly damaged
Which produce nobility of form;
And the words too whose
Meaning often changed
With change of users.
3.
Never go forward without going
Back first to check the direction.
Those who ask questions are those
Whom you will answer, but
Those who will listen to you are
Those who then ask you.
Who will speak?
He who has not spoken.
Who will enter?
He who has not yet entered.
Those whose position seems insignificant
When one looks at them
Are
The powerful ones of tomorrow
Those who have need of you
Shall have the power.
Re Gallery Visits in London, New Year 05/06
Re Richard Long’s show at the Haunch of Venison, Colin Kirkpatrick interviewed Richard Long some time ago and it touches on some of the issues…
Dimitrijevic, Smithson and Magritte
At the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art last winter I saw a room of photography that SNGMA had recently purchased. This included a group of six photographs by Braco Dimitrijevic entitled This could be a place of historical importance (I have not been able to find images of this work online). For me this work clearly links with Robert Smithson’s Visit the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey. Talking to our friend Gail about this she made the link with Magritte’s Ce n’est pas une pipe. So what is the link between these artists in the early 70s and surrealism?
What art have I seen?
‘Visiting Picasso‘ Roland Penrose collection resulting from his friendship with Picasso, on show in the Library in the Dean Gallery.
Exercises
Fluxus Performance Workbook
Edited by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn
and
52 Events 2002
by Ken Friedman
Summary of Human Settlement: Nooteboom
“Seaweed becomes kelp,
shell becomes stone,
liver becomes light,
earth becomes turf,
and rocks and sea-wrack becomes soil in which to grow potatoes”
A ‘summary of human settlement’ for the Gaelic speaking crofting community on Aran on the West coast of Ireland quote in The Guardian 06.05.06 from Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space,
Cees Nooteboom, Havill Secker, 2006
What art have I seen?
Elements of Change craft exhibition at Dick Institute, Kilmarnock
Infobabelise by Ben Woodeson
Review of Ben Woodeson‘s show at the Jerwood Space over Christmas and New Year 2005/06.
What was a technical exercise for a bunch of engineers – getting mobile phones to send text messages to each other – is just another innovation that has pushed the development of culture in a whole new direction. Short bursts of characters. Innovative use of punctuation. It has all happened in ten years and even grandparents are using it. We live in an ‘information age’. We are skilled navigators and interpreters of a complex visual and auditory world. Another generation seduced by the white heat of technological development.
In Woodeson’s work everyday human concerns are made the object of an art that behaves as interference. He describes this as “primitive attempts to re-use and re-examine that which is commonplace and everyday.” It is the only way to explain this group of work. Its the everyday made into nonsense. Where in Wallace and Gromit or in Heath Robinson the madcap machines are intended to produce benefits for their inventors, Woodeson makes these contraptions for our benefit – so that we can begin to become sensitive to the extent to which what we think is communication is almost always noise.
The exhibition is made up of three works – one in the café and one each in the two gallery spaces. ‘Herbalgerbilverbalisor’ collects speech from the reception desk, filters it through voice recognition software and then ‘types it out’ in light boxes in the far gallery. The work contains all the key issues – remoteness, indecipherability, use of the everyday human, complexity and randomness.
Woodeson avoids trite judgements and does not rely on the trendy to carry the work. The far gallery could have been cluttered with computers and screens running Linux. Rather, the alphabet stands alone blinking at you from the light boxes. The clue to the computer function is in the one box in the bottom corner, like the blinking cursor in DOS, waiting for action.
Where Gallery Three blinks, Gallery Two taps. A series of jaunty electro-magnets tap out an apparently abstract pattern. The electro-magnets are thread-sized spindles of copper wire in pairs. Power pushes them apart, release results in a click. Controlled, this results in old-fashioned Morse code. Woodeson has programmed these automated distress beacons with short extracts from self-help texts. The title gives away the attitude: ‘Chicken soup from Mars’. Texts which deal with leadership merge with texts on wealth and with relationships. There is one pair clearly together on the right hand wall – one is titled ‘Low-down on Going’ and the other ‘Blow Him Away’. Electro-magnetic sex therapy if only I could decipher it.
(De)cipher is a key concept for Woodeson. He ensures that the work cannot be deciphered exactly. His work creates circumstances in which people cannot understand each other, characterised by misheard conversations, misunderstood texts, unintelligible telephone messages – definitely not handwritten letters or quiet face to face conversations.
Woodeson’s work involves considerable technical skill – electrician, programmer,
cabinetmaker crossed with hobbyist. The irony of unintelligible self help texts, and the complexity of first using speech recognition software to overhear conversations with the receptionist (“Where is the toilet?”) and then have them typed out too fast to be read, all speaks of enormous effort for negligible reward – in his words “technical investigation with maximum effort for minimal achievement.”
The art exists in a liminal space between the real and the virtual. There is the physical presence of the electromagnets in the gallery, the light boxes, the microphones, but the meaning is attenuated through the virtual. Meaning is stored and modified as electricity.
In the gallery there is a shared experience of the physical, but the meaning is not accessible. By inference our own constructions exclude us from understanding each other.
Failure – unrealised projects
Murdo Macdonald had told me about the duplication of statues of Robert Burns. The ones we are familiar with in Scotland also exist in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We made a proposal to the Maclaurin Trust to develop an exhibition for the 250th anniversary of the birth which was going to happen in 2009. We did a presentation to them. They never responded – they must have buried it. Read it: Proposal Burns Statues MM.
Reading
A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, Leah Heneman, Aberdeen University Press, 1991.
This book covering the early connections between suffrage, education and slavery, and the subsequent development of suffrage in Scotland as a strong and distinctive movement, with its own characters and events, is well researched and thoroughly readable.
My starting point was discovering somewhere that Fanny Parker, the neice of Lord Kitchener, had in 1914 with another suffragette, attempted to blow up Burns Cottage, Alloway. Parker was an active and militant suffragette and spent more than one episode in prison as a result. Not only was she forcibly fed by tube, but she and others were given ‘nutritional enemas’. This book set her attempt to bomb Burns Cottage in a clear historical context.
I also discovered another interesting connection. Louisa Innes Lumsden, another suffrage campaigner and one of the first three women to graduate from Cambridge, must be one of the Lumsdens’ of Clova. In the short biographical sketch it mentions that she was chair of the Rhynie School Board.
Jane Jacobs 1916-2006
Obituaries: Toronto Star, Washington Post, The Guardian
Anne Douglas and I used Jane Jacobs The Nature of Economies as a means of interrogating the first phase of On The Edge Research in “Leaving the (social) ground of (artistic) intervention more fertile“, a paper presented at the Darwin Symposium, Shrewsbury; Waterfronts IV, Barcelona; and Sensuous Knowledge 2, KHiB, Bergen.
On The Edge Research is a practice-led research project based at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. OTE has, since it was launched in 2001 with a major award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, focused on developing new articulations of the value of the visual arts. In 2005 Anne Douglas, the principle researcher, and I wrote a paper which started out with the question – what is sustainability in the visual arts? This is a particularly tricky question especially in the UK because of public subsidy. Any discussion about sustainability will normally veer off into a discussion of the Arts Councils. Jane Jacobs book the Nature of Economies seeks to set out the fundamental rules of development looking at developmental processes in natural systems. She argued that the same rules that govern the development of ecosystems also apply to economies, and we explored the application of this thinking to ‘arts development’.
- What is really important is to recognise that development occurs at multiple levels simultaneously (ie fractally),
- that all development requires co-development (ie nothing happens in isolation),
- that all development requires various forms of governors (ie feedback loops, bifurcations and emergency adaptions).
- Development occurs qualitatively and quantitatively.
- Development occurs in a cycle of differentiation from generality.
I am very sad that such an important thinker, who I only recently learnt so much from, has died.
Originally posted 1 May 2006
What art have I seen?
Real Life Painting Show
Ross Sinclair
CCA Glasgow
Pink Real Life is amazing – it is so bright that it comes off the wall
and has the same effect on the eyes as looking at the sun.
Grant Kester
Essays and contact details for one of the key critical thinkers about engaged, dialogic, dare I say relational, arts practice.
What art have I seen?
This was one of the very interesting elements of the Venice Biennale in 2003. It is an on-going project.
What art have I seen?
Really good and well interpreted social and industrial history
(including lots of models of ships built in Greenock). Excellent
permanent collection beautifully presented.
Gallery Visits in London – New Year 05/06
Chapter 1
Paul McCarthy at the Whitechapel. What can I say – the guy can draw – he uses paper, pencil, red marker and cut out pornography to great effect. Like Emin, he explores the human experience of sexuality, of bodily functions – shit and penises. But somehow I am not quite sure what the point is.
The show includes older pieces documenting performance work, but the main gallery is focused around new work on the theme of pirates. According to the blurb, McCarthy and his son developed the work in response to Pirates of the Caribbean – the film and the theme park ride. I didn’t get to see the offsite project, but the pirates in the lower gallery included busts and vignettes, as well as the drawings. The ship was also a recurrent shape. The sculptural forms are crude and vivid.
There is one piece which was very striking – an animatronic female pig. She lies sleeping on top of the equipment that makes her breathe. The pig is made out of latex, but the equipment is intentionally dominating – its clearly more than what is required for the animation. Lots of wires and grey steel boxes form a plinth – not an iron lung. It is the industry under the illusion. The metal and wires hum and click quietly and the pig breathes in her sleep. You need to pay attention to the machinery.
The pig is a recurring icon, but in the other cases the pirates are fucking it. There is a model of a desert island – the whole is cast in bronze, but finished to look like plastic. The island is covered in pirates and pigs – as you look closely you begin to realise that there is an orgy going on. In the drawings cut up pornography is collaged in with pencil and pen – the pirate is having his penis cut off – also his leg – of course all pirates have a peg leg. Pirates, pigs, penises, assholes, knives and saws are the central subjects.
Upstairs there is a more mixed group of work, some of it much older and relating to performances. Again there is interesting sculptural work – in the far corner of the room a man lies on a beach recliner – it is so real it catches you by surprise – he’s old and a bit flabby – his dick hangs out below his shirt, his only clothing. It catches you by surprise – its like the artist, dressed in character, is having a nap in the corner after the installation.
Hollywood, pirates, sexual depravity – I suppose its all real, but I came away feeling a bit like it was gratuitous and simply perverse. I didn’t know enough to understand any specific satire of Pirates of the Caribbean or its makers. Is the man with the penis nose the Director? Sometimes the work you least understand deserves the most attention and thought. I am still worrying at this one.
Chapter 2
On the 4th we went to see the new Richard Long show at the Haunch of Venison. It could not be more different. I have seen a number of Richard Long exhibitions: they are always very beautiful. Long presents an approach to landscape which re-engages the aesthetic – sometimes sublime, sometimes pastoral, always empty and often exotic – places we can perhaps only imagine visiting. Long subscribes to the dictum ‘leave only footprints and take only photographs’ (more or less).
I think I prefer Hamish Fulton’s work. I am not sure about Long’s interventions in the landscape: circles of various sorts, although conceptually I do like the ones he goes back to later and disperses.
On the ground floor is a text piece that focuses on the songs he sings to himself as he walks. As far as I am aware this is a new angle. I liked the humanity of that moment – it is an acknowledgement that he is not perhaps as pure as the majority of the work suggests. I know Fulton has talked meditation and about the transition into a walk – it takes a couple of days to shake off the normality of everyday life and to enter into a different state. But this piece of Long’s acknowledges that for him it’s not constant. Walking along singing songs that stick in your head is normal. It’s not an iPod moment – just walking and singing.
Of course the point is to share only the things that can actually be shared – the functional descriptions of paces, of mile, of days. In Long’s case there are also some personal observations. There are poems made from observations, experiences and thoughts accumulated during walks. One is marked and patterned by cups of tea and wrong forks. On the top floor are two mud marked walls. The gesture and the formality of the mud wall works is fantastic. If you look closely you can see the red crayon Long uses to mark out the pattern – I have noticed this before. The line is equal to the gap and fills the wall dividing the space equally. The mud smeared onto the wall to form the line is applied by hand with swift and easy movements that belie the even-ness and equality of the repetition. The swirls made by the hand movements are elegant and are complimented by the splatter of the wet mud coming off the hand.
The larger work is meant to have a semi circle of Portuguese cork tree bark in front of it – that’s been removed for ‘conservation’. Jake found a small piece of cork tree bark on the pavement outside the gallery – its quite nice – a piece of Richard Long’s work.
So what is the relationship between Long and Fulton’s work and our understanding of the landscape? The landscape that they present us with is characterised by emptiness, wilderness, wildlife, geology, mountains and rivers. It involves camping, and this is explicit in this exhibition – we see the tent and the canoe that transport Long down the a river in a far off place.
We know that we cannot share in their experience. Whilst they have walked together (and Fulton has led group projects in Italy, Long as collaborated in India), the work they present is essentially the indvidual and isolated experience. They make a virtue of this.
They present the experiences through which they walk as ‘natural’. We know that in all their walks, and in particular in the ones that they do in the UK, they must spend a considerable time on roads, with traffic and amongst houses. Yet all the photographs are of an empty landscape devoid of modern human intervention. They even manage to exclude electricity pylons, telephone lines and aeroplanes. Their work values emptiness. Although if you go back to the poem in the Long show punctuated by cups of tea in garages and cafes, we begin to see the human habitation.
Is the distance that the artists create between the experience and the work in the gallery a modernist device? It is like the experience that the modernist creates to separate the object from the consumerist inhabited, busy, world. The experience of the artist is pure and sacrosanct – removed from everyday life. The audience is excluded. With Long and Fulton the audience is not even a spectator – in fact that is one of the ways that they are not modernists.
On the other hand there is some way in which their work suggests a correct way to take a walk, attending carefully to the natural world around you, engaging with it closely, personally, exclusively, and recording that experience.
Jonathan Jones, in his review in the Guardian last week, linked Long’s work with prehistoric sites in the landscape. Of course ‘land artists’ (and many of the rest of us) are attracted to ancient sites in the landscape. They intrigue us – we wonder why they exist. The expand time for us – they are so old that they give us a sense of human continuity, and yet they are so ‘other’. We don’t really imagine what their makers were like – did they wear hides and hunt woolly mammoths? Fulton and Long’s work is also durational and refers to time beyond our normal span “NO TALKING FOR SEVEN DAYS WALKING FOR SEVEN DAYS IN A WOOD FEBRUARY FULL MOON CAIRNGORMS SCOTLAND 1988” Can any of us imagine walking in the Cairngorms for seven days, let alone not talking for seven days?
Of course these walks are art in the form of performances, rather than of object. The object is the record, the summary, the moment, the statement. As performances they are perhaps not the modernist strategy exactly, because we could also do them – they do not take any particular skill or talent. Neither Long nor Fulton would claim any specific expertise in photography or mountaineering or survival. Nor do they particularly walk in the places that present the greatest challenges to human endurance.
Chapter 3
We went by the Economist Plaza to see Robert Orchardson’s piece. Its a sort of relief on the floor, an almost complete star, a star pattern like that which sometimes surrounds very ornate mirrors but open to the middle. Jake enjoyed getting into the aperture in the middle. Its also like a drawing of a compass in an old map – though this work does not prioritise any particular orientation. The work is made out of iodised steel or something like it with a sort of oily surface – the colour is great in the grey stone of Economist Plaza.
Chapter 4
Sadly today I saw in the Independent that John Latham died on Sunday. I never met him. I wish I had. I have a huge admiration for his work. I am not sure that the obituaries do him justice, although Simon Tait’s in the Independent was very good. None really highlighted the importance of the conceptual in his work – for instance designating the shale bings in Lothian as tourist attractions. Nor do they highlight how the Artists Placement Group, established with Barbara Stevini, is an early example of the artist as curator, the idea of the engaged artist, the social dimension, the collective looking outwards as opposed to the colony looking inwards. The impact of Lathan and Stevini’s work is still hardly understood. Equally the relevance of Latham’s work to immediate pressing issues such as terrorism and multiculturalism is ignored. The Tate withdrew God is Great, a key piece of work, from their retrospective for fear of inciting violence. The work took the Talmud, the Koran and the Bible and sliced through them a sheet of glass – a continuity of clarity. Just as Latham’s statement “The mysterious being known as God is an atemporal score with a probable time base in the region of 10 to the power of 19 seconds” challenges our understanding of God, so this work challenged our understanding of God, implying that he was continuous, transparent, and beyond being captured in our knowledge, in our books.
Obituary – The Guardian
Kenneth White
To return to the present
Cathcart Road, October 11th, 1977
‘A waant ma hole
a waant ma hole
a waant ma hole-idays
tae see the cunt
tae see the cunt
tae see the cunt-ery
fu’cu-
fu’cu-
fu’curiosity.’
Kenneth White, The Bird Path, Penguin 1989
Failure
I failed to understand John Latham’s Placement at the Scottish Office: see short text describing failure written in early 2005 about a misunderstanding that must have taken place before 2003 – probably in the late 90s.
Renewable Energy
The Energy Sang
by Sheena Blackhall
Tune: Underneath the spreading
chestnut tree
Petrol, ile an deisel, poor it in,
Fuel tae makk yer motor rin.
Win an fire an watter aa can gie
Pouer tae use as energy.
North Sea gas can cook yer tea
Hydro dams makk electricity
Win an fire an watter aa can gie
Pouer tae use as energy.
Tarry coal an kinnlers, wid an peat
Burn in the fire tae gie us heat
Win an fire an watter, aa can gie,
Pouer tae use an energy.
Hydro-Electromania
by W. L. Ferguson
GOD made o Scotland a braw place,
Wi knowes an howes an burns that race
Doon mountain sides wi foamy grace
To meet the tarns
That i’ their azure depths embrace
The gowden starns.
But cunnin chiels frae Babylon
Maun turn Creation upside doon;
God’s solitude becomes a toon
Wi mills a’ birlin;
Its reekin lums mak nicht o noon,
-An a’ for sterlin!
Thae Babylonians, oot for gain,
Wad rin oor rivers throu a drain,
Or pit a loch whaur there was nane;
A strath, they’d move it!
Oh! gowd can mak ruch places plain,
-Thae chiels’ll prove it!
Commerce an Industry an Lear
Hae lang been Mon’s chief end doon here,
But noo he something’s fand, I fear
‘ll blast an blaw Himsel, his schemes, poo’er, plant an gear
To smithers a’!
If you know of any others please send them to me.
Arts and Communities
The Scottish Parliament’s Enterprise and Culture Committee is undertaking an Inquiry into Arts in the Community.
The remit for the Inquiry is “To investigate the funding, organisation and policies relevant to community arts in the context of the overall strategy for culture in Scotland.”
This sits in parallel with the Cultural Commission announced by the Scottish Executive and headed up by James Boyle. I am not at all clear how they relate to each other. On the other hand your local MSP may be on the Enterprise and Culture Committee.
This is a unique opportunity for anyone involved in arts in the community to make their case to the Scottish Parliament.
It is clear that there is a real need to highlight the complex and multi-faceted character of arts and communities work. This is all to often characterised as a bit of mudrock or quilting in the village hall.
In reality it involves professional artists and groups of often excluded people working together to strengthen their communities and articulate their views. It manifests itself in drama and music, public art and creative writing.
All those involved in participatory and socially engaged practice need to make their experiences known through this process. The Committee and our MSPs need to understand that there are a huge number of examples of excellence in this field, but that they have a different dynamic and a different set of characteristics from excellence in the classical high arts.
Art Futures
Concerned about the position of the artist in the Cultural Review? Sensing increasing marginalisation? Worried about your ability to become a social worker?
Support artfutures and the campaign to value visual artists as artists.
Carron, Ravenscraig, Glengarnock
Starting at the only remains of the Carron Works, looking at the stone tower with carronades in the gateway. Finding the blue gate (a triumphal arch) from the Edinburgh International Exhibition of 1886. Going to the cemetery and seeing family graves, crying.
Through Ravenscraig without stopping (Gavin was not there to ground us).
Ending in Glengarnock, seeing Lorna’s gate, finding all the different bricks telling a story of industries drinking in the Masonic Lodge.
Photos by Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, George Beasley
Some Reading
children, spaces, relations – metaproject for an environment for young children
Ed. Giulio Ceppi and Michele Zini, Reggio Children, 1998
‘The municipal infant-toddler centers and pre-schools of Reggio Emilia are internationally recognised as an experience of particular cultural interest and constitute a model of “relational space” dedicated to young children.
As part of a range of activities and initiatives organised to further develop and promote this educational experience spearheaded by Loris Malaguzzi, Reggio Children initiated a line of research in conjunction with Domus Academy on designing spaces for young children. The aim of this project is to enable a “meeting of minds” between the avant-garde pedagogical philosophy of the Reggio Emilia preschools and innovative experiences within the culture of design and architecture.’
Figuring It Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists,
Colin Renfrew, Thames and Hudson, 2003
Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance,
Anthony Grafton, Penguin Books, 2002
Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads,
Richard Grant, Little Brown & Company, 2003
Francois Matarasso’s Nine Principles of Success
Tim Rollins
The Civil Arts Inquiry currently being undertaken at the City Arts Centre, Dublin, by it’s new Director, Declan McGonagle, is an innovative piece of social/arts development.
One of the treasures on the site is the transcript of a talk given by Tim Rollins – ‘Art in the building of the beloved community’. I had not come across Rollins before, but he is clearly one of the real practitioners of arts in communities. It seems to me that he is interested in the same radical agenda as Rob Fairley and Room 13 in Caol Primary School in Fort William, Scotland.
Tim Rollins talk, sadly without visuals though he refers to the slides he is talking about, conveys his energy and enthusiasm. It demonstrates the need to work slowly, and to be present over a long period of time. It also highlights the importance of pushing very hard. Inspirational.
Interestingly he talks about two phrases – ‘what if?’ and ‘why not?’ He outlines the background to these – Martin Luther King Jnr. used them to focus his argument about the American left during the Civil Rights period. The danger of ‘what if?’, according to King, was that it stopped you doing things. The attitude required is ‘why not?’.
I had picked up on ‘what if?’ and ‘why not?’ from the work of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, American environmental artists. They use in their work a dialogue between the ‘witness’ and the ‘lagoonmaker’. They use questions and phrases such as ‘what if?’, ‘why not?’ and ‘if not here then somewhere else’ in the Dragon, as means to challenge communities and bureaucracies.
Tom Fremantle's travels
Tom Fremantle is undertaking a canoe trip to Timbuktu following in the footsteps (roughly) of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer. Park explored the river Niger and published his account in the 1790s.
Tom Fremantle is a writer, public speaker, and amateur farmer. He is author of Johnny Ginger’s Last Ride, about a 12,500 mile bicycle ride between England and Australia. His latest book, The Moonshine Mule, focuses on a 2,700 mile walk from Mexico to New York with Browny, a cynical but heroic pack-mule. He lives in Oxford, where he still rides a bicycle, but never a mule.
Tom Fremantle will be posting updates about the trip to his web site www.mini-mule.co.uk/ – keep up with his progress – sponsor him and support two charities that work with young people in need.
Lucy Lippard: Shaming the Devil
The Animating Democracy Initiative undertaken by Americans for the Arts is a critical investigation into the role of the arts in relation to civic society. Excellent research has been undertaken into arts project which engage with civic dialogue. The introductory essay Shaming the Devil by Lucy Lippard is excellent in its own right. Lippard sets out the importance of critical writing in advocating for the arts. She teases out the importance of an ethical and positive culture of writing within the arts in a way which is inspiring.
Jem Southam
Fantastic photographer who has developed a programmatic exploration of the south coast of England. I first saw his work at the Spacex in Exeter, and caught up with it again recently at the Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park. Currently Southam is showing at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York and the site contains a good selection of the work well presented. The Exhibition at the Pump House has an associated publication entitled “Shape of Time: Rockfalls, Rivermouths, Ponds”, Photoworks, 2000.
Southam acknowledges a debt to Robert Smithson in his work. Southam explores the unnoticed and continuous process of natural change in the environment. He focuses on rockfalls from coastal cliffs, the rise and fall of the tides, and the recovery of man made changes to the landscape by nature. There is a clear interest in the natural rhythm and one aspect of the work is the use of photography to evidence the process of change over a range of different time scales.
Janice Kerbel
Home Climate Garden by Janice Kerbel at the Norwich Gallery NSAD in collaboration with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Janice Kerbel’s project engages with global climate change in a domestic setting. Her work uses diagramatic systems to articulate schemes of domestic gardening. I recommend requesting the calendar – its fantastic (though I haven’t seen the exhibition).
Live Art
New Territories – Scotland’s International Review of Live Art
The Live Art Development Agency,
The Live Art Magazine and ‘Focus Live Art’ (Live Art Development Agency Nov 2001) about sustainability of the sector which contains much useful insight into the sector (read between the lines of advocacy directed at the Arts Council)
An interesting critique of the Whitechapel’s (so far) two part series ‘A Short History of Performance” published on Metamute.
Robert Morris ‘From a Chomskian Couch, the Imperialist Unconscious’ I have not been able to find this on the web. It sounds very interesting – Robert Morris in dialogue with his therapist, Noam Chomsky, discussing the Imperialist agenda of American art in the 20thC. If anyone can direct me to it I’ll make the link.
And now I’ve found it. Critical Inquiry 29 4
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois‘ Stitches in Time Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, March 6 – May 9, 2004.
This was a fantastic exhibition which clearly placed Bourgeois’ work in the tradition of the surrealists. My understanding of her surrealism moved from a fact to an experience. The early prints in the show are a fascinating insight into the root of the work. The exhibition contains a number of works made from fabric. This is apparently the first time that Bourgeois has actually used sewn fabric, although she grew up in a family involved in tapestry. I saw Bourgeois’ show at the Serpentine in London some years ago. It was also fantastic, previewing with the giant spider in the central space the towers and spider in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. This exhibition was more personal if one could describe some parts of her work as more personal than other parts. Bourgeois shares her fears with us – by making them real she shows us that they can also be beautiful.
James Turrell
Extract from James Turrell’s lecture on Roden Crater at the ‘Art in the Landscape’ symposium at the Chinati Foundation.
“I suppose this is how artists think: you take a photo of it; you make plans of it. It was all pretty reasonable. I got the land. I had to buy a ranch to get the volcano. It’s hard to just buy a volcano. I made the mistake, though, of not ranching out there first, because this is open range. Arizona and Nevada are still entire states that are open range, so if you don’t want cattle on your land you’re obliged to fence them out. Even Texas has changed those rules, although there are open range areas here as well, but not the entire state. Arizona claims to be open range, as well as to not change its clocks. It doesn’t recognize daylight savings time, but that has more to do with militia-favoring political views.
I began to plan how this space at the top, in the top, would shape the sky. At the beginning, I phased it in three steps to change the shape of the rim so that it began to shape the sky. I made a plan so that I could present it to the contractors, and then they could use machinery to move the earth to shape the sky.
This is similar to breaking a few eggs to make an omelet, and it is something to take such a beautiful geologic formation as a volcano and change it. The change was not large in my mind, and there was this chewing up so it would still be a volcano and look as one, no matter whether you saw it from outside or from above. But it would then have this aspect of changing perception. That had some effect on people in terms of ecological thought. Also, the fact that I had bought this ranch and decided not to ranch or do anything with it was, to some degree, like buying a farm and letting it lie fallow, and it actually had more effect on people than I had realized it would. There is more to it than the fact that I wanted to change the volcano. The nearby volcanoes are being mined for cinder, because cinder block and cinder tracks that people run on are made from this material; this is a great building material and people have no qualms about mining it there. There are four hundred volcanoes in that volcanic field, and twelve of them are being mined actively. I see now that it was not so much that I was changing the volcano as that I was coming in and not needing to ranch as anyone else would have who bought the same land.
At any rate, I began to work on it. I had the plan of what it would take to change the sky. The problem is that sometimes you have these ideas, and it’s like having an idea to make an acoustically beautiful symphony space. Some of the worst spaces are made in the name of acoustical engineering. A lot of it is the fact that it is an art that doesn’t scale well from one situation to another; it’s something you have to inherently discover. I had an interesting way of going about that, in the sense that it was about 220,000 cubic yards before I had any way of knowing how to do this. At a dollar-fifty a yard, we were about 300,000 dollars into this and the sky hadn’t moved. Of course, the other situation is that the people form the community who were actually working on it wanted to know what it was that they were doing. After dealing with the landowner and finding that the best way is to put people aware of the truth, I said, “You know, the reason you’re moving this land, this earth, is to change the sky.” Well, they just asked if they were going to get paid on Fridays.
This is the most work that was dine to the outside of it, right here, and you can see that it did take quite a bit of changing and moving to begin to do this. I think that it is very interesting that, after the workers would work on this moving of earth, they would leave and go eighteen miles to the 2 Bar 3 Bar, which it the closest place you could get a telephone and also the closest place you could get a beer. They would go there, and they would talk to their friends about what they were doing. But after about 220,000 cubic yards, after I had changed plans on them as to what they were doing and figured out that it took something different from what I had first thought to effect this shaping of sky, they would get down off their graders and Caterpillars and come down and look – they would stand there and look at it and lie down and look at it and get back on and do more work. Pretty soon, they were bringing their friends out from the 2 Bar 3 Bar, and they would stand there and look at it and lie down and look at it, and they would get up and exchange money.
Here it is now, shaped this last winter [1994-95]. I’ve also since been convinced that we did have to ranch there, and that was because a rancher that came in had a vested interest – they seriously overgrazed our land – which, of course, everyone in the area realized was my fault. We actually had to sue and get involved and get leases back for every other state section that was leased to somebody not in the area. We’ve been ranching this land for five years now, and it has helped a considerable amount. There has been a lot more support for the project, and, in fact, there was unanimous support at the planning and zoning meetings that we had, which required that we actually zone this for art, which has been done.”
Art in the Landscape, Chinati Foundation, 2000
Ross Sinclair: Scotia
An open letter to whomsoever it may concern regarding: Scotland – A brief and fractured introduction to the history of the 1983 – 2083
A satirical essay by Ross Sinclair in which Scotland becomes a theme park has always stuck in my head. It seems to me to sum up so much of contemporary culture – a classic.
Dada2data by Chris Joseph
A short essay on the relationship between DADA, the influential artistic movement of the early 20th Century, and new media art. Many of the strategies of new media art (manifestos, collaboration, simultaneity and multiple media, use of chance, collage and montage, cabaret and shocking the audience out of complacency).
Agricultural Change
The Cultural Documents of the Foot and Mouth Crisis one of Littoral’s projects. Agricultural change in the UK is the biggest issue facing contemporary society. What are you doing?
Hans Haacke
Symbolic Capital Management: or what to do with the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
The Artist engages in critique the relationship between business and the arts.
The worker interrogates the industrial means of production.
See also PLATFORM and the project Funding for a Change.
Public Meeting on Windfarms, Lumsden
Found this in a folder on my laptop from June 2003 and thought I’d post it in its historical context (for the record actually posted 8 March 2014). I haven’t edited it, mostly because although stylistically weak, it was and still is not far off the mark.
Windfarms
I attended, along with many other people, a meeting in Lumsden Village Hall about the proposed windfarm at Kildrummy. This generated a number of thoughts.
As a visual arts professional working in a remote and rural location I believe that the current development of windfarms in rural areas is an appropriate subject for reflection.
Firstly, windfarms represent the largest industrial development that will take place in rural areas in the foreseeable future.
Secondly, these windfarms are subject to public consultation, but the level of debate about the subject is uneven.
Thirdly, much of the resistance movement articulates its core argument around visual impact, and as a person with some expertise in this field, it seems appropriate to begin to explore the subject with a visual ‘hat’ on.
Background gained from public meeting
There are a significant number of wind farm proposals at various stages of development in the Marr area. These include the proposal for Kildrummy as well as proposals at the Clashindarroch Forest behind the Tap O’ Noth, and at the Glens of Foudland. These are all being developed by different companies.
There are many views about the efficiency of the wind farms. According to the presentation and discussion at Lumsden Village Hall the companies are seeking planning permission for periods of around 25 years with a life expectancy for the wind farm of 20 years and an allowance of time for installation and decommissioning. It appears that it takes about 10 years for the wind farm to pay for itself, i.e. in financial terms the all the cost associated with the wind farm is met from income earned during the first 10 years. After that the wind farm is generating profit for the company.
This is not necessarily the same as the point at which the material and energy consumed in constructing the wind farm is ‘paid off’. There is a negative environmental impact from the material and energy consumed in construction, and a positive impact from the generation of energy from a renewable source.
There is therefore an argument about the efficacy of wind farms as a means of generating energy.
One of the major concerns expressed in the meeting was that in decommissioning only about one third of the concrete used in the foundations of the turbines would be removed.
There is also an argument about the impact of the wind farms on the inhabitants and communities.
Two specific arguments were made against wind farms:
- They would reduce tourism in the area.
- They would lower property prices in the area.
These arguments are made, but are rarely contextualised by the more general issue about the impact of infrastructure developments in our environment. These include High Voltage Power lines, Mobile Phone Masts, Water and Waste Water infrastructure, the proliferation of signs along roadsides, etc. We have, perhaps even since humankind ceased to be hunter-gatherers (around 4000 BC in this area), modified the landscape. It is difficult to identify the man-made versus the natural in our environment. Perhaps since the agricultural revolution, and the intensive programme of farm improvements, seen increasingly industrial scale infrastructure within the landscape. Perhaps the most basic form of this is the road, starting with the turnpike.
In this context it is worth noting that windmills have been a characteristic part of the landscape in other parts of the UK and Europe over a very long period. Water wheel meal mills have been an important localised infrastructure in villages across the North East of Scotland for a long period.
According to the discussion in the meeting at Lumsden Village Hall there is no ‘national renewable energy strategy’. Two reasons for this were raised at the meeting. Firstly it was suggested that the government’s view was that the most efficient means of achieving targets was to put in place financial incentives. The financial incentives drive the energy companies to implement the most achievable systems quickly, hence wind farms rather than other forms of renewable energy. The second reason suggested was that any national strategy would have to look at sites, and this would effectively involve the government in prioritising benefit to some landowners over others. The result has been what was described as a Klondike effect with landowners rushing to see if they have suitable sites.
The lack of a national strategy means that there is no authoritative assessment of the means of producing renewable energy, i.e. no analysis of the effectiveness of wind farms in comparison to wave power, solar voltaic, combined heat and power, geothermal, etc. Just the ability to list this number of alternatives highlights the need for broader analysis. It also suggests that the development and commercialisation of renewable energy technologies is ad hoc rather than rational.
It is of interest that the specific wind farms in this area have funding in various forms associated with them. This will benefit:
- The landowner
- The community
- The local authority
All are likely recipients of financial benefits. These are perceived as a bribe.
It is estimated that the community of Lumsden and Kildrummy will receive approximately £30,000 per year over the life span of the windfarm. It is expected that this will be distributed through an independent trust or other body to the benefit of the community.
It has struck me that rather than frittering this away, one might prepare or commission a renewable energy strategy for the local area. There are sources of funding for this sort of work from various agencies in any case. One might then invest the £600,000 that will be made available to the community during the lifetime of the wind farm in implementing the renewable energy strategy within the community. This might take the form of incentivising people to use solar voltaic panels on their roofs, or, preferably, implementing a mixed economy of renewable energy technologies.
At the end of 20 years the wind farm could then be removed because the community was making its own, appropriate and well thought out, contribution to energy demand.
Anne Fremantle 1909 – 2002
Anne Fremantle by Leonora Carrington, Oil on Canvas 1975
Long bio here and short bio on NYTimes here.
Bio of writing https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/fremantle-anne-jackson
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
leave a comment