What art have I seen? Gray’s Graduates in Residence
They’ve called it Only the improvisation remains constant, a quote from the Harrisons
This is a detail of one of Tako Taal’s works.
A postcard from Brussels
From Jon Price in Brussels
I’ve always loved travelling through Maelbeek metro station, as I often do when staying at my regular apartment in Brussels, going from local stop Merode towards the centre. Until yesterday Maelbeek was most distinguished for its fabulous station artwork, completed in 2001 by the Belgian artist Benoît van Innis. This series of 8 faces would gaze benignly from the white tiled walls, deceptively simple line drawings fired in ceramic. They look at first glance like someone has drawn them on with a marker.
Benoît’s faces, echoes and anticipations of the passing commuters who stared blankly back at them on a daily basis, have been a reassuring presence on this route through the EU quarter. They are also a symbol of the city’s cosmopolitanism, with their sparse detail sufficient to suggest diversity and their open expressions inviting self-identification. I found myself looking for their images on the internet last night…
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NEA Magazine: The Art of Failure: The Importance of Risk and Experimentation
Artists talk about failure
https://www.arts.gov/NEARTS/2014v4-art-failure-importance-risk-and-experimentation
What art have I seen? Musee Art Moderne, Paris
Dufy, de Chirico, Braque and Picasso, Matisse, Sekula (Museum Guardroom), Duchamp, Bourgeois, Messenger.
What art have I seen? Another Minimalism
Another Minimalism: Art After California Light and Space at The Fruitmarket, Edinburgh – I saw Robert Irwin’s 2 year installation at the Dia in NYC in 2000 in deep midwinter. The exploration of formal and sensory experience in this show is really well curated with a spectrum of works by key people. I particularly liked the retinal afterglow from the Olafur Eliasson.
What art have I seen? Island Drift and Nick Hedges
Streetlevel have an exhibition of work done with NVA in the Loch Lomond national park exploring light in a dark landscape. Light is brought to life almost as another albeit strange and new entity in the landscape. In the Trongate 103 Foyer Nick Hedges photographs from the Gorbals in the 70s are a reminder of what highrise housing was replacing – slum tenaments – but Hedges photography doesn’t just capture the issue – it’s as beautifully composed as a Vuillard.
What art have I seen? Drawn into tomorrow
Drawn into tomorrow by IC-98 at Dundee Contemporary Art
BBH story on recent Arts and health projects
Better Building in Healthcare ran the story Arts and health – more than just a picture a couple of weeks ago featuring the ‘Podium Landmarking’ project by Rachel Mimiec, Graphical House and Haa Design for the Queen Elizabeth University Hospitals in Glasgow. The landmarks are designed to work like landmarks in towns and cities, telling you that you are at an important junction. The conventional signage works like street names and directions. They compliment each other.
Rachel and the team did some workshops with staff and patients to understand what constituted a ‘landmark’ and the answer they came back with was ‘something quirky’ that stood out. They then asked some 25 members of staff (current and retired) to tell them about something quirky that happened to them. The result was distilled down in discussion with the NHS Capital Planning Team and then developed by Graphical House working with Haa Design into 3d illustrations eventually built by specialist fabricators, Interior Solutions in Corian (the Dupont kitchen surface product).
That’s how you get a jar of beach sweeties or a pair of flying saucers (or 19 other quirky images) working as landmarks helping people remember where they’ve been in a hospital.
You can also see more about the project on Ginkgo Projects and NHSGGC’s Arts & Health
What art have I seen? Simon Starling
Nine Feet Later by Simon Starling at The Modern Institute. Nice evocation of multiple timescales, almost an iteration of Latham’s Time Base Roller in a group of objects (from bamboo to fossilised wood), including the sense of the ghostly half seen past created by the Dageurrotypes of (reconstructed) previous exhibitions in the space.
https://www.themoderninstitute.com/exhibitions/3-the-modern-institute-3-airds-lane2015-11-14/5352/
What art have I seen? Burnt Sierra and the Ship of Theseus
Calum Stirling’s exhibition Burnt Sierra and the Ship of Theseus at The Briggait.
What art have I seen? Turner Prize
Sadly Janice Kerbel’s choral piece was ‘off’ for the hols, but the juxtaposition between Assemble’s ‘craftivist’ community-focused regeneration of Four Streets in Granby, Liverpool, on the one hand and Bonnie Camplin’s study centre on the community kidnapped by extra-terrestrials was compelling. In one room we found a catalogue of hand-made objects which spoke to our desire for the worthy poor to have quality fittings (for which we might read ‘to become middle class’). And of course we can buy the objects ourselves, reinforcing our sense of our own good taste. In the other we are faced with a wholly other ‘other’, clearly a population of nutjobs with whom we have nothing in common. Except that in the library (and I’ll admit to a particular fondness for libraries – see previous writing on the Martha Rosler Library and of course the ecoartscotland library) there are books that I have on my shelves. I hope everyone found something that they connected with, bringing them one or two steps closer to the individuals in the video interviews – I watched a bit with a woman talking about reptilian aliens.
It would have been the obvious decision to give the prize to this or the room with fur coats over the backs of chairs – perhaps the red topped newspapers wouldn’t even have bothered making the usual fuss. The provocative decision was to award the prize to Assemble, but they aren’t exactly radical social practice – they lack a sharp enough political edge.
Accidents will happen
More on failure, this time in relation to innovation. Article proposes three conditions:
1. Time and space for experimentation (always an issue eroded by ‘good’ project management, the hurry to evaluate, modularisation, time and motion studies, etc);
2. Knowledge ‘push’ is valuable too, and sometimes relevance becomes apparent later (‘pull’ is very popular but people need to know what’s possible in order to pull);
3. Connectivity – tell people about failures (links to ‘open’ methods but also to publishing failure, critical reflection not just KE, etc).
http://ispim.org/#mg_ld_3151
The Hope of Something Different – a piece for A Restless Art
Invited piece for Francois Matarasso’s A Restless Art unpacking some of the similarities between community/social and environmental/ecological art practices.
Old to New in Hospitals: Echoes of Grace
Marlene Creates, Echoes of Grace (detail), 2001
Marlene Creates, the Canadian artist poet known for her deep exploration of the human relation to place, undertook a project demonstrating ways to connect an old hospital with a new one, in particular focusing on staff and their experience of change. The image above is one of a series of panels comprising images, found text (graffiti written on the walls by the staff during the last days they worked there) as well as more formal text. View the project on MARLENE CREATES website.
What art have I seen? Transmissions
Transmissions is an exhibition of work produced from the ASCUS micro-residency at the Centre for Immunity Infection and Evolution in the University of Edinburgh. Works by Mark Doyle, Anne Milne, and Jo Hodges & Robbie Coleman.
Comes back to the question provoked by Matthew Dalziel’s presentation at the North Light Arts Conference in 2014. He reminded us of the question “Who speaks for the wolves?” This prompts the question for our culture “Who speaks for MRSA (or Malaria or SARS)?” This exhibition begins to address that question.
Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack: ‘He was small and lithe, like a house cat’ | Life and style | The Guardian
Countries, imperialism, war, surveillance, landscape and failure
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/28/conversation-edward-snowden-arundhati-roy-john-cusack-interview
Should be read whilst also reading Gerry Loose’ An Oakwoods Almanac
What art have I seen? Devils in the Making
Devils in the Making, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Cultural leadership and the place of the artist
Really excited to be working on a new phase of artists and leadership
On The Edge has secured a new £100,000 international project to develop professional engagement with its research into artistic and cultural leadership at Gray’s School of Art. Establishing new relationships with the Clore Leadership Programme, Creative Scotland and ENCATC (the European network of cultural management and cultural policy education), the work will generate events and discussions with the cultural sector in London, Edinburgh and Brussels. New publications will be produced and the project aims to inform new developments in cultural leadership training, theory and practice.
The year-long initiative is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) with further support from the three partners. It builds on the longstanding ‘Artist as Leader’ research as well as Jonathan Price’s Ph.D research into ‘Discourses of Cultural Leadership’ (2012-2015). Price will co-ordinate the new project while Professor Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, the co-authors of the Artist as Leader report, will…
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Remember Nature
Julia Peyton Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine wrote to ask us to participate and circulate this invitation.
We Invite you to Remember Nature by creating your own event, action, performance intervention or artwork, on social media, in a gallery, a college campus, in the street…
Institutions: Register your interest to recieve specially designed posters to support your event, giving details of name, email and postal address before Fri 23rd Oct.
Individuals: Register your interest to participate in this event
All we ask is that you send us evidence of your contribution however small – for example, you might create photos, films, or other documentary evidence. Once you have run your event please use the WeTransfer service to send us your digital artifacts. Send them to:
remembernaturemetzger@gmail.com
Just copy and paste the above email address into WeTransfer. Send us your evidence before 30 November 2015.
Example of event for Remember Nature at your campus
Gustav Metzger co-curated the programme of last years’ Serpentine Marathon titled Extinction: Visions of the Future on 18th and 19th Oct 2014. During this time his work, Mass Media: Today and Yesterday was livestreamed from Herbert Read Gallery into the Serpentine Gallery throughout the course of the Marathon. Fine Art students from University for the Creative Arts created a media wall from newspapers for 18 hours over two days. Students were fully immersed in this work, scouring newspapers, silently cutting out key texts relating to extinction, working in pairs for 2 hour blocks. This exhibition was curated by Andrea Gregson, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, at UCA Farnham.
Continue reading How to get involved
For more on extinction it’s worth checking out the previous post on Thom Van Dooren’s work.
What art have I seen: Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham’s Various Items and Complaints at the Serpentine Gallery – humourous, light touch, playing between the natural and the man-made. Parasol show last year was more critical of society.
http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/jimmie-durham-various-items-and-complaints
Collective Futures Final Report — #COFUTURES
#CoFutures Report is a really valuable source on Collectives across art, design and craft in Scotland – used design thinking methods, residents, events and tools to understand character, issues and challenges as well as values and structures.
http://www.collectivefutures.net/blog/2015/2/12/collective-futures-final-report
Failure h3333333k
Turning technological error/breakdown into architectural animation https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/h3333333k/
What art have I seen? Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly at the new Gagosian as well as the Polaroid works at Davies Str. Understand why he’s in amongst the Abstract Expressionists though the ‘blotting paper’ works are also quite conceptual in their way. They feel like Judd’s technical drawings shown at Talbot Rice a few years ago, adjuncts to the ‘real’ work. But compared to the works in Houston these have a much harder edge.
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/cy-twombly–october-10-2015
What art have I seen? Escher and Avery
M.C.Escher exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Charles Avery at the Ingleby.
What art have I seen? KennardPhillips and Holoturian
KennardPhillipps (Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps) Here Comes Everybody at Stills is immediately angry: angry about Shell drilling in the arctic, angry about George Osborne, angry about media manipulation.
Ariel Guzik’s work Holoturian in Trinity Apse courtesy of Arts Catalyst, is a slow steampunk meditation on the parallel lives of cetaceans.
What art have I seen? Crawick Multiverse
This was an opencast coal pit up until a couple of years ago. I do wonder what members of the Society for Ecological Restoration meeting in Manchester next week would make of it?
Help Place of Origin
We need your help. Kemnay Community Councillor David Evans just contacted me about a proposal to further surround Place of Origin with housing. Some of you will know that when I was Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop we worked with three artists John Maine RA, Glen Onwin RSA and Brad Goldberg (Texas) to create a landscape and viewpoint at Kemnay Quarry called Place of Origin. John Maine framed it as making landscape as art.
So Place of Origin as an artwork made out of 100,000 tonnes of quarry waste and about 7000 trees mirroring Bennachie in the way the Japanese gardens mirrored the wider landscape is all about views. When you are standing at the top you have views for 360 degrees with the quarry in front of you and Aberdeenshire’s beautiful countryside around with Bennachie in the distance. The artists also thought hard about how the landscape and viewpoint would look in the context of Kemnay village.
Anyway there is a proposal from a volume house builder for 49 new houses on greenfield immediately adjacent to the artwork. At present as you ascent the viewpoint you rise above all the housing on Fyfe Park, but this stuff will be on higher ground and will immediately be in your face.
The developer tried to get the housing into the Local Development Plan a couple of years ago and it was refused so they appealed – the Scottish Government’s Reporter commented as follows, “The site is on rising ground and any development would be elevated above the existing housing adjacent to the A933. When viewed from the approach to Kemnay from the east, particularly from the B993, a development on site H1 would seriously intrude on the view of the ‘Place of Origin’. Furthermore, the development would seriously detract from views southwards from the ‘Place of Origin’ viewpoint. Consequently, it is considered that site H1 should not be allocated for housing.”
We are so grateful that Kemnay Community Council are strenuously objecting and they have noted a number of reasons including impacts on the school, the medical centre, the traffic and the stormwater drainage as well as the impact on the artwork. I hope that you will take the time to go online and make a comment. I think frankly you can pretty much reiterate the comments of the Scottish Government Reporter and note that the artwork won both an Aberdeenshire Council Planning Award, as well as a national Saltire Award. You might also make a general reference to Aberdeenshire Council’s various policies on Landscape and in particular the value of place-making.
If you can take the time to object I would appreciate it a lot as would the people in Kemnay who look after Place of Origin. The link, email address and postal address for objections are all on the web page.
What art have I seen? Paramus
PARAMUS. Exhibition by Javier Vidal Aguilera
Javier Vidal Aguilera’s Paramus at The Lighthouse in Glasgow, a development on his MFA Art Space and Nature Degree show
http://www.thelighthouse.co.uk/visit/exhibition/paramus.-exhibition-by-javier-vidal-aguilera
What art have I seen? Spiral Jetty
Spiral Jetty – photo Jake Fremantle
To visit Spiral Jetty you have to pass through the Golden Spike National Historic Site, created in 1957 to mark the point where the east coast and west coast railways met in 1869. It now comprises 2,700 acres of scrubland, but not Spiral Jetty – you clearly pass through ranches to get to the Jetty – the signs saying anyone leaving the road is trespassing are pretty clear.
Imagining Spiral Jetty, February 2008 https://chris.fremantle.org/2008/02/05/robert-smithsons-spiral-jetty-threatened/
November, 2009. Smithson, Aldiss and Earthworks https://chris.fremantle.org/writing/earthworks-brian-aldiss/
What art have I seen? Roden Crater
Roden Crater seen from near Leuppe
For more read https://chris.fremantle.org/2004/02/07/james-turrell/
Unveiled: The art which will help and heal in new hospital | Herald Scotland
Nice piece Unveiled: The art which will help and heal in new hospital | Herald Scotland by Helen Puttick, Health Correspondent, in the Herald about the Therapeutic Design and Arts Strategy for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s new South Glasgow University Hospital and Royal Hospital for Sick Children. I’ve been responsible for responsible for the overall programme, working with Ginkgo Projects, since 2010 (this might sound like a long time, but bear in mind the NHS Capital Planning team have been working on it for 10 years).
Experience Based Design in healthcare
Some resources that the NHS provide to support Experience Based Design:
Case Studies: The ebd approach case studies – NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.
Tools: Resources for ebd – NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement includes consent forms as well as templates.
Yes, Everyone Can Be Stupid for a Minute – NYTimes.com
This Corner Office interview with a silicon valley tech CEO has stayed with me for a long time. Basically he reckons everyone says something stupid in a meeting occasionally and this guy has a rule that you can say – That thing I just said was stupid. Let’s move on. Otherwise politics kicks in, people defend their positions, etc. He’s also good on teams. Worth having a look at some of the other Corner Office interviews too.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/business/08corner.html?referrer=
What art have I seen? Richard Diebenkorn and Conrad Shawcross
Richard Diebenkorn at the RA and Conrad Shawcross’ installation in the courtyard.
What art have I seen? Ben Woodeson
Ben Woodeson‘ exhibition Obstacle at Berloni has all the things you’d expect – thing that make you feel the work not just see it, things that imply imminent danger. The basement gallery is bathed in a hellish light but there’s a Tom and Jerry mousetrap dimension promising exploding neon, shatter glass and escaping poisonous gas. Woodeson’s homage to Carl Andre gives you a shock. His precarious glass pieces hint at Latham’s God is Great. What is really good about this work is the way your body is sensitised as your mind is stimulated and your curiosity (does that really balance?) is peeked.
imagivation – drewwylie.net
Andrew Ormston recently blogged on the two types of innovation and the need for a theory of innovation that is more than just positivistic is very provocative. It resonates with Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold’s observation that innovation can only be identified in retrospect, and that in the ‘now’ we are actually improvising. It also resonates with the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, who for 50 years have been making works about places. They say,
We hold that every place is telling the story of its own becoming, which is another way of saying that it is continually creating its own history and we join that conversation of place.
All of this requires at least a concept of ‘responsible innovation’ if not a much deeper discussion of the stories we want to tell of our futures. Andrew’s blog is here: imagivation – drewwylie.net.
What art have I seen? Ian McNicol
Ian McNicol is featured artist at Glasgow Print Studio at the moment
What art have I seen? Gary Fabian Miller
Garry Fabian Miller’s exhibition at the Dovecot in Edinburgh comprises photographic works, tapestries and rugs both of his own design and also belonging to Winifred Nicholson as well as some of her paintings which have inspired Fabian Miller. Beautifully composed and judged.
Light Flight: New Work by Penny Clare
Penny Clare’s new exhibition is here www.actionforme.org.uk/light-flight Chris Dooks introduced me to the work of Penny Clare a while ago and its great to see more of her work. Anyone with a special interest in health and well-being should check out her story.
Moving Image Season: Clyde Reflections, from art-science team Hurrel and Brennan, 28 May – 5 July 2015
Very much looking forward to chairing the discussion on 13 June…
‘On truth, doubts, and pain: The significance of ideas of objectivity’ a contribution by Daniel Goldberg – Centre for Medical Humanities
Although this article comes from the Medical Humanities and is tagged for arts & health, it has a wider resonance raising issues around the role of imaging in determining what is real and what is not, what is causal and what is not. Broadly the piece argues that pain is a useful area of research for understanding how ideas of objectivity have emerged. The author argues that, “…the history of objectivity literally is a history of scientific imaging…” and “…profound changes in ideas of truth and knowledge are coextensive with profound changes in ideas of medicine and medical practice.”
What art have I seen? Danish Diaspora Scotland
At Roselle House Galleries including work by Nickolai Globe who also has work installed in the new South Glasgow University Hospital
Write, Erase, Do It Over: On Failure, Risk and Writing Outside Yourself
Toni Morrison interviewd about failure. She has a very clinical approach to it. It needs excised. Its about discipline. Its nothing to do with fear.
http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/03/10/write-erase-do-it-over-on-failure-risk-and-writing-outside-yourself/
Terry Pratchett RIP
In about 1990/91 I was knocked off my bike and spent 3 weeks in St Thomas’. My brother brought me a paperback of Weird Sisters. I laughed so much. Mind you I was on morphine based painkillers.
On the importance of being negative | Science | The Guardian
I don’t understand the detail of the science, but as highlighted in this piece, the increased tendency to publish failed experiments as a result of the growth in the number of open access journals is important.
As the author of the article says of the paper, ‘It is not destined to be highly-cited because, as the last line of the summary on page one makes clear, the results are negative: “in no case were specific protease–substrate interactions observed.” ‘ So not only were they not able to generate the interactions they had hoped to be able to generate, they also don’t expect the paper to be widely cited – acknowledging failure in this case opens up another form of failure.
On the importance of being negative | Science | The Guardian.
Failure, Diebenkorn
Diebenkorn was more troubled by easy perfection: he wanted his paintings to resolve problems but not so thoroughly that they seemed pat or pretty, the marks of struggle erased. The more restructios he could create for himself, the freer he could be in improvising his way to a solution. But it also mattered to him that his errors lingered on as the repentance marks of pentimenti, the term for when an artist has second thoughts, redoing part of a painting, but leaving traces of what has gone before. In Diebenkorn’s work, these regions, which he called “crudities”, can be vast, ghost tracts of colour imperfectly repressed, or alternatively small spatters and splodges, accidents that opened up a new road to “rightness”.
Olivia Laing, Lovely imperfection, The Guardian, Saturday 28 February 2015.
What art have I seen? Drawing at RSA
Scottish Drawing exhibition at the RSA in Edinburgh – a few thoughts on what was unexpected, familiar, unfamiliar, obsessibe, a reminder, revealing, evocative, relational, quiet, surprising, severe, known and unknown, small.
Unexpected
Most Marion Smith
Next Will Maclean
But also Glen Onwin one unexpectedly direct Galena; one intriguingly complex – The unchanging and the changing; and one I think I knew about – Flow of Near Solids (A proposal)
Familiar from recent encounters David Blyth.
Unfamiliar Alfons Bytautus, Lorna McIntosh.
Obsessive Charles Stiven.
Reminder James Castle.
Revealing Joe Fan, particularly Spring Time Chaos.
Evocative Annie Cattrell Sustain, Sustain I and II
Relationships between for instance Frances Pelly’s PI, a concertina of drawings of a sleeping dog and CameronWebster’s visual narrative of house from sketch to completion.
Quiet works including Andy Cranston and Anne Douglas
Surprising Leon Morrocco. Vibrant, engaging, challenging the chromophobia of drawing.
Severe Arthur Watson
Known Frances Walker and Doug Cocker and unknown Fiona Dean.
The smallest revealing the most – Andy Stenhouse’s Tone Poem : Tone Dee (Harbour).
Missing Donald Urquhart,
The Question of Light: Tilda Swinton’s speech at the Rothko Chapel | Connerhabib’s Blog
Having been to the Rothko Chapel and having lived in Scotland for more than thirty years and spending the best (and worst) of that working with artists, this resonates… the older I get, the more I realise, “both this and that are true at once…”
http://connerhabib.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/the-question-of-light-tilda-swintons-speech-at-the-mark-rothko-chapel/
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