In a rubberized bag comb brush towel soap change of underclothing copy of Burn's poems Milton's Paradise Lost Wood's botany small new testament journal map a plant press
John Muir’s 1000 mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico
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Wise words from the Schnabelmeister
Leisure Beacon
Funny what you find when raking around on holiday at home.
This is a cassette tape of the first Leisure Beacon, a short lived radio show on SweetFM run from Glasgow Art School on 2 February 1995.
The Leisure Beacon was hosted by David Shrigley, Jonathan Monk and Martin Young
SUPERPRIMER: Use only as directed
Katharina Fritsch: Diashow
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A view from the balcony
I didn’t realise that Craig Richardson had recently authored a book on Scottish Art, (Scottish Art Since 1960: Historical Reflections and Contemporary Overviews, £61.25! everyone) but the new edition of Variant drew my attention to it with a review by Neil Mulholland and Robin Baillie, doing a sort of Waldorf and Statler act on it. Their conversation is all a bit bah humbug but from what I’ve read on Google books, indeed I think we need something more in depth on the actual creativity and effect of the artwork and experiences for all that have been produced over the years. I must admit I am getting a bit bored by the same old story (and the same old names and scenarios), I think we all know this by now. We are all too aware of the structuring structure and the rules of the game, we need to highlight the folk who picked up the ball for a change.
A Curator requires…
A Curator requires…
YES
A creative ability to interweave knowledge, experience and risk
A relentless work ethic (a way of life)
An instinct and ability to change outputs for precision and success
MAYBE
A social and professional position in the field
A proven track record of successfully curated exhibitions / projects
NO
A historical and current knowledge and alliance with the field of power
Recognition in the field as one who curates
A position and location in the field where one curates
Martin Honert’s sculpture Feuer taken by The North Sea
Martin Honert’s sculpture Feuer taken by The North Sea
Places for Exhibition talk
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Stage 3 CCS Lecture at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen Monday 21 Nov 2011
The Blue Door
The muddy path
The raging river
The rocks of solitude
The haunted folly
The dark dark trees
The crooked fence
The private house
The opening in the woods
Curated by Iain Irving
November 2011
The Time Machine Museum
MOVING by Nicola Atkinson Does Fly & Stevie Jackson
Sweet
Nicola is coming to do a Guests @ Grays lecture
at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen on Friday 30th March 2012
Hello, it’s me
Dick Hebdige is not dead: a bit of friction and breakage helps you remember that you’re living in time.
Dick Hebdige is not dead: a bit of friction and breakage helps you remember that you’re living in time.
Funny thing, today I was reading some old CCS text and Dick Hebdige was referenced (many times) and I thought about him and his book Subculture. After I bit of (digital) research, I found out that Dick Hebdige is not dead, and very much alive in the USA, and that he is now only 60, only 10 years older than me (quick calculation) so he wrote the seminar cultural text when he was 28, blimey that’s quite good. So further fiddling and I find a bit of an interview he made in 2004. In this there are some great comments on his use of old tech, power point presentations and the need for a bit of friction and breakage to help you remember that you are living in time. Here’s some choice quotes to live to, cool
Shambling, always. Shamanistic, maybe
The technology dream is all about comfort, like a kid tucked into bed. The digital world is going to help us process information so that we are comfortably in control. And I don’t think knowledge has anything to do with those information processes. Knowledge comes from things breaking down. As Leonard Cohen said, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
You have to lean forward to understand what’s going in the world. You have to make an effort.
And if you’re continually being told what you’re going to hear and then you get a reprise on what you’ve just been told, this is a large part of the problem in a culture where everybody feels it’s their right to feel comfortable all the time.
With digital, you get pure silence between the beats and the world isn’t silent. There’s always interference. The world is a noisy place.
I think if you can distinguish between mastery and control, although I’m not pretending I’m a master… if you’re familiar with a particular medium and a particular mode of articulation and you’ve been doing it for twenty years as I have, you should have your shit together a little bit. I certainly know the groove that I want but I don’t try to control what people are thinking about it. You only gain mastery when you lose control. When you’re willing to lose control.
The jazz of it is that the improvisation is within a larger structure. You have to allow accidents to happen and then turn into the skid.
It says his current interests include the integration of autobiography and mixed media in critical writing and pedagogy, look forward to it.
Co-Creativity of yr Hand and yr Mind
Research group at Gray’s School of Art, where we discuss things
Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind
Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind is potentially one of the most important research areas within Gray’s School of Art’s portfolio, strategically positioned to ‘knit together’ and interconnect knowledge in all the other research areas (Art in the Public Sphere, Cultures of Representation, Design & Innovation). The research will address the continuum from undergraduate to post-graduate art education, positioning this critically and creatively in relation to the specificity of Gray’s cultural context. Building on past research themes (On the Edge, Working in Public, The Artist as Leader), the School has the opportunity to exploit and transfer the outcomes of this existing research and thereby develop current desires to place ourselves at the heart of ‘rural economies and ecologies’. This earlier research has already positioned itself as node within significant international networks, identifying the dynamics of rural remote culture as a catalyst to new ways of working in the arts and society. The new research will create innovative ways of conceptualising and practising teaching and learning in art education, placing these in the context of a changing world (environment, health, values and skills). Through effective dissemination, this research seeks to influence the education of the artist (and designer) in 21st century nationally and internationally.
Blimey, in the bottom half of the Art Power 100
And in the Art Review Power Art Top Hot hippity hop 100
62. Toby Webster
63. Germano Celant
64. Damien Hirst
65. Slavoj Zizek
66. Jeff Koons
67. Thaddaeus Ropac
A-m-a-zing!
Surely this shows influence and currency as opposed to just power.
Ecosse Nostra: you know who you are
Charlotte Higgins’s Glasgow’s Turner Connection article in Guardian the other day.
Interesting article (and comments) but as an art school tutor now, I really wouldn’t want to hang out with the students, cramping their style. Who wants some middle aged ‘guru’ hanging around when your making your mark. But then again maybe the ‘education’ exists within this social situation, we all know that the real learning happens outside the classroom.
I would have liked to hear even more about the current scene and activities of other art/curatorial/writing groups/projects which are working in Glasgow (and around Scotland) as its quite significant (The Mutual, Yuck n Yum, Studio 41, The Commonty, Atlas, paralines, Ganghut, Sierra Metro etc) and healthy.
You Suffer
Title Text Here
Ross Sinclair: The Real Life Gordons of Huntly Portable Museum
Last Friday, Ross Sinclair completed his 3 month residence at Deveron Arts with a portable museum tour of Huntly. Starting from the Deveron Arts office at the Brander Museum, with a skype with The House of Gordon USA the audience group picked up various placards and paintings which Ross had produced depicting portraits of the History of the Gordons and other Real Life statements, and headed off into the town like some sort of agitprop protest group. Along the way we gathered to listen to local experts on the Gordons history – stopping at The Square, War Memorial, Gordon Highlanders memorial (where Ross unveiled his portrait of “Sharpy” a local ex Gordon Highlander), Huntly Castle, a singer on the way back, Gordon Primary School (for a rousing rendition of ‘A Gordon for Me”) and finishing St Margaret’s Chapel with some sherry and conviviality.
The Marcel Duchamp Boîte en valise or portable museum contains miniature versions of Duchamp’s pre 1935 artworks. These artworks are gathered together within a ‘portable’ box and humanly easy to handle. Is this an artwork or as it seems to suggest some sort of ‘museum’, or samples of ‘products’ like a traveling salesman’s suitcase? I think that this work was probably just a useful moving on point for Duchamp in packing up your old stuff and moving to America. Ross’s work was new and current not ready just yet for a museum.
While we were carrying Ross’s artwork in the Huntly project, I sensed that we weren’t just ‘the carriers” but the artwork as one. The collective mass of people connected everyone and everything together. As the evening went on the artwork became heavier, but we still took care of it, maybe we were also the collective assistant curators to Ross. We were the custodians of his work for a couple of hours. Interestingly we all tended to carry and take care of particular works, even when we put them down or displayed them at stopping points, we went back and got the one that we had been carrying. Maybe we need to or be allowed to get more physical with art in the future.
Deveron Arts website
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The Curator is ‘In”
An integration of the ‘expert’ into the local community, interestingly this chap, has offered up Architecture solutions, I was planning Curating solutions in a similar way…
http://architecture5cents.com/
Framework reflections
The following are a couple of reflections made on the Framework curatorial group I have been attending recently – Framework website
Maria Fusco : The Subjective Voice
Saturday 10 September at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh
Maria Fusco’s highly invigorating seminar and workshop was a personal challenge but on reflection has given my writing a new editorial rigor and awareness. I daren’t look back on my previous outputs given her fresh and feisty methodology. But the technique of a subjective narrative is a voice I recognise and have used for a few years in discussing art and culture. Crucially the message from Maria’s session is that the writer can/should adopt this subjective voice as a critical method and therefore as writers we have the mandate to discuss art things in this manner. What was also apparent is that the methods and stern focus on the detail and exactness of this voice gives this genre of art writing the gravitas to challenge and bypass the tyranny of art theory writing.
This particular writing voice has been evolving in art writing for a while. Influences on my own work are the catalogue for the seminal Jan Hoet curated exhibition Chambre d’Amis in Ghent (1986) which layers the publication with selected historical factual and fictional texts with documentation of the artworks; the Private View catalogue (1996) for the exhibition of contemporary artworks in the Bowes Museum, County Durham which has a great text by the curator Penelope Curtis which plays with the concept of the imaginary exhibition and the catalogue for artist Mike Nelson’s A Forgotten Kingdom (2001) which is designed like some pulp fiction novel dovetailing his own artwork with sections from choice fiction.
And, if I can mention some of my curated projects – The House in the Woods with Janice Galloway and The Blue Chamber with Duncan Mclean – employed the creative writer to give an interpretation to the exhibition either as a commissioned piece or republished text. But these texts have a purpose in this context. They give extended interpretation to a specific curated project.
Taking such writing out of this context is interesting but may as Maria pointed out in a recent Art Monthly critique can produce hostility and confusion of its intention and integrity. Maria’s own work can stand alone in its own publication as does Chris Kraus’s writing. But it can be an easy target as illustrated in Kraus’s recent book Where Art Belongs (2011), which is a collection of sectioned short stories narrating the ups and downs of the LA artworld, as the text on the short lived Tiny Creatures gallery reads like some sort of horrible trendy Brett Easton Ellis tribute act. Not so groovy.
Framework Forum
Saturday 24 September at CCA, Glasgow
Reflections on the Framework participant’s show and tell presentations and Curating as Expanded practice discussion with Berlin based curator Ellen Blumenstein
It is always an interesting exercise to ask a group of people who appear to do the same practice what it is they are actually doing. Generally we all agree in our open discussions but to really open up, the person’s articulation, perceptions and ideas through this openness are out of the bag. This exists within any group of similar practitioners – artists, musicians etc. Our practice is a personal and self-developed thing but in this sharing, there is much self-questioning and perhaps doubt in what we are actually all doing. This is my own experience of this session. It is healthy to be challenged; this is the point of these sessions. Personally when I was challenged about my presented material and focus, whatever I thought was okay “as research” was not okay in ‘the actuality and present practice’. This created an interesting awkward moment when trying to explain research findings of issues and context, which were perceived to be focused on middle class male privileged curating ‘names’. But I did wake me up to the facts that I needed to address issues such as gender (even sexuality, nationality and age) as I sensed that these contentions did touch a nerve in the group. Therefore this opening up (expanding of perception) can cause slight turmoil but energises a deeper understanding of the real present-day issues of curatorial practice.
Ellen Blumenstein : Curating as an expanded practice
Sunday 25 September at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
The previous day’s sharing certainly bonded the group and there was a positive feeling in the room – more playful. Ellen put forward the concept of curating as an expanded practice, which is a good observation of curatorial practice – as it stretches out from the institution, extending its experience, blurring the boundaries. I am all for this form (attitude) of practice. But is this just an inevitable development that our boundaries become boring and predictable, so we start to challenge them as we have skills to change, make other things happen in other ways. Through experience of curating in whatever context, we start to use the effectiveness of the practice to become political, economic or spiritual perhaps – things that are more meaningful in life than status or power. Ellen discussed the relief of leaving the institution and surviving. Maybe we get burnt out from the relentless mill. So time out is good. But what tends to happen is that we begin to create our own ‘institutions’, and become constituted with a board of directors – over managed.
The closing exercise was a great bit of playful, hypothetical curating. We all had to spend just a short time determining a proposal for curating. This creative exercise of no restrictions and open possibilities produced a brilliant range of very dynamic and interesting possibilities. Particularly about how and where the curator existed in non-institutional contexts. These helpfully illustrated current curators ambitions of the practice to touch the everyday, be involved in local politics, develop mindful methods and creative experiences, place themselves in social services be the host and facilitator for example. We should do them all.
A page from an old NME hidden in an old Blueprint
I had a lot of trouble buying a curator a present. What do you get someone who thinks they are everything
WHAT IS VIOLENCE? WHY CURATE? by Stewart Home
Came across this text (link above) by Stewart Home which dissects curating a bit more, side panel about the live discussion reads like shit.
2 Bags : Taipei to Tarbert
