CHRIS FREMANTLE

152 trees

Martin Wolf in the FT (3 May 2006) summarises Jane Jacobs’ arguments for the importance of cities (not countries) and their role in relation to regions.

Need to read Cities and the Wealth of Nations!

I like William Boyd’s writing and he highlights something quite accurately, which is inherently problematic about the relationship between the urban and the rural.  The assumed dichotomies of creative v traditional, noisy v quiet, dirty v clean, etc need to be challenged.

Furthermore he acknowledges the constructedness of the landscape as a characteristic, but he doesn’t analyse the meaning of constructing landscapes as a human activity.

William Boyd’s It’s all too beautiful in today’s Guardian Review

This Land is (Y)our Land at CCA, Glasgow

Walking with a pepper plant, free with the exhibition, but actually a specific responsibility, in the smur, going right left right left right left…

Sauchiehall Street
Pitt Street
Bath Street
Douglas Street
across Blytheswood Square Garden
West George Street
West Campbell Street
St Vincent’s Street
Wellington Street
Bothwell Street
Hope Street
into Central Station

I like the zig zag, knowing its not actually any shorter than straight down Sauchiehall and onto Hope, but the pattern is more interesting.

Is it psychogeography, a derive, or systems thinking?

Whilst working at the University of the Arts Berne, had the opportunity to meet and speak with George Steinmann.  His work From-To-Beyond highlights what was missing from the discussion at LANDWORKERS.  We heard about wonderful cultural projects in Samiland, in Dogribland and in Scotland.  All these places continue to suffer the environmental and social impacts of extraction.  Steinmann went to the Kola Peninsula in Russia (part of Samiland) and saw the massive environmental destruction:

“In the autumn of 1995, after thorough preparation, and having contacted scientists in Norway, Finland and Russia, I headed for Murmansk to travel the Kola Peninsula with a Russian Guide.  The itinerary included a visit to Severomorsk and the nuclear submarine base there, as well as excursions to the nickel smelting works in Montsegorsk, Apatity, and Nikel, and a trip to Teriberka on the Barents Sea.  I have never traveled in a region so scarred.  It is one huge pathogenic zone caught between primal nature and industrial exploitation.  This vast region is fatally polluted and damaged by the huge amounts of nuclear waste in the Barents Sea and on the island of Novaya Zemlya, and by the gigantic sulphur-dioxide output of the smelting works. “

(p.166, George Steinmann: Blue Notes, Helmhaus Zurich, Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nurnberg, 2007)

Images

There is a real danger in focusing on the art, and the art focusing on aspects of the cultural, and thus missing the real environmental, social and economic dimensions of extraction and pollution in these remote places.

“Art is an investigation by human animals into constructable or alterable aspects of the material surroundings.  It is prior to technology or the invention of tools.  It is therefore a seedbed of economy.  Of course this is not how it is usually perceived at least in society today.  Which explains how society - that is, modern civilisation - is so unresponsive to its divergence from ecological cycles, or to basic human needs for shelter and food.  Any failure in material culture results from a failure to adopt the lessons, the probings, the investigations of art.”

p.38 Gillick, L. Proxemics: Selected Writings (1988-2006) Zurich: JRP Ringler and Dijon: Les Presses du reel

Working at the University of the Arts, Berne

Presenting The Artist as Leader and doing a workshop with 2nd Year Graphic Design students.

Zentrum Paul Klee

Two visits. In the first (27 May) I find:

“Calculation and work. Trial and error, first on paper, then as a model, then eventually as a prototype on a scale of one to one, that is the method of the practical scientist Renzo Piano and his people. The design process oscillates between tinkering and totalling, the simplest hand drawn sketches and the most high-tech computer drawings are used. The search party takes side turnings, longer routes, gets itself out of dead ends, but every step takes them closer to an as yet undefined goal. The detours are necessary - they ensure that no short circuits, no apparent short cuts, lead to a rash, un-thought-out result. Anyone who commits himself too soon, locks himself in. Piano’s people approach their task like a team of researchers on thin ice.” p.24 Benedikt Loderer, Monument in Fruchtland in Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Short Guide. Hatje Cantz, 2005.

Also Dream and Reality: Contemporary Art from the Near East. The curatorial concept is very strong comprising firstly, contemporary works; secondly, elements of material culture chosen from an anthropological collection; and thirdly, a selection of works by Paul Klee. But in practice, as an experience, its not very successful. It’s not that the Klee works aren’t relevant. It’s not that the anthropological works aren’t relevant. Some of the contemporary art is very good. But in this category there are too many video works. But let me tell you about the three really good pieces. Firstly The Walid Raad/Atlas Group work that seems to be called either Untitled 1982-2007 by Walid Raad, or We Decided to Let them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice by the Atlas Group. Secondly the series of carpets by xxx variously titled. When you first walk down the stairs you see a collection of four carpets which are not quite hung in the same way as for instance the carpets in the Burrell in Glasgow. Then you start to question what you are looking at and you realise that they are modified, reconstructed into new forms, subtley different from the normal. Finally, the chair. I thought it was simply a chair with a small booklet chained to it which might elucidate one of the videos. The book started with a short text which explained that in both Europe and in Cairo there are lots of plastic garden chairs, but where in Europe, when they break they are thrown out, in Cairo they are repaired. A sequence of approximately 20 images of various repaired plastic garden chairs followed. The text suggested that visitors to the exhibition should treat this chair very roughly because the museum had agreed to repair any broken chair in the same way that the Egyptians were repairing their chairs.

For me this work articulated the potential for the arts to highlight the infection of one culture by another culture, and the potential for that to work in both directions. Asking the museum exhibition, conservation and curatorial staff to firstly assume that a piece of plastic garden furniture is an important cultural object, and then to suggest that it should be repaired in a very explicit way, is just great. Asking the people visiting the exhibition to treat an artwork roughly (though sadly it was not showing any significant signs of wear and tear), is brilliant. Definitely a sort of Fluxus Score or an Allan Kaprow happening, read through a post-colonial distorting mirror.

Kunstmuseum Berne (28 May)

Tracey Emin (I missed it in Edinburgh, so it was great to see it in Berne).
“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Guerrilla Girls 1989.
If women are going to be naked in the museum then Emin tells us something about her experience of being a woman.
Walking through the gallery away from a video about being in a band, suddenly I heard screaming, screaming that hit me in the solar plexus. My immediate reaction was that someone in the next gallery was in deep, deep anguish. The pop music and the screaming.
In the sequence of polaroid or photobooth works it seems that Emin is saying “If you are going to look at my body, then you are going to see it as I see it, feel it as I feel it.”
There is a display of small images of early, post art school work that Emin destroyed. The pictures are presented like a collection of family photos. You can see that she has been deeply influenced by Edvard Munch. Someone also mentioned Egon Schiele. There is a work which reminds me strongly of Louise Bourgeois.

Conclusion: it’s a game of consequences - the statement is ‘if’ ‘then.’

Kunsthalle Berne (29 May) Zhang Enli

Second visit to the Zentrum Paul Klee (30 May)
Paul Klee: Carpet of Memory

It didn’t feel like an historical exhibition.  It was overwhelming, both in the beauty of the images and in the variety of tactics of the visual.  It’s not just a lot of squiggles.  The one image which was apparently simply a series of dabs of colour on a dark surface was infact a broadly applied impasto, overlayered with watercolour, and the dark colour was used to heighten the shapes of the watercolour dabs.

Conclusion: he asks which tactic will I apply here?

The sculpture park behind the Zentrum - five works - twisted and beaten coreten steel and cast bronze.

Frederick Bushe.  Born 1931 died 17 May 2009.

One of the foremost of a generation of Scottish sculptors, Fred Bushe also founded the Scottish Sculpture Workshop.

Both his drawing and his sculpture were monumental in scale and concerned with the physical of the environment around him.  He was a modernist through and through, engaged with material and form and dismissive of the fads in sculpture that came and went.  His strong sense composition in three dimensions resulted in work drawing on the industrial as a primary source.  You would naturally connect his work with that of Anthony Caro.

In 1979 he had been teaching art teachers at Aberdeen College of Education, and was looking for a studio.  He found an old bakery in the village of Lumsden, with a flat above a shop front, and a range of buildings behind.  He took these on, establishing the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) initially under the auspices of WASPS (Workshop Artists Studio Provision Scotland), and later as a ‘client’ of the Scottish Arts Council.

Fred was part of the post-war sculpture symposium movement participating in symposia in eastern europe and in turn hosting a number of international symposia at SSW.  This movement was about cultural communication in the context of political division, and Fred played an important role.  In the Bothy at SSW there is a big kitchen table, and that probably epitomises his spirit.

Over the fifteen or sixteen years that he ran SSW, more than one generation of young artists found a place to explore their interests in a working studio.  At the same time artists from something like 40 countries came to work.  When it was good, SSW was a hothouse with artists working and talking, supporting and helping each other.  When it was bad, it was freezing cold and very isolated.

Fred also established the Scottish Sculpture Open at Kildrummy Castle.  For many years it provided an opportunity to see large scale work by established and emerging artists, again both Scottish and overseas.  It is difficult to image the importance of this biennial when there are now so many opportunities for large scale work (temporary and permanent), but at the time it was critical.

Fred had studied at Glasgow School of Art, 1949–53. In 1966–67 he attended the University of Birmingham School of Art, where he gained an Advanced Diploma in Art Education.  He was a long standing member of the Royal Scottish Academy and received his OBE in 1997 (I think).

He exhibited in group shows from the Camden Arts Centre in London to the Pier Arts Centre on Orkney, as well as many of the Sculpture Opens, and his works are to be found in various locations in Scotland as well as in odd corners of Eastern Europe.

Hopefully the RSA will put on a good retrospective of his work.

A characteristic large sculpture, “Grave Gate”, in Corten steel and wood, can be found in the Hunterian Sculpture Courtyard.

Other links to images:

Chatham Street North Extension Relief

T-Fold, Highland Council

Twice this week I have been confronted by the importance of thinking about the rural as a thing in itself, rather than by what it is not.  The Scottish Government defines the rural in negative terms; it is that which is not urban.  But, and it has to be said, sometime around now according to the UN Population Fund humanity is crossing a threshold into (statistically speaking) more than 50% of us living in cities.

And it is precisely at this point that it is increasingly clear that we need to pay attention to the cost of our beliefs, and our belief that the rural is backward, dependent and boring compared to the smooth, fast and creative spaces of our cities is one we need to question.

On Thursday 14th May 2009 the Geddes Institute at the University of Dundee, as part of the Annual Conference of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland held a symposium entitled Landworkers. We were taken on a journey into a space where the indigenous and the vernacular and the rural and the remote were foremost. I have a slight reservation even using the word rural in the context of work around the Great Bear Lake in the North West Territories of Canada, or of Samiland stretching across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Rural suggests the space of western agrarian cultures, not the space of travelling folk and nomads.

So I’d like to start by suggesting several things Scotland can learn from its own rural:

The international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently reported that Scotland’s rural schools provide the best education in the world.

As noted previously, the result of more than 20 years of community development through the process of land claim on Eigg (amongst other remote Scottish estates) has resulted in the Eigg Trust introducing a renewable energy system which makes the island an exemplar. Moreover the fact that this renewable energy system incorporates a means to limit any individual from taking too much is something to be celebrated. It means that social and environmental justice are manifest in the infrastructure.

Rural Scotland also has the potential to generate 25% of Europe’s wind energy, as well as a very significant proportion of wave and tidal energy. In the context of climate change it is imperative, not that we cover every square mile of the Scottish landscape with wind turbines, but that we develop a robust politics to maximise the production of renewable energy by pushing all the technologies to commercial viability, and by re-designing and re-engineering the grid to support this. The key words for such a policy need to be a mixed economy of means across both technologies and scales - just as rural life is characterised by mixed economies and complex interdependecies.

This moves from the overused word ’sustainability’ to the more imaginatively rich concept of a ’stability domain’ as articulated by the eminent ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. A ’stability domain’ is a region, whether a watershed, or another geographical entity, which achieves ecological and economic stability. In human terms this means having the necessary interdependencies, structures and limitors embedding social and environmental justice, for life to thrive. It also means ceasing to be dependent on the extraction of, and consuming of, limited resources beyond the carrying capacity of the ecology.  We might also want to ask what a cultural stability domain might be?

If we want to challenge beliefs, then we might want to imagine the situation where our energy needs are met from the energies already in movement around the planet, rather than those embedded beneath our feet. I can understand why miners in St Helens in Lancashire are proud of their motto ‘Ex Terra Lucem’ and it’s a wonderfully resonant phrase, but we need a new motto.

These are all pragmatic and practical lessons we can learn from the rural, but we can also learn in a different way, and returning to the Landworkers symposium I want to highlight the cultural things we can learn from the rural.

Four, if not more, presentations focused on vernacular and indigenous projects:

Gavin Renwick working as cultural intermediary for the Dogrib in their land claim negotiations with the Canadian Government, andnow moving on to the process of designing and developing a new vernacular for housing in the new nation.

Juhani Pallasmaa creating a museum of nature and culture with and for the Sami.

Then two wonderful presentations flowing into each other by a process of playing ‘tag’ starting with Arthur Watson, handing on to Will Maclean, handing on to Fergus Purdie, handing back to Will Maclean handing on to Marion Leven.

Watson was talking about Cairn Gorm: Reading a Landscape in which he is collaborating with Maclean and Purdie, amongst others. Maclean then talked about the works Cuimhneachain nan Gaisgeach (Commemoration of our Land Heroes) on Lewis where he is collaborating on the fourth site with Leven.

These projects are more than just art in rural places. They speak to a very specific and different understanding: one the places priority on the vernacular and indigenous. T.S.Eliot and others were quoted on the relationship between tradition and innovation but Renwick provided some of the key phrases that structure thinking this through. The first, probably derived from reading MacDiarmid, in “Being modern in your own language.” The second is the dictum of the Dogrib elders which is to educate young people to understand both Western culture and their own traditional culture: “to be strong like two people”.

The cultural projects all demonstrate that it is absolutely critical in the context of rampant urbanisation to express the value (richness, complexity, duration, immediacy, experimentation and repetition) of the rural. And that the expressions of value and meaning we saw help us understand, if nothing else, that the rural is more than just a lower density of population.

The issue of the vernacular seemed quite opaque in the event.  What is vernacular?  Is it of the everyday?  In relation to architecture it can seem like an aspect of the aesthetic realm or a stylistic device.  But it struck me that the terrace I live on with 20 houses the same and two at the end which are larger (for the builder/developer and his family at a guess) also describes a vernacular - yes in the ‘character,’ but also in the economics.  There is a real danger that the vernacular is a lifestyle choice rather than an aspect of imagining our ’stability domain’.  It seemed to me that the artists’ projects evidenced a clear operation within a complex idea of vernacular which comes back to Renwick’s ‘modern in our own language’ and ’strong like two people.’

Willie Roe, Chair, Skills Development Scotland and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, focused this event on an idea of equivalence and interdependence. He drew on the example of Denmark where, in law, the urban and the rural have to be dealt with in equivalent ways. This means that within any planning cycle rolling out services the rural is dealt with in parallel with the urban. The case in point is broadband which has apparently been rolled out in urban Scotland but is still only just reaching the islands. He perhaps highlighted interdependence through the example of very functional ferry services in the Shetlands versus the rest of the western and northern isles ferry services. He observed that in Shetland these had been designed to be the most effective for the islanders by the islanders, whereas the rest seemed to have been designed from the urban centre outwards. He also highlighted the importance of renewable energy in rural Scotland.

It therefore felt a little like the invitation had been made to come to Edinburgh to consider what could be done for rural Scotland which was obviously ‘dependent’ but that by the end the question was quite different: and might end up something like: ‘What are the key priorities where the rural has a specific role to play?’ When we ask these questions we begin to see a different set of answers: certainly renewables, but also education (apparently the OECD recently found that education in rural Scotland is actually the best in the world), probably community development, and I am sure the list goes on. Our priorities would come out looking different: re-engineering our electricity grid from one which distributes from the centre to the periphery, to one which also enables the periphery to distribute to the centre, might be a metaphor for quite a lot of other re-engineering. We would move away from assuming that the ‘rural’ is ‘dependent.’

But, if I had a reservation about the event, it was the lack of the use of the word sustainability in relation to the proposed core concept of equivalence. Equivalence could be interpreted in very wasteful ways. Rather I’d like to imagine Scotland in 20 years time being equivalent to Eigg, certainly in relation to energy if not also land ownership. I say this because Eigg is now wholly renewable, but also because there is social and environmental justice built into the system. Eigg does not have an unlimited volume of electricity available, although it is free and not consumed in the process of use. Therefore they have implemented a 5kw limit for households and a 10kw limit for businesses in the form of a trip on the supply. This way noone can take more than their share. To me this is an important model for a sustainable future for the planet, not just one utopian island.