The Indirect Exchange of Uncertain Value

Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan Elizabeth Price Chris Evans 7 August–28 August 2011 Fettes College Carrington Road Entrance Edinburgh EH4 1QX

The indirect exchange of uncertain value Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan Elizabeth Price Chris Evans The indirect exchange of uncertain value is an offsite project for Collective, sited at Fettes College in Edinburgh and developed

by Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan. The project will include new commissioned work

by Chris Evans and Elizabeth Price, as well as new sculptural constructions by Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan.

Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan have worked collaboratively since 1995 and produce absurd or contradictory interventions as a means of considering or examining a situation. The indirect exchange of uncertain value continues this approach by siting artworks at Fettes College, a school that has privately educated many within the UK establishment and is a significant Edinburgh landmark.

Tatham & O’Sullivan’s artworks often function as displacements or diversions and are situated between - and use - sculpture, painting, architecture, photography, performance, literature, institutional critique and curation. They often describe their objects and installations as stage sets or props and it is often the choreography and curation of these elements that should be understood as the artwork. These artworks create a staged theatrical experience for the viewer, allowing them to consider their context and their relationship to it.

For The indirect exchange of uncertain value Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan invited Chris Evans and Elizabeth Price to make new works to be sited at Fettes College inside two of their sculptural constructions.

Chris Evans' work often evolves through

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conversation with people from diverse walks of life, selected in relation to their public life or symbolic role: the directors of a leading champagne house, a former member of the British Constructivists, the CEO of a Texas pharmaceutical company, etcetera.

Sculptures, letters, drawings, film scripts and unwieldy social situations become indexes of a larger structure through which Evans deliberately confuses the roles of artist, collector, philanthropist and commissioner.

Elizabeth Price works primarily with digital video and reprographic media, to reformulate and re-inscribe collections and archives using artefacts drawn from the debris of modernism, popular culture and consumerism. Her work fuses administrative, curatorial and commercial languages to reflect on these collections and the conditions that created them. Concerned with processes of assembly, CHOIR brings together disparate bodies of material and archival technologies into dissonant concert.

It is comprised of two episodes, the first of which constructs the architecture of an auditorium, whilst the second stages a sardonic and intoxicated performance.

The indirect exchange of uncertain value Free tours on the hour Mon - Sun, 11am - 5pm 7 August - 28 August Booking required: www.edfringe.com 0131 226 0000

Fettes College first opened in 1870 as a school for orphans and the sons of needy parents. It is named after Sir William Fettes, twice Lord Provost of Edinburgh who, having lost his only son and heir in 1815, decided to devote his wealth to ‘the maintenance, education and outfit of young people’.

The size of the bequest enabled the architect David Bryce to pursue a grandiose design for Fettes College.

Bryce created what architectural experts agree is one of Scotland’s greatest buildings.

Related Events

Fettes College

Symposium The indirect exchange of uncertain value: the performance of public art Fettes College Carrington Road Entrance Edinburgh EH4 1QX Fri 5 August, 10:30am - 6:30pm With speakers, performances and poetry readings by: Tom Leonard/ Elizabeth Price/ Vito Acconci/ Chris Evans/ Owen Hatherley/ Fiona Jardine

The indirect exchange of uncertain value was developed in response to the nature of public and private space within Edinburgh. The imposing landmark of Fettes College building, with its extensive grounds, brings issues of public and private space into sharp focus. The project works with and against this context to consider the wider relationship of the public to the private, with particular reference to the role of education and the instrumentalisation of art within the public sphere for the public good.

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Participation Programme The participation element of the project engaged with pupils from Broughton High School and Fettes College in a series of activities creating public art proposals, debates and statements about the project, and also attending a practical session using a letterpress at Robert Smails’ print workshop in Innerleithen. Some of the participants' statements have become posters along with the artists' posters, which formed a viral element of the project as they were displayed in the local area.

The final strand of the participation was a week-long Public Art Summer School.

The Summer School included: workshops by artists Chris Evans, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan; specially devised public art walking tours by academics Dr Ray McKenzie and Dr Angela McClanahan; a trip to Little Sparta; showing public artworks on the BBC Big Screen, Festival Square, Edinburgh, and attending The indirect exchange of uncertain value: the performance of public art symposium on Friday 5 August.

The participation programme was led

by Debi Banerjee with support from Geraldine Heaney.

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Works Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan The indirect exchange of uncertain value 2011 Two constructions sited at Fettes College, Edinburgh, 5 - 28 August 2011, housing works by Chris Evans and Elizabeth Price.

A visit to The indirect exchange of uncertain value will include a short tour of the grounds of Fettes College.

Elizabeth Price CHOIR 2011 HD Video Duration 10 minutes CHOIR was initiated and developed while Elizabeth Price was the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow at the University of Oxford and British School at Rome in 201011. Production has been supported by the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art and the artist would like to thank St John's College and Magdalen College, Oxford for their assistance with` the film. Special thanks to Paul Bonaventura and Mark Dean.

Chris Evans New Rules 2011 Bronze with ivory patina Dimensions 48cm diameter x 1.2cm New Rules is sited inside the Callover of Fettes College and cannot be viewed by visitors to The indirect exchange of uncertain value.

Portrait of a Recipient as a Door Handle, After a Drawing Produced by an Anonymous Philanthropist.

Bronze Maquette, Scale 2:1 2010 Bronze maquette, 15 × 25 × 111cm This work can only be viewed by one person at a time. After entering, the door will be closed behind you and opened again after two minutes.

Chris Evans would like to thank Cove Park and Will Holder for their support and assistance with the production of his work.

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Chris Evans, Portrait of a Recipient as a Door Handle, After a Drawing Produced by an Anonymous Philanthropist. Bronze Maquette, Scale 2:1 2010

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Elizabeth Price, CHOIR 2011 HD Video Duration 10 minutes 7

Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, The indirect exchange of uncertain value 2011 Two constructions sited at Fettes College, Edinburgh, housing works by Chris Evans and Elizabeth Price.

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The indirect exchange of uncertain value

By Fiona Jardine

I am not going to offer any interpretation of the artworks you encounter in The indirect exchange of uncertain value, or address them specifically. Rather, I’d like to draw your attention to certain unobservable features of the context/terrain you find yourself in. I’d like to augment the reality. It may well be that I point to a crumbling edifice or that I’ve read the sinking sand as beach (and vice versa), so proceed with caution. This is an unrevised field guide. I’m not promising you any shortcuts, no straight and reliable route - and no facts about the artworks or artists - but if you bear with me round the hairpins and up the slopes, at certain points, views might coalesce.

In order, I invite you to consider: 1. THE CITY 2. ENDOWMENTs 3. VIRTUE 4. BALLADs 5. COMPENSATion 6. GRAPHICs 7. MOTTOs 8. PARIAHs 9. MURIEL SPARK 10. TYPEWRITERs 11. POPULAR CULTURE 12. THEATRE 13. PHILOSOPHISing 14. PRIMORDIALity 15. PLAYing 16. ART 17. EFFIGYs 18. A MAGIC NUMBER Though it must be said, they intermix.

Expanding on this index, I give you a title by which I designate a feature followed by a brief description of it and an indication of my sourcery.

Fiona Jardine

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1 THE STOCK OF BROOM Edinburgh has had a unique relationship with its fee-paying schools: substantially more pupils in Edinburgh are in private education than elsewhere in Scotland, the UK, the world.

This can be partly attributed to the important role played by the (Edinburgh) Merchant Company in administering the legacies and endowments and of wealthy individuals who wished to establish Hospitals in the 18th and 19th centuries. Initially providing orphans and destitute children with a place of shelter and education, the Merchant Company Hospitals Mary Erskine’s, Daniel Stewart’s, George Watson’s, James Gillespie’s - became fee-paying day schools during the education reforms of the 1870s. Fettes opened in 1870, funded by the large bequest of Sir William Fettes, made in the rapidly dissipating spirit of the ‘Hospital’.

2. EPHORS AT THE ACADEMY On the 4th of July this year, Jeremy Hunt, the current Minister for Culture announced the establishment of a £55 million ‘Endowment Fund’ for arts and heritage organizations.

“George Osborne and I both have Grayson Perrys hanging in our offices, courtesy of the wonderful Government Art Collection. Mine is called Map of Nowhere and is full of cryptic comments that taunt me on a daily basis. […]

Endowments don't necessarily mean capital tied up religiously so only the investment income is available to spend.

Some can be used to support acquisitions. Some for capital projects. Others could potentially be used to weather financial storms.

Endowments aren't for everyone. For organisations with limited fundraising capacity they need to sort that out first.

Nor are they a quick fix. It's taken the Met over a century to build up its endowment. […]

Is not now the time to start our own - British - endowments century?”

3. THE TROUBLE WITH CLASSICISTS The National Gallery of Modern Art at Belford Road was, until 1975, John Watson’s Hospital (Institution-School). John Watson was a solicitor and Writer to the Signet who bequeathed £2000 in 1762 for the founding of an Hospital for the purpose of “preventing child murder”.

Alasdair Roberts in the Ties that Bind: Boys’ Schools of Edinburgh, imaginatively links Watson’s concern for “secretly infant children…and women big with Child” with the story of Helen Walker on whom Sir Walter Scott based the character of Jeanie Deans in his novel, The Heart of Midlothian. In 1788, Walker made a journey of over 300 miles on foot from her home in Dumfries to the Royal court in London to beg a pardon for her sister, Isabella, (falsely) imprisoned on a charge of infanticide.

4. THE CRUEL MOTHER Roberts could equally have linked Watson’s concern to a resonance with infanticide as the social subject of so many ballads: “She’s ta’en out her little penknife/ Fine Flowers in the Valley/ And Twinned the Sweet babe o’ its life/ And the green leaves they grow rarely.” ( from Border Ballads: A Selection ed.

James Reed ) Scott knew well such mutable, permanent history, collecting ballads to publish in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Scott is acknowledged (and suffers) for his role in the 10

romanticisation of (Highland) Scotland. A facet of this romanticising is visible in the crenellated fusion of Loire valley chateau and Scots Baronial hall you see in the Fettes building: the strict Enlightenment line, so deeply etched in New Town architecture, enjoys extravagant time off as it skips across the bartizans, gargoyles and projecting oriels.

5. SLAPSTICK MYSTICKS (with sticks) (THE MOUNTAIN EYRIE) Can this romanticising be seen as spectacular architectural compensation for the urbanisation that characterises the 19th century? In his study of Galoshins: The Scottish Folk Play, Brian Hayward implicates the Trade Union Acts of 1871-6, the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884 (bracketing the years that saw reform of the Hospital school system) as indications of the cumulative changes that occurred in social relationships as a result of industrialisation. The traditional performance of Galoshins – a (Lowland) Scottish mumming play, known to date from the 13th century - became associated with threats and begging during the 19th century, rather than functioning as a satirico-magic “death and resurrection” drama.

6. LES FRERES BARRES How to throw flat confection into deep relief? To dissolve the familiar? How to penetrate the stark graphic to cast some personal shadow across the rhetoric and find the familiar?

“The stripe is not a form, like the disc, star or round piece of cloth (la rouelle) that Jews and Muslims sometimes had to wear. It’s a structure. As is nearly always the case in medieval sensibilities and symbolic systems, structure is given priority over form and colour. The stripe, whatever its perimeter and colours is more pronounced, and thus more effective, than the colour yellow, the pointed hat, or the rouelle partie […]…the stripe always plays a trompe l’oeil role.”

7. INDUSTRIA: THE GRUMBLING HIVE

“Let them be a bit dearer and fade if they will / The original colours have charms for us still / And inspite of the schemes of the cunning inventa / Let’s stick to our Brown and our faded Magenta.” ( Fettes song, quoted in Alasdair Roberts, Ties That Bind: Boys’ Schools of Edinburgh )

8. THE MARK OF CAIN

“Treacherous knights, usurping seneschals, adulterous wives, rebel sons, disloyal brothers, cruel dwarves, greedy servants (Judas, Mary Magdalene) they all may be endowed with stripes in heraldry or on clothes…\…[…]…Striped (virgulatus, lineatus, fasciatus, etc.) and varied (varius) are sometimes synonymous, and this synonymy instantly pulls the stripe over to the pejorative side….A good Christian, an honest man, cannot be varius.” ( 6 & 8 from Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth )

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9. SISTER HELENA OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

“She clutched the bars of the grille…and received choice visitors…Eunice, when she came, told Sandy ‘We were at the Edinburgh Festival last year. I found Miss Brodie’s grave, I put some flowers on it.’” ( From Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ) Muriel Spark, steeped in the peculiar and particular atmosphere of an Edinburgh childhood, a pupil at the dissipated Merchant Company interest that was James Gillespie’s (School for Girls), endows the doubling Dougal Douglas in The Ballad of Peckham Rye with diabolic attributes, placing him in “human research” at the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He is an “Arts man”, a malevolent upsetter, as striped as Brighton Rock. Miss Brodie permits great artists to scream at the chorus and fascists to deal with unemployment. Incidentally, Alexander Trocchi published his solipsistic roman a clef, Cain’s Book, in the same year as Spark publishes her proleptic “nouveau roman”, The Ballad of Peckham Rye: 1960. I am making claims.

10. MUTABLE AND PERMANENT open inverted commas capital T the artist who masters the art of deception comma by which I mean mimesis dash the seamless trumping of the eye dash is said to ascend a hero’s heights full stop capital T the artist animating some lumpen clay comma some makeshift assemblage of splints and screws dash a mangy bag of bones and blood dash adopts the garb of a magus comma regardless of the mechanics full stop close inverted commas

11. CRIS DE PARIS

“The Marketplace of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a world in itself, a world which was one; all ‘performances’ in this area, from loud cursing to the organised show, had something in common and were imbued with the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness and familiarity. Such elements of familiar speech as profanities, oaths and curses were fully legalised in the marketplace and were easily adopted by all the festive genres, even by Church drama. The marketplace was the center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology.”

12. LES ECHAFAUDS

“Rabelais learned about life on the theatre scaffoldings which he describes in his novel.

These scaffoldings were put up on the square, and the people crowded around them. Lost in the crowd, Rabelais, in these attended mysteries, moralities and farces.

School parodies, travesties, faceties in Latin and in the vernacular prove this relation (to the marketplace) and bear inner resemblance to popular forms. In Montpellier on Epiphany students led carnival processions and danced in the square.” ( 11 & 12 from Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of The Language of The Marketplace in Rabelais and His World )

13. PLATO’S MAN - A FEATHERLESS BIPED

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“Good People, most illustrious topers, thrice-precious gouty gentlemen, I wonder whether you ever saw Diogenes, the Cynic Philosopher? If you did see him, then your vision was as

keen as ever; or I am devoid of all intelligence and logic.

If you have never heard of Diogenes, I will tell you a story about him presently, while we start on the wine - Drink up, my boys - and I start my argument. Now listen to me! But first, let me inform you - in case, in your simplicity, you are deceived, like so many infidels - that in his day he was a rare philosopher and the cheerfullest among a thousand.”

14. CORBUSIER’S PRIMORDIAL CELL - AN EARTHENWARE TUB

“When Philip, King of Macedon, undertook the siege and destruction of Corinth, the Corinthians were warned by their spies of the grand array and the huge forces that he was leading against them. So they were all, not unreasonably, afraid, and neglected no precautions.

Now when Diogenes saw them all so warm at work and himself assigned no duties by the magistrates, he watched their behaviour for some days in complete silence. Then, as if spurred by the martial spirit, he slung his cloak across his chest, rolled his sleeves up to his elbows, trussed himself up like an apple-gatherer, handed his wallet to an old comrade of his, together with his books and his double-sided scrolls, and made off out of the town towards Cranium, which is a jutting hill not far from Corinth, and a fine look-out place.

Thither he rolled his earthen tub, which served him as a shelter against the inclemencies of weather…

15. (not) THE LITANY OF LORETO

…putting out all his strength, in a tremendous outburst of spirits, he twirled it, whirled it, scrambled it, bungled it, frisked it, jumbled it, tumbled it, wheedled it, scratched it, stroked it, churned it, beat it, bumed it, banged it, battered it, up-ended it, tempered it, tapped it, stamped it, stopped it, unstopped it, shifted it, shook it, thumped it, pummeled it, waggled it, hurled it, teased it, staggered it, tottered it, raised it, rinsed it, nailed it, thethered it, veered it, steered it, stuffed it, bustled it, lifted it, soiled it, tackled it, shackled it, mocked it, spiked it, patted it, plaited it, fondled it, fumbled it, dashed it, splashed it, crashed it, slashed it, planed it, charmed it, armed it, speared it, harnessed it, pennoned it, caparisoned it, rolled it from top to bottom of the hill, and precipated it from Cranium…

16. ……..

At the sight of this activity one of his friends asked him what moved him thus to torment his body, his spirit and his tub. To which the philosopher replied that, not being entrusted with any other duties by the State, he was giving his tub a thrashing in order not to seem one lazy idler among a people so feverishly busy.

Having made my choice, having made up my mind, I decide that I should perform no useless or tiresome role if I were to tumble my Diogenic tub, which is all that is left to me from the shipwreck of my past in the Straits of Misfortune. Now, how do you advise me to set about my tub-rumbling?” ( 13,14,15 & 16 from Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel )

17. AN OBJECT IS NAMED FOR ITS OWN SAKE In Cranium. Read our jutting seat as jaw, our striated crags as teeth.

23. IS A MAGIC NUMBER 13

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Collective is committed to supporting new visual art through a programme of exhibitions, projects and commissions.

Originally established as an artist run organisation in 1984, Collective is an international organisation for the production, research, presentation and distribution of contemporary art and culture with a specific focus on new visual art and practices.

We aim to foster, support and debate new work and practices in a way which is of mutual benefit to artists and audiences. See the future of visual art today.

Collective 22–28 Cockburn Street Edinburgh EH1 1NY t: +44 (0) 131 220 1260 w: www.collectivegallery.net e: mail@collectivegallery.net