Satellites Programme 2017: Wake Up and the World Is Different

Wake Up and the World Is Different

INTRODUCTION

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The work of words, Anna McLauchlan

OURS, GRACE JOHNSTON

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A birdcage, Grace Johnston Writing in absence, Anna McLauchlan ←TERM.←LAM.←, ALEX IMPEY

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Madonna del Parto, Grace Johnston The particular in general, Anna McLauchlan EMOTIONAL NEED, ADAM LEWIS JACOB

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Everyone knows that the Sex Pistols weren’t real anarchists but …, Timothea Armour Every contact leaves a trace, Anna McLauchlan THE HEAVY OF YOUR BODY PARTS AND

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THE COOL AIR OF THE AIR CONDITION, ROSS LITTLE Jellytime, Timothea Armour May all of your dreams come true, Anna McLauchlan THE LAST HOUR!, TIMOTHEA ARMOUR

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Are Pub Landlords Artists?, Toby Phips Lloyd Wake up and the world is different, Anna McLauchlan

AFTERWORD

Satellites Programme 2017

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Being/Built, James N. Hutchinson ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Wake Up and the World Is Different Satellites Programme 2017

2 Wake Up and the World Is Different

The work of words Anna McLauchlan

Sitting on a bench in the light drinking tea from a disposable Greggs cup with label ‘FRESHLY GROUND FAIRTRADE COFFEE’. Looking past the grand clean brick buildings covered by an opaque atrium, through an elaborate exit/entrance, to cars and people on The Headrow, Leeds. As the wax paper touches my lips and the warm liquid draws into my mouth – thinking about writing: what it is and how it feels to do it. Jaw slightly tightening, shoulders moving up (descend them) stretch into the upper back; reverberations through arms, into hands, finger tips.

Calton Hill, Edinburgh, projects onto this foreground. Words seep from me, puddling on the shopping centre’s stone floor: a blackened volcanic lump, clad in a darkly green mass, at times in sunshine, a viewpoint and potential prehistoric site. Littered by monuments, classical and gothic; relics of a dissolving British Empire. A site seemingly ‘grounded, fixed, actual’,1 this hill both ‘stage and backdrop to the broader philosophical, cultural and scientific ideas that were developed during [the Enlightenment] period’.2 Those ideas take form in the landscape: the broader quest for progress congealing into what we live in, live through, now.

Through 2017 I repeatedly visit Calton Hill. Collective—an organisation supporting a diversity of contemporary arts—are rejuvenating The City Observatory’s walled zone. Next to The City Observatory sits the present gallery, a complex of temporary buildings: the large windows echo Collective’s previous location on Cockburn Street. Frances Stacey, a producer at Collective, invites me to write a response, this text, to their Satellites Programme. This programme facilitates the work of two Associate Producers’ and three artists ‘at a pivotal, emergent, point in their career’.3 My first visit is on 26 March, the final day of Ours, an exhibition by Associate Producer Grace Johnston—my fifth and last, 5 November, the concluding day of Timothea Armour’s The Last Hour! I experience and write about each commission in turn.

Introduction

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Map, an organisation aiding ‘artist-led publishing and production’,4 brings my texts alive online, indexed and searchable by type, issue, artist, author, subject matter… The texts are categorised ‘review’, but rather than graded (✰✰✰✰✰) expressions of how a work ‘fits’ within a wider art context, they are responses. That writing (and this) draws from my visits and (in)formal communication with many people working at and with Collective; it borrows from essays accompanying the commissions by Associate Producers, Grace and Tim, together with a newspaper article by Toby Phips Lloyd. This book gathers all those texts. Where and how they are read mediates our message.

Writing, text, words, letters… circulate art and the visual, they are formative but also intervene. Words can be thought to signify and be painterly or sculptural – the shape, the individual linearity of letters. Ambiguous.

Built as a ‘temple to knowledge’ The City Observatory sits in a legal liminal space. Part of a fund of ancient origin held in the ‘Common Good’ the management of such land, its registration, morphs with administrative and boundary reforms: from burghs, to town councils, district councils and now local authorities. These stone buildings with gravitas, a visible seat of learning, are garnished with bottles and cans: some stashed, some absentmindedly placed at the foot of a bench; as with the effect of alcohol and other drugs, the intoxication from art alters with your anticipation (the ‘set’) together with its social and physical setting.5 Texts, writing, mediate engagement with The City Observatory, its surrounding land, and Collective.

The interpretation text for the first commission, Grace Johnston’s Ours, offers presence to an inspirational artwork that is materially absent: Beatrice Whistler’s ink sketch A birdcage, held in The Hunterian Art Gallery collection in Glasgow and unavailable for loan. Interpretations, written in English by Collective staff in collaboration with the Associate Producer or artist, introduce but also frame the commissions: this expansion of the press release or ‘long-form piece of advertising copy’6 picked up by publications for rehashing into reviews. In contrast with Cockburn Street, 80% of the audience are first time visual art attenders. Many visitors’ ‘first’ language is not English.

How does this, or should it, change the interpretation?

Sometimes work has a sculptural presence but looking closely writing forms its core. Ours contains … a two sided pale blue pamphlet facing the gallery entrance, many copies filling a wide low void in a large flat pillar acting as a partial room divider. As I remove one copy of Part of Speech: a

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whistle in the gloom (2017) by Sophie Collins a gallery assistant adds another, maintaining the installation. This reversible booklet re-voicing the words of other female writers draws from another form of text, a book, the English version of Pauline Réage’s 1954 Histoire d’O (Story of O). Inspiring me to read that popular sadomasochistic novel. The names of women appear in Ours but looking around the gallery, the figure, the woman, is always there but never really present.

The absences cut through work that is full of imagery. Interpretations contain plans of the exhibitions, the titles of works, and implicate absent authors. The second commission, Alex Impey’s ←Term.←Lam.←, contains replicas of birds’ nests called Nesting. Nesting then titles an irregular object in the space, dark and flat … a piece of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) black plastic, a hatched relic of modernism cut from a ventilation duct. Striking through a word in that title — ‘sous rature’ or ‘under erasure’— (for some) makes the pioneers then followers of this approach present: Martin Heidegger.

Jacques Derrida.

When authors, these men, become symbols, what does it form and erase?

In Ours symbols bring into and alter being. Beatrix Whistler often signed her work with a monogram or a trefoil and sometimes with the symbol φ, the Greek letter (phi) denoting Philip, her maiden name. Alongside exhibiting her work under the gender neutral pseudonym ‘Rix Birnie’, these actions indicate a desire to evade language’s role in gender display. The third commission, Adam Lewis Jacob’s Emotional Need, features framed cartoons by the anarchist Donald Rooum—letters form into A-in-a-circle symbols, potentially potent signifiers of freedom from coercion. Symbols are malleable, A-in-a-circle can be the preserve of anarchist poseurs, without ‘the least interest in anarchism as an idea’7: evidencing the slippage between the practice and the performance of a politics, and the subsequent slide into stereotyping.

Donald Rooum’s framed cartoons suggest ways of being, of living: visual fables, acting as reminders to an ardent anarchist of shared ideals and illustrating the pitfalls or misunderstandings they may confront. Cartoons as (sometimes animated) stills feature in the video Wildcat (2017) alongside verbal narratives drawn from readings and Rooum’s accounts from recorded interviews. The stories are also present in Rooum’s books that sit alongside others from Collective in the gallery entrance: Collective’s history (1984-2009),8 previous Satellites publications, their reflection on their working practices in preparation for this new phase for the organisation—the polyvocal Towards a City Observatory.9

Introduction

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The large windows were previously bare, you could look in from out. Now, circling Collective from the south pathway, the first two windows facing the National Monument are black, the third and also the fourth around the corner beside the ramp are a very subtle almost-black blue: darkness making a mirror.

The presence and popularity of Rooum’s books inspires. Walking in before the preview of the fourth commission, Ross Little’s The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition, the entrance makes space for sources or thematically related publications.10 Light shining into the room is bright blue, dreamlike, illuminating a tank holding translucent moon jellyfish. Circulating.

Jellyfish benefit from the environmental impact of humans on the oceans, and from environmental shifts that also threaten human populations. The darkness of the next larger space frames Ross Little’s video.

Boarding the cruise ship, The Sovereign. Recordings of discussions with digital nomads: mainly white (often men) from northern Europe or the US with jobs they can do online. Their verbal explanations crystallise in my writing. ‘… we have like everything that you need to run a really successful business while we’re travelling the world.’ Conflation of life and work produces a variety of outcomes. Dreams become nightmares. The Nomad’s libertarian urge given contradictory flesh: relying on their State for citizenship privileges, for freedom, but manipulating the rules to build up funds in offshore accounts.

The nightmare intensifies as we witness the impact of international shipping on the bodies of ‘shipbreakers’ dismantling redundant vessels in Alang-Soyisa in the Indian State of Gujarat.

Despair. Seeking solace in alcohol, the lubricant of art openings or previews often preceding visits to the sites celebrated in the fifth and final commission, Timothea Armour’s The Last Hour!: the pub, somewhere to let off steam, talk to strangers, make and meet friends. Collective’s temporary buildings on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill are closed. Sheets of the newspaper with the same name mask the windows. This newspaper available from a red (now weatherproofed) box and all pubs within a one mile radius. Drinkers in those pubs might find that text, reading stories of pub culture, pub preservation and new life, visit other pubs, think about ownership, take the newspaper home, leave it on a train.

The act of writing makes and mediates relationships. Controversy and myths come to my awareness. Unseen, invisible, things about the setting, the work, emerge through repetition and dialogue. The artist Keith MacIsaac tells me of the journal article The Edinburgh Observatory 1736–1811: A story of failure.11 Frances Stacey says that the site’s not presently open to the public

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but the builders’ say people trespass. I’ve done many things but never… jumping the wall; never—as Patrick Staff’s audio essay, memoir and story narrates—been part of the mass of bodies that ‘pummel the hillside into the shape that we see in the daytime’. Bodies ‘separate but united under one blanket of darkness … lost in the low lying grasses’.12 The specific materiality of your own human body, your experience, conditions understanding of the work. Do you ‘see’ Alan Sekula’s The Forgotten Space when you watch Ross Little’s film, layering container vessels onto leisure cruises? There’s also what’s not in the texts, may not appear in the work, but arises in speech. The flip side to Ross’ cruise on the Sovereign.

Arriving in the departure site Gran Canaria, staying at the cheapest hostel.

The owner, a short very tanned muscular Italian man with long hair, warmly greeting Ross with an incredibly long hug. The hostel welcoming, domestic, personal. Sharing a meal: the owner layering aubergine, tomatoes and parmesan to prepare melanzane parmigiana; blessing the food as it is made and eaten.

After dinner, the owner asks us, each guest, individually if we want to experience a group meditation. The mood, it feels sort of right. Lots of us, ten maybe, agree—many of us, and others moving about the hostel, are later on the cruise: our low-cost route to South America. Sitting in a circle, focussing on each individual part of the body: the top of the head, the scalp, the temples, the forehead, eyebrows, eyes, eyelashes; systematically working our way through the whole body, to the soles of the feet. “Now feel your whole body, your whole body together”. Vibrating and coming alive. It feels like an orgasm.

1. Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity’, October, 80 (Spring 1997), p.95 2. Kirsten Carter McKee, The Genius Loci of the Athens of the North: The Cultural Significance of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, PhD Thesis (Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh, 2013), p.28 3. Collective, Satellites Programme. URL: http://collectivegallery.net/news/satellites-programme-2018-open-call 4. Map, ‘About’. URL: https://mapmagazine.co.uk/about 5. Will Self, ‘Let Us Intoxicate’. Originally published in The Observer, 1994, reproduced in Will Self, Junk Mail (London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp.28-33 6. Martha Rosler, ‘English and All That’, e-flux, 45 (May 2013) 7. Donald Rooum, What is Anarchism: An Introduction, (Oakland CA: PM Press), p.17 8. Collective, Collective 1984-2009: 25 Years of exhibitions at Collective, (Edinburgh: Collective, 2010) 9. Collective, Towards a City Observatory (Edinburgh: Collective, 2017) 10. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016); Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1971); Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the absolute: an aesthetics of the economy for the twenty-first century, (London: Zero Books, 2015) 11. D. J. Bryden, ‘The Edinburgh Observatory 1736–1811: A story of failure’, Annals of Science, 47(5), 1990, pp.445-474 12. Patrick Staff, To Those in Search of Immunity, Observers Walks, commissioned by Collective. URL: http://www.collectivegallery.net/ programme/patrick-staff

Grace Johnston Ours 7

OURS Curated by Grace Johnston with works by Sophie Collins, Carol Rhodes and photographic prints from Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library.

25 February–26 March 2017

Ours was an exhibition that housed art works and writing. It explored ideas implicit in the formal and abstract qualities of an historical drawing by Beatrice Whistler. Although absent from the exhibition space, the drawing emerged discretely through multiple female voices, as a hybrid and flickering form open to interpretation. The gallery was adapted to create an intimate viewing environment: a space of shared authorship where different mediums and positions were layered. Exploring the drawing as a transitory site, unstable and dual in nature, Ours questioned to what extent close observation can be undertaken at a distance.

List of works ··Sophie Collins, Part of Speech: a whistle in the gloom, 2017, text in reversible booklet, digitally printed, saddle stitch, 20 pages, 21 x 13cm, edition of 500 ··Carol Rhodes, Forest, 1999, oil on board, 41.5 x 47.5cm ··110 rue du Bac, 2017, 3 photopolymer prints on paper, framed, 33 x 42.5cm. Photographer and date of creation unknown. Reproduced to scale, by permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

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A birdcage Grace Johnston

I first encountered the drawing, A birdcage, two years ago in the archives at The Hunterian in Glasgow. I was drawn to its small-scale and uneven lower edge, which slants at an angle as though the paper has been deliberately cut that way. The birdcage is sketched in ink on both the recto and verso, with simplified marks outlining its structure from three different perspectives. On one side, there is a frontal view, above a hatched octagonal form – perhaps an aerial plan or a bird’s eye view – that is discordant in shape, as though from another design. The side of the cage is hesitantly delineated on the reverse of the paper, with the bars that should hold the structure together remaining incomplete. The drawing fragments across the two surfaces, and within this duality, it becomes a restless and mutable image that cannot be fully discerned.

A birdcage was made by Beatrice Whistler at her home in Paris between 1892 and 1893. Beatrice designed trellises, pedestals for flowers and birdcages for her garden, where she kept songbirds for company and observational drawing.

Her sketches are intimate, gestural and sometimes drawn repetitively, on the backs of letters or other pieces of paper and card. Her work has often been confused for that of her husband – the artist James McNeill Whistler – due to historical preconceptions regarding the ‘masculine’ quality of her drawn line.

However, it is likely that her bold, simplified mark making was influenced by the style of the Japanese woodcut prints that they collected. She often signed her work with a monogram or a trefoil, and sometimes with the symbol φ, the Greek letter (phi) denoting Philip, which was her maiden name. These discreet measures indicate a reluctance to designate her identity and gender, and when she occasionally exhibited her work, she did so under the pseudonym ‘Rix Birnie’.

In December, I visited the house where Beatrice had lived, at no. 110 rue du Bac, on the Left Bank in Paris. Before travelling there, I posted a letter to the address requesting access to the garden, which was returned to me some weeks later undelivered. Although I arrived with uncertainty, a series of fortuitous circumstances led me to a neighbouring apartment. I intended to remember names, textures and materials as I moved through the rooms and folding doors onto a balcony, from where I looked down into the garden. I saw the secluded space captured in photographs that I had found in the library at

Grace Johnston Ours 9

the University of Glasgow. In observing the garden from an elevated distance, I came closer to the drawing’s subject, yet it only became more unknowable.

In Ours, the drawing was an intermediary between multiple voices. Part of Speech: a whistle in the gloom by Sophie Collins incorporates source texts and re-voices the words of other female writers. Focusing on Pauline Réage’s 1954 novel Histoire d’O (Story of O), it addresses the notions – including pronouns, possession and the very act of naming – suggested by the exhibition’s title.

Carol Rhodes’ paintings begin with a form of collage, using a range of found images and intricate compositional drawings to construct layered surfaces.

Her small-scale paintings often depict aerial views of fictional landscapes, yet the work included in the exhibition, Forest (1999), is anomalous due to its dense and continuous field of colour. This painting was placed in dialogue with photopolymer reproductions of archival photographs, currently held in Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library. Depicting the garden I observed from the balcony in Paris, the pictures show three views of a sheltered, circular lawn. As prints made from digital files, the images were altered through their inscription back into material form. The maker and the date of their creation is unknown, bringing into question the nature of origins and acts of reframing.

A birdcage could not be lent from The Hunterian due to the conditions of the bequest made by Beatrice’s sister, Rosalind Birnie Philip, in 1935. Ours is the possessive pronoun I used to conjure the drawing by naming its absence.

It denotes oneself and others, implying shared interpretations of an object that was denied visibility.

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Writing in absence Anna McLauchlan visits Ours,1 curated by Grace Johnston

Reading the interpretation, the show contains a text by Sophie Collins, half concerning Pauline Réage’s 1954 sadomasochistic novel Histoire d’O (Story of O). On the train to Edinburgh, ordering a hard copy of the book and taking in the first few pages from an online pdf preview …

Moving up Calton Hill’s steep stairs, there are lots of people. Temporary red buildings surrounding the City Observatory, soon to be Collective’s home.

The present gallery is a complex of portacabins clothed in columns, a faux mirror of the National Monument of Scotland opposite—blending in.

The inside feels reserved, clean. An installation of Sophie Collins’ two sided pale blue pamphlet faces the gallery entrance, many copies filling a wide low void in a large flat pillar acting as a partial room divider. Sitting on the adjacent seat, reading from the front, turning it to read from the other front—on the face of it neither text has priority but the one about ‘O’ is longer and seems more compelling. ‘At the beginning of the book, O is not standing but sitting, in a car (a cab), her skirt gathered up in order to allow her bare genitals to rest directly on the vehicle’s leather upholstery.’2 On the seat, shifting to the left hand side (facing), an image getting up and moving closer. Carol Rhodes’ small painting Forest (1999) looks like an aerial photograph, a gigantic figure below ground, the dissonance between the smallness of the board and its seeming representation of something large.

Can it be landfill? Countless people’s sheddings—gathered, buried, then forgotten—Forest suggesting trees with roots made to grow horizontally to maintain the clay cap, the fake naturalism of that toxic store needing constant management. Initially dark, drawing nearer the painting becomes subtly colourful, many layers, khaki lattices on top.

Turning to the right, three framed prints on paper, photographs of Beatrice Whistler’s house, 110 rue du Bac, Paris. ‘Photographer and date of creation unknown.’ Images reproduced, to scale, with permission of the University of Glasgow Library Special Collections, providing a visual link to Grace Johnston’s trip to this site in Paris. The impossibility of gaining access, seeing this unpeopled view from the adjacent building. But this searching marks the absence of something more significant, Beatrice’s ink sketch, A birdcage held in The Hunterian Art Gallery collection in Glasgow and unavailable for loan:

Grace Johnston Ours 11

The interpretation has in-depth description of this missing artefact.

The drawing purportedly made ‘at her home in Paris between 1892 and 1893’ functioning as one of many designs for a garden where Beatrice kept ‘songbirds for company and observational drawing’. ‘The “masculine” quality of her line’ often leading to a confusion between her work and that of her husband, the famous painter James McNeill Whistler. Before coming here, he, surname Whistler, exists without her, forename Beatrice. She was unknown.

The press release, readings about her, represent her as a force, using φ as identifier or the gender neutral pseudonym Rix Birnie. But does she, or will she, ever exist to many, to any, without the link to him? Has his story, tragic and joyous, now become of ‘them’?

The enormous window of this portacabin gallery frames the outside.

Movement—some quite erratic—a practising of rituals in a circle in front of that strange, unfinished, National Monument. Entering the Story of O, the window at Roissy, the view from the torture chamber. Pedagogy, discipline

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From left to right: Carol Rhodes, Forest, 1999, oil on board, 41.5 x 47.5cm; Sophie Collins, Part of Speech: a whistle in the gloom, 2017, text in reversible booklet, digitally printed, saddle stitch, 20 pages, 21 x 13cm, edition of 500

and progressively moving towards extremes, some idea of ‘graduation’. Some parts familiar, a lite version of De Sade’s The 120 days of Sodom. The book then filtering into lite-er tales of less anally absorbed female banality that are, as with O, authored by women. Twilight, Fifty Shades …

Being there and taking on a character. Reading translates, textual stimulus becomes somatic, conditioning what is thought or felt. In no way associating with their look, the only real place to be found in the Story is that of O or other female counterparts. What does it mean for those women authors to objectify others? Does it, did it, promote the same early ‘anxieties over woman painting the female nude’?3 Is it also ‘a challenge to society’?4 Or, is it merely a well-worn form of titillation where those self-identifying as woman (and those that don’t but are recognised as such) are expected to get off on their own subjugation?

Is it about being a woman or being a masochist? Do these texts make these formally interchangeable? A myth of habituation, a means of blaming many who take responsibility to be caring, courageous, pragmatic or hard working.

Grace Johnston Ours 13

110 rue du Bac, 2017, 3 photopolymer prints on paper, framed, 33 x 42.5cm. Photographer and date of creation unknown.

Reproduced to scale, by permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections

Remembering a talk, artwork by a woman is more celebrated when it contains a visual reference to her own female form.5 Looking around the gallery, the figure, the woman, always there but never really present: the pictures of the buildings and garden peopled only by narrative; the painting of a buried figure or perhaps things thrown away by a collective body; the pamphlet crammed in to a slit in the pillar with the discussion of O and its many interpretations, perhaps a lack, perhaps a (w)hole.

1. Ours or l’ours, translates from French to English as ‘bear’, but the animal with fur rather than ‘to bear’ or ‘to take responsibility for’.

2. Sophie Collins, Part of Speech: a whistle in the gloom, 2017 3. Taken from information on a wall panel ‘Laura Knight 1877-1970, Self-Portrait, 1913 Oil paint on canvas’ at Queer British Art 1861–1967, Tate Britain, London 5 April–1 October 2017 4. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ in Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and other writings, compiled and translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver, (London: Arrow Books, 1990[1955]), p.28 5. Emily Watlington, ‘Shigeko Kubota and the ‘Tokenization of Women’s Body Art’, presentation at ‘Speak, Body: Art, the Reproduction of Capital and the Reproduction of Life’, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies University of Leeds, April, 2017

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←TERM.←LAM.← Alex Impey 8 April-14 May 2017

←Term.←Lam.← was an exhibition by artist Alex Impey that metabolised his research into animal motifs, composite materials, divination, and art history. A sculptural installation stretched across the gallery walls in a mirrored format, incorporating diverse materials from car air ducts to chitin: a natural product derived from crab shells. Through particular material resonances, the work speculated upon the production and organisation of value, considering processes in which humankind has tried to make sense of the world by adapting nature to its own needs.

List of works ··Nesting, custom chitin composite, 2017 ··Ocelli (auspicious), cow hoof repair nails, 2017 ··Ocelli (inauspicious), cow hoof repair nails, 2017 ··Nesting then, HDPE plastic, 2017

Alex Impey ←Term.←Lam.← 15

Madonna del parto Grace Johnston

In the duplicity of beauty there is the strange trope of a presence which is the shadow of itself, of a being which, anachronously, lurks in its trace.1 The Madonna del Parto was painted in the early renaissance by artist Piero della Francesca, directly on to the wall of the small chapel of Santa Maria di Momentana, in the rural hillside village of Monterchi in Italy. In this original location, it faced to the east and was illuminated by the sunlight cast through a circular opening above the entrance. Although details of the commission are unknown, the fresco dates from the period between 1450–1465, and is thought to have been made in haste by the artist over seven days, in homage to his mother after her death in the nearby town of Sansepolcro.

The fresco is a rare depiction of the Virgin Mary - the Madonna del parto, ‘of childbirth’ - as visibly, heavily pregnant. Her duty as a conduit for the birth of Christ is more commonly indicated by a closed book in front of her body, which is physically unchanged. Through immaculate conception her purity is kept intact, and this innocence is implied by the aquamarine pigment that is often used for the colour of her robe. Piero della Francesca’s Madonna is unbelievably youthful, hunching with the burden of her swollen stomach, in a vulnerable and ambivalent stance that reveals a sense of her humanity, rather than an image of divine remove.

Specular angels are positioned at either side of the composition, drawing open a tent in a symmetrical action to show her presence inside. Only the colours of wings, slippers and robes alternate between them: the emerald clothing of one figure reversed to red on the other. The surface of the parting fabric is embroidered with gold thread; an intricate detail that has faded from one half of the fresco, leaving vanishing silhouettes of the design. The texture of

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the shelter’s interior is diffused and implies fur-lining that forms a rectangular grid of animal skins. This pattern is extracted from the background and defined on elliptical halos - above the figures of the angels and the Madonna - where the hatched lines tilt to mirror the axis of her turning pose. The painted image operates within a logic of flipping, doubling and inversion to distinguish spatial and material qualities across the shifting planes.

Frescoes are composed of elemental matter; of earth, minerals and pigments that become part of the surface of the wall. Their layers are an experiment in lastingness. The Madonna del Parto endures as a fragment, bearing signs of its age and displacement caused by architectural adaptations to the chapel, earthquakes, war, conservation and dispute. The tremulous nature of its history is apt for a work whose subject is subtly, quietly, resisting allegory through her own melancholic disposition. As one arm comes to rest on her hip for support, the other meets the curve of an opening in her blue dress, marking the central point of the fresco. Her white under slip is visible in this crevice and in the neckline of the garment, with her fingers resting on the opening at her middle in a peculiar gesture that is almost chaotic to the balance and harmony of the scene. The space appears like a fissure - in the dual sense of the word - forming a narrow line of breakage or a state of incompatibility or dissent: splitting her body in two. Her hand hesitates, suspending this moment of tension to the effect of a tangible pause.

The visual correspondence between the tent and the Madonna’s womb multiplies within the image like a Russian doll, appearing in her slanting eyelids and downward gaze, although not pertaining to a maternal tenderness.

Is she waiting, or bored, or dreaming? Her psychological state is visible as a material trace through the ambiguous spaces of her garments, with her weary contemplation emerging in white reams at the edges, curves, and contours of her body: from the luminous extremities of her feet to the ribbon at the crown of her head. The absences cut through a work that is full of imagery and mathematical logic, channeling her doubt to create small moments of rupture. As abstractions, these details allow latent self-reflection, for personal meditations can inhabit the strange, uncertain marks of her melancholic purity.

1. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1981), p.93

Alex Impey ←Term.←Lam.← 17

Alex Impey, Nesting, 2017, custom chitin composite

The particular in general Anna McLauchlan preserves Alex Impey’s ←Term.←Lam.← In Mesopotamia and Ancient Rome the entrails of animals, particularly those of sheep, were used to divine the future. Clay models of livers survive sometimes with grids etched into them, some models containing holes. Such ‘fortuitous’ holes were likely caused by parasites and inscriptions on livers suggest that, along with ‘abrasions, blisters, scars, fissures’, these markings are ominous.1 In liver divination the future is read through subtle differences with, and deviation from, what is considered to be normal; the normal surface texture, the normal gallbladder length. Often photographs of model livers, because of the clay material and the holes, inadvertently mimic the look of birds’ nests burrowed in earthen walls and the faces of sandstone cliffs.

The exhibition appears simultaneously sparse and full. Three subtle pieces entitled Nesting straddle the ceiling and upper wall. Resembling house martins’ nests, usually a site of reproduction, nothing conspicuously moves into or out of their entrance/exit holes. Birds take two months to (dot by dot)

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Alex Impey, Ocelli (auspicious), 2017, cow hoof repair nails (detail)

build these nests, whereas within two weeks these sculptures have been formed into the gallery by human hands. Fabricated from a super resilient composite of an organic polymer, chitin, they are off-colour, a muddy salmon pink. ‘Chitin is the main structural component of the shells of crustaceans, molluscs and insects. It also makes up parts of the jaws and body spines of certain worms, and is found in the cell walls of fungi and in some algae.’2 Industrially, chitin is largely synthesised from shellfish remains and fungal fermentation. First used commercially for ‘purifying water from the processing of shellfish’,3 chitin came to clean other water, including being a flocculant for swimming pools. It’s a component of a wide range of cosmetics, has a key role in strengthening paper, and, as suggested by its process of synthesis, is a major part of edible mycoproteins. Chitin makes up roughly one third of the fibre content of the substance sculpted into meat-like burgers, sausages and chik’n patties under the name QuornTM.4 An industrial product derived from and inspired by so-called nature, chitin simultaneously solves industrial water pollution, nourishes (or conceals) our skin AND feeds top class vegetarian athletes.5 Below Nesting two subtle but large wall pieces spread out from the corner, Ocelli (auspicious) and Ocelli (inauspicious) are a near, but not precise, mirror of one another. Made from cow hoof repair nails—long silver spikes, thin and narrow—the pattern and their name ‘Ocelli’ echoes the classic ‘eye spots’ found on moths and butterflies. These spots deter predators by mimicking the eyes of larger and potentially more dangerous hunters. Although how or

Alex Impey ←Term.←Lam.← 19

Alex Impey, Nesting then, 2017, HDPE plastic

whether this capacity is accidental, or whether the moth or butterfly is aware of their visual power, is up for grabs.6 One thing is certain, the perspective the moth or butterfly has of their pattern differs from the flat mirrored views often presented for our eyes.

Tiny injuries inflicted to the wall by people hammering nails to construct the piece evokes the method of determining how the normal pattern of the eyes spots develop: ‘Pupae have their pre-formation wings cauterised, each in a different place’, once the butterfly or moth has grown the deviation from the normal can be noted.7 Large numbers of individual butterflies and moths are sacrificed in systematic attempts to provide a general explanation of how they, and others of their species, have come to look a particular way. Studies furnish biomedicine with general understandings of how patterns form and wounds heal.

Trying to sum something up, to produce a general understanding, requires literal deaths: the experimentation with the pupae and then the living butterfly or moth.8 Killing for, and through, analysis. As with the liver, the future is stabilised through animal sacrifice. Sacrifices perhaps considered justified in relation to the incapacity of animals to understand their ‘being’. But do people know or understand—can they see the complexity of what they are embroiled in—are they not just differently conscious? These questions over ‘being’ signal Heidegger’s chequered presence in the thinking surrounding this exhibition, as does the trope of crossing out the titles.

Nesting then, an irregular object in the space, dark and flat, resting above

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and to the right of the Ocelli. Perhaps liver sized but not quite liver shaped, more like an ear, a piece of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) black plastic, a hatched relic of modernism cut from a ventilation duct. The object mimics the rubber blocks routinely nailed, with those long silver spikes, to one side of the hoofs of cattle reared for milk and meat production. An adjustment that shifts the balance of the cow’s weight. When applied correctly, the rubber nail-on block changes the gait of the cow and protects against and prevents lameness; when incorrect, it leads to infection and pain. Rather than nature providing a solution, engineering is applied to nature.

The knowledge produced through scientific research is systematic, dogged. In contrast, this exhibition is associative; bringing materials, metonym and thoughts together in a non-prescriptive way. In some of the works, such as Nesting, animal remains may form the substance of the work. Just as our faces may be covered in chitin, the product of technological processes frames the exhibition within the fabric of the walls, the windows, the surface paint.

Birds’ nests, sculpted, regular and mass produced, can be bought and installed in gardens. Works here can be replicated but not readily removed, rehoused or sold. Detaching Nesting damages the integrity of the chitin structures. Collectively the cow hoof repair nails are intentional sculpture, individually they become disaggregated fragments with a specific practical function. Nesting then can be relocated, retaining its shape but not its context.

The exhibition, the works, are represented by photographs, preserved in this text and Collective’s online archive. But none of these express the movement of a person or people in the space, or the evaluation of nails and nests against the specific materiality of your own human body.

1. Ivan Starr (editor), State Archives of Assyria Volume IV – Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria, (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1990), p.XXXIX 2. Stephen Nicol, ‘Life after death for empty shells: Crustacean fisheries create a mountain of waste shells, made of a strong natural polymer, chitin. Now chemists are helping to put this waste to some surprising uses’, New Scientist, 1755 (February 1991) 3. Ibid.

4. Jeanne H. Bottin, Jonathan R. Swann, Eleanor Cropp, Edward S. Chambers, Heather E. Ford, Mohammed A. Ghatei and Gary S. Frost, ‘Mycoprotein reduces energy intake and postprandial insulin release without altering glucagon-like peptide-1 and peptide tyrosine-tyrosine concentrations in healthy overweight and obese adults: a randomised-controlled trial’, British Journal of Nutrition, 116(2) (July 2016), pp. 360-374 URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007114516001872 5. Mostly closely associated with the top class Mo Farah although new Olympians are now fronting the brand. Mike Dennis, ‘Olympians star in new TV ads for Quorn’, Talking Retail, 23 December 2016. URL: https://www.talkingretail.com/products-news/olympians-starnew-tv-ads-quorn-23-12-2016/ 6. Martin Olofsson, Hanne Løvlie, Jessika Tibblin, Sven Jakobsson and Christer Wiklund, ‘Eyespot display in the peacock butterfly triggers antipredator behaviors in naïve adult fowl’, Behavioural Ecology, 24(1), 2013, pp. 305-310. URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/ ars167 7. Notes supplied to Collective by Alex Impey 8. Yawen Zou, ‘Development, Plasticity and Evolution of Butterfly Eyespot Patterns’, by Paul M. Brakefield et al, summary of research, 1996. URL: https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/development-plasticity-and-evolution-butterfly-eyespot-patterns-1996-paul-m-brakefieldet-al

Adam Lewis Jacob Emotional Need 21

EMOTIONAL NEED Adam Lewis Jacob with works by Donald Rooum 27 May-2 July 2017

The work of anarchist cartoonist Donald Rooum and his involvement since the late 1940s in political organising, publishing and comic illustration, were the catalysts for a new film and a soft sculpture by Adam Lewis Jacob.

Covered in patches, stickers and newspaper clippings; material choices for the sculpture drew on Adam’s interest in DIY culture, fanzines and adolescent rebellion and the formation of collective identity. These works were exhibited alongside a selection of Donald’s original drawings related to his famous Wildcat Comics series.

List of works ··Adam Lewis Jacob, Wildcat, HD video, 25 minutes, looped, 2017 ··Performers: Sukana Kubba and Anya Liko Cheong Nicol ··Animation and music: Jason Kerley ··Music: Anxiety, Crass, Laps, Mumdance, Position Normal ··­Adam Lewis Jacob (made with Katy White), Soft Noise (Issue 1, May 2017), fabric, handmatches patches, buttons, studs, pen and soft toy, 2017 ··Donald Rooum, original drawings for comic strip, 1975 – 2014

22 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Everyone knows that the Sex Pistols weren’t real anarchists but ...

Timothea Armour

My first encounter with the idea of anarchy or indeed anarchism was through the Sex Pistols’ first single, Anarchy in the UK. Thirty years after its release, my friends and I performed a cover version of it in a music class when we were twelve or thirteen, in which the inclusion of a triangle solo possibly made for a performance more ‘punk’ than the Sex Pistols’ own. We drew in biro on bags and school books, and although I don’t recall having any conception of anarchism as anything other than apolitical chaos, we wanted to be punks.1 Whilst one meaning of ‘anarchy’ is chaos, confusion and disorder, this isn’t necessarily what ‘anarchism’ intends; it incorporates a whole school of social thought directed towards replacing the state with non-governmental cooperation between free individuals. However, Anarchy in the UK’s anarchist posturing has no doubt been formative in terms of the way anarchism is perceived by a lot of people, especially, y’know, in the UK. Even what an anarchist looks like in the popular consciousness, probably resembles the Sex Pistols – torn clothes, spiked hair, safety pins.

Because of this, I feel that Anarchy in the UK ought not to be dismissed because it is popular, it appropriates anarchist ideas or lacks political commitment. Rather, it is more interesting because of these things. As cartoonist Donald Rooum’s Revolting Pussycat observes: those ‘who write xxmight not all be real anarchists and people who write xx are not always real fascists, but still I prefer the ones who write xx’. She hits upon something here that is particularly pertinent to the anarchist imagery used in Adam’s work, with its oft-repeated visual signifiers and scrawlable symbol; the slippage between the practice and the performance of a politics, and the subsequent slide into stereotyping. Anarchy in the UK offers a good demonstration of this slippage, wavering between alignment with anarchist politics and compliance with a tabloid notion of an anarchist as a destructive pariah – an antichrist.

Adam Lewis Jacob Emotional Need 23

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This can be seen by looking more closely at the lyrics. For instance, distaste shown at the idea of being a ‘dogsbody’ does seem to have some recourse to a key tenet of anarchism, that of self-determinacy; the idea that no human being is fit to tell another what to do. Meanwhile, a generous reading of the wish to ‘give a wrong time, stop a traffic line’ could argue that it is invoking ‘the positive, intensive, social bonds forged through street confrontation’; the shared gestures and interactions of bodies in the street favoured amongst more insurrectionist anarchists, although the intention of this direct action is somewhat vague.2 The listing and dismissal of various political organisations – the MPLA, the UDA and the IRA – does potentially reflect an anarchist perspective; that any kind of government is the wrong kind to have, no matter how revolutionary their policies claim to be.3 And what if ‘Destroy the passerby’ is intended as ‘the destruction of the subjectifying processes that reproduce society daily, […] the institutions and practices that racialize and engender bodies [the passerby] within the social order’ but coming from a place so embedded in all this, all that is communicable is the necessity of some sort of destruction?4 Maybe.

That last point perhaps begins to touch on why the politics of Anarchy in the UK bears resemblance to anarchist thought, yet also misrepresents it and in doing so, subdues it. The Sex Pistols and their image were cannily managed

by Malcolm McLaren. Whilst at art school McLaren came into contact with the work of the Situationist International, a grouping of artists whose practices included creating structured encounters in urban settings, happening in everyday life, with a view to its imaginative transformation. Theorist Guy Debord, who came to dominate the movement, prophesised in his 1962 text Society of the Spectacle that ‘in the second half of this century, culture will hold the key role in the development of the economy’.5 This in turn borrows from Marxist thinking; the idea of ‘real subsumption’, under which ‘everything produced by human beings, whether manually or intellectually, is mediated by value-form’.6 The Situationists themselves had ties to the anarchist movement in Paris in 1968, and their literature would have been available alongside Donald Rooum’s comics at Freedom Press. However, by the time Anarchy in the UK was released, these strands of utopian agitation had largely already lapsed into Debord’s prophecy or gone totally underground, with groups engaging in violent direct action being rounded up by police allegedly using a copy of Society of the Spectacle as a guide.7 As such, although both the aesthetic of,

Adam Lewis Jacob Emotional Need 25

and the concept behind, the Sex Pistols were genuinely influenced by this movement, as with many forms of subculture under ‘real subsumption’, being an anarchist had already become cool, and therefore eminently marketable.

Is a performance of rebellion better than no rebellion at all? Try asking a thirteen year-old that question.

1. Sometimes I think this is partly down to the satisfaction of drawing a symbol, felt especially by teenagers. See also: 2. K. Aarons. ‘No Selves to Abolish: Afropessimism, Anti-Politics and the end of the world’, Meta Mute, 29 February 2016. URL: http:// www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-and-end-world As an aside, I always thought that holding up traffic sounded a bit feeble, whatever ideology it was being enacted in the name of.

3. The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola; most likely the Ulster Defence Association; the Irish Republican Army. All of these would have been present in current affairs when Anarchy in the UK was written. Probably not the Islamabad Rugby Asociation.

4. Aarons 5. Guy Debord, quoted in John Savage., England’s Dreaming, (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2001). p.31 6. Ray Brassier, ‘Wandering Abstraction’, Meta Mute, 13 February 2014. URL: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction 7. Savage, England’s Dreaming, p.42

26 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Emotional Need, installation view, 2017

Every contact leaves a trace Anna McLauchlan encourages Adam Lewis Jacob’s Emotional Need During the Easter weekend of 1957, a lone pacifist walked 52 miles from London to the nuclear weapons factory in Aldermaston. This act acknowledges that people make, and can notionally stop making, nuclear weapons. The anarchist-inspired Direct Action Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (DAC), under banners designed by Gerald Holtom, organise a similar march the following year attracting over 2000 people. Its popularity prompted the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to appropriate (steal) the DAC sign and restage the March in 1959, changing the direction from Aldermaston to London.

This reversal signalled an ideological shift, from persuading workers to persuading politicians.1 A vastly overlong soft snake, segmented by different fabrics, patched with anarchist aligned symbols, moves from the central wall and across the ceiling, slinks around Donald Rooum’s framed cartoons, moves back and forth to the near side of the gallery, behind a TV on a stand, again winding up the wall, its blue head resting at the inner left hand side of the door. Two stools, stationed in front of the TV, similarly covered in symbols, this time made of vinyl—overall quite domestic, a bit teenager’s bedroom. The snake makes an aesthetic link to the character Wildcat, the soft toy version featured in the video on the telly, in all but one of Rooum’s drawings and in the books available from entrance corridor, including Wildcat Anarchist Comics.2

Adam Lewis Jacob Emotional Need 27

Adam Lewis Jacob, still from Wildcat HD video 25 minutes, 2017

In that book, Donald Rooum outlines how and why he became an anarchist. How: a first visit to Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London in September 1944, buying the weekly War Commentary for Anarchism to which he then subscribed, leading to registering as a conscientious objector but being conscripted anyway … But why?

‘I was once asked by a policeman, “Why are you an anarchist?” and I said, “Why is anybody anything? It satisfies some emotional need, I suppose,” Which is the only answer I can think of.’3 This answer, ‘emotional need’ is echoed in the exhibition title and the video that features the soft toy, draws from footage of interviews with Donald Rooum that includes his ‘15 minutes of fame’ as a result of the Challenor case where he successfully invokes Lochard’s Principle (see title) in defence of an accusation by the police that he was carrying a weapon (a brick) in his pocket, reanimates some of his cartoons, and contains readings by Sukaina Kubba from Rooum’s book What is Anarchism? Then there’s sound, the music, beginning with LAPS’ Who me? Adam Lewis Jacob says, ‘like the snake, [the music] acts as a bridge between Donald, his politics and the past and me, my position and my adolescent development.’

Rooum drew other characters, but his most celebrated, Wildcat (appearing in Freedom 1980-2014), differentiates herself from others such as Korky or Fat Freddy’s Cat by questioning ‘Cartoon cats are mostly male.

So what?’.4 Someone else first drew this androgynous but recognisably female cat for the magazine Wildcat, but ‘had no idea of anarchism even though he thought he was an anarchist’5 so the editor asked Rooum to do it. Wildcat, ‘the revolting pussycat who is very bad tempered’ is contrasted with the other key protagonist, ‘the free range egghead who is an intellectual snob’.6 The two represent simple models of anarchist approaches based in

28 Wake Up and the World Is Different

voluntary cooperation. But, for want of a less hierarchical aphorism, are they preaching to the converted? Conversely, the cartoons are fables, acting as reminders to an ardent anarchist of shared ideals and illustrating the pitfalls or misunderstandings they may confront.

Anarchism is often characterised as being against ‘the state’. Rather, as Rooum’s output makes clear, it is opposition to all forms of government and the associated coercion by institutions (which could include individual people), of which the (nation-) state is an, perhaps the most, invasive form. Rather than existing through socialist strategies for utopia, anarchists attempt to enact their beliefs through the day-to-day practice of living: recognising the importance of the means, that is how things are done. The video shows the opening of envelopes to reveal anarchist merchandise, the infamous A sign on a lighter and patches. Perhaps indicating the triumph of ‘“anarchist” poseurs, like the sartorial stylists who paint A-in-a-circle symbols on their leather jackets without having the least interest in anarchism as an idea’.7 Rooum contrasts voluntary cooperation with both these poseurs and ‘worldly self-styled ‘anarchists’ (‘anarcho-capitalists’) who want to abolish the state as a regulatory and welfare institution but do not oppose capitalist oppression’.8 Following the cartoons, nuances are blunted for clarity, underplaying the complications of what different approaches might offer and how they blur: surely, Wildcat is a brand, merch, a commodity?; historically, extreme libertarianism is credited as shocking instigators into recognising their own individuality, threatening but also questioning the foundations of the state and society.9 What does it mean to exhibit works by an anarchist in spaces partly funded by Creative Scotland and The City of Edinburgh Council? Anarchists always live in, and recognise, contradiction. Diligent anarchists may reject ‘justice’, ‘human rights’ and ‘equality’ because of their conceptual reliance on a contractarian and ultimately coercive state and legal system. However, anarchist activities have contributed to more ‘just’ or equal treatment, such as backing the formation of a national health service, stopping physical punishment in schools and abolition of the death penalty.10 Groups espousing anarchist sentiments are also fundamental to supporting people that the state leaves ‘destitute’11 and taking ongoing action over nuclear disarmament.

After the 1959 March from Aldermaston to London, CND affiliates banners proclaimed ‘Labour in power minus the bomb’. This, and ongoing promotion of that party, was in return for Labour’s commitment to scrapping the UK’s nuclear arsenal. After their 1964 general election win, Labour’s Harold Wilson chose to keep the bomb.12 This example resonates: the present Labour

Adam Lewis Jacob Emotional Need 29

leader Jeremy Corbyn, a committed anti-nuclear campaigner, recognised his inability (even if elected) to get rid of Trident in advance of the last general election.13 Rooums’ cartoons clearly outline the economic incentives—if not necessity—for many states to be engaged in perpetual war, including ‘The British arms trade providing British jobs’.14 However, beyond visible bomb making, institutions—Local Authorities, Universities and some charities (Comic Relief)—have supported weapons manufacture through relatively invisible investments.15 Just by using money, capital, aren’t we all implicated, however unconsciously, in contact that leaves traces?

Donald Rooum’s own ‘emotional need’ emerged in a very different set of circumstances to what I, Adam and many other people resident in the UK now encounter. As forced conscription suggests, war, and thus the military state, were powerfully present. Although WE (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) are still at war, it would be possible—through blankets of Love Island —to have limited knowledge of OUR continuing military involvement in Iraq and Syria.16 However, the nation-state is constantly, if banally,17 reinstated in other ways, as endless spins offs from the Great British Bake Off attest.18 Anarchism encourages awareness of this present, recognising that how things are done, through day-to-day practice, produces what happens next.

1. This narrative is derived from Donald Rooum, Wildcat Anarchist Comics. (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2016). One of the main sites of the Atomic Weapons Establishment is still at Aldermaston. AWE, 2017, ‘About us: Our locations’ 2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p.7 4. Donald Rooum, What is Anarchism?: An Introduction, 2nd Edition. (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2016) p.9. There is also a gender indeterminate cartoon cat, Krazy Kat, that is variously referred to as ‘he’ and ‘she’.

5. Donald Rooum in Adam Lewis Jacob, Wildcat, HD video, 2017, commissioned by Collective 6. Ibid.

7. Rooum, What is Anarchism?, p.17 8. Ibid.

9. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ in Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and other writings. Compiled and translated

by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. (London: Arrow Books, 1990[1955]) 10. Rooum, Wildcat 11. The Unity Centre, 2017, ‘About The Unity Centre’. URL: http://unitycentreglasgow.org/about-the-unity-centre/ 12. Rooum, Wildcat, p.15 13. Rowena Mason, ‘Corbyn refuses to back Trident but says he will respect Labour position’, The Guardian, 26 May 2017. URL: https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/26/jeremy-corbyn-trident-labour-manifesto-commitment 14. Rooum, Wildcat, p.81 15. Kaye Stearman, ‘Investing in the arms trade – is it ethical?’, Policy Review, December 2013 URL: http://www.policyreview.eu/investing-in-the-arms-trade-is-it-ethical/ (August 2017); Declan Lawn, ‘Comic relief money invested in arms and tobacco shares’, BBC News, 10 December 2013. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25273024 16. Robert Verkaik, ‘Is Britain fighting another illegal war in the Middle East?’, The Guardian, 21 September 2016. URL: https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/21/is-britain-fighting-another-illegal-war-in-middle-east-uk-drone Camilla Thurlow, of Love Island’ s runner up couple is an Explosive Ordnance Disposal worker. However, exactly what she does and where she does it remains vague.

17. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, (London, Thousand Oakes, Singapore: Sage Publications Limited, 1995) 18. This is the latest: Olivia Waring, ‘LOOK HUS BAKE When is Nadiya’s British Food Adventure on BBC Two tonight, who’s The Great British Bake Off winner and what is the show about?’, The Sun, 22 July 2017. URL: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/3951894/ nadiyas-british-food-adventure-tonight-bbc-episode-2-peak-district/

30 Wake Up and the World Is Different

THE HEAVY OF YOUR BODY PARTS AND THE COOL AIR OF THE AIR CONDITION Ross Little 22 July-10 September 2017 A film and installation exploring different forms of globalised labour on board a cruise ship and in a ship breaking yard in India. For this exhibition, Collective’s gallery space adopted a form of affected interior design also to be found on cruise ships. Soothing lighting and a mini aquarium in an anteroom encouraged visitors into a relaxed state, corresponding to and contrasting with elements of the film.

List of works ··Ross Little, The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition, HD Video, 42 minutes and 24 seconds, looped, 2017 / Excerpts read by Kati Kärki / Music and voice recording by Tom Marshallsay and Richard McMaster ··Ross Little, I Hear a New World Calling Me, Jellyfish, 2017

Ross Little The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition 31

Jellytime Timothea Armour

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.1 Jellyfish, one of the oldest living organisms, predating humans by nearly five hundred million years, are, in contrast to much marine life, thriving. As the sea gets warmer, more acidic, less oxygenated, it begins to resemble Precambrian conditions.2 Simulating a return to an earlier geological era, when jellyfish first appeared, this species is blooming like never before. As overfishing, industrial pollution and rising temperatures slowly deplete and suffocate other creatures, jellyfish benefit from the environmental impact of humans on the oceans, and from environmental shifts that threaten human populations too. Their soft bodies, that leave barely a ghostly trace on fossil records, give them an advantage over their crustaceous contemporaries whose exoskeletons – that make clear, well defined fossils – dissolve in more acidic waters. Jellyfish time extends much further back into the past, and may reach much further into the future too, further than humans or other more evolutionarily complicated species, primitive, yet advancing.

Of late, humans and jellyfish have become entangled, the trajectories of one in the tentacles of the other. Blooms of jellyfish, ungrateful to their human benefactors, are wiping out fishing industries internationally, and have been known to bring nuclear power stations to a standstill, drawn into cooling filters by the tonne. They have all this destructive potential yet most species

32 Wake Up and the World Is Different

of jellyfish have no brain or central nervous system, no ability to control the direction of their own movement, other than to go up or down. It’s also worth noting that they’re not actually fish. Jellies. Jelly. Their brainlessness and otherworldliness makes them difficult to comprehend. Irrepressible, emotionlessly damaging and with a logic that seeks only to colonise, the spread of jellyfish blooms seems at once a product of, and analogous to, global capitalism.

A fishing net heaving with jellies makes visible the messy material reality of this global system of trade, labour and industry in a similar way to the Alang breakers’ yards in Ross Little’s film The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition. Here, huge vessels, cargo ships and cruise liners alike, arrive at the end of their lives, are broken down in a decomposition-like process, dispersed and then recirculated. Terrific masses of stuff constantly being created, piling up, largely unwanted by-products of industry. What are we going to do with this gelatinous mass, these miles and miles of rusting propellers, lifeboats, mattresses? It is what is beneath the surface of the gleaming, somewhat abstract world of the ‘digital nomad’, that can’t exist without infrastructure, superstructure, air conditioning units, pool inflatables.

Matter can’t be made to disappear, it can only change form or be broken down.

When a Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish dies, and begins to disintegrate, some of its cells, on escaping the rotting body, will then find each other again somehow, reaggregate, and form a polyp, a mass of cells from which more jellies are born.3 At the same time, a jellyfish is not similarly bound by maps, territories or shipping lanes, and its perspective is unstable. Maybe we ought to adapt, view the world through jellytime, or through the jellyfish-as-lens. From these older-than-ancient life-forms we could derive alternate temporalities. This would mean doing away with an overarching narrative of human progress and its fixed vantage points and becoming part of a tentacular, intertwining mesh. A concept of jellytime is drifting, diaphanous multi-directional and slippery. It occurs everywhere at once, has no particular direction of travel.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold defines ‘transport’ as travel along prescribed routes, between point-to-point connectors that create an empirical network across the surface of the world, such as the maps of trade routes that are included in The Heavy of Your Body Parts […]. It is defined in contrast to ‘wayfaring’, a more embodied way of travelling which threads through the world rather than over it, creating a ‘tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands’.4 In filmmaking or storytelling, this might translate as both filmmaker and viewer being immersed in a subject matter, drifting and wave-flung like Ursula LeGuin’s jellyfish. It could also mean seeing two subjects simultaneously; the

Ross Little The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition 33

depths viewed through the bell of a jellyfish, seeing both the abstract labour of the digital nomads and the physical labour of the workers in the breakers’ yard, the osmosis between one and the other, one as part of the other.

Cruise liners and ocean freighters take on jellyfish in ballast water, contributing to their conquering of the oceans by transporting them and depositing them in new territories. In an entropic collapse of metaphor, global trade routes interrupt and carry along the directionless drift of the jellyfish (as they always have done with people, diseases, ideas). Do jellyfish sometimes slump out of ballast tanks when a cruise ship at Alang is being broken down for scrap metal, like a sad ghost of the future of the ocean?

1. Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, (New York: Avon Books, 1971), p.1 2. The Precambrian is the earliest period of the earth’s history, spanning from the beginning of the earth to about 541 million years ago.

It precedes the Cambrian period, which is when hard-shelled organisms began to appear.

3. Tim Flannery, ‘They’re Taking Over’, a review of Lisa-Ann Gershwin’s book Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean for The New York Review of Books, URL: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/09/26/jellyfish-theyre-taking-over/ (13/06/2017) 4. Tim Ingold, Boundless Worlds – an Anthropological Approach to Movement, (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008) p.37

34 Wake Up and the World Is Different

May all of your dreams come true Anna McLauchlan experiences Ross Little’s The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition

Circling Collective from the south pathway, the first two windows facing the National Monument are black, the third and also the fourth around the corner beside the ramp are a very subtle almost-black blue: darkness making a mirror.

Blue light in the entrance corridor. Moving into the gallery the windows are intense, their light shining through a tank holding translucent moon jellyfish.

Circulating. Jellyfish thrive in a warming world, where ‘the liveability of earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages’ is increasingly threatened.1 Decorative.

Clinical. Exhibiting something alive that’s not a person. Dreamlike.

The next room in darkness. The video begins, a still image, perhaps this world but on a tray surrounded by clouds, flat. A voice introducing the ‘Nomads’: We have an amazing community on this cruise ship: graphic designers, SEOs, people who are doing start up consulting and have been working for like the biggest corporations in the world. And it’s so cool that you can just go anywhere and just grab all this knowledge that we have on this boat, and it can, it doesn’t really matter if you’re just starting out or are already professional, we have like everything that you need to run a really successful business while we’re travelling the world.2 Establishing shots of the cruise ship, surrounding sounds, the Sovereign, in port at Gran Canaria, Spain. Queues of some sort. Then it’s night and we’re moving onto a, the, ship, lights fading into the distance. Sunshine on deck.

Breathing. Tranquil water. Stills of an immense atrium. Walking, watching someone white filming a white entertainer—the image quality changes, decentring—entering a dining area with white guests and white waiters in white tuxedo jackets. Jumping into the pool we are submerged but moving.

Self-styled ‘digital nomads’ are mainly white (often men) from northern Europe or the US with jobs they can do online. Still citizens of privilege attached to a nation, but migrating and working, often solitary, for months at a time, they come together for demonstrations of community. On this, their first (self) conscious cruise,3 they edutain one other: ‘… em, offshore is a theme and

Ross Little The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition 35

Ross Little, I Hear a New World Calling Me (detail), 2017, Jellyfish Ross Little, The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition (still), 2017, HD video, looped

a question you will always find in all digital nomad groups … I think it started in the 1950s … The smaller the country … the more you can be sure that there’s a tax haven waiting for you, and waiting for your money … “Please come in, we don’t tell anybody, we hide everything” … Belize, Hong Kong, Seychelles, Singapore, em Uruguay, Bahama … it became normal.’4 Cruises and freight transportation are increasing, and so are the number of ships. This cruise, a one way trip to reposition the boat, doesn’t stop, is cheaper, much quieter and consequently has a disproportionate amount of crew to guests, 1:1. There’s still a passenger hierarchy—‘Gold’ tickets for better booze and berths—but, it seems so … Daydream: Nine days trapped on a ship, time to get on with writing: luxury, room always clean, all meals made for me, blue skies, sunbathing at times, meditating, doing yoga, perhaps going for a swim; trying to avoid the complimentary alcohol but dancing at the nightly parties … Are they wearing togas?

Archival maps pepper the footage: beginning with the flat world, then partial but recognisable structures of continents and countries, ‘progressing’ to several based on the familiar Mercator projection: originally dating from 1569, it’s good for navigation but centralises Europe and overemphasises its land area relative to Russia and Africa. Mercator was (disputably) Flemish, although a Japanese map similarly makes ‘home’ large and middle. Mercator’s projection is the basis of Google Maps, endlessly reinforcing a particular understanding of this World’s structure.5 Routing. Managing.

A youngish white man (Ross Little), semi-prone, eyes closed, being schooled in hypnosis, in front of something that could be his sculptural female alter ego. Smooth jazz Tears in Heaven. ‘Breathe in and out … concentrate and look inside … feel your heartbeat, your pulse.’ Shots of a silent, not white, security guard, not white cleaners. ‘… the weight of your body … you fall

36 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Ross Little, The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition (still), 2017, HD video, looped

Ross Little, The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition (installation view), 2017, HD video, looped

deeper, and deeper, get very relaxed … feel really really relaxed and happy.’

The nomads’ final poolside photo call. ‘… feel the air conditioned cool air’, Marichyasana Cs modified. Doubles tennis. ‘… now that we’re really relaxed we’ll start a little journey … you can see any place you want to be … you want to be on the beach, go on the beach, you want to be on the moon … doesn’t matter.’6 Images eventually fading from sunsets, through artificial light and into darkness.

The sound of waves subside. Black. Fading in, following two workers with torches. Is it the engine room? In the dimness a phone tone magically echoes a song I know but can’t name, behind metal structures voices reverberate in a language I don’t understand. Workers open a door into the light, footage of dereliction, controls of ships from different eras, lined up. We are transported to the beach at Alang-Sosiya Ship Recycling site in the coastal Bhavnagar district in the Indian state of Gujarat.7 This second part of the video is formally different. Sound sources are always visible, synced. Subjects talk to one another and there are some gestures of communication but they are not explaining. So, let me offer some explanation: operating since 1983, Alang-Sosiya only really filtered into broader public (US and northern European) consciousness with the Pulitzer prize winning article A Third World dump for America’s ships8 with workers then famously visualised

by Sebastião Salgado.9 Ships ‘worn out and torn apart … lie stranded along six miles of beach, in a hundred stage of demolition. Tankers, freighters, fish processor and destroyers – smashed, cut rusting smoking’.10 35,000 workers coming from ‘poor villages on the other side of India’, living in ‘hovels built of scrap, with no showers or toilets’. ‘They suffer broken ankles, severed fingers, smashed skulls, malaria fevers, cholera, dysentery

Ross Little The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition 37

Ross Little, The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition (still), 2017, HD video, looped

and tuberculosis. Some are burned and some are drowned. Nobody keeps track of how many die here from accidents and disease. Some say a worker dies every day.’11 Hard hats suggest conditions are better, but the coastline is still littered with ships and continually recoated with highly toxic oils, asbestos, PCBs, heavy metals (including lead and mercury), asbestos … Workers don’t wear masks or much protection.12 A cow stubbornly takes space in the centre of a road; the only other kind of animal, next to people, shown in the video.

Endless accumulations of bowls, mattresses, gym equipment, decorative sculptures, tape dispensers … Other waste is still dumped into the sea, or sometimes burnt on site causing air pollution, or discarded in surrounding villages. Figuring out who dumped what and where is difficult, and so is enforcing any form of legal liability. Pollution impacts the water, and poisons fish (and thus many people’s food) up to (but not measured beyond) 50km away.13 Even jellyfish would find it hard to survive the metal contamination. The repurposing of steel into rebar in local ‘rolling mills’ generates air pollution.14 Can we dream effective solutions?15 What about The 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal? Some said a boat that’s sailing only becomes waste when it hits the beach then starts to get cut up.16 This argument didn’t wash with those overseeing the convention, but paralleling tax avoidance, ships are often ‘reflagged’ before scrapping to make them seem like they come from countries with poor records of enforcing international environmental law. ‘In 2014, only 7.7% of all beached ships (by gross tonnage) were still registered under an EU flag, although 32% were still under EU ownership.’17 Audit trails often confused by boats changing name many times.18

38 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Following the Pulitzer-prize winning story, stringent conditions in the US left almost 170 ships rotting into the James River in Virginia, needing constant expensive repairs just to remain in the water.19 In Alang, ships take around four months to dismantle, and companies bid for the boats, making millions from recycling the materials, supporting a large (poorly) paid workforce. In either case, water is polluted with oils and heavy metals. But in Alang, many thousands of workers—as well as the beach and surrounding agricultural land—are exposed and (permanently) contaminated.

Just as there no workable strategies for ‘World Peace’, straightforward solutions to increasing problems of environmental contamination are elusive.

Fulfilling commitments to remove highly toxic materials (such as asbestos) before ships are transported could prevent some of the health impacts. But international agreements are levers that require both ongoing monitoring and scepticism about their efficacy. Change on this beach happens slowly through the nascent workers’ association. Perhaps a different ‘solution’ is needed. Jellyfish managed to pacify the USS Ronald Regan by ‘softly but ineluctably sludging it fast within a sea that had become pure slime’.20 Will jellyfish become so numerous that military, freight and leisure transport become unviable? A change spurring the only way to materially suspend the contamination: to stop making, then breaking, ships.

1. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p.43 2. Quote from audio, Ross Little, The Heavy of Your Body Parts and The Cool Air of the Air Condition, HD Video, 2017, commissioned by Collective 3. Nomad Cruise, Nomad Cruise I-III, 2017. URL: https://www.nomadcruise.com/history/ 4. Quotes from audio of The Heavy of …

5. Simon Garfield, On the map: why the world looks the way it does. (London: Profile books, 2012) 6. Quotes from audio The Heavy of …

7. Alang-Soyisa is a compound of the names of two separate villages Alang and Soyisa 8. Will Englund and Gary Cohn, ‘A Third World dump for America’s ships?’, The Baltimore Sun, 9 December 1997. URL: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/history/bal-pulitzer-shipbreakers-story-2-story.html 9. William Langewiesche, ‘The Shipbreakers’, The Atlantic Monthly, 286(2) (August 2000), pp. 31-49 10. England and Cohn, ‘A Third World dump … ’ 11. Ibid.

12. Federico Demaria, 2010, ‘Shipbreaking at Alang-Sosiya (India): An ecological distribution conflict’, Ecological Economics, 70, 2010, pp.250-260. Malini Goyal, At Alang shipbreaking yard, worker safety remains a dusty dream, The Economic Times, 23 October 1996.

URL: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/shipping-/-transport/at-alang-shipbreaking-yard-worker-safetyremains-a-dusty-dream/articleshow/55002097.cms 13. Demaria, ‘Shipbreaking at Alang-Sosiya’, p.254 14. Ibid. Also see Langewiesche, ‘The Shipbreakers’ 15. Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, (London: Orion Publishing Group, 1971) 16. Langewiesche, ‘The Shipbreakers’ 17. European Commission, ‘Thematic Issue: Ship recycling: reducing human and environmental impacts’, Science for Environmental Policy, Issue 55 (June 2016), p.3 URL: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/ship_recycling_ reducing_human_and_environmental_impacts_55si_en.pdf 18. Ibid.

19. As discussed in Langewiesche, ‘The Shipbreakers’ 20. Tom McCarthy, Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish: Essays. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2017), p.2 The USS Ronald Reagan is discussed in relation to Lisa-ann Gershwin’s writing.

Timothea Armour The Last Hour! 39

THE LAST HOUR! Curated by Timothea Armour with work

by Lloyd and Wilson 22 September - 5 November 2017

A newspaper, installation and series of events that considered the contemporary state, and potential future, of the public house. The Last Hour! took its title from a chapter of The Pub and the People, a Mass Observation study from 1938 that examined the pub as a British institution. The newspaper was available in the gallery and in pubs within a mile of Collective. With the temporary space closed for decommissioning, Lloyd and Wilson created an installation in the gallery windows, echoing the appearance of a closed pub and an expanded mind-map.

List of works ··Timothea Armour, Toby Phips Lloyd and Andrew Wilson, The Last Hour!, newspaper, edition of 2000, September 2017 ··Additional texts by Sarah Turner, Christopher Rountree, Joe Posset, Janelle Shane, Carolina Ravailoi and Malcy Duff ··Lloyd and Wilson, The Last Hour! incomplete diagram, newsprint, lightboxes, marker pen, September 2017 Events ··A Mass Observation Field Trip, 7 October 2017 ··When is a pub not a pub?, 21 October 2017 ··Performance by Usurper, the Waverley Bar, 21 October 2017 ··Screening of Public House by Sarah Turner, Cameo Picturehouse, 5 November 2017

40 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Are Pub Landlords Artists?

Toby Phips Lloyd

Joseph Beuys stated that “everyone is an artist”. He believed that we are all creative beings and what we do is our art. When challenged about what he understood as art, Beuys said that “everything under the sun is art”. Of course this does not mean that it is all good art. There is plenty of bad art out there, just as there are plenty of bad artists.

So how do we decide what is good art and what is bad? Marcel Duchamp asks us to consider the ‘two important factors […] of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other hand the spectator […] The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act’.1 In 1970, the conceptual artist Tom Marioni created an artwork called The Act of Drinking Beer is the Highest Form of Art. This involved building a bar in the corner of his studio and inviting ten guests every Wednesday to join him for drinks. The guests were asked to behave by a set of rules which included: No drinking from beer bottle except in character No art collectors except in disguise Every guest must have a minimum of two drinks People should sign the guest book at the bar Hours 5 to 8 PM, except on special occasions Many people would label Marioni as a piss artist instead of a conceptual artist, but the point of his work was not getting drunk. It was about creating a space where a group of people could come together and share each other’s company. The art is a combination of the environment he constructed, his presence as the host, the rules and the people he invited to drink with him:

Timothea Armour The Last Hour! 41

not the individual elements on their own. Framing it as an artwork highlights how important this activity is to us.

Most publicans would not consider themselves to be artists, and I feel that this is largely down to our limited definition of what art is and what artists do. There is an incredible amount of skill involved in running a good pub and I believe that this should be valued as an art form. There is more to it than opening the doors and serving drinks.

Like bad art, there are plenty of bad pubs. We have all experienced them and will go back to them because they serve a purpose. We do not drink there out of love but out of convenience, because they are the closest or the only places available to us.

So what makes a good pub? ·An · amazing range of beer ·A · great jukebox ·A · pool table ·Big · screen TV ·Beer · garden ·Comfortable · furniture ·Dancefloor · This all depends on your taste. A bad pub could have all these things, just as the best pub in the world may have none of the above. A good pub is more than its physical attributes. The way you are greeted as you enter will resonate far beyond the colour of the wall paper and the pictures on the wall.

We all know what we would consider a good pub when we see it, but there are those extra special places that have something about them that marks them out above the rest. Often it is hard to express what that magic ingredient is, but whatever it is, it makes us want to return to drink there again and again.

The role of the landlord and landlady is to make the drinkers comfortable and build a relationship beyond the financial transaction of selling them a drink. To do this they need to be able to move seamlessly between the guise of policeman, therapist, diplomat and friend. There is art to this role and to be able to do this well takes real commitment. It is a vocation, in the traditional sense of the word, a calling like joining the clergy. If this seems like an exaggeration (like calling publicans artists), then I think that you underestimate how much work goes into running a pub and the important role public houses play in our society. They are not just a place to get pissed.

42 Wake Up and the World Is Different

The 1937 Mass Observation study, The Pub and The People states: ‘It is no more true to say that people go to public houses to drink than it is to say they go to private houses to eat and sleep’.2 The pub is a place where the normal rules and hierarchies of society do not apply. Somewhere to let off steam, talk to strangers, make friends and speak without fear of judgement. It is a Public House in the true sense of the word. Everyone can enter and should be made to feel at home.

For the publican, their pub is both the place of work and private home. The divide between the two will be extremely porous or completely non-existent.

Imagine turning your front room into a pub and opening the doors every day to serve drinks to strangers. The closest most of us will come to this experience is throwing a party or inviting guests over for dinner. The major difference is that we will know most, if not all of the people, before letting them walk through the door.

The aesthetic choices a landlord and landlady makes, good and bad, will have an effect on the feel of the space and the ambience it creates.

They should feel completely comfortable in their pub and it should reflect their personality, the same way your home does. Would you want to live at work? Imagine spending every waking minute in your office. My parents were publicans (they would not consider themselves to be artists, but I do). The decisions they made about their environment contributed to the kind of pub it was and the people who would drink there. ·­·No smoking (1992) ·No · TV or music ·No · pool table ·No · Stella or Fosters (he had Dortmunder and Bitburger lager instead) ·No · chips or fried food (the oil would ruin the beer) ·Keep · the beer well (letting it settle for up to two weeks) ·Fine · for mobile phones ringing (1990s before smartphones) to encourage people to speak to those who were in the room ·Rowing · memorabilia (my Dad was mad about rowing - but there was a sign behind the bar that stated: ‘Rowing will seriously damage your conversation’) Some of the choices were instinctive; others were deliberately provocative to gain certain results. Could these choices have been seen as an artistic practice? Why not, some of them were definitely creative and done for the love of it instead of for financial reasons. Hell, making the pub no smoking in

Timothea Armour The Last Hour! 43

1992 was seen as suicidal at the time. But after six quiet months they were the busiest they had ever been.

Some publicans just want to run a successful business. Somewhere that caters for everybody. Somewhere that serves a purpose. But if you’re going to run a pub it needs to be one that you love. It should be your artwork. There seems little point in running a pub that you don’t like, full of arseholes who you don’t want to drink with.

My Dad used to say that when the pub was open, that was his leisure time. All the activity that happened when the pub was closed was ‘work’. If a landlord calculated how much they were paid by the hour they would either break down in tears at how little they earn, or smile at the level of satisfaction they receive from their work that is not financial.

Most publicans, like artists, are not in it to make money – there are much easier ways to earn a living. They do it because it is something they care about and it gives them a reason to get out of bed each morning. This is why I believe they deserve to be called artists.

By contrast, consider the artists who work in their studios thinking about how much money they will make from each artwork they sell. They should be viewed the same way as the landlords and landladies who make decisions about how to run their pubs by how much profit they think they will yield. Does this mean that they are bad artists? That is up to you, but for me, if drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art, then I think they will be performing the creative act alone.

1. Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p.78 2. Mass-Observation, The Pub and The People: A Worktown Study (London: Faber & Faber, 2009 reprint), p.20

44 Wake Up and the World Is Different

The Last Hour!, 2017, newsprint

Wake up and the world is different Anna McLauchlan drinks in The Last Hour!, a project curated by Timothea Armour

When younger, people sometimes told me ‘drinking’s not ladylike’ or ‘you shouldn’t drink’. Drinking’s one solution to ‘the personal problem of existence’.

A method of ‘physiological change’ a ‘safety valve’, an accepted loosener of constraints associated with the formal and informal rules that govern our being in the world.1 Boozing promotes conviviality, feelings of warmth and friendship but doing it lots has been linked with violence together with health effects such as stroke and heart or liver disease.2 In Scotland, a country famed for drinking, the Scottish Parliament have just been allowed to enact legislation aiming to curb consumption by setting a minimum price for alcohol.3 Alcohol is foundational to UK contemporary art, lubricating the openings or previews that often precede visits to the sites celebrated in Timothea Armour’s The Last Hour! Taking its name from the final chapter of the The Pub and the People Mass-Observation study published 1943,4 this curatorial project similarly avoids the “drink problem” to focus on the pub as social institution. The titling summons the agreeable last hour of nightly service

Timothea Armour The Last Hour! 45

The last hour: an incomplete diagram (detail) by Toby Lloyd and Andrew Wilson, 2017, newsprint, writing and photographs behind glass

alongside a grim prophecy of decline as chain pubs increasingly take over independents.5 Making it to Collective, this, the final day of the exhibition, the portacabins on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill are closed. Sheets of The Last Hour! mask the windows, this newspaper available from a red (now weatherproofed) box and all pubs within a one mile radius. Reminiscent of a shop shut for repurposing, the newsprint on the windows—off-white with a black print, red accent and colour images—forms content, context and backdrop for mirror written words projecting out from in. Partial narratives trace across the glass, themes drawn from the paper’s stories laced with pictures: ‘gender – nostalgia’, ‘work – class’, ‘behaviour – talk’. Strategic gaps permit a partial view inside, floating lit up ethereal images of a fresh pint, a clean ashtray, a shiny but ancient telly.

Reflecting this assemblage’s tang of nostalgia, smoking in ‘wholly or substantially enclosed’ public spaces has been banned in Scotland since 26 March 2006.6 One of the newspaper’s stories exploring the ‘authenticity’ of

46 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Sarah Turner, Public House (still), 2016, HD Video, shown at offsite event in Cameo Cinema as part of The Last Hour!

British pub culture – styles of the past still play out in the present. Others concern the definition of ‘pub’, the art of pub management, a bartender’s reminiscences, and practical direction for ‘what to do if you’re worried about losing your local’. Almost centrefold there’s ‘An attempt to map pub ownership within a mile radius of Calton Hill’.7 This map implicates the pubs where newspapers have been distributed.

Drinkers in those pubs might find a copy, framing themselves relative to others. In keeping with convention, the site of map production, Collective, is central. Some papers escape the mile: sent to Leeds, left on a train, given to Linda—moving in uncontrolled ways, understandings of intent altering with place and person. The mile around Collective is largely within Edinburgh’s UNESCO world heritage site.8 Disneyesque, conjuring images of folksy ‘traditional’ pubs: wood, tiling maybe, single malts, live music only …

Perhaps something close to the aesthetic of The Ivy in London’s Nunhead/ Peckham Rye, the star of Sarah Turner’s film Public House (2016) showing at Cameo Cinema today. Owners Enterprise Inns9 gave the community five days’ notice of closure, trying for a ‘vacant possession’ sale to a developer. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) had already applied to English Heritage to list this as ‘An historic pub interior of regional importance’.10 The community

Timothea Armour The Last Hour! 47

At the back of Old Observatory House, Calton Hill, 5 November 2017

got together, exercising their ‘right to bid’ for ‘assets of community value’, becoming the first to purchase a community building using the Localism Act 2011. An acclaimed victory of community over gentrification.

The film, made collaboratively with some of the pub’s many users, features documentation of poetry and swing dance practice and performance, alongside kids moving around at play. Ethereal recordings of members of the community responding to 30 questions documented in The Last Hour! layered into the footage.11 Questions range from the prosaic, ‘When did you first visit this pub?’ to the sensory, ‘What’s your favourite pub smell?’. The final, number 30, is telling: ‘Could the pub be more diverse? In what way (age, race, class, gender, sexuality … etc)?’ There are lots of children, women and men, but, Carling is out and craft beer is in, those featured are startlingly white. What is this community? Who are ‘the People’?12 In Edinburgh, A Mass Observation Field Trip (offsite event née pub crawl), could help to explore these questions. The mapping permits investigation of the sites of the newspaper’s distribution. Participants do more than ‘ground truth’ the data: small groups visit pubs, recording occurrences, later sharing findings en masse. Does ‘getting’ or ‘capturing’ the atmosphere require (even partial) inebriation? Pub crawls, a form of alcotainment constrained

48 Wake Up and the World Is Different

by location and (potentially) specialist subject. The lawyer’s crawl: choose a landmark legal case, go to the site of that case and narrate it, have a drink in the nearest pub. Repeat. Narratives of lawlessness become increasingly loose.

Despite no “drink problem”, wellbeing is present in The Last Hour! through Yoga for Bartenders.13 Bartenders may blossom but in yogic terms serving alcohol means they trade in ‘tamas’, a ‘negative and obstructive force that resists change, [embodying] darkness, not feeling, attachment, depression, lethargy, dullness, heaviness, stagnation and ignorance’.14 This description echoes the guilt, shame and death like feelings that may accompany an alcoholiday15—a necessary day of rest after excessive drinking. Happily, such symptoms can be alleviated by twisting postures (such as Marichyasana C) that stimulate blood flow to the abdomen. The alcoholiday, more than ‘a partial release of accumulating tensions’,16 a grounding ‘break’, you (hopefully) wake up and the world is different.

This is also ‘the last hour’ for Collective’s tenure in this temporary space just outside The City Observatory’s grounds. They make another, shorter, move to the Old Observatory House prior to permanently relocating to The City Dome and other renovated buildings. Walking around, it’s blustery, the portacabin’s short term dereliction infiltrates Calton Hill, surroundings tatty before the transformation. Stone buildings with gravitas, a visible seat of learning, garnished with bottles and cans: some stashed, some absentmindedly placed at the foot of a bench, evidence of pre-loading perhaps, intoxication enhanced by the crisp air and the scenic view.

Timothea Armour The Last Hour! 49

1. Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study, (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1943), quotes derived from pp. 336 & 337 2. Detrimental health and other effects of alcohol are widely documented and then translated into guidance, for example NHS, ‘The risks of drinking too much’, 2017. URL: https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/alcohol/Pages/Effectsofalcohol.aspx 3. Following a challenge by the Scotch Whisky Association this legislation was recently upheld by the UK Supreme Court. Scottish Government, Minimum Unit Pricing, 2017. URL: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Health/Services/Alcohol/minimum-pricing 4. Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People 5. Anonymous, When is a pub not a pub? In Collective, The Last Hour!, 22 September–5 November, 2017 6. What does ‘substantially’ mean? Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act 2005. URL: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ asp/2005/13/section/4 7. Collective, The Last Hour!, pp.10-11 8. UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Old and New Towns of Edinburgh, 2012. URL: http://whc. unesco.org/en/list/728 9. Enterprise Inns plc, now known as Ei Group plc, “are the largest pub company in the UK, owning over 4,500 properties, predominantly run as leased and tenanted pubs” Ei Group, ‘About Us’, 2017. URL: http://www.eigroupplc.com/ 10. CAMRA, Pub Heritage Historic Pub Interiors, LONDON, GREATER - Nunhead, London SE15, Ivy House, 2017. URL: https://pubheritage. camra.org.uk/pubs/historic-pub-interior-entry.asp?NatPubID=SEL/10680&Detail=brief 11. Collective, The Last Hour!, p.17 12. This echoes questions raised by Sally A Marston, ‘Who are ‘the people’?: gender, citizenship, and the making of the American nation’, Environment and Planning D, 8, 1990, pp.449-458. In the Scottish context, minimum pricing for alcohol will increase the price of cheaper drinks such as Carling bought in bulk but will not impact on more expensive craft beers.

13. Collective, The Last Hour!, p.9 14. This interpretation, reflecting orthodox approaches, is taken from Mark Kan, The Complete Yoga Tutor: A structured course to achieve professional expertise. (London: Gaia, 2013) p.75. In observances known as niyamas drinking alcohol goes against saucha (or shaucha) cleansing the body and being pure in word and deed. However many yoga practitioners drink alcohol, some have incorporated into their teaching (for example by David Sye), and it has an ambiguous role in tantric rituals.

15. Alcoholiday Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈalkəhɒlɪdeɪ/ U.S. /ˈælkəˌhɔlɪdeɪ/, /ˈælkəˌhɑlɪdeɪ/ A day on which ordinary occupations (of an individual or group) are suspended as a result of a hangover due to severe intoxication from alcohol the previous day or night before; a day of cessation from work as a consequence of previous alcohol intoxication. Incapacity to participate in formal work may turn this into a day of recreation or amusement. Often accompanied by feelings of shame or dread.

Adapted from entries for ‘alcohol’ and ‘holiday’ from Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Also the name of a Teenage Fanclub song from 1991 16. Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People, p.337

50 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Afterword Being/Built

Collective is still being built. The City Observatory is no longer The City Observatory, it is a construction site in which the ruin of an observatory is being transformed into a contemporary art space, into Collective. For the time being though, this site is neither The City Observatory nor Collective. It is a site in transition.

Sitting next to this site is what has become known to its occupants as the Temporary Unit. It is a container that is doing its best to be an art space, but it doesn’t look particularly out of place in the company of its more rudimentary doppelgangers stacked up beside it, which are surrounded by diggers, scaffolding and construction workers in hi-vis jackets. The workers in the Temporary Unit sometimes wear hi-vis jackets too, when they walk into the construction site to see what’s going on, to check on progress. The rest of the time they are planning what’s going to happen when they move out of the Temporary Unit and into the former City Observatory.

This transitionary phase has been underway for five years now, which is quite a long time to be in a worker in a Temporary Unit. And these workers are particularly sensitive to the passing of time. They measure it through the annual formation and dissolution of a different kind of temporary unit with whom they co-habit their container. This other temporary unit consists of artists, curators and producers and is known – both within and outwith the container – as the Satellites Programme. This publication marks the end of the fifth temporary unit, the fifth Satellites group and it also marks the end of the Temporary Unit itself, the end of the transitionary phase. At last, some finality. Or …

For artists (and other art-workers) there is no end to the transitionary phase. They live in a constant state of in-betweenness. Every artwork, every performance, every exhibition they make might initially feel like an ending, but this feeling lasts only for an instant, before giving way to the sense that it is merely the beginning of whatever’s next. It is a marker, or a ‘setting down’, as the artist Sarah Pierce describes it, ‘a moment where one thing is let go and in letting go, it allows others to take it up.’1 These markers suggest myriad new possibilities not only for the artist who made them, but for those who encounter them. Pierce continues, ‘we venture to put our words and deeds into the world in recognition that someone else will take them up – misuse

Afterword 51

and reuse them, changing what I have done into something plural – and this unpredictable quality of action is also its community.’2 Exhibitions are part of a conversation with the world, they are discourses in action, they are both the invitation and the party at the same time.

One of the main problems with art education is the degree show, the glorious climatic moment into which four or more years of work will be distilled. The problem is not the show itself, but rather the promise of finality, of resolution. It does not prepare you for what’s on the other side, which is this constant state of transition, an endless becoming. Satellites is a programme that recognises and acknowledges the transitory nature of art production. A lazy observer may see a string of solo shows and authored curatorial projects, but participants on the programme are working together to re-think their practice in the context of a long term, unfolding project that does not end at its point of exhibition. They enter the programme with a private proposal for how they’ll spend the year, and leave by making a public proposal for how things might be from this moment on.

Collective is still being built, but even when it’s finished, the workers who occupy it will not stop building.

James N. Hutchinson is an artist and a founding member of the curatorial cooperative, Chapter Thirteen. He is the facilitator of the Satellites Programme.

1. Sarah Pierce, ‘The Simple Operator’ in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon, (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p.102 2. Pierce, ‘The Simple Operator’, p.103

52 Wake Up and the World Is Different

Acknowledgements The artists and Associate Producers would like to thank all of the Collective team; teacher and learner Anna McLauchlan; artist and facilitator James N. Hutchinson; retreat contributors Stephen Sutcliffe, Shona Macnaughton, Julie-Ann Delaney, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Natasha Hoare and Annie Fletcher; selectors Petra Bauer, Bryony Bond, and Tom O’Sullivan.

With special thanks to Grace Johnston Thank you to Sophie Collins, Carol Rhodes, Martin Holman, Andrew Mummery, Margaret Macdonald, Lesley Young, Dominic Paterson, Claire Walsh, Julie-Ann Delaney, Jessica Crisp, James MacEachran, Melanie Letore, Calum Sutherland, Abigale Neate Wilson, Jamie Kane, Rosie O’Grady, Eilidh Ratcliffe, Ewan Murray and my family.

Alex Impey Jenny, Barbara, Gayle, Pat, Hirofumi and Dominic.

Adam Lewis Jacob Benjie Cluness, Emily McFarland and Catalyst Arts, Elizabeth Murphy, Freedom Press, Tim Sandys, Susanna Stark, Michael White, Katy White. With special thanks to Donald Rooum.

Ross Little Alang Sosiya Ship Recycling and General Workers’ Association, the workers of Plot 19 Alang, the crew of the MS Sovereign, the digital nomads from the cruise, Florrie James, Joe Sloan, Anna Pearce, Beth Heron, Oliver Pitt and Sam Bellacosa. Thanks also to Rory Fox of UK Jellyfish.

Acknowledgements 53

Timothea Armour and Lloyd and Wilson Adam and everyone else at the Jolly Judge, Ronan at the Waverley Bar, Luke Smithson, Esme, John and Jane Armour, Kieran Curran, Matthew Slevin, Yasmine Akamune-Miles, Melissa Jarram, Trevor Griffiths, Iris Priest, Joe Posset, Chris Lloyd, Debbie Lloyd, Derek Wilson and Janice Wilson.

Anna McLauchlan Massive thanks to Collective, and in particular Frances Stacey, for commissioning me to write about the 2017 Satellites Programme and supporting my investigation and writing over the course of a year; Timothea Armour and Grace Johnston for managing the production of this book and generously responding to my writing and ideas; the Satellites Programme producers and artists for alerting me to sources, reading my words and offering feedback; Barry Burns for reading and commenting on all, and Katherine MacBride and Zac Taylor most, of the texts; Alice Bain, Laura Edbrook and Daisy Lafarge of Map for their exceptional editorial support; Liam Casey, Luke Collins, Clare Stephenson and Andrew Wallace for each reading and commenting on one of the five texts originally published by Map. My writing was made possible by the kindness of Margaret McLauchlan.

Wake Up and the World Is Different Satellites Programme 2017 Edited by: Timothea Armour, Grace Johnston and Anna McLauchlan Design: Cecilia Serafini Print: Edinburgh Copyshop ISBN: 13: 978-1-873653-22-7 Installation Photography by Tom Nolan All images courtesy of Collective, the artists and writers The texts by Anna McLauchlan, ‘Writing in absence’, ‘The particular in general’, ‘Every contact leaves a trace’, ‘May all of your dreams come true’ and ‘Wake up and the world is different’, were first published in MAP, www.mapmagazine.co.uk, Issues 39 & 42, 2017/18 Edition of: 60 Commissioned and published by: Collective, City Observatory, 38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh, EH7 5AA

© Collective, the artists and writers www.collective-edinburgh.art