Unstuck in Time

su grierson

unstuck in time

PROJECT BACKGROUND During a residency in Ireland in 2015 on the Performance corporation’s Space programme I worked several times with another international participant, Adam Chienjo from Kenya. Adam is a dancer/performer and I work with images and video and we found a shared understanding of how those two mediums can interact. We agreed to keep in touch to see if a joint project might be found.

In 2017 I was able to establish a residency for Adam and a musician Izo Anyanga at my local Perth Museum in Scotland. During a very full two weeks of workshops and connections in which Adam and Izo brought their culture to a wide section of our local Perthshire community, I created a short video and some images of Adam in the Museum, interacting with a series of white marble busts depicting heroes of our western and local history.

It was only later when I had time to revisit the footage, that the full impact of the work became apparent. Beside each ‘dead’ marble bust there was Adam’s very live African face just being a presence, just ‘saying’ I am here too, I have another history to offer. The images were benign and beautiful but hid a world of other possible interpretations which I did not feel ready or entitled to address.

In 2018 I attended a multi cultural networking event held by Creative Edinburgh and met Dr Mary Irwin an Academic Historian specialising in media history. In talking about our backgrounds I mentioned the work with Adam and the marble busts which resonated with her own interest in Confederate statues in America which were being defaced and attacked. We quickly developed a conversation of shared interest which we continued thorough a series of discussions which lead to the production of a Zine, a completely new form for us both. Not a narrative but a coming together of images and text in a free form that simply aimed to spark ideas and thoughts around the subject. We titled it ‘Mythology of the moment’.

Following on from this I created a small personal exhibition of posters and video that followed our lines of discussion. The intended exhibition would give a focus in which the Zine could be distributed. I, rather prophetically as it turned out, called the exhibition ‘Unstuck in Time’.

And then there was Covid-19. The galleries were closed, I was isolated and the future was put on hold. But much more importantly there followed a global public outpouring in our cities following a brutal death in America and Black Lives Matter was born.

In my posters I was exposing behaviour, using statues and busts, pointing to the way in which we think and do things, but now in BLM here was the evidence. My own project was totally overtaken by the real thing. The power and rightness and rage of generations of wrong thinking was being exposed. It has overtaken my project and I feel the time is no longer right for this exhibition.

For this reason I am creating this documentation of the work. Firstly ‘Unstuck in time’ posters and images, then followed with a commentary by Mary Irwin of her involvement with ‘Mythology of the Moment’.

The two publications will be available together as a pair.

Su Grierson : October 2020

UNSTUCK IN TIME Using the popular tropes of posters zine and postcards, which rely on the power of image, words and memes to create a sense of immediate knowing, Unstuck in Time elucidates the social phenomenon of icons, myth, reality, truth and belief.

Certain people over time become lionised, fetishized, and historically privileged over others. These Icons, regularly represented as Sculptural Busts or Images become harbingers of assimilated information, validated by their cultural repetition as they become established in multiple Museums, texts and other cultural collections. Shaped by and bestowed with the politics and culture of the age that made them, static marble busts become stories, become myths and legends but over time the reality of the individual life becomes lost, disputed, re-invented or repurposed to promote our own new stories.

This de-canonisation can involve violent removal, public demeaning with paint throwing, political graffiti or ridicule, usually involving lengthy public debate as new cultural stories are etched out.

Today we live in a world of instant communication where every group in society has its own voice, its own platform. Everything becomes politicised and open to unrestrained attack through intensely held beliefs. This project seeks to be only a reminder of the human ability to effect changes in our perceptions and opinions over time. At this time of great uncertainty perhaps that knowledge equates with hope.

Su Grierson : April 2020

Adam Chienjo performance with marble busts in Perth Museum. Images Su Grierson.

THE MUTABILITY OF REPUTATION

MIGRANTS THROUGH TIME

Narratives written in stone the rubble is where belief lies

A VOICELESS STATUE CAN BE VOCALISED AS WE CHOOSE

MYTH COMMENT ICON RUMOUR HERO GOSSIP TRUTH TEXT LIES VLOG BELIEF BELIEF

WE HAVE NO FUTURE BECAUSE OUR PRESENT IS TOO VOLATILE Pattern Recognition

William Gibson

WHAT IS NARRATED EXISTS

BUT WHO WAS THE MAN

Studio installation with ‘Unknown Woman’ posters and 4 videos based on search engine algorithms for...

‘Female image Beautiful’ ‘Female image angry’ ‘Female image Sad’ ‘Female image Happy’ All unknown women selected for their appearance and emotion.

MYTHOLOGY OF THE MOMENT Before Su and I met at a Creative Edinburgh event in 2018 and had a chance conversation about narratives and storytelling. Su is an artist and I’m an academic specialising in media history.

We decided to meet up and see where our discussions could take us. Su had been working on a project within Perth museum which resulted in a video involving a selection of their statues, busts and unidentified heads. Discussing Su’s art prompted all kinds of questions and reflections on the meaning and intentionality of commemorative culture. What do the memorials we leave behind say about us? The museum has immortalised a lot of powerful men, yet there are few women. Why are female statues frequently anonymised and often used to represent abstract concepts like liberty or justice? Why are statues erected in the first place? What happens when reputation changes? Do statues have a sell by date? Are they only noticed when what they represent ‘falls out of favour’ or become politically and or morally unacceptable?

We began to talk about statues whose meaning had become so offensive to groups of people that physical attempts were made to change their meaning. Graffiti, paint and even decapitation have been used to reinterpret meaning. Coincidentally, I noticed a story that in 2016 the deputy mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia called on the City Council to remove a statue of confederate general Robert E Lee. We thought then about what happened to statues of communist heroes when the Iron Curtain came down and how they moved to the ‘wrong’ side of history. Pulling these representations down became an act of political celebration. Su designed an illustrated zine to document some of our ideas. The aesthetic style of the zine, a type of publication itself most associated with a ripped, torn, jagged and ragged punk aesthetic, resonated very well with the underlying sensibility of the ideas we were working with. That is, we were mobilising the punk concept of a ‘year zero’, the ethos of ‘ripping up and starting again’, disrupting and overturning old tired regimes and elites. The Stranglers 1977 punk anthem ‘No More Heroes’ with its key question- ‘whatever happened to the heroes?’ and repeated refrain of ‘no more heroes any more’ says it best.

Afterwards Then our project came literally to life. What had been a reflective and conceptual exploration of intertwining strands of art, commemoration and history suddenly became headline news. The statue of Edward Colston a Bristol slave trader on Colston Avenue, Bristol was pulled down on 7th June 2020 by members of The Black Lives Matter movement as part of global protest at the police killing of African American George Floyd. Colston’s statue

and what it represented had been the cause of unhappiness and disquiet for many years Temporarily, a statue made by sculptor Marc Quinn of BLM protester Jen Reid, fist held in a black power salute, took Colston’s place on the plinth. A powerful white man standing at the centre of the city being replaced by a woman of colour provided a visual narrative of everything that we had been theorising. Did we see it coming? Absolutely not! Suddenly statues were visible, visibly falling and not just us, but everyone else was talking about them and what they stood for: a summer of dangerous, living statues. More confederate statues embodying everything that BLM were protesting against were targeted and removed - Confederate General Stonewall Jackson in Richmond, Virginia and Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Frankfort Kentucky. Across the world statues were vandalised, pulled down or taken away for storage and safekeeping by the authorities. A bust of Belgian King Leopold II in Antwerp was painted red then removed and Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square London was covered up for its own protection.

Coincidence? How did we know? Our discussions began in 2018, in a highly politicised and febrile international atmosphere where the disruptions caused by the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump had people suddenly talking and talking about politics.

It felt like history had come back to life and was once again the subject of debate. Established norms were being ripped up, re-examined and replaced. We, like everyone else, couldn’t help talking about the current explosive politics and this infused our ongoing work on historical statutes and the narratives developed around them. Raymond Williams the cultural theorist talks about the notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ the sense of being alive in a particular time and place- ‘what it’s like to be there, then’. While we didn’t predict what happened, the ongoing dislocation and sense of norms being overturned was part of the cultural context in which we were living and shaped and dominated our conversations.

When the Covid 19 pandemic hit, it accelerated the sense of succeeding seismic global events spinning the world ever further from where we were used to it being. In a summer dominated by fear and anger when people hit the streets, history was physically being made and remade. New heroes were being created and many of the old ones were being torn down. This reactivates and takes our discussion of heroism further. The new heroes of this period were not the powerful upper-class white men of old, rather, ordinary people -shop workers, nurses and carers and women, lots of women. New questions arise. Will we be being seeing a very different set of statues documenting this period? Are commemorative statues a thing of the past?

Dr Mary Irwin : October 2020

With thanks to: Perth Museum & Art Gallery WASPS artists studios Perth VACMA award Adam Chienjo