What Remains

Nigel Mullan

2009

Developing your own practice as a visual artist, what does that mean? Does it mean developing your methods to make things that can be seen and in a way that is at least on the way to being understood by you and others as something in the world? Is this a passive process or an active one or neither or both? Is it one based exclusively on production for a private, a more cornered consumption, and something more quietist and well behaved? Or is it more active and less exclusive and if less exclusive, can it be awkward and less well behaved? Is it measured, affixed a value and exchanged as a commodity to the first successful bidder or produced in a less stifled, less cornered and less cost inhibited way? Whatever its drive, can it escape the bounds of its original production so that as soon as it is out in the world it becomes up for grabs from all corners? Is it not then more public or social, belonging to none and everyone, something held in common? Or does it revert back to the artist and obscurity, stillborn?

These and linked questions will continue and meander for a while yet. They especially arise and are worth asking at a time when after it became acceptable for some to have property and wealth well over and beyond necessity, it became acceptable for them to own artwork, to have a share in a particular market and prestige. You can date this as belonging intensely to a period as recently as 1979-2009, the post-industrial, post-modern period some think, or more remotely and originally during the late Neolithic and Bronze ages in prehistory, a time when prestige goods, land ownership and hierarchic social groupings began to emerge. Developing your own practice however you do it and manage it is unavoidably bound up in an individualised society where prestige and value are ranked and inequality widens, when subordination of social relations and concerns occurs as a costly result of accumulated wealth channelled in a disproportionate and disrespectful manner. The artificiality here may reach such great levels of distortion that explosion and collapse are inevitable, true even for artificiality in artworks. Hitchcock said the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

1

2

Planting a town housing development across a hill, once used agriculturally, and before agricultural improvements, enclosures and depopulation, lived and worked on agriculturally for five thousand years, if not more, creates a cultural site that is exclusively used for dwelling in without any real economic activity. Another question now: is this the town and country, the urban and rural divide, a replay or hangover of manufacturing and landed interests clashed over two or so centuries ago, a time that saw extensive population removals and enclosures at their height? What was and is the difference if you had or have no interests, or your interests, however amazingly patient and good-natured you remain, are taken away from under your nose? A poet from Monaghan wrote about the rural land and culturescape of his homeland of the 1940s in a way that every dog on a city street corner knows it: “the apocalypse of clay screams in every corner of the land” (The Great Hunger – Patrick Kavanagh, 1942).

The present furore over banking and investment systems and their outlandish failures, conveniently supplanted by a scandal over a bizarrely outrageous expenses system operated by publicly elected members of the UK parliament, a scandal righteously spearheaded by a media outlet owned by a couple of boyos registered for tax purposes as being off-shore, says nothing new and was seen coming years ago, so systemically ingrained and as plain as day was it, a shout from the hilltops echoing and re-echoing. The real questions that erupt and are largely masked by this, about the production, distribution and consumption of resources are indeed pressing and need to be addressed now more than ever. Developing your own practice as an artist, along with every other soul on the globe, may have to shape up to some very new and unexpected twists, because the days of empire as they have been known are over.

Social relations and concerns everywhere will very soon have to question disproportionate and disrespectful behaviours, even down to the last crumb of the loaf in order to avert a food crisis. The food sovereignty movement that works on a world wide basis is involved in one particular and important way in making the vitally needed readjustments realisable: “Food sovereignty is best seen as a growing movement initiated and taken forward by small-scale producers to reclaim both their place as the fundamental basis of the global food system and the power to feed themselves, their urban cousins, and the rest of us by operating a system with the hallmark of distributing benefits fairly along the whole supply chain…. This is not food security, which seeks to ensure that food of some kind is available in a reasonably steady supply, but often leaves it beyond the means of many or wholly inappropriate and misguided” (Food Sovereignty: it s̓ time to choose sides - Anthony Jackson and Eve Mitchell, Soundings 41, 2009). Food and art, ever close, may very well be interchangeable terms in this equation.

Archaeologists argue that the Neolithic revolution was founded on the experience of sedentism, which developed, stabilised and endured, becoming the prerequisite for food production. In early food producing societies little evidence has emerged for the ranking of individuals. The economic basis of the European Neolithic created group-orientated societies (distinct from later state societies) whose religious and ideological aspirations were expressed and shaped by monuments requiring hundreds, thousands and millions of hours of collective labour. Nobody would argue with any justification that this represented a golden age where things were just fine like a hippy hay day, but it is interesting to note how human societies and culture emerged and worked for extremely long periods before the period, comparatively much shorter, when inequality ran riot in them. How the practice of

3

art emerged and developed when there was time for reflection and the making of things that had a shared and recognisable value beyond that of the day to day struggle for survival, a time when perhaps every kind of effort was tied up together, and the subsequent emergence of the difficult and specialised making of objects in clay and metal, when the visual arts industry really started to roll, is important to try to understand, especially as distinctive and valued objects existed for human groups long before they attained a recognisable status for individuals and contributed to the disproportionate accumulation of wealth by individuals.

In Europe at least, archaeologists suggest that individual prestige seems to have arisen alongside a combination of bronze, weaponry and masculinity, reinforced later by the horse and chariot and then by the cavalry. Artists as such were always involved in the production of prestige goods, distinctive things, things that distinguished, that were valued and cared for. “In these cases the symbolic role of so many features is crucial and the symbol did not reflect so much as constitute and create the newly perceived and conceptualised reality” (Prehistory – The Making of the Human Mind – Colin Renfrew, 2007). In other words, the work of art contributed not so indirectly to the accumulation of individual wealth and prestige and the growth of hierarchically ranked societies with the subsequent effect of subordinating the role of the artist in such and later societies, even if this entailed being considered a specialist and ranked not entirely as the lowest of the low.

Neolithic burials were mainly communal in form, whereas during the Bronze Age individual burials occurred along with prestige goods indicating that the person was regarded as prominent. The frequency of these burial types increased and showed that a shift in social relationships was underway. Does the cairn contain the ashes of the many or a small stone slab box, a cist,

with a curled up figure in it next to a beaker style pot? Many stone boxes and remains were found down the road and across the fields from here in the middle of the nineteenth century and one as recently as the 1970s during the excavations for new housing in Dundee West. Does this cairn now on the edge of the city mark the shift to a competitively ranked, hierarchic society?

The landscape is really the culturescape. Land and people, place and overlay upon overlay. Ruins and the structures of today patiently waiting to become the ruins of tomorrow whilst natural habitats cling on and regenerate and bird song reminds us that bird territories are coexistent with our own if not predating them and go on regardless of the rural or urban nature of our culturescapes. Provided of course that habitats are not totally destroyed. Yet seldom are they totally destroyed and their regeneration from destruction is always truly remarkable, even if as some suggest the world is facing its sixth great extinction of species. The housing development in Dundee West at Menzieshill was laid out over good mixed agricultural ground comprising cereals, livestock and pasture. The traces of previous habitats and cultural traces remain in places and the generous grass spaces between many built sites were planted well with a mixture of shrubs, cherry and sycamore varieties. Remnant field boundaries can still be seen in lines of oak trees and the building layout in many places was defined by previous field layouts. In some places a pathway amongst the housing represents a significant road or track from way back and at least two burial cairns are left more or less as they have been down the centuries. In amongst modernism and the plan, through post-modernism and the scam, older and wilder presences whisper on.

4

Market forces may have depopulated the Highlands and accentuated marginalisation but these same market forces hideously concentrated populations elsewhere and by the middle of the twentieth century created dire housing conditions and housing shortages. Globally, during this same century the trend was for rapid urbanisation and a switch from the majority of the population living in rural areas to a majority living in urban centres. In Dundee by 1993, the 75th year of council built housing, a programme undertaken across the country to alleviate and replenish a chronically inadequate housing stock, 40,000 houses had been built. On Menzieshill, a 201acre site, 3,459 homes were built in the 1960s on the western periphery of the city. People who came from the centre 40 years ago talk of themselves then as the pioneers. The twinkle in their eyes still remains. Do ghosts of tomorrow eek out today yesterdays dream?

5

6

Thereʼs a strange haunting in our culturescape, an estranging or alienating drift. So what can an artwork do in a place like today?

7

8

With a multiplication of images, text and sound continual and inescapable, what can still glimmer from an artwork in amongst the fast movement of shadows cast by so much relentless production? Does even the rarefied space and atmosphere of galleries permit the artwork to operate in splendid isolation? And these spaces alongside those outside galleries and mainstream organisations made accessible to the public, if they are at all, can these manage with limited resources to compete for attention with the prevailing cultural intensity? Have these shrines for the dedicated pilgrim been over run? Has the artwork been overpowered or has it suffered from an internal collapse? Or both? Do the glimmers offered here and there from time to time arise from embers powerful enough for a fire to burn yet? Parades of itsy-bitsy clever ironies, or stoic, sparse opaqueness, artworks that can never come in from the cold, may yet for a while longer retain their small coteries of loyal attendant support, whilst post card representations reflecting back an idealised mirror of land and people will chug along as a kind of bedrock of mimesis grown aimless. But nothing is guaranteed. This is very much a period of fragmentation, a place where gleanings alone can be had.

In a long tradition of architecture, theatre and film set building, the force of visualisation can now hypnotically arrive live through the TV and bring the manic-depressive (bi-polar) installation to end all installations, the Big Brother house, the perfect unsatisfactory reflection of widespread dissatisfaction and distraction, sedentism in a mire. A media critic has even suggested that the 24-7 Trafalgar Square fourth plinth project of the moment is in a kind Big Brother format, streamed live with a weekly TV show update of the best bits, and that compared to the Angel of the North this is brilliantly futile. And on an abandoned hillside the ghost of an incomplete townscape is glimpsed as a mirage. The Land Reform Act (Scotland) 2003 may be successfully addressing land use and ownership in rural areas defined by the act but the issues of use and ownership are badly in need of facing up to in the non-rural areas where most of the population is squeezed.

9

A great geological aloofness stares through the run around of biological nature and entirely rises above the rural and urban trenches and citadels. The rough heel of a mountain throws it all back to us. Silicon life comes before carbon life. There is a need now to reshape the artwork and its place amongst people in the face of drift and diffusion, if not out and out disaffection and rejection along with the all too usual hardened indifferences. The artwork can and must still remain autonomous, arising freely and awkwardly, and constitute as much as reflect a reality, but the assurance of its continued presence in the world of people requires that other fundamental, far reaching reshapings are made in that world, this world, in the whole culturescape. The artwork like a raw presence can stand apart and detached in a momentary way from the culture that gives rise to it because it can truly constitute something else however fleeting. Yet, this is just about next to useless if it is not shared and next to impossible if there are no resources to spare.

10

The potential of the visual artwork is being severely affected and challenged by the very same processes that have and still are affecting and challenging the lives of millions, amongst whom the lives of artists too are situated, no more special, no more protected than any other. Inequitable production, distribution, allocation and consumption of resources, on a scale haunting the culturescape as never before, are so evidently and bleakly destabilising. Artists will need somehow to sit in and stand by the communities they live amongst as the solutions necessary to re-establish equitable and stable relations are worked out by communities everywhere. In this no less arduous and difficult process that leads away from the absurdly inefficient, clumsy and often downright violent processes that have led to dire instability and inequality, a place and another space will be found for the work of art again. At the moment this long moment is one of both confusion and suspense. Up to this moment our traces on the earth over time, marked out on the land, have produced a complex and scarred organism, a scratched surface of lines and cuts, worked and reworked in a not always clever or just search for either a living or an image. The saga has to be re-imagined, redrawn and rewritten. Development in other words because we are all now living in the developing world. That is what remains and this points to opportunities, conditional openings, and, yes, creative developments in the best sense.

The last image here shows an overlay of aerial photographs of Dundee West centred on Menzieshill. A joined up set of 154 digital photo-files derived from Google Earth, roughly circa 2007, laid over a set of four derived from plate photographs from RAF aerial sorties of January 1953, which in themselves largely reflect the layout of the area when first mapped in the mid 1800s by the Ordnance Survey. The synthesis obtained is no frozen image of human

11

settlement and development. It perhaps represents what Finn MacCool reputedly once said was the most beautiful music in the world, the music of what goes on.