'I'm
checking them out
I'm checking them out
I got it figured out
I got it figured out
There's good points and bad points
Find a city
Find myself a city to live in.'
I'm checking them out
I got it figured out
I got it figured out
There's good points and bad points
Find a city
Find myself a city to live in.'
David
Byrne / Talking Heads - Cities
If Edinburgh's town
planners had had their way in the 1960s, the city would have been
cut in half by a flyover that would have run the length of The
Meadows and across Calton Hill, razing many of the Georgian Streets
in their wake. Just as such a shock-of-the-new attempt at social
engineering was being kicked into the metaphorical long grass where
it belonged, artistically speaking, Edinburgh was in the midst of a
more beneficial form of turmoil.
Art was breaking out of
the galleries, onto the streets and into the pubs of Rose Street,
then a bohemian enclave populated by poets and painters, or the old
Laigh Bakehouse on Hanover Street, where plots were hatched and
schemes dreamed. As provocateurs like Jeff Nuttall, co-founder of The
People Show, the UK's first experimental performance art troupe,
noised up The Abbotsford, such activities became a form of late
twentieth century enlightenment that burst through the city's old
Calvinist facade with a sense of joy that didn't quite fit in with
its surroundings even as it reinvented them.
Much the same can be
said about Festival Promenade, Edinburgh Art Festival's series of
commissions, in which artists including Callum Innes, Susan Philipsz
and Anthony Schrag use the streets and landmarks of Edinburgh as
backdrop, subject and inspiration. By tapping into the iconography of
the original Enlightenment, Festival Promenade's series of
interventions, actions and events open things out for all the world
to see beyond Edinburgh's sometime penchant for staying
behind-closed-doors.
These range from The
Waiting Place, a summerhouse by Andrew Miller situated in St Andrew's
Square, to Tourist in Residence, Anthony Schrag's series of guided
tours, one of which will culminate in a game of football running the
length of Rose Street. In 'The Regent Bridge', Callum Innes will give
the old entry into Edinburgh on Calton Road a splash of colour, Emily
Speed's 'Human Castle' co-opts the Royal Military Tattoo's motto of
Castellum est urbs (the fortress is the city) to inform a
human pyramid that will emerge in West Princes Street Gardens, while
the One O' Clock Gun will reverberate in new ways around several
sites in the city in as 'Timeline', a major sound installation by
Susan Phillipsz.
The result of all this
is a kind of Doors Open Day of the imagination, that offers up a
freedom of the city that reflects what has been going on in the
city's grassroots arts scenes for the last few years. Both Edinburgh
Annuale and LeithLate have focussed on art as an event or series of
events that are as civic and as social much as aesthetic.
“We're trying to get
people to look at the city differently,” says EAF artistic director
Sorcha Carey. “On one level, Edinburgh and its architecture has a
really rich history that's very grand, but its only once you do
things like the artists in the Festival Promenade commissions have
done that your relationship with it changes.”
Schrag, who will use
Parkour techniques to navigate unique tours that will culminate in
picnics in public spaces, concurs.
“We look at the ugly
side of the city as well,” he says. “You can tell a lot about a
city by what it's trying to hide. Edinburgh's a very controlled city.
T started out building the New Town at the birth of civil
engineering, which was also the birth of social engineering. So it's
an imagined city, but one which was trying to entice rich people back
to it.”
While arguably all this
current high-profile activity legislated by Edinburgh Art Festival
could be said to have begun with Martin Creed's marble deification of
the Scotsman Steps – now part public thoroughfare, part living
monument – such activities go back further.
When Angus Farquhar's
NVA Organisation reignited the Beltane Fire on Calton Hill at the end
of the 1980s after spending years with Test Department, his
agit-industrial troupe of metal-bashing provocateurs in empty
factories closed down by Thatcherism, he probably wasn't envisaging
Speed of Light, NVA's Edinburgh International Festival commissioned
participatory spectacle set to take place on Arthur's Seat.
Of all the artists
commissioned for Festival Promenade, Kevin Harman's '24/7' is most
born out of the DIY pop-up events that have proliferated over the
last few years. Harman's degree show at Edinburgh College of art saw
him liberate a heap of door-mats from neighbourhood front-steps, then
transform them into an installation in ECA's Sculpture Court after
popping invitations to see it through the letter-boxes of each
address he pilfered from.
In keeping with such
surreptitious manipulations of community, Harman can't say exactly
what this new work will entail other than that it's a “David
Attenburgh investigation of a twenty-four hour shopping culture.
“I get far more
satisfaction from being on the streets,” he says. “Working in
galleries is one way of doing things, and if you want to be validated
by institutions, that's fine, but working on the street there's no
need to sit around and wait. You've got to take the bull b y the
horns, because you can do something anywhere you want to. Why wait to
be picked up? This is live, and anything can happen.”
The EAF Festival
Promenade commissions run between August 2nd-September 2nd
2012
The List, July 2012
ends
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