Place is the Space - David Harding, Claudia Zeiske and Jean Cameron on transforming Scotland's artistic landscape in Glenrothes, Huntly and Paisley from the Ground Up
“I think interesting places that have really
strong art schools tend to have really good music scenes,” said artist/musician
Ross Sinclair recently in an interview about Artists who make music Musicians
who make art. The exhibition, which he curated recently at Queens Park Railway
Club in Glasgow, featured 100 of his contemporaries to illustrate the symbiosis
between the sonic and visual worlds.
This probably wasn’t quite what David Harding
had in mind when he set up the Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art
in 1985, but as an alumnus of the course, Sinclair’s observation is one of the
world-changing consequences of an initiative which recognised a sense of place
as being vital to the work that came out of it.
The surge of DIY energy that came out of
Harding’s course has been well-documented by way of assorted Turner Prize
winners from GSA. The foundation stones for a more holistic, social-based
attitude towards art being about something more than what you hang on a wall
were set down almost two decades earlier, when Harding became Town Artist in
Glenrothes. While the central Fife new town went on to become a beacon of
community art throughout Harding’s tenure from 1968 to 1978, earlier
initiatives, such as Craigmillar Festival Society, which existed in south
Edinburgh between 1962 and 2002, similarly transformed the social landscape
occupied by a population previously shunted out of sight and starved of civic
and artistic facilities.
Since then, property developers and local
authorities have conspired to rip the hearts out of urban centres by using
so-called creative hubs or – even worse – ‘cultural quarters’ - as a short-cut
to gentrification. The trickle-down effect of the Glenrothes and Craigmillar
initiatives, however, has seen an increasing awareness of community-led
projects that put their immediate environment at their heart. Since 1995, a
group of residents in the Aberdeenshire town of Huntly formed Deveron Arts (now
Deveron Projects) to use the town itself as a venue. Paisley, meanwhile, may
have lost out in its bid to become UK City of Culture 2021, but looks set to
continue with a rejuvinated sense of self-determination and civic pride at a
grassroots level.
“People have different expectations of Paisley
now, and Paisley has different expectations of itself,” says Jean Cameron,
outgoing project director for Paisley 2021.”
Something similar is true of Deveron Projects.
“It’s put the town on the map,” says Claudia
Zeiske, one of its co-founders, “and by linking the local to the global, it
allows people to look at Huntly with fresh eyes, and with a new sense of
identity and community.”
Harding praises both initiatives, recognising
their very different forms of transformative power, just as Glasgow’s tenure as
European Capital of Culture in 1990 opened the city up in a way that the
closure of the Arches marked the end of such enlightened civic thinking. This
is a long way from Harding’s time in Glenrothes, when, care of Glenrothes
Development Corporation, he sat on the local planning committee, working with
architects and builders to create a series of sculptural interventions,
including his famed hippopotamus series.
“A lot of people in Glenrothese felt an
ownership of the work,” he says today. “That’s why what’s happened in Huntly is
so special. To come up with the idea of the town as the venue is so holistic.”
While predatory developers hover over areas such
as Leith intent on monetising grassroots culture, in terms of progressive
thinking regarding the arts as part of everyday activity, the ongoing presence
of Deveron Projects, the legacy of Paisley 2021 and Harding’s time in
Glenrothes suggests that the wheel appears to have come full circle.
This is evident from works such as Forest Pitch,
Craig Coulthard’s 2012 project which hosted a day of football games on land in
the Borders where trees planted marking the lines of a football pitch are still
growing. It was significant too that the 2015 Turner Prize, hosted in Glasgow,
was won by Assemble, the young arts and design collective who regenerated a
group of run-down houses in Liverpool’s Toxteth district.
All of this goes back further than Harding’s
work, to environmentally inclined German iconoclast Joseph Beuys’ assorted
Scottish interventions. These in part inspired 7,000 Oaks, in which Beuys
planted seeds for 7,000 oak trees in Kassel, Germany. Coming full circle,
Deveron Arts responded by commissioning artist Caroline Wendling to create a
new piece of land art.
Harding’s own work was discussed at a recent
conference at North Edinburgh Arts, and looks set to feature at events in this
year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival.
As artists help reclaim the landscape of public
art, perhaps town planners, culture committees and artists themselves should
pay heed to Harding’s final words in Glenrothes Town Artist, a booklet published in the 1970s to highlight
and document his post.
“I can only see growing opportunities for
artists willing to lose a little of their precious regard for the object,” he
wrote, “and to see creative activity itself as the main objective.”
The List, April 2018
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