McManus Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee
Saturday October 29th
It is thirty years since Alastair MacLennan performed CAN’T CANT over several days at McManus Galleries in Dundee. Three decades on, the Perthshire born artist is recognised as one of the world’s most important live practitioners, with his ever-expanding archive now housed at his alma mater, Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Returning to The McManus for this afternoon commemoration, MacLennan’s new work, SILIBANT MISCIBLE, bridged past, present and possible futures.
Brought together by DJCAD (University of Dundee) and Leisure and Culture Dundee with artist-led spaces, Bbeyond in Belfast, and GENERATORprojects, Dundee, this fusion of the institutional and the independent also saw two younger artists - Rabindranath X Bhose and Hattie Godfrey - present work inspired by the Archive.
In the Howf Graveyard, across the road from The McManus, Bhose, bare-torsoed and sporting coloured scarves tucked into his waistband and wrapped around his knees, moves around the graves, stopping occasionally to wipe the stones with latex. It is as if he is giving a blessing in some ancient holy ritual. This is Memento Mori, in which Bhose becomes an oracle bird on his very personal day of the dead, communing with the underworld as he goes. At one point, Bhose stoops to peer down at a dead bird on the ground, a kindred sacred spirit brought down to earth too soon.
Back at The McManus, thirty-three pairs of shoes sit on the spiral staircase’s steps. High heels, sandals and red children’s wellingtons all sit in state, as if waiting to be reclaimed after some stocking footed function before they step outside.
Over the next four hours in Hands My In Head My Clasped, Godfrey takes each pair of shoes one by one through the corridor and into the Victoria Gallery, where she collects them inside a makeshift three-sided steel room built at the centre of the gallery.
Dressed in black like some Victorian apparition, Godfrey tries the footwear on for size, tottering like a child raiding her mother’s wardrobe, or else drags the shoes along the floor on a string. She clutches the red children’s wellingtons to her face, as if mourning the loss of the little girl grown too big for her boots.
For SILIBANT MISCIBLE, MacLennan paces slowly around the Dundee and The World Gallery in a white suit covered in paper strips. Trailing shoes, a plastic pigeon and charred dolls in his wake, he pauses occasionally at an altar, picking up white flowers and pouring milk as a sacrament.
Something holy permeates through all three performances, with MacLennan resembling some Beckettian priest doing penance, his repeated steps an epic Sisyphean stride towards forever. As a metronome ticks out the rhythm of life, ever onwards, the totems of the past aren’t far behind.
https://amaclennan-archive.ac.uk/
Scottish Art News, November 2022
ends
Comments