Coffee-Table Notes

Action! Time! Vision!   It was fifty-one years and a little bit more ago today that Strategy: Get Arts opened its doors at Edinburgh College of Art with a splash. The latter came care of Klaus Rinke’s water installation hosing people down as they entered ECA’s main building during the exhibition’s three-week run during Edinburgh International Festival from late August to mid September 1970. Since then, the ripples of this now legendary conceptualist infiltration of ECA’s historically staid environs by 35  Düsseldorf based artists has arguably helped open up, not just its host city, but the entire world it turned upside down.    Just how much the palindromically named extravaganza left its mark is clear from Christian Weikop’s forensically researched new book, Strategy: Get Arts – 35 Artists Who Broke the Rules. The book was launched in August at the 2021 Edinburgh International Book Festival, at an event in ECA’s Sculpture Court. It was here and in the rooms around it that work by Jose

Doin’ it For the Kids the ESTATE Way – 13 Snapshots    1. ‘Is it comin’ back next year?’ asked the little girl on her bike beside the 40-foot shipping container in the car park beside North Edinburgh Arts in Muirhouse, where it had mysteriously arrived at the end of May.    It was her fourth or fifth visit to  ESTATE , Jimmy Cauty’s dystopian model village housed in the container, and she brought a different friend every time.   ‘Is it scary?’ asked her pal. The girl shook her head wisely, confident of her own experience, despite the rumbles coming from inside the container as smoke billowed out.   ‘How come you keep coming back?’ I asked her.   Her face lit up.   ‘It’s something to do!’      2.   ESTATE  consists of four model tower blocks built to 1:24 scale and standing about 2 metres high. Uninhabited, these less than des-res constructions have previously been appropriated in different ways.  One was made up of ‘Residential Live-Work-Die Units’ ‘Owned by the Residents, Controlled b

A Grand Scheme   When Jimmy Cauty’s new installation is offloaded from the back of a lorry beside an Edinburgh community based arts centre over the next month, one might arguably see its arrival as a tale of two cities. This is the case even before it does something similar in Glasgow the following month, when worlds might collide some more.    ESTATE is Cauty’s high-rise based dystopian model village housed in a 40-foot shipping container. The construction consists of four 2-metre high tower blocks built at 1:24 scale, each containing what its website blurb describes as ‘amusing scenes of mass social, economic and environmental devastation.’    Built by Cauty over two years, each of ESTATE’s tower blocks serves a different function. Tower Block 1, Iceni Heights, contains ‘residential Live-Work-Die units’; Tower Block 2, HM Prison Camp Delta-Zulu, is a multi-storey high security children’s prison; Tower Block 3, Roman Point, houses a high-rise care home ‘for the old, the dying and the