Helmsdale is an even smaller and more remote community than Huntly. Nestled way up in the North of Scotland with a population in the high hundreds and a history dating back to the early AD years, Helmsdale has a heritage focus on genealogy and geology, and the past is undeniable in this region of the Sutherland. 

As it goes, a museum and art gallery was built in the mid 80s and in 2009, Timespan began shifting towards bridging the past with the present. Commissioning GSA’s Jenny Brownrigg along with Deveron Art’s Claudia Zieske to write a research report for the 2010 - 2013 period, the first set of artists in residence commissioned included Julia Douglas and Jo Roberts, working in contemporary modes of knitting and commentariographing, respectively.

Currently under guest curator Kirsteen Macdonald’s stewardship, the artists from this past weekend of events included artists in residence Graham Fagen and Corin Sworn, along with screenings and performances by Luke Fowler and Wounded Knee (Drew Wright). Notably more high profile in terms of art world credibility, the programme certainly brought in members of Scotland’s art community up for a packed weekend, with many visiting Helmsdale for the first time.

Still from Graham Fagen’s Baile An Or, 2011

The main exhibition was Fagen’s new work, Baile An Or, and the short film certainly captured his first impressions of the place by its focus on time spanning (excuse the pun) through a series of still shots capturing the fall and rise of the tides along the bonnie river. Moving from morning light to moon light while offering meditations on the legacies of war, the film is controlled by its mood editing, which received a short reprieve from its subdued pace for an almost spirited focus on the motions of gold panning. The HD work was crisp and clean, showing no betrayal of a trained eye, but it also exists very much on the surface of Helmsdale’s purported identity that left nothing complicated to unravel. In comparison to The Summer Walkers (1977) ( a documentary about the life and culture of travellers by Hamish Henderson and Timothy Neat which was also shown as part of the arts weekend), Baile An Or clearly balked at going any deeper or closer to the subject of human history as any sense of personality was stripped from the land. While “The Summer Walkers” was complicated by various ethical and formal issues in its anthropological narrative of the travellers, that work as a whole left a far greater impression of a story being spun and told about a people and the places they inhabited, while Baile An Or read more as a postcard snapshot. 

Not surprisingly, while the weekend audience roamed the town like a pack, the number of locals in attendance were few and far between. The void of local engagement in this particular exhibition drags up the persistent question of whether showing contemporary art in remote locations is actually for those living there or if these exercises are simply a field trip for the art hounds?

I visited Helmsdale during my first week in Scotland, and I was appalled by the Ed Ruscha exhibition that was touring through as there was not an iota of connection to the place it was being shown. The Fagen exhibition and accompanying short works by community members was of course far better by comparison, and I don’t know if these type of issues ever get resolved or even reach a consensus, but it’s refreshing to see Timespan juggling these conundrums through an ongoing experiment of trying out different strategies and formulas in connecting contemporary art everywhere and anywhere. 

Andrew Dixon, Chief Executive of Creative Scotland, has started blogging, so I’m definitely not the only one looking at Huntly through a contemporary art lens.

Read his post about Deveron Arts’ Town Collection.

Image credit: Nina Rhode, C Major Harmonica, 2009

Friendly Fire, the first UK solo exhibition by Berlin-based Nina Rhode, shakes you down deep into your internal core, reverberating a resonance that draws you in before it spins you back out.

As the first major survey show of her kinetic and aural workings, Friendly Fire is not a culmination of her past projects via monikers like Ninja Pleasure, collectives like Honey-Suckle Company, and collaborations with musician Chilly Gonzales. In some ways the exhibition marks a watershed moment for an artist working undefined across disciplines, making work that tries to answer her own self-affirming question, “If it can be done why do it.”

As an artist that has not necessarily made work for a gallery system, Rhode here makes a deft impression of what it means to experience our visual and aural pleasures in a controlled environment. Elements and expectations of alchemy and transformation are inherent throughout Friendly Fire, from the melted street bin seamlessly emerging from the gallery floor greeting you upon entry to the undulating sensation of mirages in her combination of motors and mirrors, Rhode conjures up the playful mad scientist efforts of Roman Signer and Fischli & Weiss with an awareness of the bodily malaise.

Starting with a gong, or simply titled “Gong”, hanging overhead near the entrance of the gallery, a tree trunk embedded with a long thick rope hangs dutifully between two large stone cutting disks inviting audiences to strike the improvised gong. The ceremonial nature of striking such a resonance, often done so to mark a passing of time, especially to your neighbors, is here done so to ring in the activation of your physical senses, to send a reverb through DCA’s cavernous space to say we can see, hear, and feel all that is around us.

The call to participate and engage with her works runs throughout, as many of the works require you to manually spin or adjust the speed of light repetition (“3 RAD”). Coming back to “Bin”, which was inspired by the street vandalism of the May Day Riots in 2009, an event that reinvigorated the thought for self organization and socially engaged participation, Rhode subtly inquires into the value of participation on all levels of engagement by casting this bin, symbolic of the anti-capitalist riots, and transforming this object into an art object that once gain fits into a capitalist value system.

While every work gave me some level of joy, especially the soundless yet organ-shaped “Procurator” composed of once audible and visually explosive firecrackers and I fell hopelessly for the alluring siren hum of “C Major Harmonica”, I was actually most enraptured by the artist’s self portrait of “Es It”, a photograph of a round head-like mirror over a red arm chair resembling a body in repose. The photograph is stately, as is suggested by its self reference to a throne, and lit naturally by daylight, which was only visible in the mirror along with the artist’s face in profile and her one hand, which is holding a half moon mirror, reflecting back the image ad infinitum. The photograph is as perfect a self portrait as I have ever seen, as the endless refractions of perception and identity are contained but in a reflection. The viewer is made aware, but only of what we cannot see and what we do not know. 

Nina Rhode, Friendly Fire, Curated by Graham Domke, runs 21 May 2011 - 31 July 2011. Check DCA for further information.

While Elvis Costello has said better things, his judgement against music criticism, namely music journalists, can certainly be applied to the field of art criticism. While the quote is more or less: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to do,” I believe the underlying sentiment is that we are dealing with different languages. Be it music, dance, or architecture, each discipline communicates as its own form, without the mediation of natural language (i.e. speaking and writing) to get the point across.

There is an element to this quote, cheeky as it may be, that I inherently agree with, but I also press, that stupid or not, criticism is a necessary agent to further discuss and understand what it is we’re all doing.

Only, this type of writing, especially in the form of criticism and theory, is often extremely poorly written. While all the comma’s and conjunctions are fine to read mechanically, the writing is so heavily bogged down by a self-referential vocabulary that the text itself no longer functions independently of its footnotes. Criticism, especially when we get into the more nuanced modes of academic theory, is a language unto itself, and so it speaks volumes more to the history and lineage of theory than to perhaps any subject matters that are up for discussion.

I am not necessarily against this type of writing, and I have more patience for the convoluted language of philosophy as there is a wrestling of ideas that have yet to fit into words, but when turned to the topic of writing on public intellectualism and socially engaged practices, (i.e. contemporary art) I strongly resent the use of specialized languages that automatically exclude a public audience.

Every Thursday evening since I’ve arrived in Huntly to work with and through Deveron Arts, the The Huntly Art Reader has taken place as a means to open up a more critical discussion on socially engaged art. One reading is preselected, with a current series by former Deveron arts intern and current PhD student, Ben Jones, the readings have included: Simon Sheikh’s Representation, Contestation and Power: The Artist as Public Intellectual; Susan Kelly, Communities of the Question who Wants to Know; David Beech, Art and Participation; and Isabell Lorel, Becoming Common: Precarization as Political Constituting.

The conversations have been lively, but more so in the vein that we (for the most part) have hated reading these texts, and have blatantly expressed the how’s and the why’s. It’s not that we don’t like reading theory, or enjoy thinking and talking only in abstract idioms, but I would have stayed in the academy if I wanted to name drop dead philosophers like it was going out of style. Coming to Deveron Arts, having built a reputation for bridging contemporary art with its environment, namely, the town and towns people of Huntly, I do not want to be reading texts that position the artist as a rare and special commodity, texts that read more as manifestos calling for a paradigm overturn, and simply, texts that are so ingrained in theory that they have absolutely nothing to do communicating with the public at all. 

Looking through the archives, which only go back to late 2010, I think HAR started out quite strong, but right now, I am certainly less than inspired by the text selections that are tired, at best. To end with another quote, one that I do wholeheartedly agree with, is I believe from Mark Twain, who said (and I’m paraphrasing): “Your intelligence isn’t measured by how much you know, but by how you communicate what you know.”