You are my Audience
You are my Audience
You are my Audience: painted tin with leaves and sign, and slight noise coming from inside – Talbot Rice Gallery 2014.
The Thermodynamic Manifesto
The Thermodynamic Manifesto
The participant is a conservator with an interest in the conservation of contemporary art. She believes that conservation is not a static function, but a dynamic one. The laws of thermodynamics which state that energy is not lost, only redistributed, provide her with a metaphor for this more energetic, fluid and relational process.
She described her role as akin to walking alongside the object, joining it for a part of it’s journey. She described hearing the ‘voices’ of all the people who have ever been involved with the object and all the people who will be involved now and in the future which engenders a certain sense of responsibility and conscientiousness. Despite this, the workshop is a quiet space and the voices in a sense are audible only within that meditative space.
The art work was a group experience where small groups of participants held an object in darkness in a large room used to store art works not being displayed by museums. Scottish National Opera soprana Shuna Sendall sang the graveside song from Cymbeline. When she had finished the lights stayed out for a further 10 seconds and then were put back on signifying the end of the event.
Intervention in a Recession Buster
Intervention in a Recession Buster
Floating a not very scary remote controlled shark around an independent bargain store to the amusement of shoppers.
The Fork Manifesto
The Fork Manifesto
Everybody at GMRC is involved in navigating systems in order to reach their goals.
As a member of management, the participant traverses the bridge between the staff of the centre and the seemingly remote corporate and estates staff. Tasks can take on surprisingly extenuated form. It takes a certain grace, patience and possibly gallows humour to experience this unscathed.
I was struck by the participant’s sense of humour and his ability to keep such things in proportion, or to bring them back down to size with humanity.
This manifesto allowed me to reference humour and its mechanisms for subversion and resilience.
The Gift Manifesto
The Gift Manifesto
” Works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies”, a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art”
Lewis Hyde
Production of a box of tissue paper to be used in the Burrell Gift Shop following a conversation with a Senior Museum Curator. Tissue paper was illustrated with images of the curator and her small son. It was wrapped and crumpled around gift shop sales until it was used up. The participant is manager of an enormous museum with a very complex set of needs. She sits in an office atop the Burrell and there is something of the Jean Luc Picard or Captain Kirk about her as she steers the enormous brutalist edifice that is the Burrell into its turbulent near future of capital building and rehanging.
Our conversations were wide ranging and we shared an interest in gift giving both professionally and as parents and humans.