Stan Bonnar – environmental art philosphy

Introduction

Welcome.

I’m not sure what just happened. On the face of it, there was nothing very unusual about my life. I was born in 1948, I fell in love with Rosi and we got married in 1968, and we had two wonderful boys, Mark and Vincent. I made many artworks and thought about many things, then suddenly here it is – 2020 and I am writing these words. But actually I know that my life has revolved around a very unusual and perhaps unique set of circumstances, a sequence of moments which only I can tell, if I have the skill.

I am in the process of making this website about my life as an environmental artist-philosopher, and if you glance down to the time-line below you’ll be able to see where I’ve got to.

My life as an environmental artist has taken me from making sculptures and murals to education and philosophy. I studied sculpture in Dundee in the 1960’s; was the Town artist in East Kilbride New Town in the 1970’s; an environmental artist in Glasgow and Dundee in the 1970’s and 1980’s; and an environmental art lecturer at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980’s and 1990’s, since which time I have been an environmental artist-philosopher.

To be an environmental artist is to work with the environment, offering oneself to people and places. That is why environmental art does not exist, rather it always ‘takes place’.

It is natural that I would find myself in moving from place to place, always asking the same question ever more exactingly – who am I and what is this environment? So although my artworks necessarily take many different forms, the underlying question that each one asks is concerning the nature of reality. How are these things actually different from each other?

It has taken me fifty years to comprehend that although we appear to be different from each other, we are actually moments of a singular under-standing – which under-stands itself as this reality of different things in space and time. In this work I want to try and describe how that takes place.

As you read this work, you will notice that it’s comprised of various elements. The spinal column of the work is a narrative that describes my life and art in text and pictures. Interlaced with that is a continuum of icy blue panes containing text under the heading ‘thinking’. These thoughts don’t adhere strictly to the narrative, and are intended to give me space to extemporize or improvise and develop my philosophy. There are also green panes which contain more formal writings and these do relate more obviously to the text. Finally there are also small widgets which if clicked upon will expand to reveal a tri-versal image relating to the text.

1948-

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, my father Felix escaped from Warsaw to Britain and fought with the RAF Polish squadron stationed in Scotland. Later in the war he met my mother Amelia, who was a nurse at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and in 1946 they married.

I was born in 1948 and for the first three years of my life I was a baby and a toddler. But from 1952, I have my first real memory…

After the war, my parents ran a small seaside hotel in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. I remember that one day a hessian sack was lying on the kitchen floor, just where there had never been one before. It looked nice and soft but when I touched it I got a sharp surprise. When I looked inside to see what had caused my pain, I saw that it was filled with strangely beautiful things of a kind I had never seen. I took out the one that had pricked my finger: it was a highly polished steel blade with black leather grip and bronze hilt – a Nazi SS dagger. How this pleasant, soft, brown, hessian sack, lying on the linoleum-covered floor of a hotel kitchen in Ayr, could be full of shiny SS bayonets and daggers with polished leather handles I do not know. But this bitter difference between hessian and daggers is my first memory of being aesthetically aware.

“Dissociative seizures happen for psychological reasons rather than physical ones. Often dissociative seizures are how the brain reacts to thoughts or feelings related to present and past experiences.”

By the time I was seven we lived in the residential area of Newton-on-Ayr. My parents had worked hard in the hotel, and now my mother continued nursing part-time while my father worked as a nurseryman. They had been able to afford the deposit on a bungalow with a nice garden and a garage, (although we didn’t have a car.)

But Felix found it impossible to cope with what had happened to his beloved Poland. First the Nazi invasion, and then after the war this proud, creative nation absorbed and neutered by the dead-weight of the Soviet empire; and since the war he had not been able to return home because of the fear that he would end up in some Siberian gulag.

So instead, the brain of this brave man took refuge in dissociative seizures. I remember him lying on the bed, shaking and laughing uncontrollably before going unconscious. My mother the nurse, knowing the importance of preventing him from swallowing his tongue, sent me to get a tablespoon from the kitchen, for that very purpose.

In the post war years there was anti-Polish bigotry in Great Britain; and although there was also gratitude towards the Poles for having fought side by side with the British, nevertheless by the Fifties they were seen in some quarters as having outstayed their welcome. But whereas most allied forces could return home after the war, the Poles could not do so without risk. Undoubtedly the bigotry was a contributory factor towards my father’s seizures, and in 1960 Felix and Milly moved from Ayr to Edinburgh where they found a thriving Polish community.

But for me in the 1950’s, Newton-on-Ayr was the just the place to be a child…

Me and the other boys played kick-the-can in Seaforth Road or Gerries and British in the orchard. We talked and played football, golf and cricket in the park, and on long summer evenings, we went swimming in the sea. I remember one evening that the sun was just thinking about setting (sinking) over Arran, and the Firth of Clyde was flat calm as we swam about. But unlike the golden sands at Ayr, Newton had a rocky foreshore, and unfortunately this was also the place where a huge sewage pipe emptied the town’s untreated waste into the sea. As we swam, we were forever having to avoid dead ministers (which was the traditional Ayrshire name for floating turds.)

My Grandpa stayed with us after Grandma died, and he used to give me my nine pence pocket money on Saturdays. This was usually spent on Highland Toffee and Tobermory Tatties in the corner shop by the park. But in November we always went further afield, to McClusky’s the newsagent who stocked fireworks. It was always penny or tu’penny bangers that we bought, and the idea was to maximize the fun by amplifying the effects of the bangers. Of all the places you might think to stick a tu’penny banger before it explodes, wet cowpats in a field are definitely the most spectacular.

I don’t remember how or when I thought up the idea for a mortar that would fire a projectile (a bit of garden cane) from a metal pipe. Anyway, I had a couple of bangers left and had found a couple of feet of steel tubing in the garage. I got a bit of my dad’s garden cane and wrapped some of his electrical insulating tape round it, so that it would be a snug, sliding fit inside the pipe. Then in the field I buried the pipe at a slight angle up to its neck, and lit the touch paper of the banger; this would give me about five seconds before it went off. Quickly I dropped it into the pipe followed by the length of cane, and in a couple of seconds, thump! the cane was fired half way down the field.

I had one banger left, so I lit the blue touch paper and popped it into the pipe quickly followed by the cane, which got some way in before jamming. “Och! It’s not so good this time,” I thought as I tried to push it further into the pipe. When, thump! the banger went off, projecting the missile straight at the palm of my hand. I could understand it being a blackened mess of blood and carbon as I ran home.

It seemed that I always had to go one step further than was sensible, and sometimes it ended in catastrophe – like the time I replaced the rubber sucker on the end of an arrow in my Robin Hood outfit, with a darning needle from my mum’s sewing box. I’d seen the movie and I knew that Robin did not have rubber suckers on the end of his arrows, and I wanted to shoot my arrow into trees too. Instead, I shot it into my friend George’s leg by mistake. I still remember him shouting on my father. “Mr.Bonnar, can you come here please…”

By the time I was in year P6 at Ayr Grammar School, my class mates knew that I was ‘good at art’…

… and so, with Christmas time approaching, Miss Campbell had given us the art project of making our own Christmas cards, using the technique of lino cutting. On the first day she produced all these 5″x3″ rectangles of lovely thick, brown lino, and our task was to carefully use the lino cutting tools to incise the designs we’d prepared previously. Of course being ‘good at art’, I had soon finished a spectacular picture of a snowman and Christmas trees, with the words ‘Happy Christmas!’ emblazoned below. A lot of my class-mates were pretty impressed with the neatness of the lettering, and because these cards were going to be printed for mums and dads and aunties and uncles and friends (in other words they were important), a few girls and boys formed a queue to get me to cut out the words of greeting onto the lino for their cards.

I felt pleased with myself that day I can tell you, and it wasn’t until next day, when we started printing, that I remembered that everything in print is a mirror image of the lino cut – and that I’d forgotten to mirror cut all the ‘Merry Christmas’s’ on peoples’ cards. I took some verbal beatings that day.

I took immediately to chemistry at secondary school (which by the way was Trinity Academy in Edinburgh.)

It started innocently enough when Milly and Felix bought me a Merit chemistry set for my fourteenth birthday. They wanted to encourage my fledgling interest in chemistry, and were willing to put up with any bad smells that might come from my bedroom. How could they have known that they were actually kick-starting my life as an artist and philosopher! Well, look for yourself, is the chemistry set not a sculptural thing? Never mind my thrill at anticipating the chemistry experiments – the sheer surge of aesthetic mystery I felt in the relationship of soft blue cardboard to hard glass test tubes marked me for life. It was the hessian sack and the SS dagger ten years on! And look at all these brightly coloured chemicals – borax, copper sulphate, manganese sulphate, sodium bisulphite, and the gloriously named ‘potassium permanganate’ and ‘zinc nodules’. Wait a minute, I’d heard these names before in Mr. Turpie’s chemistry class at school.

Mr. Turpie was a good and patient teacher, and although he could tell that I was not cut out for chemistry, he nevertheless encouraged me. And when he saw that I had bought a book on organic chemistry, he immediately responded by raking around in the back of the science room cupboard and hauling out a micro-distillation unit, which he presented to me.

But unbeknown to Mr. Turpie I was a boy on a mission. I mean I knew that I did not have the patience to be an organic chemist – I just loved the paraphernalia and the sheer sculptural quality of the glassware. I was also pestering the good folk of the Lothian Laboratory Supplies Co., who very kindly cleared out all their old test tubes, flasks and beakers, put them in a box and gave them to me for a song. In addition to all this glassware, when I asked if I could buy some hydrochloric acid, they let me have me a gallon of it, concentrated, in a winchester bottle, which I took home on a No.11 bus. I remember sitting downstairs on the long seat that faced backwards, right behind the drivers cab. You might picture me at the age of fourteen in my school shorts, balancing on my knee a gallon bottle of concentrated hydrochloric acid that sloshed about every time we went round a corner. I got some strange and worried looks from the other passengers.

By this time, in my tiny bedroom I had already set up the micro-distillation unit and attached it to a vast and very beautiful array of glass tubes and flasks. This was to be the beginning (and end as it turned out) of my career as a pioneering organic chemist. Do you remember the potassium permanganate and the zinc nodules?…

Thoughts on being a Boy Scout…

I had been in the Cubs and Scouts when we lived in Ayr, and so it was just natural when we moved to Edinburgh that I continued my Scouting. As it happened, we bought a small attic flat right upstairs from the Group Scout Master of the 13th Waverley (YMCA) Troop – one James S. Spencer.

The 13th Waverley of course was the best Scout Troop in Edinburgh, and I have nothing but fond memories of the summer camps and of our trip to Denmark. Here’s a photo taken by Felix in 1962, of myself and Spencer just before we departed for Copenhagen…

I have no idea what the duties of a Group Scout Master are, but I can’t imagine that they include belting the hands of a 14 year old boy in order to get him to stop biting his nails. Although he had my parents permission, there was other stuff too which they didn’t know about and which I won’t describe here, but which leads me to believe that my nail biting was just an opportunity for his self-gratification. But in my mind I can separate him entirely from the rest of the 13th Waverley, which I loved, and by the age of 16 I was the leader of the Lion Patrol.

As part of my preparations for the 25Km First Class Hike, I was to take the Lions on a short walk in the Pentland Hills, just to the south of Edinburgh…

The plan was that I would lead the patrol of five scouts aged between 11 and 16 years, due south from the Bonaly Training Centre, climbing the White Hill before turning East and descending through the plantation, then back to the centre. About 4 Km. Easy.

I don’t remember much about the ascent, I’m sure that the views of Edinburgh to the north were just grand. All that is etched in my memory is the five of us capering about on the descent through the plantation (or so we thought) when suddenly we saw a man further down the hill. He seemed to be a soldier and in his hand he was waving a red flag. He was running up the hill towards us shouting, “You idiots, you’re walking down the middle of the firing range!” In our fooling about I hadn’t noticed the ‘KEEP OUT’ signs and the big red flags. I had led five young boys into the receiving end of Dreghorn Rifle Ranges.

Nobody got shot, but I still bite my nails.

Notes for trombonists…

I started my secondary education at Trinity Academy exactly one week late and wearing a lovat green suit – because of which I was given a trombone to learn and not a viola. It was a lovely old Boosey & Hawkes silver plated model which had seen better days for sure, but nevertheless after I’d steam-cleaned the layers of caked mucus from its interior, I was able to produce a squeaky fart or two.

Situated at the end of the first floor corridor – as far away from other classrooms as possible was the tiny room of Mr. Miller, the brass instruments teacher. He was a crusty old gentleman, whose evening job was to play in the orchestra pit of the Kings Theatre. I remember that during my trombone lessons he chain-smoked Capstan Full Strength cigarettes, and although I knew where he was as he shouted at me for not practising enough, by the end of the lessons it was difficult to see him or the sheet-music through the smoke. Nevertheless, I stuck with the trombone because it got me out of history class, eventually becoming third trombone in the Edinburgh Secondary Schools Orchestra.

Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ has a number of fanfares, in which the brass section is seriously exposed… with nowhere for an un-practised and therefore clueless trombone to hide. And as if this wasn’t enough, on the day of the big concert with no less an eminence than the Queen Mother in the audience, the three trombonists were to be sitting on a raised stage at the rear of the orchestra. I was so terrified that not one note could I produce. I mimed the fanfare.

I have only ever once played in an actual rugby match …

Although the first fifteen of Trinity Academy played many games of rugby during my time (that’s me sitting third from the right) only once did we ever play an actual game of rugby football – a match so perfect, between two teams so perfectly matched, that for a few moments in 1967, the game of rugby was revealed as a sublime entity.

It’s not important to say who the other team were – they were just like us, fifteen different characters cast in a uniform passed from generation to generation. What is important is that on that bright Spring morning it didn’t take long for us to sense that something special was happening: the competitive value of the game receded as each team was mysteriously choreographed by the other to understand the very idea of rugby.

1967-

At Trinity Academy I had shown such an obvious aptitude for art in the chemistry class…

…that in 1967 I applied for Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, and was very lucky to be accepted. Rosi and I had met at school, and in 1968 our son Mark was born…

This photograph was taken in the front room of our third floor flat on Broughty Ferry Road, Dundee. The room had a huge bay window made of of curved glass, and if you imagine looking round to the right you’ll have a great view over the River Tay. Admittedly the giant gas works gasometer is right in the way, but cast your mind’s eye over there across the ship yards and you’ll see the river sparkling silver in the morning sun.

But the water overflowing from the shared toilet on the half landing was a worry and wading upstairs through cascading sewage while carrying a baby is not good. But as with all dilapidated Victorian tenements, by the time hard-up students move in, you might tell that it’ll only be a matter of a few years before they’re followed by bulldozers. And so it is that our flat with it’s beautiful bay window is no more. But the arms of the figures in the painting on the wall behind us show an early attempt of mine to describe time as a series of spatial moments.

thinking…

if quantum entanglement means that we are a singularity …if space and time are merely the way we understand things …then what exactly is a moment?

I now comprehend it as the dynamic relatedness that constitutes a thing – an under-standing…

If we are one …then I am writing this text as you who are reading it as me …we are each in critical obligation to the other for our very existence as this thing …this moment of under-standing. But we don’t just under-stand each other …our under-standing is not a binary thing; …there is always yet the other of our mutual under-standing …in this case, the thing we read and write …which also under-stands us as itself. If all this is the case …then the moment of understanding which we name ‘thing’ is always a threefold symmetry …in other words a tri-verse.

There are other places too, which once were but are no more, like the Tavern where the students and lecturers drank.

…through the swing doors past the snugs …say hello to Bert the barman and thank him for loaning you his Rover 3.5 litre yesterday …say hello to friends warming themselves by the roaring fire …order a pint and head towards the small back room where the boys are playing darts.

Say hello to Nigel (that’s a twice life-size sculpture you did of him …architect of the red hair) …Eunice, Jim, Louis and him have just finished setting up the gear …plug your home made bass guitar into the tiny AC30 valve amplifier. It’s going to be a good night. Just one problem …who’s going to be brave enough to plug it all into the old brass light socket on the wall? …it can’t be you after what Mr. Turpie said when you tried to make a 240v electromagnet and almost burnt the house down …and it can’t be Nige ’cause he hates electrics anyway. Fortunately Eunice has a stout heart and we get under way with Sunshine of your Love.

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art had a very rich social life – it was like being in a family; and every year in December we had a ball called ‘The Revels’…

In 1968, Pink Floyd played at the Revels and Louis and I, because we were sculptors, had been given the task of designing and building the set for their performance. Louis had been making sculptures using geometric forms and was particularly interested in the optical characteristics of the rhombohedron…

So we decided to base the design for the set on rhombohedrons, and I suggested that the faces be painted with simple primary colours red, blue and yellow. The idea was that when the spotlights changed colour, the effect would be pretty psychedelic! And if we could use an electronic device called a sound-light modulator, which ‘heard’ the sounds, and changed the colours of the spotlights in time to the music, then the set would be complete.

Come the night of the Revels, Pink Floyd were playing and everybody was dancing. I think Louis and I were propping up the bar, congratulating ourselves on a job well done, when just then somebody ran up shouting that the sound-light modulator had blown a fuse and that the lights had stuck on blue. So we ran to behind the stage, and between us took turns of switching on and off all the different spots manually, changing the set’s lighting in time to the music – or as best we could manage at that stage.

That was in 1968, and you can see from the computer reconstruction in the video what our set looked like. That was ten years before the release of Pink Floyd’s album ‘The Wall’ – from which the video music is taken.

(I’m saying nothing!)

I made that portrait of Nigel in third year, and it represents the more traditional aspects of the sculpture course at that time. But my passion was space and how to describe its beauty as moments of time…

This piece was in my degree show in 1972. It describes 14 moments in the form of an aluminium sphere moving through space, and although this is an old photograph, you can maybe make out the movement’s subtle curves as the sphere approaches and departs the moment of closest proximity to the hessian covered floor. It is the hessian and polished metal of my childhood all over again, and to me the moment of the sphere’s closest proximity to the floor is one of agonizing beauty.

But that’s not where the story begins or ends. It was one of the aims of the sculpture course that students should learn some of the techniques of hot metal casting, and so with lecturer Chalky’s help I made sand moulds from a plastic ball, and we cast the 14 aluminium spheres. After interminable polishing each was ready for suspending in space using fine nylon fishing line.

But I couldn’t leave it that simple, could I? …I had to somehow get the spheres to twitch in order, to give the idea that it was one sphere travelling through space and not just a bunch of nicely arranged balls. But how to achieve that?

Instead of simply suspending the spheres by stapling the nylon line to the ceiling, I made a curved GRP channel about 6cm x 2cm and attached that to the ceiling. Each nylon line passed through a tiny hole in the bottom of the channel and inside was attached to a steel nut. I wound 50m of thin copper wire round each of the bolts to make 14 small electromagnets – which I attached to the channel, just above the steel nuts from which the spheres were suspended.

I led the wires from each electromagnet along the channel and thence to a terminal box situated some way away from the sculpture. Inside this little box was a contraption I devised which delivered a short burst of electricity to each electromagnet in turn – at which moment the sphere gave a slight twitch!

The photograph and the video show more or less what it looked like, and in my degree show it did work well. Then some weeks after the show I was invited to display the work in the Scottish Young Contemporaries exhibition in Edinburgh. I set it up and it was working fine until someone thought it was some kind of ‘Newtons Cradle’ (which had just come onto the market at that time). I don’t know how they thought that, but the result was a tangled mess and I had to remove the work.

thinking…

Reiterating the moment of under-standing …or reiteration of the thing … our triverse of under-standing …you the sphere, you the reader and me the writer …this momentary thing we are …which is actually real …reiteration of a threefold symmetry. But I was naive to see the flow of time so literally … to make the spheres twitch from the beginning to the end. The agonizing beauty of the moment of closest proximity to the floor is the present moment …the moment as which the metal sphere presents itself to the hessian to become our thing of under-standing. All the other spheres are mere ripples in an interference wave of under-standing, manifesting as the present moment.

Continuing on the theme of time and space, another sculpture from my degree show in 1972…

Inside a room, a 1m cube of welded copper is suspended from the four corners of the ceiling. Inside the copper cube is suspended a smaller cube of patinated bronze, inside of which are suspended five Airfix Fokker triplanes (1:72 scale).

In this piece, as with the spheres of the previous work, I was trying to describe the agonizing beauty of the present moment – as five triplanes suspended relative to a cube expanding.

thinking…

It seems to me now that there is a huge difference between the detailed precision of the Airfix models and the nebulous expansion of the cube … even although the geometry of the environment is exact …the precise moment of threefold under-standing …beautiful as the very be-coming real thing …agonizingly beautiful because it actually-is our very ownmost constitution with alterity …as this present moment.

But by 1972 I was already an environmental artist (even although the term ‘environmental art’ was not known to us) and intuitively I didn’t want to restrict my degree show to the confines of the sculpture department…

The photograph above shows two of my friends and I standing in a beech wood situated between Perth and Dundee. Above our heads a number of orange, expanded polystyrene sheets are suspended from the trees. Prior to the physical construction of the work, my friends and I had got hold of a brand new state-of-the-art Akai 4000D reel-to-reel tape recorder and about a gallon of wine, and together we recorded ourselves getting sounds out of just about anything we could find – spoons, rulers, paper & comb, voice and guitar. This sophisticated piece of equipment allowed us to mess about with the sounds – slowing them, giving echo, reverb and also looped reiterations. During the exhibition, these sounds were played through Tannoy speakers secreted in the beech wood. Long ago I lost the tape that we made, but the excellent soundtrack by Vincent Bonnar gives an idea of what it was like. Looking at the artwork now, nearly fifty years later, I can’t believe that the whole thing was not blown away in a gale.

thinking…

in what context …what environment of under-standing do we use the term ‘reiteration of the moment’? …in other words …what does reiteration of the moment actually mean? But before trying to answer that conundrum, we must posit this … that when we say ‘actually’ relative to anything, we are indeed referring to an environment of under-standing …as the constituency of meaning for all realities.

We are not ashamed to ask and re-ask the question, ‘What is the momentary thing we understand?’ …because that is our reality of things in time and space. But the question cannot be answered in existential terms, because to do so would be to limit all under-standing to our mere understanding of reality as things in time and space.

The answer to the question, ‘What is this real thing we understand in this moment?’ is indeed the question, ‘How do we actually under-stand as this momentary thing?’

So to answer our original question, ‘What does reiteration of the moment actually mean?’ is equivalent to asking the question, ‘What is time?’ and will require a lot of work … but it is one of the main aims in the text.

I have very fond memories of the sculpture department at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art…

The Tavern on the Hawkhill with its Victorian wooden bar and roaring fire, and the back room where we played the songs of Cream, Hendrix, Dylan and Presley was the place I remember most fondly. Sometimes it got so crowded with art students on a Friday night that the drainage system from the ancient toilets couldn’t cope, and if you happened to go in for a hair of the dog on Saturday lunchtime, well, it was kind of hard to breathe. On the night that the Tavern closed it’s doors for the last time, we played and Chig, I fondly remember you dancing to ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. But of all the people we sculpture students knew, the one we loved the most was you Alastair Smart, sculptor, lecturer, mentor and friend ‘Chalky’.

The photograph below gives a sense of what made Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art a special place, for the team was comprised of painters, architects, ceramic artist, town planner, designers and sculptors. (That’s me in the front with the respirator and the welding goggles.) I don’t remember who we were playing, but it was obviously for charity. The ‘ball’ that Manus is presenting to the camera was made by me in plaster of paris – a very thin shell, so that on first contact by an unknowing member of the opposition it would evaporate into a cloud of dust!

1972-

By 1972 I had applied to Teacher Training College…

During my five years at Art College, the greater task of parenting our son Mark had been Rosi’s. While doing this, she had also worked hard as a manager in the School Meals service in Dundee. So by the time I graduated, we were hoping that I would begin to pay my way by teaching art in one of the Secondary Schools in Dundee. But this is not what happened.

David Harding had been working for a number of years as the ‘Town Artist’ with Glenrothes New Town Development Corporation. During that time he had made many artworks for the town (which are well documented elsewhere.) I remember Chalky saying that this guy who worked as an artist somewhere in Fife was looking for an assistant – a graduate from one of the Scottish Art Colleges, who would live in Glenrothes, be paid for one year by the Development Corporation to assist David, and also more importantly to me, get to make an artwork of their own for the town.

DING DONG!

In those days this sort of thing just did not happen. You were an artist, you went to Art College, then you spent your days teaching art and your nights trying to say what your art needed you to say. And here was this guy with a beard offering me the chance to make art and get a salary for it – you bet I jumped at the chance!

We moved to a smart new corporation house in an area of Glenrothes called Pitteuchar. Mark started primary school, and we made lots of friends. I bought my first motor bike – a BSA Bantam, and chugged off to work each morning at the Corporation artist’s studio. David made us very welcome and I did my best to help with his projects, but what to make as my art contribution to the new town? I mean, in the rarefied atmosphere of the sculpture department, I had been used to suspending things on nylon fishing line, but in the Scottish Young Contemporaries exhibition I’d seen how easily such works could be destroyed.

Nevertheless, it was not possible for me to abandon the basic idea of momentary reiteration, neither was it possible for me to ignore my need to make simple, gliding shapes in space. I just had to make something more robust and sociable…

thinking…

…in reality this is just a quintet …a concert of concrete hippos that kids like to play on …that’s what they are …that’s the way we understand them in reality. But how do we actually under-stand with them …as the constituents of a common being …for this is what we ‘common beings‘ (including human) must try to visualise in the half-light given to us by the paradox of quantum entanglement …that things like hippos are not ‘out there’ as such …but rather, they are actually in here.

I am alterity as alterity is me …that is the moment of our common being.

I made a prototype hippo in plaster of paris. After it had dried out fully, I sealed it with shellac and beeswax, and after a further application of blue PVA separating agent, was ready to take GRP moulds from the prototype (using Plasticene then plaster to make the mould walls). In the photo above, you can see one of the mould sections stuck to its rear end and plaster bits stuck to the front legs. The finished GRP mould sections were then drilled for bolting together prior to removal from the prototype form. As far as I know, this was all original technique.

The empty mould was then transported to a small hut on the building site in Pitteuchar. Meanwhile, four internal reinforcing frames had been made from 10mm steel, and one of these was suspended upside down from the rafters of the hut, around which we then reassembled the GRP mould supported on blocks of expanded polystyrene. Concrete (4:2:1) was then poured into the oiled GRP moulds and left to set for a couple of days before disassembly. Then we moved on to the next rafter of the small rickety hut and repeated the process. Two concrete hippos each weighing a ton were hanging upside down from the rafters. We made three more hippos after that – so there was a total of five tons of upside down hippos hanging there the night that a gale struck the east of Scotland and blew the hut down!

But look, we had got this far, and with the help of a JCB, we extricated the concrete hippos from the wreckage of the hut. They were then transported to the site where they still are today – much loved by the people – so much so that they recently became the Town’s official mascot.

writing…

If the task of art is to challenge the status quo and to shake the complacency of language, how is this task accomplished by the hippos? And if the purpose of the challenge is to modify language so that justice might prevail, how is that purpose fulfilled by the hippos? Let us look at the above photograph and imagine that the hippos are not there; we can see that what’s left is perhaps quite unremarkable…

‘just the corner of a house, some concrete block-work, a wooden fence and a bush’.

These words which I’ve just used are so easily said because they belong to the world they describe – which is the same world as I live in. For example, if I live in the house on the corner, I might say that I live in a two storey house with a roughcast finish, opposite a wooden fence and beside a bush. These are the objects with which I make sense of my environment and I don’t necessarily think of them as art. They all fit together to form the world at the corner of the street in which I live, and I don’t normally give them another thought.

The problem is that the words we use to describe our worlds do not sit comfortably with who we are as humane beings. They cannot, for worlds are the means by which we advance the human cause at the expense of others – those unnamed things, awkward and unpredictable but ultimately categorized and subjugated in the dominion of speech. We must do this, we have no choice, it is the way of the world, but that it has returned to haunt us in the cloak of so many environmental emergencies, means that we must try to speak more thoughtfully with the awkwardness of things and not about them as the ideal objects of our dominion.

And that is surely where the indomitable hippos come in. At least inscrutable, perhaps sullen or even angry, they are not the subjugated objects of our world-at-the-corner, to be made diaphanous and ideal by the breath of speech. They are the avatars of living creatures and the embodiment of an idea. Hippos do not come round corners in Glenrothes, there is no predicate for this mode of being – the sentence that would contain them has already been destroyed. That these concrete hippos are dislocated from their usual habitat is their strength and meaning. They are the thing, the otherness which demands that we justify our will to dominate them – the Glenrothes hippos stand for linguistic justice.

But if all this is true, would one hippo not have done the job just as well as five hippos? Well not really because ‘it’ would more easily become the object (of subjugation) whereas with five, one cannot exactly be sure of where one’s attention is to aim. There is no such thing as ‘a hippo’ – and that is the very point. These are reiterations of the moment, and because of that they are not merely sited in an environment but rather they are part of it – the part that creates the work of environmental art. Each has a slightly different under-standing with the house, the fence, the bush and the block-work, and that’s what sets up the artwork to be greater than the sum of its parts.

So what is this art – so important that it has taken the greater part of my life just to scratch at its surface? It is about the nature of things and about asking the specific question, do things exist in time and space as the objects of language, or are things actually the under-standing that creates its own time and space? I think that quantum entanglement shows the latter to be more exact than the former.

Each hippo is a moment of under-standing-with the others that surround it (including ourself) – a moment of justice for the objects of the world. The hippos release us to our common thing-hood – now we just have to comprehend what that actually means.