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!
