In 1996 I had made a proposal to the Forestry Commission for the environmental artwork called ‘House of Eight Rooms’…
And although The Forestry Commission passed on that idea, I received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council on the strength of the proposal. The grant enabled me to re-use the Forestry Authority guides among other things and make an art exhibition inside my 1:10 scale model* of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. I then took photographs and videos of this exhibition (called DARK) and used them to make a broadsheet and video which would be published and distributed to every other house in Glasgow. Ostensibly the broadsheet was the publicity for an exhibition at the CCA, however the DARK exhibition was open only after the art centre had closed its doors for the night. In other words this broadsheet/video was the artwork, which I intended would de-centre the Centre for Contemporary Arts and deconstruct ‘Art’ (with a capital).
Apart from views of the exhibition, the broadsheet contained a plan of the CCA showing where the eight views were from. But the video was the crux, and it seemed to have been made by a visitor to the DARK exhibition. From here on I will be writing in first person singular, as if to emulate the commentary of that video…
* see Shimmer 1995
After entering the Centre for Contemporary Arts I found myself in the foyer and looking at this video projection…
The guide says that it shows a Scots Pine tree with its sap running down and dripping from the end of a glass pipette. I can tell right away that the video is playing on a loop, one drip repeating every few seconds, and there’s a momentary darkening as if it all happening in the blink of an eye. But between the blinks there is a long time and my eyes begin to hurt if I try and keep them open. I imagine that time is experienced differently by a tree than it is by me – much more slowly? And yet then the dripping of its resin is surely happening more quickly than could ever be the case. It seems like for me, the resin is dripping too slowly, while for the tree it’s dripping too quickly. I get the feeling that inside the space of the video projection is where a Scots Pine and a Scots Man must meet. But what’s it saying?
Video projection is surely, par excellence, the medium in which to interrogate language and time. And that’s what this glass pipette with resin drips seems to suggest, that with careful looking and mutual understanding, there is a further time between trees and humans to be disclosed.
And as if to emphasize that, after leaving the foyer I enter what the guide tells me is a ‘corridor to nowhere’…
Set into the internal wall of this strangely shaped corridor, I see in front of me a rough wooden panel, painted white. Attached to it is a book…
My guide tells me that this is one of eight Forestry Commission guides to the good Management of British semi-natural woodlands. But I can see and smell that from between the pages of the guide, tree resin is bubbling and oozing. And although this is a guide to the management of Wet Woodlands, the resin is certainly not that of Alder, Birch or Willow – rather it is Pine resin that comes from the pages of all these books. I begin to wonder whether the Scots Pine in the video is trying to tell me something. And why does this corridor supposedly lead to nowhere, when these little books about our relatedness with British Semi-Natural Woodlands are the best there are? Is the language of the books that which is under interrogation? Is it the linear time-base of that language that is being questioned?
Around the corner I find my son Vincent looking a bit confused. He beckons me over, and I immediately understand why. For emanating from behind the book where he’s been standing we can hear muffled noises – someone is in there and it sounds like they are in darkness.
We make our way back along the corridor and through the foyer to try and discover what the noises are. But instead, as we approach a large room called the ‘projection space’, we are met by sounds of a different kind – for inside the room, a large antique cinema projector is flickering and croaking with its massive spools running empty…
As with the video projection in the foyer, there seems to be an intention to disrupt the flow of time and space; and now that we’ve been into the corridor to nowhere, I can sense language might be another constituent of this conceptual artwork. It seems that whole of DARK exhibition is one single work, with each space meaningless but as the context of the others.
Vini and I hang around as people come and go. The sound of the projector spools turning is constant, but they are empty and seemingly devoid of their usual purpose, which would be to keep the projector fed with film for the duration of a movie. And that’s just it, a movie starts and a movie ends, and between those two points a narrative has unfolded. So what’s the big deal? Why does that linear language need to be highlighted through its absence? The answer is environmental.
The specialisms of linear time based worlds have enabled us to come to a position of technological dominance over other things. We can cultivate and we can destroy the objects of language at our need – or even at our whim. But the woven texture of our ‘human world’ is so full of gaps between the warp and the weft of these specialisms – as narrow as strips of film – that they do not overlap nearly enough to stop us from falling through. We must find broader, more symbolic ways of listening and speaking. That is what environmental artists try to do, and that is why they should be nurtured.
So with all that in mind, we do not ask the question ‘what is being projected instead of a movie?’ rather we ask, ‘how the projection as the projector – how the projector as the projection?’ How are they entangled? – that is always the question.
And indeed we are induced into asking such a question in this ‘projection space’, for the ‘screen’ is in fact a very large, translucent still image of a botanical garden. We can tell immediately that the image has been compressed in a horizontal direction, and indeed, the guide tells us that it is a 360° black and white photograph taken in the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh – at a place where three paths meet. This has then been compressed to give the impression that there are three different conceptual paths linked to the projection space. With the benefit of 2020 hindsight, here is my reading of the projection space…
The photograph is translucent which means that light is flooding into the space through its content. That the content is monochrome suggests that it is the form of the content which is to be considered – undiluted by the distraction of colour. So what are these forms – those many trees that surround three paths out of – or into – one space, where sits a redundant cinema projector?
They are paths in a botanical garden, in a world where plants are collected, nurtured, studied and named. In other words they are part of a scientific world that draws unknown things into itself, and makes them known as the objects of its own-most substance – its very constitution.
But from within that body of scientific knowledge the three paths appear for our consideration – for us to walk upon. But they cannot be considered without their meaning, their means of existence. They are paths defined by what surrounds them, which is not simply trees, but the whole body of scientific study – the world of botany which stretches back to the beginning.
Yesterday Rosi and I visited the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, (which due to the covid19 pandemic we had had to book in advance). Rosi’s father had been one of the assistant curators, many moons ago, and he had got me a summer job as a labourer in the Botanics. I remember how manicured were the lawns and the plant beds. But on our visit yesterday I was pleased to see that a certain intentional relaxation of that regime appears to have taken place over the decades since I worked there. Nowadays specimen plants are not only to be viewed as objects in isolation, but rather in contexts similar to their natural surroundings. In places nature is being allowed to take control to demonstrate the importance of biodiversity.
These are philosophical changes which to me as an artist demonstrate a new more symbolic (mythogrammic) way of speaking. I saw in these natural areas the texture of a new pluri-dimensional language that carries in its symbols the very means of its own creation. And now I can see that the screen in the model which I made many years ago is literally projecting symbolism as a linguistic concept into the staring, signifying, blinking eye of the projector.
But the symbolism of this projection is not to be limited by language; for here we see that the screen is showing something that cannot be easily described, which is that from the biodiversity of plants a threefold path arises, from which simultaneously is revealed that biodiversity is threefold.
Three is the number, that is what the screen projects. Our understanding of spacetime is threefold or tri-versal, and to comprehend what that actually means is the aim of this investigation.
My son Mark joins Vini and I in the projection space, and we are talking about these things when I notice a dark entrance-way with a black velvet curtain drawn across. We pull back the curtain and enter a dark space, where it seems the noises that we heard had been coming from. This is the centre of the DARK exhibition. We are fumbling about, disorientated and trying to comprehend the meaning of the darkness, when I see a tiny light, perhaps no bigger than a thumbnail. It is the only source of light and as we walk towards it we brush against the walls, and clatter them with our feet. We are now the source of the noises. Then the tiny word comes into focus. It is the meaning of the darkness, very, very carefully incised through the dark wall that envelops us. A wind begins to howl.
The DARK room may be the centre of this exhibition, but it is not the end, for there is still what the guide tells us is ‘the Scots Pine room’…
This was the large room behind the screen of the projection room, and from whence comes its illumination…
In this room are suspended eight huge slabs of pine rosin, inside of which, almost like insects in amber, are embedded many small loudspeakers. From these is being broadcast a BBC Radio Scotland documentary about the natural history of the ancient Scottish woodland known as the Caledonian Forest…
As we listen to Laurel and Hardy we have a sense of having come full circle from where we started. From the video in the foyer showing the resin dripping like moments of time from a Scots Pine tree, to these huge slabs of Scots Pine resin, containing time of quite a different kind.