1986-

writing

I had just finished work on the West Port Toilets Artwork in Dundee, when in 1985 I received a telephone call from David Harding to say that he had been appointed Head of the new Department of Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art, and that he wanted me to work with him there as a part-time lecturer with a special responsibility for working with students on their ‘Public Art’ projects.

It is the central narrative of my life, the one thought that I have struggled for nearly seventy years to understand and describe, the one thought comprised of many thoughts…

environment

… whose meaning can be defined but not understood, because it is what we are and how we are. The theme of this website is to chart my struggles to understand and disclose its meaning. And this is important, as it effects every living thing on this planet. Considerations of people and place are the core of environmental art.

So I was thrilled at the thought of working in the environment of environmental art at Glasgow School of Art, and there is no doubt that during my six years there I worked with many great artists – a number of Turner Prize winners and nominees among them. But that for me was the problem, for no sooner had some students graduated than they were being swept up by the Art World. Yes they were working in places for people – Art galleries are places and gallery directors are people, and so are their rich clients who eat fresh, dark and sexy artists for breakfast – but at that time I wept to see so few of these artists working reconstructively in broader social contexts. I admit that the problem is complex and ultimately societal, but it is also my belief that those conceptual artists who took free rein in the department from its inception, obscured the ethos and postponed the potential of environmental art for working with people at deep levels of their languages.

During the six years that I spent at GSA I began to realize that if I wanted to disclose the meaning of environment for people, even beyond the borders of our existence in space and time, then I would have to go it alone, because otherwise I would be promoting that in which I did not believe. But although I resigned from my position at the department in 1992 I have many happy memories of working with the people there, students and staff.

As I mentioned at the start, my duties in the department were to tutor students in their ‘Public art projects’, discussing with them how these could inform and be informed by their studio practice. The idea was to enable students to work in social and physical environments in the City of Glasgow with the expectation that there would be cross-fertilization between their studio and public artworks. My work could involve anything from critical analysis with the student of the language context for their proposed project, to teaching them welding and other construction techniques to enable us to erect the work and to have it exist for some time in unrestricted public space. All these projects – and there were many – were then criticised on site by members of staff and fellow students.

But there arose situations that just could not be prepared for, like the time in St Enoch Square in the city centre, when I was at the top of a ladder, attaching a brightly coloured artwork to a huge gable end by hammering a nail into it. The first I knew of the police sergeant with the shiny boots and the cap – the peak of which came right down over his eyes, was on hearing the words “Ho you, get down off that ladder!” Well I couldn’t because I was holding onto the side of a building; but the student whose work it was persuaded him that we were only doing this after a period of patient negotiation with the owners!

On another occasion, a female student had made a large pencil drawing on the interior wall of the entrance to the Maternity Hospital in Rotten Row. During the crit she described very eloquently all the negotiations with staff at the hospital that had led up to her rendering of the anatomy of childbirth. Bearing in mind my own status as a developing new man and feminist (albeit bearded and ugly), I found myself announcing as we left that place, “I think I might be pregnant”. And it’s true that in many ways I was impregnated by my experience as a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. I was every bit as much educated as educator. But occasionally it could get quite rough while installing artworks in public space; people don’t always like what you’re doing!

In 1989 – exactly 200 years after the French Revolution, David and I took a group of third year students to Tours in France, where they were taking part in a week long festival called ‘Créacité’ – ‘Creativity in the City’. As well as having an exhibition of their work in a gallery setting, the students made environmental artworks (on a theme of water) for the banks the River Loire. David and I had also collaborated on preparing a work for the huge flood defence walls that line the south bank of the Loire in Tours. The work was a text piece, a play on the word ‘Loire’ – of course the organizers of Créacité knew all about it and all we had to do was install it.

The monarchy of France had ruled in the Loire Valley for several centuries, and it was called “The Valley of Kings”, that is up until 1789 when King Louis XVI  – Le Roi – was deposed in the Revolution. But another significant event took place in Tours in 1789, which was that the River Loire flooded to a height of 6.66m – which is engraved to this day on the flood defence wall.

Back in Glasgow exactly 200 years later, David and I had been looking into the history of the place, and wondering what we could make out of it. Then the whole thing slotted together. The Loire (loire) – the King (le roi); the flooding of the river – the flood of people that washed away the monarchy; the blue blood and the rope that bound the hands as the guillotine did its work. So what did we make of all this quantum resonance?…