Visual Art OUTSIDE THE FESTIVALS
‘THE IDEA OF COMMUNITY HAS BEEN APPROPRIATED AND USED IN AN IDEOLOGICAL WAY’ Hitlist THE BEST EXHIBITIONS *
✽✽ Chicks on Speed: Don’t Art, Fashion, Music Last chance to catch this typically outrageous show by the globe- spanning riot grrl art provocateurs. Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 8 Aug. ✽✽ Scott Myles: Elba Stunning collection of accompalished silver and black prints from the Dundonian performative artist. Glasgow Print Studio, until Sun 15 Aug. ✽✽ Henry Coombes: Magic Towards Your Face The artist returns to his alma mater with this new film exploring the act of creation and putting together an exhibition. Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, until Sat 28 Aug. ✽✽ Hat Trick: Recoat Third Birthday Exhibition The Glasgow gallery specialising in street art, graffiti, photography and illustration reaches a ripe old age. See picture caption, page 125. Recoat Gallery, Glasgow, until Sun 29 Aug. ✽✽ Jimmie Durham: Universal Miniature Golf Fascinating response to his environment by the American sculptor and Civil Rights activist. Glasgow Sculpture Studios, until Sat 4 Sep. ✽✽ Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880–1900 The work of the pioneering Scottish and international artists of the late 1800s comes into focus in this hugely popular exhibition. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, until Mon 27 Sep. ✽✽ Simon Yuill: Fields, Factories and Workshops The artist presents a series of works exploring communal ownership and representation and the role of history in forming identity. See preview, left. CCA, Glasgow, Sat 7 Aug–Sat 18 Sep.
Lie of the land
Neil Cooper talks to Simon Yuill, whose solo exhibition explores the relationship between space, community and politics
History doesn’t always tell the truth. Official records invariably have an agenda and, as the line of inquiry in Simon Yuill’s Fields, Factories and Workshops solo show makes clear, there is more than one way to tell a story.
‘I’m looking at forms of self-organisation within communities,’ he says. ‘You get a lot of cultural archives with lots of legal documentation, but we’re developing our own archive, which has more anecdotal stuff in it. We’re trying to bridge the terrain between personal expression and official records.’ There are three strands to Fields, Factories and Workshops: ‘Stackwalker’ juxtaposes the experiences of crafting communities in the West of Scotland with those of migrant workers in the North East. ‘New Commons – Field Reports’ looks at a housing estate on formerly common land that became the inspiration for Thomas Hardy’s fictional Egdon Heath.
It is perhaps ‘Pollok Free State’, however, that remains most emotive to the exhibition’s landscape. Here, Yuill returns to the territory of ‘Given to The People’, originally commissioned for the 2008 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. The film charted the long-term environmental protest in the early 1990s that attempted to prevent the building of the M77 motorway through Pollok Country Park, cutting off an adjacent housing estate from what was then the largest urban green space in Europe. The protest, which involved protesters living in tree houses, ended after the bailiffs evicted residents in 1995. By that time, a real-life community had grown up around the activism. ‘Pollok Free State’ is a full
124 THE LIST 5–12 Aug 2010 5–12 Aug 2010
six hours of unedited footage in an attempt to create a pure document, free of any mediated narrative. All three works in different ways reclaim a history of dissent and direct action some people would rather pretend hadn’t happened. ‘A lot of people in Glasgow know about the Pollok Free State,’ Yuill points out, ‘but it’s not officially acknowledged.’
Alongside the main exhibition, a series of accompanying films and events aims to highlight the connections between documentation of communities and an oral folk culture. Yuill cites the folk-song collecting of Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson as influences on his explicitly social practice. Much of Yuill’s work ties in too with a resurgence of grassroots activity that in spirit dates back to the mid- 1980s via initiatives such as Workers City and the ‘Self Determination and Power’ event that brought Noam Chomsky to the Pearce Institute in Govan in January 1990.
Twenty years on, the new government has just announced its ‘Big Society’. With public spending about to be slashed, however, Cameron’s catch-all attempt at community spirit is fooling no one.
‘The early community arts movement is really interesting,’ says Yuill, ‘but it became completely distorted, and the idea of community has been appropriated and used in an ideological way. But people are seeing through that now, and are hopefully starting to think about what community really means.’
Simon Yuill: Fields, Factories and Workshops, CCA, Glasgow, Sat 7 Aug–Sat 18 Sep.