I film a lot wherever I am so both films have parts shot in Scotland, Africa or the Caribbean, and they’re meant to create these linkages between these places, but also to try to speak about refuge. Is it possible to even have refuge? I am still haunted by the idea of these people left […]
In a similar gesture, Douglas Gordon’s Under Darkness, Between Shadows (2000), hovered over the city. I first heard rumours of this work in the 1990s, and included it in Justified Sinners (co-edited with Ross Birrell, 2002), an anthology surveying the archaeology of Scottish counter-culture, of which Gordon’s darkness marked an endpoint. ‘Under Darkness, Between Shadows’ is a proposal to […]
Architectural ruins and dematerialised art objects share their sense of potential with the archaeological traces of dùn (fort), suidhe (seats), temples, cup-and-ring marked rocks and shieling. These dark relics have offered poets and artists mytho-poetic conspectus to conjure new-and-yet-older Scotlands. For instance, the landscape installations, performances and projections created by Angus Farquhar’s NVA are ambitious projects that riff off […]
These days we meet and talk in underground chambers, beneath the ruins of our former institutions; all we have left are our human resources…[C]atastrophes do not mean the end of the human needs embodied by museums, even if we do not use that name. What matters is collective memory: not only the memories of experts […]
It never felt so goodIt never felt so rightAnd we were glowing likeA metal on the edge of a knife – Meatloaf ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ (1977) Two spreads from the same book Two duets from the same invocation: Peter Morin (1:15:07) and Aaron; Jacques Coursil and Marque Gilmore (8:26:45)
Yes, I’m back and I come bearing a story. He, my librarian (who, to be clear, is definitely not the hero here), was in Athens, at his second day at documenta 14. He is at EMST, in the gallery shared by the colorful grid paintings of Stanley Whitney and the reddened column of Tracey Rose […]
If I admire, or even excuse, a brutal act committed two thousand years ago, it means that my thought, today, is lacking in the virtue of humanity. – Simone Weil ‘The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism’, in Simone Weil: Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1962) p. 133, quoted in […]
Some of my memories pin to a minute of love on a big screen in an imagined future, or broken open when the sax solo of “Careless Whisper” blows through the communal heart. – Joy Harjo ‘Becoming Seventy’, in ‘An American Sunrise: Poems’ (Norton: New York, 2019) pp. 92-93.