On December 30th 2023, I visited artist David Harding at his home in Glasgow. Among the things we spoke about, he told me the story of the poem called ‘The Last Lauch’ by poet and classicist Douglas Young. As town artist in Glenrothes from 1968 to 1978, Harding used some of the pavement and road building budgets […]
When you’ve watched the 14 hours of Exergue on documenta 14 (2024), I think you will be ready to watch Wang Bing’s 15 Hours (2017) as your next task. – Adam Szymczyk message to students in the Ohio State University classes Contemporary Theory and Art Education and The Social World of the Arts, Fall 2025, […]
Dear David, How are you doing? I thought of you today as I was reading an essay by Tom Leonard. It’s called ‘Beckett and Graham’, and I can’t remember where I came across it, but I think it was something in James Kelman and I thought about you because of you poetry path in, both […]
Realized in close collaboration with a wide range of artists, academics, writers, students, community activists and interested members of the public, these projects attempt to ‘think outwards’ from a somewhat peripheral ethnographic exhibition, and the histories that have produced it, towards a collective investigation of the connections, resonances, resitances and possible sites of transformation that […]
So, fellow reader, yesterday’s post was a test. Did you pass? Just because I am not here to accompany a post about a book (in this case Artists and Buildings by Scottish artist David Harding), it doesn’t turn that post into a placeholder. I am behind every post that our librarian types; thinking within his […]
Walter Benjamin ended his life in this small border town of Spain, having crossed over from France the day before using a mountain trail. I visited his grave and memorial sculpture at the clifftop cemetery in 2004. This profound experience led to a work and collaboration with Ross Birrell that continues to this day.
When you made the video from which this still is taken, did you consider pausing at the word ‘DO’? As the next word of David Harding’s work at Rizari Park, taken from a Samuel Beckett poem, was ‘NOT’, could you have played Socrates, stopping in his tracks as he listened to his daimonion? Then through […]
