Two Oaks – Dunglass April 3, 2007
Posted by Giles in : Essays , add a commentTwo oaks grow in opposition and complement, like parent and child. One old, the other with only four or five years’ of ringed growth. The older started and continued its life on the shelving sandstone sediments, perhaps unfurling its first shoots from the acorn at the same time as the masons arrived to lay the foundation stones for the nearby collegiate church.
Two oaks growing in proximity and distance, separated by time and the river’s constant flow. They grow on either side of a gentle valley, the older looking east, the younger west.
The older grips the precarious ledge, worn by the water’s erosive power through millennia. Its roots are like the clutching fingers of a desperate hand, searching for stability. A rock-climber, a survivor. It’s as if the massive form of this tenacious quercus has been liquid, the dendritic mass oozing over the stone and then somehow solidifying just before spilling over the edge. There’s no exact point where root stops and trunk begins. Source and existence having merged.
In the clearing across the river, the younger’s circumstance and growth are less complex, as if its start in life were more promising. Its sapling trunk is relatively straight; its roots tap the darker, softer soil. There is, as yet, only a mere hint of difficulty.
The older’s life is seen as a story in its limbs, branches, trunk. Malnourished, bent by a relentless sea wind, twisted this way and that. Even if its DNA were ‘perfect’ its growing place proved a challenge. It cannot now be challenged or altered. It is in its place. As much part of this locus as all the other components which form the uniqueness of this place.
Perhaps its putative offspring will have an easier course. Perhaps the wind will be kinder, less persistent and biting. Perhaps the soil will prove more nourishing; and flood and river will not pull at its roots.
Here, there’s already symbiosis. Oak galls attest to the birthing place of wasps uniquely adapted to this particular ecological niche.
The parent supports more life. A whole ecosystem of mosses, lichens, boring insects, beetles, birds, bacteria, epiphytes…It’s a blessing and a burden of age. It has found and created its place, despite its difficulties and imperfections.
Its roots now bind the sediments, stabilising and complete, as all the while the younger’s taproot searches the soil.
Body Parts April 24, 2005
Posted by Giles in : writing , add a commentThis article appeared originally at the SSA web site at http://www.s-s-a.org/
The recent Body Parts Festival held by the Society of Scottish Artists has its roots in the history of Western performance art which, in turn, can be traced at least as far back as the theatre of ancient Greece – that tremendous flourishing of theatrical art which began around the middle of the first millennium BC. As a modern phenomenon, its origins go back to the Italian Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) who unleashed his theatrical ‘incendiary violence’ as an attack on Bourgeois values with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto in Paris in 1909. Several years earlier, the German actor Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) had shocked and delighted audiences in Munich with sexually explicit performances in venues such as the city’s Café Simplicissimus. Over the years practitioners such as Pina Bausch, Hermann Nitsch, Yves Klein, Gilbert & George and Laurie Anderson have elevated performance to an art-form capable of holding its own amongst the best that twentieth century art, in all its manifestations, had to offer.
The SSA has, since its foundation in 1891, existed to promote “the more adventurous spirits in art†and it is therefore no surprise that this festival - the idea of the current SSA president, Kate Downie - should have included such an adventurous programme of experimental and challenging work. Downie comments that “although performance art was not entirely new to the Scottish and Edinburgh scene, the collective platform represented by the Body Parts festival was a unique and important event which required an immense amount of political and organisational will on behalf of the SSA - with the support of the National Galleries and the Royal Scottish Academy - to make happen.â€
In Scotland, the first sustained and radical exposure to performance art came in 1970 with Richard Demarco’s inspired exhibition Strategy: Get Arts which successfully attempted to present the vast array of contemporary art forms currently being practised in Düsseldorf and other important centres in Germany. Among the artists were Klaus Rinke, Daniel Spoerri and Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ seminal Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony combined, action, images, music and theatricality in a sustained performance which melded Beuys’ deeply held spiritual beliefs with a perceived Celtic rootedness.