ART&RESEARCH

SM: And also probably about 15 or 18 of the sentences are written in Gaelic and some of them are written in Scots, kind of mapping in terms of accent within the sentences which are written.

Klaus Jung: I’m also thinking about mapping or names forming your map of Scotland. It’s absolutely fascinating but what I was wondering now is this, I might be completely wrong, you know, a lot of the sentences present some very strong local connection you know to somewhere where people think they belong. And then I thought of you as a Northern Irish artist doing something about belonging to a Scottish identity: Is there conflict, is there a contradiction? And also on the other hand thinking, you know, identity, a place, is that still a lasting or sustainable way of identity, with migration growing more and more and more? Or is that something more romantic, you know, or fantastic, actually ‘I belong here’, ‘I’m from the Shetlands’, etc. I wonder what your thoughts are on that, have you been working on it?

SM: I think Klaus at the beginning I was talking about that idea of dealing with my own identity at the very beginning of the work and acknowledging that I had chosen to live here for 12 years, I wasn’t from here and I was of a certain age, and the kind of fields that I work in and move in understand Scotland as a place that’s made up of multiple identities and so the work in someway had to address my specific relationship to Scottish identity and also try and address a much wider relationship to that. And I think, you know, moving around the country to meet with everybody and talk to them, you realise in the conversations that you were having with people that that movement, the conversation was much bigger than Scotland and the women were talking about people, even local people, but also national and international and kind of European and world wide, and I think some of the sentences look at that and refer to it.

DB: It’s a really interesting point because I think we get very possessive of the local in a way. I think one aspect of the local is historical memory, of generations of the people that lived in the place for a long time and another way of thinking of the local is where you are, where you happen to be, where I am right now. And that’s a transferable experience, you know, and so I think that one understanding of the local in one situation can be in part, if we think about it as affection for place, can be transposed to other kinds of experience, maybe even transposed to other peoples’ experience, to relate and to understand a cultural situation. But I think in this a wider, more allegorical understanding of what that might be comes into play and I like that idea very much.

Rhona Warwick: Can I actually ask a question, which follows on from the lecture this morning? That if we make the assumption that all art is political, then we have to look at where politics resides, the territory of politics and what kind of space politics is manifested in. In my experience, the public space and public arena for making art is hugely influenced by consensus, and I just kind of wanted to ask both of you how you dealt with this culture of consensus working in public space?

SM: Politely… But it’s amazing what you can get away with whenever you politely ask for something. But maybe it’s a bad way of answering it. But, again, going back to that idea of what is political, my understanding of the political is that its everything. And I grew up under that assumption that everything we did and said has something political attached to it. So the Scottish Parliament was kind of interesting cos it was a very particular space to make work for. But if you make work under the assumption that whatever you’re doing involves some notion of the political then making it in the Scottish Parliament wasn’t gonna be any different. And in terms of consensus, I think I was trying to open it out so that there wasn’t a consensus within the work in terms of what was being said, everything was very different.

DB: I think that’s really key cos I think in Mouffe’s argument she quite often sets up this scale - she talks about the concepts of consensus and census, splitting the terms, deliberately trying to set up some opposition situation, a kind of language game - and I find that really intriguing and I think the implication in her argument was that it’s all too easy to take some apparent moral consensus to take some neo-liberal line. I think it’s quite interesting to set up a situation where you’re set apart, or to set something up that’s a problematic and I think one of the implications of her thesis is to say ‘hey look, why, why don’t you set something up that actually maybe feels a little bit uncomfortable in order to set something in motion?’

RW: I mean that there’s the commissioning process, there’s a kind of consultation stage that the artists has to go through and, you know, this idea of how critically-engaged practice is almost kind of diverted away from questioning dominant ideologies. So did your experience, especially with the Scottish Executive, feel like a consultation, where you had to present the idea, and was that tweaked and was there compromises made?

Ross Sinclair: What happened after that? Was it a competition, or were you just invited to do it or?

SM: Kenny said he wouldn’t do it and it was wrong. So they opened it up and advertised it.

Erik Sandersson: There’s an interesting difference, in Mouffean terms, between the two of you, because whereas you just put something out and put something in motion and don’t propose something different; this alternative map is what she talked about as the offer which that agonist intervention should present. So, in my view, this is the difference between the two of you in the work I have seen today; where your work is much more engaged, telling these stories is the true map of Scotland. And also it’s agonistic in the sense that the first thing that one would have thought of as putting in the parliament is a gold leaf map - in the traditional sense - of Scotland. So it’s clearly disrupting something. And it’s also a sort of consensus thing but weren’t people pissed off? weren’t they angry about not having this gold leaf sort of thing?

SM: I think the people who commissioned it, because it ticked all the boxes for them in terms of all the things that they wanted it to do, they didn’t really care, in all honesty, about what it looked like, I don’t think. I think as long as they could say, ‘ok, it’s done that, it’s done that, it’s done that, it’s done that’ then it’s fine.

Ken Neil: Is that a description of your anxiety Rhona?

RW: Yeah. It’s when the form of production is changed as a result of consensual thinking?

KN: There’s a maybe the beginnings of an irony there. Of all arenas where you might expect to see contestation or civic discourse which is genuinely agonistic, you don’t, you see something which has been cleansed by the processes, if necessary, of cooperation with clients, customers, funders, sponsors and so on.

DB: I wriggle out of that by not putting myself in that situation. So in other ways it means that, on a practical and financial level, you opt out, you opt yourself out of certain kinds of opportunities, perhaps. It’s not as if I wouldn’t do anything that’s sanctioned on that level, but I would only take it if I was given licence to do it. If I had the final say.

RW: But that opt out could also be viewed as a cop out.

DB: It could be, I’m accepting that. I mean, partly it’s a practical thing, because I’ve done a few public art things where there have been bodies of money and committees and it takes so much time, it’s a practical thing you know and from personal level I just get bored. In a way, the reason for control isn’t about control freakishness, or really even sort of the need to maintain some sort of political hold on things, it’s really that it’s easier to do things independently than it is to do things institutionally.

KN: The last thing I’ll say is the most politically dangerous thing I think we’ve seen today or heard is Shauna’s picture, the montage of all the green dots. And that’s a tremendously bold statement that if you care to you can carry with you, literally which is where you made the point, you can carry with you an aesthetic insistence that you impose something unseen onto the world as you go about it and, lo and behold, you have your own kind of join-the-dots kind of personal politics underneath the ordinary. I mean that’s a tremendously powerful piece of work, it’s fantastic.

Minty Donald: Just going back a bit, David. Both you and Ross were talking about the potential threat of the SNP gaining power and that therefore formed a sort of strong hegemony that we as artists could react against and I was just really quite troubled by that. I know you weren’t suggesting that was necessarily a good thing, but I just think the idea that that really creates the most interesting work troubles me, whereas actually dealing with the heavy political structures within an institutions, as Shauna is working, I think we have to find strategies to do that.

DB: Of course, I mean that was a response to a ‘What if?’ situation, saying if we end up in that extreme circumstance, there’s something positive to be gained from it. You know, one could look to other European models from the not so distance past that suggest that cultural production doesn’t die when the money’s cut off, when the support of the infrastructure is less.

MD: Yet it does raise all these difficult questions. I’m also really interested in one piece, Shauna, you thought you might have to include that you were going to, personally, have problems with: one of the sentences from a woman, the charismatic, religious person. What would have happened if you’d had a sentence that the Executive had trouble with it, say it was racist or sexist or whatever, that they couldn’t have as part of a permanent, however permanent it was, work in the Scottish parliament?

SM: Well I had a couple of meetings with them where I would have to show them a sample selection of sentences and I just kept that sample selection really polite and these are the sentences you’re getting and so the ones that were more difficult I didn’t put them under their noses and also they would have to take quite a bit of time to read through every single one of the sentences and I don’t think that they’ve got the time to do that, so I think I was safe enough.

ES: How controversial were those sentences?

SM: They weren’t anything that I thought was overly controversial or difficult. I mean, probably for me the most difficult thing was actually in terms of their proximity to one another; so where one sentence is talking about ‘Black, lesbian, poet, mother’ alongside a Free Presbyterian woman who had a quote from a Psalm from The Bible. To have them together I know that both of them were gonna be seriously offended by that and brings up something I didn’t want to bring up which was about the clash of these. It was much more about kind of knitting it into an overall thing so I think maybe the conflict could have arisen in terms of how closely the sentences were connect or rubbed up against each other, rather than what they were saying. I mean the one sentence that is probably my favourite is the one that says ‘Still listening for the voice of the Ootlin’. The ‘ootlin’ is an east coast term, a word for outsider, and I’d never heard of it before but apparently it’s a kind of well used word and I just think, you know, to have that on a wall of the parliament where you’re saying ‘I’m still listening for this voice to be recognised’, I kind of think that’s quite, it’s not controversial, but it’s actually what the work was about.

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