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This text is an excerpt from
the essay Space Inscribed;
Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum at HICA, by
Murdo Macdonald.
The full text is included in HICA's Exhibitions 2010 publication.
(click for larger images)
The work of Esther Polak and Ivar van
Bekkum at HICA in September and October 2010 showed their understanding of
the possibilities of GPS as a medium. The work is ecological in a true
sense: it illuminates ourselves and the habitats, urban and non-urban,
that we share with each other and other living beings. It is thus both
personal and planetary. Here is the absolute localisation,
personalisation, made possible by global surveillance technology, its use
by artists not so much an irony as an unintended consequence. Here the GPS
tracks become real by imposing them on an illusion, the pre-recorded
planetary surface as recorded on Google Earth. And yet this illusion is
apposite for it reminds us that by the time we see the track it is itself
also illusion. We are so used to these illusions that track reality. The
track of an atomic particle in a Cloud Chamber: what could be more, or
less, real?
Creating
and responding to art out of doors in the Highlands of Scotland is about
weather. In the 1890s William McTaggart needed ropes and members of his
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family to
keep his canvas on the easel at Machrihanish as he witnessed the weather
and the people who lived with it. In 2010 these two artists witnessed the
weather in a different way, but just as with McTaggart their work is made
by human response to the interaction of land, wind and water. The poet
Iain Crichton Smith talks of building from the rain and the stones, in an
ecological metaphor of Highland cultural renewal, a cultural renewal of
which HICA deserves to be a key part. Abstract View built from the wind
and the hills, both in gallery exhibited work and in a key performance in
which continuous rain, far from undermining the experience, contributed to
it. At one point spectators huddled in a damp boat house avoiding the
rising water level of a burn that was normally little more than a trickle.
Framed for us out on Loch Ruthven the two artists launched balloons -
green, yellow, red, blue, black - into veils of heavy rain. Hume met De
Stijl in the Highlands. The rain relented to give a view of bright points
of colour blown in the wind across a grey landscape, each connected to the
surface of the loch by a float, and each sending a double GPS signal. This
performance was drawn out, thanks to the wind direction, almost as if on a
film screen in front of us. And the electronic wind-drawings themselves
were recovered via GPS transmitters, satellites and computers and
generated for viewing later in the day. An abstract view indeed. That
synthesis with the wind was complemented by another profoundly ecological
work projected in the gallery space itself, a collaboration with the local
farmer in which the tracks generated by sheep and sheepdog became an
expressive, enjoyable and informative dance of nature and husbandry.
Esther quotes Yoko Ono: 'Draw an imaginary
map and follow it down an actual street.' Exactly. What else could an
artist - or a philosopher - possibly do?
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