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Excerpt from
the exhibition essay A Sudden Light, by Colin Glen.
The full text is included in the publication Four Exhibitions:
October 2008 - August 2009
(click for larger images)
‘A sudden light
transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a
winnowing-flail, the dust in the barn door: a moment-and the thing has
vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a
longing that the accident may happen again’ (from Walter Pater’s 1873
essay Joachim du Bellay quoted by Stephen Bann)
Standing
waiting holding your breath for each of the gleaming camping kettles in
Alexander and Susan Maris’ DVD Heather Tea on Rannoch Moor, 2005, to boil
you gradually become aware of the effect of slowed-down time, slowed
beyond the real-time exposure of the video. As a result the ‘composition’
of each image encourages the eye and the mind to wander over the
surrounding landscape of Rannoch moor. The play of light on the hills as
clouds scud across the sky becomes more than a distraction whilst waiting,
but in fact constitutes the reason for boiling the kettle and for taking
the heather tea in the first place. The premise of attending to the
little stoves becomes a kind of preparation, a priming for the quality of
attention that Alec Finlay, at the exhibition's Sunday morning discussion,
poignantly termed 'the act of noticing'. Indeed, the process of becoming
aware permeates the works in the exhibition with the suggestion that the
'concrete' is an experience of the moment of realisation or 'noticing', a
glimpsed epiphany before thought processes are absorbed back into the
ongoing stream of consciousness.[i]
To this end the concrete artwork's formal makeup is conditioned by
its function as a point of connection between the artist and the viewer.
Through in HICA's red-wall painted front room, in front of the large
picture window that frames views of the mountains beyond Loch Ruthven as
they catch moving shards of light cast down through the clouds, Alec
Finlay fulfilled the desire to return to a state of distracted
attentiveness with his high tea installation. In a still moment before
repast, the clothed table lay set with the accoutrements of tea-time; cups
and saucers, freshly-baked bread, jars of home-made jam and willow-pattern
plates bearing a variety of biscuits. This familiar inventory consisted
however of objects which had previously played a part in Finlay's
collaborative projects and continued to hold the charge of those
resonances. Like the Maris’ kettles, the objects performed a role beyond
that of souvenirs -memory-made-object - or the signifying props after a
performance or participatory event. What actually occurred is that the
contingent words and images found on the objects pricked what Finlay
refers to as ‘the viewer’s gentle attention’, to gradually animate the
still objects with the ‘seep of meaning’,[ii] to use Ian Hamilton Finlay’s phrase.
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In a curious
slippage of time, back in the pure white gallery space, the sliver of
display space between the kitchen and the front room, Finlay also presents
his ‘stochastic spills’ of tea, memory stains after the drinking of tea,
accompanied by associative readings into each ludic overflow.
There is an
interesting resonance between Finlay’s series of circular stains and the
sooty underside of each of the Maris’ kettles on the shelves, and a Hamish
Fulton paper-based work from 1995 which bears the ring marks of pot and
tea stain in a concentric formation around which are written the words
‘OUTLINE OF THE COOKING POT/OUTLINE OF THE DRINKING CUP’. The pertinent
difference highlighted by this formal connection is, that where we are
presented in the Fulton piece with the index of an event that we could not
witness, emphasising distance in space and time, at H-I-C-A - past,
present and future coalesce into a kind of concentrated ‘presentness’ in
the viewer’s mind.[iii]
The effect of the exhibition in relation to HICA’s
agenda of assessing the place of the ‘concrete’ in current practice is to
propose that the concrete is an experience more than the production of
forms or adherence to style.[iv] The experience is a manifestation of a moment where the inner space
of the imagination, the anticipated and the visualised, coincides with an
outer, actual form. Crucially, the experience of this connection realised
in essential simple forms, is not achieved through reduction to archetypes
or symbols, but is a glimpsed insight, like that of ‘noticing’ the
movement of light on a distant hillside. Experience becomes significant
through such an ‘act of noticing’, as if the light were coming from within
the viewer themselves
[i] Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History,
written in the Spring of 1940, suggested that ‘the past can be
seized as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be
recognized and never seen again.’ In this sense the ‘concrete’
experience is an attempt to ‘articulate the past historically’,
condensed for Benjamin in the specific, the crystalline, which
preserves the moment as with a photograph and breaks with tradition as
the flow of history. ‘It means to seize hold of a memory as it
flashes up…’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt,
Fontana, 1970.
[ii] In a letter to the collector Ronnie Duncan in 1976 outlining
the thinking behind the anteboreum sundial Ian Hamilton Finlay
says ‘…any projected work will not be a matter of what people
call ‘visual impact’ (horrid phrase) but will have a slow
excitement, a kind of seep (as it were) of meaning, and not a sudden
wham.’
[iii] This ‘presentness’ is further confirmed by the recalled
memory of the Heather Tea on Rannoch Moor DVD, which in
conjunction with the recreation of the Beuysian waistcoat as a
fly-fishing vest, The Friday Object series, provides that rare
experience of an awareness of the point of view of the art
documentation photographer. Where one initially thinks of an
‘objective’ camera left to run on a tripod, the bodily presence
implicated by the hanging empty vest, fishing rod and tin of trout
flies stimulates an empathy with the photographer watching the scene,
registering the play of light.
[iv] It is appropriate here to refer to the famous quote by Ian
Hamilton Finlay in a letter to Pierre Garnier in 1963, discussing the
significance of the term ‘concrete’, ‘… it comes back, after each
poem, to a level of ‘being’, to an almost physical intuition of the
time, or of a form…to which I try to be ‘true’. Just so, ‘concrete’
began for me with the extraordinary (since wholly unexpected) sense
that the syntax I had been using, the movement of language in
me, at a physical level, was no longer there - so it had to be
replaced with something else, with a syntax and movement that would be
true to the new feeling…’
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