We All Cast Shadows Location: Aberdeen

Organisation: Aberdeen Art Gallery (“AAG”) Date: 1 May – 30 June 2015.

Concept: A commission that explored the relationship between the Aberdeen Art Gallery (AAG), its Art Collection and the public for whom it is intended. The 2-month project developed out of long-term conversation with the education manager and after several applications the project was eventually funded by both the Aberdeen City Council but also via the GENERATION programme (which celebrating 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland). The aim of the project was to explore the closing (for refurbishment) of the Art Gallery and moving of Aberdeen’s entire art to a purpose-built site in Northfield, in the North of the City. It looked to make connections between the Northfield community and the art collection (as well as the future collection building) and was arranged around 6 events inspired by objects within the collection.

Key Reflections: My long-term presence is required to fully understand an institution’s intent, but also the configuration and desires of a community. External, short-term visitations are insufficient to work with people, unless there are pre-existing relationships and structures exist.

AAG1 Human Easter Rolling Competition: Rolling people instead of Easter Eggs

Capitalising on previously arranged Easter events adjacent to the

gallery this project used William Scott’s Still Life (1954) –

featuring a plate of eggs – as the link between the Easter events and the collection. For this event, I developed the Human Rolling Competition as a sport-and-art related event that could invite the community to participate in our project. While many participated in the activities, it rapidly became clear from this event that the project was neither critical nor ethically framed, as there was no specific audience, nor did the participants have co-creative opportunities and nor did the institution critically engaged. Due to a lack of time on-site and reflection on concept, the event was hastily cobbled together and viewing the event from a remove, I realise it was done merely to fit into the pre-arranged Easter events. It resonated with Rua Red projects (above) where insufficient time or focus on local communities, and lack for reflection on the institution's intentions resulted in ‘entertainment-like’ events, rather than aesthetic proposals.

Human Rolling and failed art

AAG2 Tennish: a recreation of John Laverey’s famous

‘The Tennis Party’ (1885)

Considering the failure of the previous project (Human Easter

Rolling Competition) and a lack of specific communities, this project used John Lavery’s 1885 painting to find connections with a specific community, in this case, the Grass Lawn Tennis Club.

It aimed to recreate the Tennis Party in a way that would bring attention to the Art Gallery’s forthcoming closure and renovation, and the construction of the new Collection Centre in a way that might lead to critical and reflective discussion on what that closure could mean. The event pitted groups in opposition in mildly ridiculous ways, and did encourage new groups to engage with the project because of its link to something they were interested in (Tennis), but it also revealed the inequities between the institution and the public in regards to how ‘public

participation’ was being framed. What became apparent was that this project was a marketing exercise to get people in Northfield to ‘like’ the idea of the new Collection Centre. Through this event, I therefore recognised the essential need to focus on enacting an appropriate ‘conflict engagement’ with the AAG.

It’s a bit like Tennis. Tennish

AAG3 The Department of The Grey Area: re-imagining the format of the collection

The Aberdeen’s public collection has over 17,000 objects within

in it, from Fine Art to Historical to Scientific artefacts. This work attempted to reconfigure the format of the collection so that there was more merging between these ‘silo-ed’ departments in a way that might provide new subjectivities to how these events relate to the every-day lives of Aberdonians. This was done by presenting a graphic of where/how many objects existed within the collection and proposing that there should exist a

‘Department of The Grey Area’ which would allow objects to move between departments. This would be in opposition to the artefacts residing solely within the domain of a singular dept. and unreachable by others (i.e. art objects would not have to stay within the art/gallery dept. and scientific objects didn’t need to be limited to the scientific museum, etc.). This document was printed and handed out to all staff within the institution and discussed at several meetings and arranged discussion events. The graphic that emerged also proposed an aesthetic link – almost a ‘logo’ for the new collection centre – which began to suggest a focus for the rest of the project.

Restructuring collection policy

AAG4 Propositions: provocations about the new collection centre

Zizek suggests that to imagine the success of something, one

should conceptualise its failure. These digital graphics were created to propose how the new Collection Centre might ‘fail’ in its mission to be something that provides social renewal to the area of Northfield. These existed as self-contained images, but were also used in presentations, emails and discussions to continue to challenge the unquestioned approach of the institution to this building and it’s siting.

Conflictual conceptualisations

AAG5 A Collection of Failure: a discursive and re-locational approach to considering ‘for whom’ this

project was intended

During my research, I stumbled across a medal given to a local Aberdonian who held the (apparently still standing) for longest continuous roller skating (over 64 hours!) and as each event was focused around an item within the collection, this strange item inspired an event about the purpose of an art collection, and who it serves. The medal problematised the distinct lines between the social, the scientific, the artistic, the cultural and strange,

wonderful reality of life. How would the Collection Centre do the same to the community of Northfield? How would it serve them?

This event featured an ‘away day’ to the site, discussions about what the outcomes of the Collection Centre should be and a challenged the institution to prove how the new Collection centre would provide a service to the community. See page 123 for a broader discussion on this work.

Art Gallery Invasion Force

AAG6 (in)Action Points: returning the findings of the

‘collection of failure’ back to the institutional

managers

The outcome of the Collection of Failure event (above) resulted in several action points, and while the Collection staff had been challenged to consider how the nature of ‘collection centre’ and how this project was being marketed as a way to get the community to be happy with a decision to construct a Collection Centre in the centre of their community, the upper managers had not attended the event. I therefore copied the action points and wrote a letter to the managers and councillors, including these (anonymous) action points, re-titling them ‘(in)Action’ points to challenge the recipients to implement the findings of their staff.

The intention was not to demand endpoints of the ‘inaction points’, but to suggest a deeper reflection on the participatory approach, and in what ways the institution was instrumentalising participatory practices.

Feeding back the findings

AAG7 We All Cast Shadows: an event that combined the citizens of Northfield with the future staff of the

Collection Centre in productive pro-social conflict Having had extensive conversations with the staff about the

construction of the new Collection Centre and their trepidation about moving there, as well as discussing the concerns of the community about the purpose of the Centre and how it would relate to/upset their lives, this last event aimed to put both groups in a productive conflict with each other that could unravel some of these concerns, but not be ameliorative in its approach. The goal was to keep the concerns active and not eradicate them, but rather put them into an egalitarian discourse. This event placed the two groups in competition with each other, and thus allowed them to retain a sense of identity and agency, but also develop conversations that related to their concerns. As both groups were also on neutral ground, involved in physical activity, rather than intellectual or conceptual debates, the event allowed for both different perspective of each other as well as a different approach of engagement. These aspects helped to provide new

subjectivities for both groups. See page 125 for a broader discussion on this work.

Bipartisan community day

AAG8 Publication: a documentation of the project

The project required a ‘final display’ and instead of a finished

work that would exist in the AAG, I developed a publication of the documentation of the entire project (with designer Tommy Perman) that could travel to the communities with whom I worked. The publication itself also acted as a way to continue to challenge the institution to reflect on how and why it wanted to engage with the population of Northfield. As members of the community suggested in the final event, the concern about the ethics of engagement with this project arose once the Collection Centre had been phrased as somehow ‘useful’ or ‘ameliorative’

to the community. If the buildings was only to be a Collection Centre without public engagement, it would not offer such a problematic concern. It was only once ‘participation’ was instrumentalised towards specific remits and involving people who might have different concerns that it become problematic.

The publication run was split so that half the books went to the Northfield Community Centre and half the books remained in the Art Gallery.

A document