Ideas of Beauty at Summerhall

2016 has been such an ugly year, it feels like anything beautiful will just slide right off it, give it two fingers, and run away for all its worth, maybe never to return again. But just before it gave 2016 the slip, John Sumpter of the Democratic Camera Club gallantly chased beauty down with his butterfly net, dressed in a dapper yellow tie, suit and hat and placed beauty gently but firmly under his magnifying glass for an exhibition called Ideas of Beauty held at Summerhall in Edinburgh.

In an open submission, he invited enthusiasts, professional photographers and artists alike to puzzle over ideas of beauty. We discovered that, beauty being ever elusive, many of us do not agree on what is beautiful. Beauty then, was traditional, unconventional, mundane, dynamic, whimsical, concrete, uncanny, homely, alive, dead, deceptive, revealing, brash and shy, boring and interesting and even, yes, I am afraid to say, it could be really downright ugly.

Then the public came, and some of us were convinced there was a strong possibility that they would think Flickr sunsets and picture of kittens are beautiful and would be disappointed and not buy anything at all from our exhibition and leave rude comments. Then some of us thought that that this was maybe patronising and not the right way to imagine the public but then we asked ourselves - well who is the public exactly anyway?

In the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, do we have to listen to popular opinion even if we don't agree with it?

Luckily for us, as it wasn't a referendum, or even an election, we didn't. The public came, also trying to get a glimpse of beauty before it evaporated forever, and not one of them asked why there were no kittens or Flickr sunsets in the show. Instead they had so very many different and unpredictable ideas of beauty that surprised us.

And for some of us, some of the pictures became more beautiful over the ten days the exhibition was on, like friends do when you get to know them. I would say some of them became less beautiful but that would not be polite.

If I could pin down beauty just a little bit, it would be to say that the process of assisting John in selecting and arranging so many disparate ideas of beauty on the walls together with Elaine Robson was a truly beautiful process, though by saying that I may be falling into chocolate-box cliche, the cardinal sin of beauty and best to be avoided if we have any hope of getting beauty to stick around in 2017.

Performance

This is a guest post for WhiteWallYellowDoor, an artist run initiative set up by Ashley Amery and Sophy Rickett to provide museums, galleries, theatres and other cultural establishments with resources for families and children. They specialise in creating fun, creative and educational worksheets to help younger visitors engage with what is on show, be it an artificial artifact, a performance, temporary exhibition, or some other type of permanent display.

Their most recent project is a series of activity sheets for the newly refurbished Anna Freud Room at the Freud Museum in London. 

In a dusty room, in the basement corridor of Summerhall in Edinburgh, my son and I are playing a game of table tennis. Ten minutes before, I had been cajoling him to come to the centre at all, as he didn't want to see 'art you like' which, he said, was 'boring'. But here we are now engrossed in a game, not even sure if we were supposed to be using this room at all.

By all accounts, it was a storage space: empty plinths, stacked chairs covered with dust, a glass of red wine abandoned on the floor. We had paused and peered into the darkness of the room, seen the table tennis table and cheekily flicked on the switch, bathing the room in fluorescent light. Accompanied by Donna Summer on an infernal loop blasting from a film installation next door, our performance had begun. Members of the public walked past, peered in for an instant, then moved on. All that we lacked was a title for our show.

Nothing happened much in our performance, my son's school uniform got covered in dust as he wriggled under the chairs to retrieve a ping-pong ball. No, nothing really happened, just a victory on both sides and a lot of fun. No lasting impressions from our under-the-radar performance then, just a permanent synesthetic association between table tennis and Donna Summer for the performers themselves.

After this discovery, it was not hard anymore to persuade my son to come to the arts centre.

When we returned at a later date for a rematch, we found the room had been cleared. But just beyond the corridor in an exhibition space there was, luckily for us, a new table tennis table. This time it was not near collapse like the other one, but brand new and covered with an intriguing laminated design. Three brand new bats sat in their holder and there was a bowl full of new ping-pong balls.

This table tennis table, however, formed the basis of a sound piece, and it had a title, Noisy Table, a collaboration between artist Will Nash and the Build Brighton Hack Space. When the ball hits the table the vibrations creates sounds that are broadcast back into the game. In one of its soundscapes, the ball's touch on the table filled the room with words spoken by Ivor Cutler: 'Creamy Pumpkins', 'Kiss', 'How do I get out of here?' My younger son aged 4, not yet old enough to play, but able to operate the buttons switching soundscapes, was heaped over the corner of the table in fits of giggles, connecting as children naturally do, with the absurd.

The artist has said of the piece: 'People can feel intimidated when they are asked to join in by an artist but they don't even think about that with table tennis. They just pick up the bat and start playing'.

When it was first exhibited, the ping-pong table simply amplified the sound of the ping-pong hitting the table, a nice idea in itself. Now it has apparently endless possibilities as it can work with open patch software for customisation.

May I suggest for its next incarnation, a soundscape of top volume disco hits of Donna Summer, filtered through a dusty room and an eight-year old boy shouting, 'best out of 10, no 11, no 12!' 'Just one more game!' and 'Stop taking pictures Mum, just play!'
 

Life in the Shallows

Its New Year's Eve and we have been joined in Edinburgh by a bunch of crazy sophisticates from Hastings and Berlin. So we start off the jocularities by visiting creative hub and exhibition/studio space at Summerhall in Edinburgh (not to be confused with Summer Hill, the progressive and somewhat controversial public school in Suffolk). Artist Jerry Gretzinger, obviously drawn to the school's attitude that children should be free to play all day, generously allows ours to play and run all over his maps. Luckily the maps on the floor at least are protected by perspex which could be annoying for a photographer wanting to document the space as the light bounces right back but I enjoy photographing the play between reflections of windows and strip lighting and shadows against the maps themselves. 

The new Summer Hill intake experiment with new found freedom

and my mobile wasn't even confiscated

Luckily the curators have left a (visual) escape route to the cafe

An oil spill that you may want to dive into

life in the shallows