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I contributed to a google map of soundscapes in Edinburgh for a group called "Drift and Derive (with an accent)" which meet ups regularly to explore the city in interesting ways. I chose to go up Calton Hill, which is in the centre of Edinburgh next to Princess Street. Once you get up there you are removed from the hubbub of the city with wonderful views of Arthur's Seat. With its half-built 'National Monument' based on the Acropolis and once called 'Edinburgh's Shame' as the project ran out of money before completion,  the hill is a place of refuge for half-finished projects and the personal follies within us all. When I first came to Edinburgh, I'm embarrassed to admit I built a superstition around Calton Hill. I made a pact with myself that if I went up, I would move away from Edinburgh. Nevertheless, a year or so later, there I was, up on Calton Hill with some friends of mine who had come to visit Edinburgh. Calton Hill must be far too rational a rock from to go in for superstition, however, as I am still a resident of Edinburgh. A visit to Calton Hill, though, is a reminder of my ongoing ambivalence to staying here.

This time on my visit to Calton Hill, I tuned in to the sounds around me. I sat on a bench with a view to Arthur's Seat and listened to the tourists who were taking selfies. There was a millstone the tourists would step onto to take their photos. For half an hour, I sat and listened, not understanding a single sentence of the many different languages spoken. I enjoyed their ritual of taking selfies, which I appreciated as an investment of time and energy, skill and love. The intricacies of relations has to be symbolically recorded, acknowledged and reflected upon in the selfie ritual. This took often many minutes for each party, and much communication that went over my head. It began to sound like a musical score. Only the English words "3, 2, 1" were woven deftly into one woman's conversation, as she readied her sister for the next photo, of which there were many, usurping her own language with the global language of the selfie. The three words spoken were like a pendulum, ever returning to the same place. In the same way, the tourists were attracted to the millstone, to the stage it gave them, consecrating their outdoor photo booth, again and again, first in front of the craggy landscape, then, turning around, against the National Monument. I began to wonder at the millstone. Who brought it up here?  Did they think of selfies whoever brought it up here, relinquishing the millstone to the tourist's ever-growing demands for their self-affirming ritual? When the millstone was free, I got up on it, and took a selfie, just as I had observed the others doing. I felt at home among the tourists. For me, the tourist attraction was the tourist themselves. It was certainly nice to be surrounded by foreign languages as an antidote to Brexit, insular Britain and small-mindedness. In this way, Calton Hill was rather a haven from half-finished projects and follies on a grand scale.

When I returned from Calton Hill, I mixed and looped the conversations I'd heard. Now disembodied, the voices sounded urgent and haunting from a time and place never to be repeated. In the recording, the woman counts down the "3, 2, 1" against the sound of a kiss, a woman laughing, a man talking in Spanish, and a woman saying 'Holyrood'. Through the recording, each of these ordinary moments become the expectant outcome, the great event, the solution, the reason, though of what is never revealed.

Thanks to Ewan and Michelle for organising.


You can hear the soundscape here, best heard on headphones as the quality is not the best.

Cancelled

Human spirographs in the 'cancelled' exhibition space of the artist Marlie Mul at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow.

In the Dog House

My niece and friend in Erwin Wurm's Confessional (One Minute Sculpture) at the Berlinisches Galerie in Berlin. Participants are invited through written instructions to interact with Erwin Wurm's sculptures to be the artwork themselves. In this case to put their heads into the doghouse and confess for one minute. The girls seemed to particularly enjoy this sculpture as this was their second round. More info on the exhibition here.

Mel Gibson's Legs

Akin to hiring the least qualified and unsuitable candidate for a job, illustrator ZEEL invited me to write a piece for the book accompanying the upcoming illustration exhibition The Rise and Fall of Mel Gibson. Least qualified as I had never even seen a Mel Gibson film before ZEEL asked me. Under strict laboratory conditions then, with my hand hovering over a red alarm button in case of emergency,  I was exposed to the film What Women Want, an American Romantic Comedy from the year 2000. How a Norwegian fisheries scientist/ film buff got into the mix, I don't know.
The flyer is designed by Aidan Saunders, who organised the exhibition together with ZEEL.

Mel Gibson’s legs

I’ve come to Norway to do some research into Mel Gibson and his seminal film, What Women Want. Although the film came out in 2000, and was quite popular in Norway that year, incredibly, fifteen years later, it is still the highest grossing film here. At the Oslo Film Foundation, recent research has revealed that the average Norwegian has seen the film 13.3 times.

Sometimes films get lost in translation when they cross the Atlantic, but in this case the film bound for Norway was actually lost. Ragnar Holst Sørland, a fisheries scientist, was given the task of importing What Women Want. He had made a series of highly successful films of fish for television. In Norway people love to see slow, contempletive films of trains going from one side of the country to another, for example, or rain pattering on a corrugated iron roof, or twitching curtains, all in real time. The trouble was after Sørland’s astoundingly low key film Fish Sleep Too the genre seemed to be exhausted.

But what does all this have to do with What Women Want, a film about a chauvinistic advertising executive, played by Mel Gibson, who electrocutes himself in the bath and suddenly is gifted with the ability to hear women’s thoughts? Surely that couldn’t be boring? It’s true, Sørland was pretty disappointed when he saw this film. He had never done product placement, but this film was practically an advertisement for Nike. They even had Nike executives play themselves in a key pivotal scene. He didn’t like scenes with pivots either. The protagonists in his film were fish of the most easy going nature, so would blow any rampant egotistic alpha male like Gibson out of the water.

As he sat through the film in Gibson’s own private screening room in LA, he had to stifle yawns. In one scene, Gibson was supposed to be sampling products aimed at women such as lipstick, leg wax, and mascara, to get insight for a pitch to his advertising boss the next day. Instead of putting his mind to it, he wastes his time drinking red wine and dancing around his apartment to Frank Sinatra. He even rips a decent pair of tights. Ragnar tries to understand the premise of the film. Why doesn’t Nick Marshall respect and understand women in the first place? Why does he find having a female boss a problem? Don’t they have a women’s quota?

After turning down Gibson’s offer of a part in his latest movie as a Norwegian fisheries scientist, Ragnar makes his excuses and leaves with Sinatra still ringing in his ears. Gibson’s film stinks like Surstrømming, but Ragnar has the film board to answer to. Ragnar comes to a decision. “I’ll do it ‘My Way’”, he says. “Not for me though. For my fellow citizens.”

On the ship back to Norway, Ragnar has just six months to rework the film. In his tiny cabin he works with scissors and glue, cellophane and burned matchstick heads to recreate a film that could just merit his journey. After four months he pauses to look out the porthole, then resumes his work. 

The Oslo Film Foundation screens What Women Want. It is a 24 hour frame by frame version of the scene in which Mel Gibson waxes his right leg. The part that Ragnar finds particularly successful is the four hour scene of the wax heating up in the sink in its little tub. How that scene was wasted before in a matter of a second? The scream Gibson emits when ripping off the wax strip now has a spiritual quality. Slowed down, it is hard to tell if there is really one tone or more, but at times it sounds like a Mongolian throat singer, uplifting.

Pleased with his work, he decides to set off on a vanity project, ‘sink or sink’, a film about a carp's journey to the bottom of a pond. He has also made a friend across the pond. Mel Gibson has agreed to introduce him to a friend or two in Hollywood. Maybe they will knock out some slo-mo films together, as Mel calls them. They even have a working title: What Fish Want. 

by ZEEL

A video of a flick through preview of book:

AProof of 'The rise and fall of Mel Gibson' book ! By the brilliant @rik1p inc @geoffreycoupland @wocco @michaeldriver @mrmillerchip @jontofski @jakedetonator @peterlloyd68 @ninafuga @jimtheillustrator @issygreenberg @daryl_rainbow @billymatherart @iamrobertnicol @middleboop @thisisnickwhite #illustration #book #exhibition #theriseandfallofmelgibson #design #ripedigital #drawing #art #melgibson

A video posted by Aidan Saunders (@print_wagon_) on Oct 28, 2015 at 4:41pm PDT

Territory

September's theme at the Democratic Camera Club was on Territory.
I tackled this from two angles in my introduction. The first was territory as a photographic theme and the second was the medium of photography as a contested territory in itself.


The photographers I showed for first part were Fay Godwin, Luisa Lambri, Robert Adams and Jo Spence. 

Fay Godwin Tethered Caravan, Easha-Ness, Shetland, 1987

Themes of private land ownership are playfully and wryly portrayed in Godwin's images of the British landscape. She beautifully chronicles our attempts to control and repackage nature, as well as highlighting environmental issues. A book to look out for: Landmarks 

Luisa Lambri Untitled (Darwin D. Martin House, #02),2007

Luisa Lambri,  b. 1965, addresses the territory of modernist architecture, traditionally a male preserve. She creates intimate, subtle and mysterious images of details of famous buildings by Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright. The repetitive quality of her series refuse clarity, unlike the buildings themselves which remain static, material and defined. Her work was exhibited in the recent Constructing Worlds Exhibition at the Barbican in London. The catalogue is available at the Edinburgh Art and Design Library. Or check out her website here. 

Robert Adams From What we Bought: The New World highlight

Robert Adams documents the territory of expanding suburbs in America and its effects on nature. His photos appear beguilingly sober, but the 'empty' natural spaces, fragile human presence  and signs of encroaching exploitation convey an emotive tension.  Of this series he said 'The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid, and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn, from the natural world that we professed to love.' To see more of his work click here.

There are artists who explore the body as territory and the politics of space in their artwork: Jo Spence, Sophy Rickett's pissing women series and Lili Reynaud Dewar, to name just a few.

Jo Spence and Terry Dennett: The Picture of Health?, 1982-1986

For the second part of the talk I focussed on the territory of photography as a medium in itself.

The BA (Hons) Degree in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, which I attended in 1990  was the first of its kind in the UK. Photography seemed to have an inferiority complex about being accepted as art, i.e. on a par with painting and sculpture. It became important to define photography as art, rather than photography for commercial or private use.

John Baldessari, Frames and Ribbons 1988

Meanwhile painters were incorporating photography into their work, like the artist John Baldaserri.

Gerhard Richter

Whilst Fine Art Photographers were working to make photography more exclusive and collectable, painter Gerhard Richter was using photography as a way to deal with the increasing mass of photographic images in the world, which he describes as a "Bilderflut". He has been collecting photographs, cuttings and sketches since the 1960s in a work called Atlas.

Today 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, a veritable tsunami of images. The distinctions between amateur and professional photography become harder to maintain, if they should be maintained at all.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Anthony , 2005

Some of the most interesting photographic work being made today questions the role of photography. These photographic artists question the value of photography, addressing the 'Bilderflut', by using appropriated images from the Internet, using new technologies to usurp the idea of the"maker", and revisit analogue approaches using different materials to create negatives and see the photographic paper itself as a sculptural form. In fact these were the themes of a recent exhibition in Berlin called Photo Poetics which will be at the Guggenheim Museum in November.

Lisa Oppenheim The sun is always setting somewhere else, 2006

Here is a link to a short video about Lisa Oppenheim, explaining her use of appropriates images, and her use of new and historical techniques.

Claudia Angelmaier, Betty, 2008.

(And in a reversal of the idea of "Bilderflut", this image by Claudia Angelmaier references Gerhard Richter)

Anne Collier, Crying, 2005

Thanks for everyone for coming to this month's meeting at the Democratic Photo Club, the interesting discussions and photography responses to the theme.

This post first appeared on the website of the democratic camera club. 

Peace Lily

What comes between Picasso and Lee?

- The pale, mildly mannered Peace Lily

The muse it holds in a green embrace

As for the master, it blocks out his face

The poster is from an exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery about the friendship between Lee Miller and Picasso which ran from 23 May - 6th September. The poster was at the Fine Art Public Library in Edinburgh, which apart from having nice plants, has a room dedicated to photography. 

Your Voice is You

Some photos from the opening night of HIDDEN DOOR in Edinburgh, which is a non profit arts festival which takes place in abandoned or hidden places in Edinburgh. This year it is at the old street lighting depot on King's Stables Road, right in Edinburgh's old town, near the Grassmarket. On until Saturday 30 May.