Artcyclescotland

Teeming with rain this morning, and dark too as I left the house with more of the same for a while now as the winter begins to take hold. It’s the start-day of the second week of the “construction project” with another wave of nearly seventy first year students. Last week began with “paper boats”—and another paper exercise related to the body—as a way of introducing (structural, strategic, aesthetic and material) issues of contemporary sculpture, installation and documentative practices. In addition to all the individual works that the students made, the week ended with a slow, silent procession through a shopping mall—as “a protective organism” for two of the group wearing “constructions” … this organism made it two thirds of the way through before agitated (and comically serious) security guards guided us to the outside through a side door, frightened that we were a threat to the (other) predictable consumers going about there material lunchtime business.

Not sure where we’re going this week, but we started out making paper boats again, and by the end of the day a working guillotine was in development.

I’m currently teaching ‘objective painting’ to groups of about 32 first year Scottish art college students. Each week, over a three week period, I have a different group and they work in the studio with me Monday through to Wednesday and on Friday of each week … It’s the start of week three … The first group returns in two weeks time and we’ll do something with sculpture and installation practices, and I’ll go through a similar cycle. It’s intensive and fun and exhausting and there’s a lot of good energy, but it can be hot and clammy in the studio.

The Musée de La Parfumerie Fragonard (39 blvd des Capucines) is housed in a former Art Deco theatre in Paris—it’s one of my favourite museums. Last year, in Dundee, I happened upon an enjoyable lunchtime activity: I began visiting the cosmetic area at Debenhams in order to “freshen up” using the different brands of eau de parfum in the shops range of free testers. On one occasion, carried away by the heady sweetness and my love for these expensive nectars, I overdid it and became for a time an indescribable and embarrassed pall of contemporary perfumery … (a stocky ape) stinking like the perfumer’s equivalent of a muddy palette, and wishing I could go home.

I now however have occasion to pursue this activity quite purposefully whenever the fancy takes me—in the name of art and poetry, and the scholastic search for truth in performance—before taking a little ramble through the town centre. Writing this from a table in Caffé Ritazza in the bustling lounge of Exeter Airport I’m smelling pretty nice—if intensely—of the combined fragrance of ‘Alien’ and ‘A (star) Men’, courtesy of the World Duty Free shop.

These have been accumulating for a while; snakebites … and this first drawing at the start of the new art school year.

A while back I read an essay titled, That’s How Wrong my Love Is, by Lynne Tillman. (The Happy Hypocrite: Hunting And Gathering; Issue 2, Autumn 2008) and in it she describes how she watched a pair of mourning doves in their nest everyday: ‘witnessed the entire cycle of a nesting mother and father, a chick’s beak cracking through the eggshell … the baby’s first flight’; in New York, in the backyard of a group of smaller apartments which are often ‘quiet, untrafficked, almost bucolic settings’.

The essay moves to talk about how she feeds the doves over a period of five years and becomes intimate with every detail of their existence; how the doves become to a great extent habituated and dependent on her, and how she by turns becomes habituated to them; how she feels guilty about not feeding them when she is away, ‘not doing my duty to them’, but telling herself that there is plenty of food on the streets of New york, and on her return, continuing the habit.

I suffer from the same feelings of guilt when I leave home and similarly console myself with the thought that—for most of the year—there is plenty of food in the fields and fruit bushes around my ‘almost bucolic’ garden for the playful and colourful finch’s, blackbirds, thrushes, tit’s, woodpeckers … I spend my time with, and who visit the bird table near the Catriona’s.

Pidgeons—‘ugly’ big members of the same family as doves—start to congregate at Tillman’s window and ‘greedily consume all the seed’; frightening off the doves and complicating her pleasures, in the same way as grey squirrels do for mine. Tillman’s essay is essentially concerned with ethics, or how living ethically is necessarily a conscious endeavour. She writes: ‘I love animals, I am an animal, I’m a mammal, a human being, I like most people, love many, despise one person, though I don’t want to hate anyone. I am also selfish and want what I want. My greatest and most enduring problems in life are ethical … Not feeding the mourning doves regularly is wrong, but I generally give myself a pass. My not feeding the pidgeons because I find them big and ugly is unethical’.