Another Venice Biennale (the 120th anniversary) and another internationally respected curator sets the scene; this time it’s Okwui Enwezor. For me, every time, this cycle of world-class research is impressive. Not everyone has the capacity to travel (literally or conceptually); therefore the engagement with art and artists from other countries and cultures is precious. When art resonates beyond its edges, it starts conversations with us, beyond its surroundings and between people. In the context of the Biennale the capacity to bring global thinking to life is intensified by its sheer volume, collective spirit and gravity. This year’s title All The World’s Futures is so vast in its reluctance to be pinned down that I’m seeking solid ground before the adventure begins.

After a slightly underwhelming start in the Arsenale, Enwezor is relentless in the inclusion of artists from countries the predominately Western art world has regularly overlooked. I found myself looking for a breathing space in a journey through an evolving story with too many voices and issues to grasp.

Halfway down the Arsenale, Katharina Grosse’s ‘Untitled Trumpet’ heralded its arrival. A single immersive experience created by drapes falling to a rubble-covered floor, spray paint blurring the space between sculpture and backdrop. Here I was transported to a future where the art of our time lay shattered and trampled. Images of Isis destroying ancient temples and the violence the earth does to her self raced through my head. The pause was quickly filled by an acknowledgement that no matter what we try to do, no matter how clever we think we are events and actions repeat a cycle out-with our control.

Katharina Grosse ‘Untitled Trumpet, 2015 (taken at ‘All The World’s Futures’, La Biennale di Venezia 2015)

The art world isn’t ‘even’ or ‘fair’ but I am pretty sure there is commonality in the hopes and dreams of artists working across the globe. Trying to be an artist and maintaining a practice whither in Glasgow or Mozambique is challenging, just in different ways. Regardless, ideas are made visible often with the tools closest to you and the push and pull of artistic communities the world over continues and refreshes. The difference brings a variety of voices, opinions or just things you hadn’t thought of (maybe before the internet).

Looking to the past is necessary to critique the present, but I couldn’t help feeling that those shaping the way we really might or might not read the future were missing. I kept asking myself what ‘All the World’s Futures’ would have delivered, if the same unapologetic research and inclusion of lesser known artists, like (new to me) Goncalo Mabunda, a sculptor who lives and works in Maputo, had been applied to the selection of artists from ‘western’ countries. Instead, the same western ‘names’ from well-worn routes across familiar art territory only added to my uneasy feeling, but maybe that was the point. In my anticipation, I think I expected too much of Enwezor’s Biennale. Although it does feel like a new platform has been crafted and Enwezor dares us to address its fragile condition, however, its identity is a long way off. Enwezor’s presented 136 artists across the Arsenale and Italian Pavilion, eighty-eight of whom are in the Biennale for the first time. To experience this amount of new art in one place is a privilege and the inclusion of more artists from countries previously overlooked made me pay more attention to work I have been guilty of walking past before. Did it make me think about all the world’s futures?

The highlights have been poured over in the art press already. Joan Jonas’s They Come to Us was ‘haunting’ (in a good way). On my return I am surprised by the lack on images on my phone. In the Gardini, I took more images of the spectacle of the new Australian Pavilion designed by Denton Corker Marshall sitting in its precarious setting and wondered what it will look like as a swimming pool in 2016 at The Architecture Biennale. It would be great if the pool could be kept for the Sant’ Elena community, but that’s not going to happen. Will the cantilever act as a diving board? Oh God, swimwear to add to the what to pack-for-Venice-dilemma! We did encounter the best-trained gallery assistant ‘ever’ inside, which, given the building works and a huge install, the attention to detail and preparedness of the staff was one of my highlights. I loved roving about the Gardini but this year my standout exhibitions were in the Collatorale section.

New Australian Pavilion (Gardini, Venice) designed by Denton Corker Marshall

Lucy Byatt Director at Hospitalfield has sensitively curated Graham Fagan’s* outstanding new work at Palazzo Fontana. In it, the work of Ayrshire poet Rabbie Burns is cast as a powerful catalyst to confront Scotland’s participation in the slave trade. The venue’s balcony overlooks the Grand Canal connecting the water, the architecture and the exhibition to Venice. Reggae singer Ghetto Priest’s slow repetitive channeling of Burn’s poem The Slave’s Lament lingers like dappled sun on the canal following a route to those dark days. This made me wonder if Enwezor could have revealed more about the slave trade today, the impact on communities and the different ways it exists in our cities and towns. As the canal follows eventually to the Mediterranean, thoughts of what type of future the people risking their lives in small boats hope for and what we can do to help. A future to be safe, to be able to feed your family and not be used by another should be the right of everyone.

Graham Fagen: Scotland + Venice, 2015 (taken at ‘All The World’s Futures’, La Biennale di Venezia 2015)

The afternoon was spent in the Querini Stampalia where Jimmie Durham’s sculptures nuzzled affectionately with Carlo Scarpa’s architecture in the basement gallery. This must be one of the best art and architecture pairings I’ve seen to date, not only in its appeal for all ages but in the sheer joy of being invited into Durham’s imagination, alongside the precision of Scarpa’s details.

As the sunset over our time in Venice, our group shared Biennale chatter. I voiced my perplexity over the inclusion of Georg Baselitz and one of our party chipped in that they had overheard an American family in front of the oversized paintings say: ‘Where would we put it?’ to which the Dad replied: ‘in the museum’.

I’m hopeful that my questions are left unanswered here, but ‘fair’ or not what is clear is that ‘All the World’s Futures’ are our collective responsibility.

Sunset over Venice, May 2015

*Read more about Graham Fagen’s Venice exhibition on Central Station here. Matt’s Gallery who represent Graham have just released 150 editions of 10″ signed records of The Slave’s Lament available to purchase here via the Own Art scheme.

The Venice Biennale continues until 22 November. Patricia highly recommends a visit and you can now get affordable flights from Edinburgh. Visit www.labiennale.org for more information.

All images courtesy Patricia Fleming Projects, Glasgow.

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Graham Fagen appears admirably calm and collected as he presents the work he will be showing at the 56th Venice Biennale to a room full of journalists. He jokes about early aspirations of playing for Scotland on the football field and it feels fitting that he will have the chance to represent his country within the arts world. Curated by Hospitalfield in Arbroath, Scotland, Fagen’s exhibition will be held in the Palazzo Fontana, a new exhibition space for Scotland in Venice. He will be exhibiting new work across a series of rooms including a bronze rope/tree sculpture, an audio piece, a selection of drawings and a multi-channel AV installation.

One of the pieces to be shown explores a poem by Robert Burns. The Slave’s Lament is a recorded musical performance by the Scottish Ensemble. Graham worked with composer Sally Beamish, musician Ghetto Priest and music producer Adrian Sherwood to include references to reggae, folk songs and classical music in this ambitious piece. It encompasses a 5 channel AV installation whereby four of the channels will be linked to four screens. Each screen will show a video of the individual musician playing the piece and as the viewer approaches any one particular screen, that instrument will be singled out to be heard more clearly as the visitor gets nearer.

Production image, (L-R: Diane Clark and Graham Fagen), Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, 2015. Photo: Holger Mohaupt.

Production image, (L-R: Graham Fagen, Sally Beamish, Ghetto Priest and Jonathan Morton), Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, 2015. Photo: Holger Mohaupt.

What do you ask one of the most influential artists working in Scotland today? We had quite a few things to put to Graham, but decided to open up this opportunity to all of you in our Ask Graham feature and we’re glad we did! Below are Graham’s responses.

Q: Central Station

The exhibition at Venice has been curated by Hospitalfield Arts. How much input have they had into your work?
They’re helping me achieve the work that I want to make. I suppose their input comes in the shape and form of help and support. I’m working with Jane who is the Producer of the project and she’s working with Hospitalfield to help me make what I’m trying to make.

As one of the largest and most prestigious visual arts exhibition in the world, how have you dealt with the pressure of creating work for the Venice Biennale?
As an artist you deal with your own pressure; the pressure’s always from yourself. In my experience, it doesn’t really matter who you’re making the exhibition for. You’re working to the pressure of yourself. You want to do the best job that you can. It doesn’t matter if it’s for the gallery at the flat of one of your friends or whether it’s at the Venice Biennale. That pressure that you get is from yourself about doing the best that you can is the most important pressure to pay attention to.

Graham Fagen, Guerro/Giardino, 2015, neon and acrylic, 180 x 60 x 12cm. Photo: Graham Fagen.

Q: artist Liz West

What does a day in your life look like?
A mess! [Laughs] I suppose it depends on what job I’m working on. We’re in Glasgow Sculpture Studios just now so I’ve been spending some time in the studio. Some days I’m down in the workshops. I’ve got a studio at home so some days I’m working there. Sometimes I’m at Powder Hall Bronze in Edinburgh. Some days I’m editing with the editor I work with. Sometimes I’m in London, sometimes I’m travelling. I’ve got an opening in Berlin in two weeks time, so it’s lots of different things. There’s no typical day. There’s days where you’re having to do different jobs; you’re doing the job that needs to be done on that particular day.

What made you decide to become an artist?
That’s a good question. I don’t think it’s something that I’ve consciously decided to do. It’s only fairly recently when somebody’s asked me what I do that I’ve had the confidence to say I’m an artist. I did an undergrad in sculpture in Glasgow and I was able to make things that people were interested in, but I didn’t know at that time why they should be interested in what I was making. For me there was something missing. I did a masters in architecture and I read a book by Irwin Pernovsky called Scholastic Philosophy in Gothic Architecture. That book did a really simple thing of connecting a philosophy with form, also connecting form with philosophy. That book was a revelation for me. It gave me the thing that was missing. It gave me the reason why I could make something and why people should take it seriously. I suppose that’s what I’ve been trying to do as an artist.

Does teaching interrupt your ability to practice?
I’ve been lucky in that it hasn’t. I don’t teach full time. I’m on a fractional contract and I get a lot of support from Duncan of Jordanstone to do my own work. A percentage of my contract is for research and a percentage is for teaching. There’s times like doing this project and times when I’ve been doing projects in the States and I’ve gone and lived there. Duncan of Jordanstone have always been very supportive and allowed me that time to do the work. On the contrary, rather than the teaching getting in the way, the teaching has actually helped to support and enable me to do the things that I do. Also, at times you can get too close to your work and on the days you’re teaching, it’s a privilege to change the head for that day. And it’s a privilege to hear other people’s thoughts and ideas and to share conversation about them. I think that experience keeps my own art practice grounded and keeps me thinking about it. It keeps it alive.

Q: artist Lesley Finlayson

If you could collaborate with any artist who would it be?
I would make a fantastic film with John Waters.

Q: artist & curator Alex Hetherington

I am very interested in a line that you draw between visual art and theatre specifically in the work you have done with Graham Eatough in the pieces ‘Killing Time‘ and the ‘Making of Us‘. Can you describe this process of making live work that has its roots in visual in the contexts of theatre and how will this subject impact on the work you will be making for Venice?
The things that I like about working in a collaborative aspect, not just with theatre directors but with Sally Beamish our composer or Adrian Sherwood our music producer is the fact that I don’t really know what the lines or the boundaries are. Maybe what it is is working between lines and boundaries of disciplines or things that are supposed to be disciplines to break that strict concept of disciplines. I think that’s what I like about it – I guess in essence I’m just doing what I want to do and not letting boundaries or disciplines be guides or hindrances for the way that it should work. I think it’s great and fine that people should go to an art gallery and hear music or see a bit of live acting.

I am also particularly interested in the poetic and the poetry that appear in your work often, roses, journeys, songs, that have a feminine quality. How do these work with or against the more masculine, tragic, abject or brutal passages?
When I was a war artist for Kosovo I came back with a few thoughts and one of the strongest was that women should rule the world.

For more information on Graham’s work, see his GENERATION exhibition review by Rachel Boyd on Central Station here.

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There are just two months to go until this year’s Venice Biennale opens. Scotland will be represented by Glasgow based contemporary artist Graham Fagen. Graham’s work combines video, performance, photography and sculpture with text, live music and plants.

Central Station has been given the fantastic opportunity to meet Graham and ask him a few questions this coming Monday 9 March. Here is where you come in. As valued members of our growing creative community, we’d love to open out this opportunity to all of you.

Do you have a burning question you’d like Graham to answer? If so, please email hello@thisiscentralstation.com with subject line “Ask Graham” or tweet us @CenSta. We’ll choose a selection of your questions and mention you in the Q&A feature scheduled to be published next week. Please include your website or link to your online portfolio of work.

Deadline: 5pm, Friday 6 March

For more information on Graham’s work, see his GENERATION exhibition review by Rachel Boyd on Central Station here.

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Rachel Boyd finished Secondary School this year and will start the Portfolio preparation course at Tramway’s Open Studio in August. She collaborated with Glasgow CAMRA to produce the logo for this year’s Glasgow Real Ale Festival (GRAF), and has worked alongside Hamilton Sculptor Allan Potter to produce a design for The Merryton Roundabout Project, entitled ‘Working Hands’, commissioned in August 2011.

As a major focus of the GENERATION festival is to engage a younger audience, The Glasgow School of Art asked 18 year old Rachel to review Graham Fagen’s exhibition – Cabbages in an Orchard; The formers and forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen. She interviewed Graham and her review of his exhibition which is currently on display at the GSA’s Reid Building is below.

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My first confrontation with the Reid Gallery was met with the intrusion of faceless teeth.

Open, vast and echoing; I entered in through the mouth of the Reid Gallery. Two giant, wooden doors enclose its gape. Launched in 2014, each new show brings forward the thought processes of each forthcoming artist into aesthetic contemplation. To paraphrase Jenny Brownrigg, Exhibitions Director of The Glasgow School of Art: “A gallery is almost like looking into someone’s head…”

In Cabbages in an Orchard; The formers and forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen, contemporary Glasgow-based Artist Graham Fagen has manipulated the notions of “Nature, Thinking and Form.” Each element of this exhibition is divided into ‘Schemes’. ‘Scheme’, by definition, may relate to an ‘estate of social housing’ or the precise, intent arrangement of each artwork in kinship to another. Firstly, a Scheme for Consciousness. A series of faceless teeth, aligned randomly, group themselves on three separate walls of the exhibition. Taken primarily from a previous work, Under Heavy Manners (2011), Fagen projects a sensory approach to representing the most common of human forms – our teeth, felt with our tongues; front teeth, then back. Their sculptural relations, titled Scheme for Support, are just as tactile. All three of these toothy impressions (divided into three separate sculptures) were supported by mounts of concrete pillars. In one, the bloodied, gummy-looking mould presides over a ceramic mould of two clenched fists, expressing the distance between the teeth and the hands; thinking and doing. Unlike Under Heavy Manners, these newer developments attempt to “draw consciousness”:
“I argue that everybody in the world has teeth, we’ve all got them, and at the same time, they’re unique. But they are a form, they do a job. Another thing we’ve all got is a consciousness – but you can’t see consciousness in the same way you see teeth. I think that’s what I’m interested in; a collective consciousness…the consciousness of a community, or a culture, but also of the individual.”

Scheme of Consciousness continues. Indian ink – in variants of colour, size and shape – penetrate through paper, manifesting each twinge and trip of feeling as we drag ourselves along missing fillings; the enamel detail hinting at long-softened veneers. “Perhaps all heads are mine…but no two heads are the same; No two thoughts are the same – perhaps that’s what thinking is like, what consciousness is like.” As Fagen muses, these inverted views of the skull – marked by two bulbous splodges of ink, nostrils or eyes – delve deep into our ‘roots’.

The title of this exhibition is another point of interest when considering the gallery as a thinking space. ‘Formers and Forms’ is a phrase coined by Fagen to describe his creative practice. It refers both to what defines our character – the formers of location, family background, childhood and occupation – but also to anatomical, even architectural, structures which ‘form’ the environment and encapsulate our strongest sense of being.

One such ‘former’ is exemplified within Scheme for a Cannabis Tree House. Consisting of a collection of photographs taken from Fagen’s background growing up in the Scottish New Town of Irvine, he seems to pinpoint his greatest influences upon some very ordinary landmarks: a tree, collared by an old tyre; the outside of his childhood home; a rosebush in the garden. Original colour images are juxtaposed by their opposites – inverted colour schemes that imply an exuberant ‘flipside’ to a typical suburban upbringing.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Watercolour, Cabbages in an Orchard (1894), is reminiscent of such a concept. The young Mackintosh was christened as one of ‘The Immortals’ for a then revolutionary approach to visuals; visuals which transcended time and place in the name of creating small philosophies: one of which is evident in Cabbages in an Orchard. This subject matter, however banal, reincarnates the humble cabbage as a symbol of endurance. Use of purples, pinks and greens create a weighted undertone of ethereal beauty; highlighting the cabbage not as a vegetable or even as an object – but a balloon, hung high in the sky. Composition instils common ground between Fagen and Mackintosh. This symmetry between their works is emphasized in placing of the twelve ‘heads’ within Scheme of Consciousness to reflect the position of twelve Cabbages in Mackintosh’s Orchard.

Cabbages in an Orchard is featured alongside other Mackintosh watercolours The Tree of Influence (1896), and The Tree of Personal Growth (1896). These three watercolours were originally published in ‘The Magazine’; a student-run publication founded by Mackintosh and his peers – arguably, all of whom were the ‘formers’ for his creative development.

Mackintosh’s titular references to creative development almost insist upon his role not just as an artist, but as the philosopher to Fagen’s Sociologist:
“I like them [the watercolours] all the more for that sense of searching. I think what I’m always trying to do within my work is find something worth searching for.”

A notable influence upon the respective artists is their mutual focus on botany; intrinsically, the belief that the plant is at the core of all living things. Whilst Mackintosh endeavoured to preserve the meaning behind these symbolic forms through watercolour, Fagen’s pragmatic approach to Conceptualism once again relies upon preserving the literal, actual beauty behind nature. A realist at heart, his work Scheme for Nature features a fig tree cast in bronze. After casting, Fagen left the plant outside to ‘weather’ for about a year. This has since caused the plant to age and develop outside of its precious overcoat; allowing the viewer to observe a work of creation in its existing form.

Scheme of Conscience, a bronze sculpture, imitates the organic, linear form of Mackintosh’s watercolour trees. Each branch extends out toward cubes of concrete, mild steel, ceramic and gold lustre; united, alongside Scheme of Nature, in a quality of preciousness. The emblem of tree – at least, its capacity to grow, and establish itself within the soil – is symbolic of the potential of the human mind; an idea as significant to Fagen as it was to Mackintosh.

I left the gallery. Teeth gurned. A lone bronze tree, facing outward onto the Mackintosh Building, blinked in the light. The watercolours – more relevant now than ever – remained.

Cabbages in an Orchard; The formers and forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Graham Fagen runs until 29 August at the GSA Reid Building. For more information about the exhibition, see the GSA website. To see more from Rachel Boyd, check out her blog.

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