More details of the campaign here.

As one Aberdonian commented this morning on Twitter: “It’s disgusting. ACC sold our integrity, our reputation, our culture, our heritage, our green space and democracy yesterday.” (JackKeenan)

The general feeling in the City today is one of deep-set frustration and despair. The campaign to save UTG and the Peacock proposal has been high profile and bitterly fought in the North East for months now. The culmination of which was a £300,000 public enquiry (paid for by the tax payer) to discover what Aberdonian’s wanted the space to be used as.

Despite a majority being in favour of saving UTG, the council made the highly questionable vote of 20 to 7 in favour of Sir Ian Wood’s concrete tomb. 12 Councillors chose not to vote, a decision which is both disgusting and disgraceful considering the monumental impact of the outcome.

As the decision stands, the concrete will start flowing, our green space will be lost, our hopes for a cultural centre in the city will die and Aberdeen’s faith in democracy and our council has been shattered.

The mood in Aberdeen is one of despair and heartbreak.

Thank you Alex

Also available on my BLOG>

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The Orchid Thief, For Rachel, reflection, On Union Terrace Gardens

By Alex Hetherington

Dear Rachel:

This is my text for you and the campaign; I had a draft but felt it awkward and in the light of your passionate accounts of the 10-year long commitment by Peacock and their remarkable team and your own narrative, your life-story, within in this, I felt it would be like a voice unheard in a scream.

So I’m writing this like Adaptation, by Charlie Kaufman, as played by Nicholas Cage, as he tries to adapt The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean from page to screen, and in doing so becomes, at the same time, a character in a fictional narrative and a real person, with pain, and frustration and disbelief, which I think are some of the collective and individual feelings exposed by this ongoing fight between Alpha Male Big Daddy, Sir Ian Wood and a population of people bulldozed into a kind of marginalization. The sub-line to the book by the way is: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. I don’t have all the fact and figures and I don’t want this to be about speculation and rumour, because that’s poor writing, I’m not a journalist, I’m an artist, who writes sometimes and curates, occasionally. I want to add my voice because I believe that’s all I have.

Nicholas/Charlie struggles to interpret Susan’s writing, about a Southern orchid thief, whose life has been damaged by a terrible incident, that he forever blames himself for. He drove his car out of his driveway, without seeing an oncoming car, he got distracted and the passengers were killed; later on a tornado hits his hometown, his house is destroyed and he’s left with nothing.

What I’m saying is I am struggling with what the motivations are here; I am struggling to interpret this, because, well the bottom-line is in its title Union Terrace Gardens. Union. Gardens. I think Sir Ian Wood is a kind of orchid thief, I’m not saying his activities are criminal, but he’s by-passing something significant that’s right under his nose. I think also he’s missing out on a debate between what is public and collective and what is private and exclusive. But maybe I am letting feelings get in the way. Here’s a metaphor: Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever. Wealthy orchid fanatics of that era sent explorers (heavily armed, more to protect themselves against other orchid seekers than against hostile natives or wild animals) to unmapped territories in search of new varieties of Cattleya and Paphiopedilum. As knowledge of the family Orchidaceae grew to encompass the currently more than 60,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, orchidelirium might have been expected to go the way of Dutch tulip mania. Yet, as journalist Susan Orlean found out, there still exists a vein of orchid madness strong enough to inspire larceny among collectors.

Anyway, back to Union. And art. I have to acknowledge something here: I lived in Aberdeen for four years, I called it my home, I fell in love there and grew up there, was nurtured there, given a chance: I studied at the city’s art school, out in Garthdee, a kind of periphery, but potent nonetheless to Aberdeen’s cultural glow. And it does glow. It made me who I am now, an artist with some success. I sensed then and I know now a kind of division in the city, and I think its that division which sits at the heart of this unrelenting tug-of-war.

I looked at the public consultation web site and I am astonished that its representatives are exploiting global examples of similar proposals without citing their corresponding cultural significances, the art of these places as an activation of public unity. That are unique to these places. And kind of universal too. It’s sloppy. An idea that experience may well be more significant than more shopping bags.

Anyway back to the screenplay: Cut to Donald Fisher, recently deceased founder of the Gap, you know the clothes store, with jeans and t-shirts. So here he is in San Francisco and he’s decided to build himself a mausoleum that will coincidentally hold his enormous contemporary art collection. He decides he’s going to build this museum in the Presidio area of the city, close to the Golden Gate Bridge. This museum is “sprawling” by all accounts. The Presidio is a park, and “is characterized by many wooded areas, hills, and scenic vistas overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean”. Donald Fisher’s net worth at the time of his death was said to be about $3 billion. However, the plan engendered widespread scepticism and even outright antagonism among some historic preservationists in San Francisco, not to mention the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants. You can maybe understand why. It’s a beautiful spot in the city. It may be that its uses or its significance were underestimated or devalued until someone came along, a very rich someone came along and threatened to tear it down, build a freeway through it and site a museum in the middle of it. Cut to Donald Fisher abandoning his plans. In the interim something happens, the force of objection makes him change his mind, perhaps, or that his tactics may affect his business, or that he understands the content of his collection, the art he has amassed and wishes to display may have more significance than his obsession to get his own way, no matter what. I am speculating here. It’s only a film/true story.  Cut to: his collection being annexed as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Where it belonged in the first place. Happy Ending. Fade to black.

I was going to put in a little piece here about Naomi Klein’s text The Shock Doctrine, but it felt too melodramatic. But the good folks of Aberdeen might want to read up on it, its an interesting read.

Anyway Rachel, I was moved, more than you’ll ever know, about what you said about your city. I am also thinking about the V&A coming to Dundee, what that will do to the city, or the DCA and what that has achieved. Or what the new Riverside Museum in Glasgow, built by Zaha Hadid, will do for there. Its awe-inspiring.

I’m looking right now at the plans for Peacock and its so beautiful, a jewel. I’m also looking ‘through’ it to see effort, sustainability, enquiry, experience, fortitude, promise, a solution. It kind of requires though a bit of vision and trust.

There’s probably another agenda here. I’m thinking about Eva Merz, and her book/project Get A Fucking Job. And Aberdeen’s council’s attitude to homelessness. Or to its general social problems, affecting broad parts of Aberdeenshire. I guess that’s part of the mix too. All I know is people cross oceans to see art. I’ve transported myself to Bilbao right now, I’m inside Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim. Now I’m in Herzog & de Meuron’s Philharmonic Hall being built in Hamburg, to regenerate the underused waterfront area, falling into dilapidation. I guess right now someone, lots of people, are shouting out about elitism. But you know what I think, its more about ambition and aspiration. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We can get over it. I think maybe Sir Ian Wood is being elitist. You probably can’t say these things though, the arguments always go the other way. Anyway I was just thinking about that famous collage by Richard Hamilton: “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” The answer being: open planning and being bold (the text is from an advertisement). I think these two sentiments are worth bearing in mind. So. “What makes Aberdeen so different, so appealing”?  I think I’ve said enough.

I am livid at a sense of cultural failure, that this could slip through our fingers so easily, without dialogue, or thoughts about compromises, or that its my-way-or-the-highway mentality, that this reeks of, but am inspired by a condition of resilience and all of its audaciousness, its potency.

I’m sorry if this isn’t what you expected me to write, but I think maybe its readers will take something more away from it than another set of facts and figures or a rant about DOING THE RIGHT THING.

I don’t want to write a piece about the merits, values, sustenance, intelligence of art, people have to find that out for themselves. The deal here is something is being denied for a vaster population than Sir Ian Wood will ever know. And is that is theft.

Best for now

Alex H

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ALEX HETHERINGTON: performance/visual artist/curator/writer

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The notion of place is one of the universal concerns intrinsic to the development of our species since long before we crawled out of the oceans and grew legs. Our immediate and extended context has dictated how society has developed, we have always reacted to the space around us: celebrated it, took inspiration from it, amended it, created new spaces or simply destroyed it.

For an artist, the contemporary concerns about space are often as important to a practice than the materials used or sometimes the final artistic output. While pre-Duchamp, the interest in place was mostly representational – afterwards the focus shifted from representation to an overriding analysis of context that the conceptual concerns with our surroundings came to the fore.

At the dawn of a new century, we seem on the brink of a critical point in perspective and thinking. Two hundred years of industrialisation have irreparably changed the face of the world we live in and it is our generation that has to confront the consequences of this “progress.” Within contemporary practice, the approaches to making, creating and concept often involve working in the public realm, whether large scale site-specific commissions or more subtle interventions or subversive, in-your-face street art, the artist is no longer confined to the studio and artwork no longer to the gallery.

Widespread industrialisation and population migration from rural to urban spaces caused the rapid, unplanned, transformation of cities. Tenements, factories, mills, foundries, stores and roads emerged as societal perspective and priorities changed and our surroundings became less important. The human race had abandoned its former fascination with synergy and natural order with the emergence of the hedonistic pursuit of Capitalism.

In the inevitable decline of heavy industry, forgotten spaces became ubiquitous in the urban landscape, monuments to short sightedness of our forefathers and reminders of the effect of progress on our planet. The transitional period we find ourselves is an area of certain fascination for artists. Gormley’s Angel of The North, built through the processes and materials common to Newcastle’s manufacturing heritage, looks over the city symbolising the cultural awakening of the city; Rachel Whiteread’s House represented the living space of a street which no longer stood, erased from reality and from our memories.

Tracing Place seeks to highlight those forgotten spaces throughout Aberdeen. Simple interventions, such as Amy Flint’s outline footprints, encouraging the viewer to see the cityscape as artwork, or Hannah Malone’s Castlegate, a series of sandcastles crumble across Aberdeen’s Civic Square emphasising the fragility of the space around it: an underutilised, yet historically significant part of the city.

Aberdeen differs greatly from the post-industrial centres discussed. As heavy industry declined across the UK, North Sea Oil gave Aberdeen its own Industrial Revolution. A great many unique features were swept away: historic buildings on Broad Street replaced by St Nicholas House; Old Torry by an oil refinery; the Wallace tower, making way for Mark’s and Spencer.

Even today, with a global shift in priority, Aberdeen, still in the grips of the billion-dollar oil boom, seems destined not to take heed. A project for culture-led rejuvenation of Union Terrace Gardens, a gift to the people of the City, is under threat from a boorish scheme reeking of sixties modernism brought forward by those who have personally benefited from industrial exploitation would see these Gardens ripped out, covered over and wiped from existence.

Projects such as Tracing Place are vital at this particular juncture. The role of the artist is to celebrate our context, remind us of what we have and what we have lost. We must be able to stand back and embrace the beauty around us or we will be forever destined to repeat the mistakes of our past at the expense of our future.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

I’ve been under the radar recently but thanks to you all for keeping up with this group and posting your images…  Please tell others to get involved and keep up with the progress of this ongoing debacle in Aberdeen.  We need arts centres and civic spaces that offer more than commerce and concrete. Anyway, I’ll not launch into a rant…

Peacock had some good news this week about their Scottish Arts Council funding for the new building.

As you may know, the Scottish Arts Council deadline on the £4.3 million lottery award for Peacock’s new arts centre was due on the end of March.  However, as the results of the public consultation for Sir Ian Woods ACSEF City Square proposal in Union Terrace Gardens will now not be released until 13th April, the Scottish Arts Council have decided to review the award in June 2010, so support for this opposing City Square scheme can be measured.

This means that Peacock still has the support of the Scottish Arts Council and potentially Aberdeen WON’T loose out on this huge investment in arts and culture.

Peacock’s board requested that the arts centre be a part of this public consultation for Union Terrace Gardens but were refused.

Have a read of the two links below..

Herald article 28/03/10

Peacock Visual Arts UPDATE

I will post the details of the public consultation on the City Square once they are released on April 13th.

Meanwhile.. if you’ve not done so already

sign the petition to show support for Peacock and watch this for a laugh..

Thanks,
Rachel