Future Library: Five Years of Contemporary Collecting in the University of Edinburgh Art Collection
This week marks my last at the University, having been Curator of the Art Collection since 2012. Whilst considering how it’s possible to tie up all the loose ends of a job after that period of time (it isn’t), I am thinking more about the contemporary works that have been collected in that time; as it’s infinitely more interesting than clearing out old files. So, purely by way of procrastination, I’ve set myself the challenge to select and reflect on what I think to be 5 key acquisitions that we’ve made in the last 5 years.
First thing to say is that I’ve fallen at the first hurdle as I’ve selected 6 works and there also are many, many others I’d want to include.
Four Blades (1987)
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Four slate plates, cut and engraved with red lettering, with Nicholas Sloane. Acquired with support from the Art Fund and the National Fund for Acquisitions. Photography courtesy Victoria Miro Gallery and Digital Imaging Unit, UoE.
It is always good to start with something new, and very pleased to announce the latest acquisition to the Art Collection. Four slate ‘blades’, carved with blood-red lettering carrying quotations from Denis Diderot, Nicholas Poussin, Maximilien Robespierre and lastly Ian Hamilton Finlay himself. Finlay was fascinated by the French Revolution for much of his career, but there was a period in the mid-1980s where this really reached its zenith – both positively and negatively for the artist. The University holds important archival collections around this period, so this work has been acquired to add to existing strengths. Most importantly, this is a significant sculpture by one of the most important Scottish artists of the 20th century.
This is a work that requires some digestion, and I am still doing so. It is both beautiful and shocking – carrying quotations that reference terror being ‘an emanation of virtue’. In our post 9/11 society, this is an extraordinarily difficult concept. The image of the guillotine blade itself, which Finlay came back to often, is perhaps a hint at the contradictions that he is pointing us towards; though with Finlay it is often difficult to tell. The guillotine was designed primarily as an efficient and egalitarian form of execution and seen as the epitome of Enlightenment rationality. As the Revolution eventually betrayed its own ideals, the blade came to represent something very different – The Terror itself.
Painted Ladies 14, 15 & 16 (2015)
Jessica Harrison
Found ceramic, enamel paint. Photography by Chris Park.
Commissioned in 2015, Harrison’s Painted Ladies are, hands down, the most popular new sculptures amongst audiences. Like many institutions, trying to understand the complex beast that is social media is tricky. One thing I have figured out is that whenever we post an image of one of the Ladies, it gets 10/20/30 times the reach of anything else.
In the Painted Ladies series, Harrison scrutinises perceptions of beauty and gender identity; juxtaposing an insipid view of femininity with early tattoo culture. She acquires existing objects - in this case traditional Doulton figures - and meticulously ‘tattoos’ them. The mass-produced, homogenous ladies (your Granny had one) are offered a new lease of life. The tattoos reference templates used at The Black Eye Barber Shop, an early twentieth century tattoo parlour in the Bowery, New York.
Like many large institutions with collections formed in the 19th century, ours has what can only be described as a spectacular gender imbalance. Our portraits, for example, have 95% male representation. Sitting within the Art Collection as they now do, the Painted Ladies question and subvert the period from which much of our Art Collection was formed. I believe that ‘correcting’ mistakes in collections, for example posthumously commissioning portraits of important female figures, only serves to airbrush the circumstances in which these imbalances were allowed to form. As with the Contemporary Art Research Collection, mentioned below, it is much more satisfying to critique than to correct.
Timepieces (Solar System) (2014)
Katie Paterson
Nine modified clocks. Acquired with support from the National Fund for Acquisitions. Photography by Chris Park.
It is not very often that a work completely stops you in your tracks. Seeing this installation for the first time in the Ingleby Gallery in the summer of 2014, along with Gordon Brennan of ECA, that was exactly what happened. We were stunned into silence whilst viewing 9 clocks that tell the exact time on the planets of the solar system, as well as Earth’s moon. Hung high above our heads, you literally gaze up at each clock – the design of which is beautifully minimal. Only when you get up close to each that you notice the name of the planet and the increasing/decreasing amounts of hourly increments on the faces.
Paterson’s work treads a line between these seemingly impossible, but beautifully poetic, propositions that are backed up by rigour and precision. In this case, the artist worked extensively with horologists and the observatories here in Edinburgh and at UCL in London. The clocks are accurate to within 5 decimal points and need to be regularly calibrated.
When Stuart Fallon and I were curating Between poles and tides at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 2017, Stuart mentioned this quote from Lisa le Feuvre writing about Paterson’s work that is hard to beat:
“We find our place in the world through language, through history, through assumptions and through researched and received knowledge. The job of an artwork is to exceed this, to remind us that we are human, impermanent and frail.”
Not For Gain (2016)
Daisy Lafarge
Video. Photography by Chris Park.
Edinburgh College of Art has a long-established history of collecting graduate work from Degree Shows, creating a unique record of formative works by some of Scotland’s leading artists. This practice had slowed by the 1980s but was resurrected in 2013; we now collected around half a dozen artists from across the College each year. Daisy Lafarge’s film Not For Gain is an extraordinary example of the quality of work that is produced every year by graduating artists.
Beautifully shot in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow, the slow, creeping narrative alludes to the Victorian obsession with collecting and classification, and also to contemporary debates around nationalism and migration. This is a work that really gets under your skin.
The Common Sense (2014-15)
Melanie Gilligan
Video, scaffolding. Acquired with support from the Art Fund.
(Installation in Trondheim Kunstmuseum, 2016)
A very important acquisition both in terms of the work itself and what it represents. This was the first acquisition to the Contemporary Art Research Collection, a new strand being built with Dr Kirsten Lloyd that is formally linked to teaching and research in Edinburgh College of Art. For the first time, artists are connected to the University by subject and not necessarily by geography. As well as incorporating the Art Collection into the academic fabric of the institution, this allows us to broaden the international scope of the Collection. As the University operates on a global scale, so to should our collections.
The work itself is sharply prescient. Set in a near future where a new device, The Patch, allows users to communicate their emotions with others in real time. The 15 episodes of The Common Sense explore whether this potentially revolutionary tool is used for the benefit of humanity, or not. Gilligan raises pressing questions about the impact and influence that technology already has on our lives, and points to a horizon that we are fast approaching.
The Basic Material Is Not The Word But The Letter (2018)
Nathan Coley
Illuminated text on scaffolding. Commissioned to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Main Library. Photography by Keith Hunter and Digital Imaging Unit, UoE.
It has been a long-held ambition to have a commissioned art work in the Forum space of the Main Library. For about a decade, 20th century abstract works hung there – each important paintings in their own right, but slightly lost high up on the wood panelled wall. An artist with a long-established career questioning space, architecture and the power that is exerted within it, Nathan Coley seemed the perfect choice to mark the 50th anniversary of the Main Library building with a new permanent work.
I find Coley’s work fascinating; bold and direct, but still like trying to hold jelly in your hands. You think you’ve got it, then it slips through your fingers. In his illuminated text works, the words are authoritative, inspirational and accusatory - yet always anonymous. Coley appropriates existing phrases, removing them from their original context and repurposing them for reasons that are not immediately apparent. The meaning, as with our work in the Library, can be both immediate and intangible.
Coley worked extensively in the Centre for Research Collections on the 6th floor of the Library, working from the same Ian Hamilton Finlay archive material mentioned at the start of this post. This has been one of the most satisfying things about recent developments with the Art Collection; the growing connection between the old and the new. The University is in the immensely fortunate position of having one of the world’s great collections, and there are infinite possibilities for artists, researchers, students and members of the public to be inspired by the 40 miles of material that is held here.
What lies next for the Art Collection is very exciting. A number of projects are running at the moment that will generate new work, there will be new exhibitions and our students will continue to have a stake at every stage. Undergraduates are currently making propositions for where Four Blades should be exhibited on campus, The Common Sense will be part of a major exhibition at ECA for the Edinburgh Art Festival this summer and Public Art goes from strength to strength; with the recent installation of Susan Collis’ The Next Big Thing….Is A Series of Little Things (2017) in Bristo Square. I look forward to seeing what happens.
