A Popular Destination, Peannmeanach, the Scottish Highlands, March 2014
We went and did nothing, together.
A Popular Destination took place in March 2014 in Peannmeanach in the Scottish Highlands. There were nine of us and it was an experiment in site-specific art and friendship. Other conceptual interests rest on top of this broad foundation. As well as working together, we have solitary studio practices and individual interests. During the last four years we have convened once a year to execute collaborative projects in different locations. Because of their temporality (their objection to being objectified) the projects have existed in two ways: as a lived experience and as an event mediated through photography, writing, word of mouth, and video documentation.
Our site-specific projects originated from a want to make exhibitions, which led us to
work in unusual spaces. It forced us to work with and for each other.
The project was an extension of similar previous ones. The first took place in a big warehouse in Dublin in November 2011. The building was an artist-led space which some of our friends ran, an old factory rumoured to have once been a slaughterhouse. Its sides were lined with trenches from an excavation. It was used as a large open studio with the occasional exhibition. One of us suggested we should do an exhibition where all the work was made using only the trenches, so we did. We spent about two months thinking, talking, and digging, and developing an identity for the show. We called it Underground: An Exhibition of Works Below Surface Level. There was an amazing chemistry among the group because of the freedom we had of only having to work for and with each other.
Following this, we wanted to sustain the energy. Shortly after, we started planning our next event. We decided to use the temporality of the previous project as the foundation. We thought a beach would be a good place. This project happened in May 2012. We called the project Resort and there were 15 artists in total. We spent a week there living and making in close proximity. The residency culminated in an evening long event. It started on a cliff side, which ran along to a beach. Scattered along the way were sculptures, performances participatory works and installations. Some of these also functioned as tools to assist along the precarious path. It ended with a film screening in the woods at two in the morning after the local pub had closed.
Following this, we wanted to do a project in a less familiar place - somewhere isolated without any audience but ourselves. Tom, one member of the group, had hiked to a mountain bothy in the Scottish highlands before and it seemed like an excitingly accessible adventure. So, after about 4 months planning, we went forth into the cold. We called the project Winter Resort. In my memory, the other projects had a beginning, middle and end - a planning, a process and a result. For Winter Resort, it was a blur of traveling, walking, cold, fires, earned warmth, sleeping, waking up, then, repetition. We tried to make art in a traditional sense, in drawing, video and photography, it didn't work out very well. The site was sublime, much greater than us. It made it difficult to think about anything, other than vastness, and inferiority. We stayed for one week. We left with stories and photographs, then, arrived home to the non-survivalist comfort of urban living.
A journal of the project by Clare Breen was published in the Visual Artist Newssheet, Ireland’s Art News Paper, which was the only real material outcome.
We decided to return a year later, equipped with knowledge gained from experience rather than speculation and internet research. This time, we travelled to a different Bothy, closer to the sea and a little more accessible.
Once more, we stayed for about a week. Each day we woke early. We spent our time between the beach and the mountains, wandering, taking photos and videos and enjoying the weather, which was cold at times but pleasant enough to bear. Dinnertime was always filling: we usually had more food than we needed.
In the evenings, we entertained each other with stories. They ranged from personal anecdotes to reading aloud stories from a book of short stories by Donald Bartheleme and a re-enactment of Macbeth remembered as best we could from memories of the leaving cert. Being in the dark and cold looking at a fire is one of my favourite things to do - it never stops moving, and there's an amazing sensation where the part of you facing the fire is really hot on the surface, but not too hot. We went to sleep around midnight each night, although time doesn't exist there the way it does elsewhere, only light and dark, and breakfast and dinner. Hours and days blended into one and we had to return to our lives before it felt like it had begun.
Similarly to the previous year, few material things have surfaced from this project, which has made me realise why it, and collaboration in general, is important. Working with someone creates a bond, and I have now been working with these people for four years. Being an artist is emotionally stressful. It is important to have people you know to share that stress with you.
To conclude, personally, I'm never quite sure what's achieved from one of these projects until we've done another, usually a year later. One project always leads to the next and they're markers of time in my memory. As much as art is a space for producing things, it's also a learning process for the makers. From Underground I learned the aesthetic and conceptual power of space, atmosphere and collaboration. From Resort I experienced different ways that minds can respond to producing art outside a prescribed space and what this experience might create for other people who become the audience.
In our project A Popular Destination, we went there alone, but together. Winter Resort led to nothing physical but was still an important exercise, approaching the Scottish Highlands a second time without an anxiety around art production has led me to think about the political and philosophical significance of not producing objects, and reinforced the value of corporeal communication and text. The cold wind and warm fires, and sun and snow, mountains, grass and sludge were props for us to think and talk, and eat and sleep, and our quantity of production was minimal.
Joseph Kosuth says 'success means becoming institutionalised: both having power and representing it, if you risk changing its representation you risk losing it and all that goes with it.’ Definitely, a strength of the projects so far has been the participants not being tied to other professional commitments. I'm curious to see how the projects change when given professional or logistical restrictions and if they become more what they are rather than what they could be. They have been contingent on improvisation, which has always led to fun. Because we've publicised these projects through the internet, we're being asked to create shows in gallery settings with forthcoming projects in Pallas Projects in Dublin and Catalyst Arts in Belfast. None of us have really worked together in gallery settings and some of us barely show in galleries. Not to sound too mawkish but I hope we continue to pursue to make things together in specific sites, as friends. "It’s not that we think so much alike, but that we do this thinking-business for and with each other". (Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt)
Text - John Ryan
Images - Clare Breen (35mm film scans)
Participating artists 2013: Tom Watt, John Ryan, Clare Breen, David Lunney, Roisin Beirne, Andreas Kindler Von Knobloch
Participating artists 2014: Tom Watt, John Ryan, Clare Breen, David Lunney, Roisin Beirne, Andreas Kindler Von Knobloch, Daniel Tuomey, Liliane Puthod, Blaine O'Donnell
