Paul Thek. Notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy the Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Jörg Lohse.

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translating the subjective experience into artistic practice were explored in the exhibitions In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, the personal, and the self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek: If you don’t like this book you don’t like me, on view at the Modern Institute through June 2, 2012. Fragments of an artist’s life, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries, or “meat pieces,” a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of Minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about eighty of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

Paul Thek. If you don’t like this book you don’t like me, 2012. Installation view at the Modern Institute, Glasgow; Courtesy the Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Ruth Clark.

The Technological Reliquaries are materially absent in the show. Knowledge of it is acquired through the supplementary reading materials provided. The artist’s notebooks, usually occupying this secondary position for signposts to an artist’s intentions, instead form the core of the show, presented in the main artery of the gallery space alongside several of his paintings, with photographs by Peter Hujar in the gallery’s upper level.

Paul Thek. Notebook #68, 1978; Courtesy the Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Jörg Lohse.

Thek’s notebooks reveal repeated scribbles of self-motivational phrases, meticulous lists, and hand copies of religious texts. Illustrations, drawings, and watercolor works suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism, on the possibility of fulfillment within one’s earthly existence and a continual search for a higher spiritual being. Enclosed in vitrines, most of the notebooks are spread open to specific pages. Several remain shut. While the open pages disclose paradoxes, exuberance, and anxieties that intimate the intentions behind the hybrid approach to the form and style of his works, it is the pages withheld from view that provoke the viewer to consider the subjective voice of the hand behind.

Lorna Macintyre; Installation view. Midnight Scenes & Other Works, Mary Mary, Glasgow 2012. Image courtesy of Mary Mary, Glasgow.

This concluding feature on Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art presents Lorna Macintyre – ‘Midnight Scenes & Other Works’, a solo exhibition of recent works by Glasgow-based artist Lorna Macintyre at Mary Mary, Glasgow that runs till 2 June 2012.

Lorna Macintyre; Midnight Scenes 2012; Steel, chain, stainless steel, ferric ferrocyanide crystals; 107.5 x 10 x 21 cms / 42 3/8 x 3 7/8 x 8 1/4 ins. Image courtesy of Mary Mary, Glasgow.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from the 1858 publication, ‘Midnight scenes and social photographs: sketches of life in the streets, wynds, and dens of the city [of Glasgow]’ by Alexander Brown, a letterpress printer in Glasgow, containing what he termed as “facts and observations” of the conditions of the poor, with photographs of the streets of Glasgow taken by moonlight. The imagery of midnight scenes bathed in the glow of moonlight suggest a particular point of time that demarcates the nebulous zones of night and day, dark and light, where concrete reality becomes enmeshed within and transformed by myth – themes that emerge in the exhibition.

Lorna Macintyre; Everything merges with the night (detail) 2012; Cyanotype collage, glass, wood; 44 x 30 x 6 cms / 17 3/8 x 11 3/4 x 2 3/8 ins. Image courtesy of Mary Mary, Glasgow.

The idea of moonlight emerging amidst darkness to reveal a situation from a different perspective parallels the way that the gradual exposure to light is used as an artistic process for Macintyre’s works. Dark blue crystals encrust the steel tubes of Midnight Scenes, a sculptural work whose tactility is a result of a process where light is used to alter the composition and appearance of materials. Macintyre uses cyanotype, a photographic technique requiring a photosensitive solution and exposure to sunlight. A monitor placed amongst Macintyre’s cyanotype collages and photographs displays a digital animation. At intervals, the blue appearing on its screen alters to another shade. Whilst pointing to the range of blue tones within the gallery space, its inclusion makes visible the contrasting production techniques, from a highly controlled digital format to one that reveals the effects of chance, light and time on materials, to create silhouettes of different intensities.

Lorna Macintyre; Apollo 2012; Wood, turned birch wood, concrete, magician’s rope, cyanotype, glass, paint; Dimensions Variable . Image courtesy of Mary Mary, Glasgow.

Motifs, materials and images used in the works take reference from the building the gallery is housed in, as well as those in the area, almost as vestiges of the real, the factual. In the adjoining gallery space, two installations are placed as if to partition rooms, in allusion to the building’s original function as a hotel. Titled Apollo and Artemis, the god of sunlight and the goddess of moonlight respectively in Grecian mythology, the interventions open up notions of time beyond the passage of day and night, light and darkness; to imaginaries where myths and mysteries reflect, illuminate and recreate concrete reality.

Lorna Macintyre; Artemis 2012; Wood, turned ebony, concrete, magician’s rope, bleached mirror, spray paint; Dimensions Variable. Image courtesy of Mary Mary, Glasgow.

Spread from Paul Thek notebook #63, 1974; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

As part of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, approaches to translate the subjective experience into the artistic process were explored in In the Shadow of the Hand and Back to the Things Themselves. Questions were raised on the nuances and distinctions between notions of the subjective, personal and self-indulgent. These borders disintegrate in the exhibition Paul Thek – ‘If you don’t like this book you don’t like me.’, on show at The Modern Institute till 2 June 2012, where fragments of the life of an artist, as narrated through pages of notebooks, become a part of the works on display.

Paul Thek; Untitled (cityscape with twin towers), 1972; Acrylic on canvas; 241.5 x 165 cm; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of exhibitions and publications on Paul Thek, perhaps as part of an effort to re-insert him into the history of art. Though well-received in Europe during the 1970s, he died in relative obscurity in 1988 after his return to the United States. Thek’s name is often cited in relation to the Technological Reliquaries or “meat pieces”, a series of works made in the 1960s where body parts appearing as chunks of flesh were presented in geometric vitrines, a revelry of one’s fleshly mortality within the confines of the composed exterior of minimalism. While these sculptures were solid and dense, he also made works from ephemeral materials with collaborators, creating immersive environments that lasted for the duration of the exhibition. While little documentation remains of these installations, about 80 of Thek’s notebooks were retrieved and carefully preserved after his passing.

Paul Thek - If you don’t like this book you don’t like me. Installation view, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph Ruth Clark

The Technological Reliquaries are materially absent in the show. Knowledge of it is acquired through the supplementary reading materials provided. The artist’s notebooks, usually occupying this secondary position for signposts to an artist’s intentions, instead forms the core of the show, presented in the main artery of the gallery space alongside several of his paintings, and photographs by Peter Hujar in the gallery’s upper level.

Bust of Tomb Figure (Paul Thek) 1967/2010; Pigmented ink print; Sheet 51 x 40.6 cm, image 47 x 32 cm; Photograph Peter Hujar; Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

His notebooks reveal repeated scribbles of self-motivational phrases to meticulous lists and copying of religious texts.  Illustrations, drawings and watercolor works suggest a mind filled with both doubt and idealism, on the possibility of fulfillment within one’s earthly existence and a continual search for a higher spiritual being. Enclosed in vitrines, most of the notebooks are spread open to specific pages. Several remain shut. While the open pages disclose paradoxes, exuberance and anxieties that intimate the intentions behind the hybrid approach to the form and style of his works, it is the pages withheld from view that provokes one to consider the subjective voice of the hand behind how one is to like the book, and Paul Thek.

Cover of Paul Thek Notebook #68, 1978; Courtesy Watermill Center Collection and Alexander and Bonin, New York; Photograph © Estate of George Paul Thek; Photograph Jörg Lohse

Installation view of Back to the Things Themselves (Lesley Punton & Judy Spark). Image courtesy of Lesley Punton.

Back to the Things Themselves, on show at The Briggait, presents artworks by Lesley Punton (LP) and Judy Spark (JS) who both explore possibilities and limits of translating one’s lived experience of the environment, and the potential for connections between a subjective experience with universal ways of knowing the world.

Magdalen Chua (MC) had a conversation with Punton and Spark, as a second part of a feature on exhibitions presented during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art that place emphasis on the process of collaboration and the subjective experience within artistic practice.

Judy Spark, Like punctuation (symphoricarphos), Graphite on paper, 2012, (with Lesley Punton White out receding – Carn Dearg to right). Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: Shall we start off by talking about your individual practices?

LP: My work has always been concerned with landscape issues. In recent years, through the process of walking, it has become more explicit in relation to my lived experience of places that are usually wild and rarely urban. In the exhibition, I have tried to create a diverse conversation between different pieces of work, exploring the limits of experience; and polarities – of night and day, light and dark, and time and duration.

Lesley Punton, Schiehallion, silver gelatin 5 x 4 contact print made after placing a pinhole camera in the summit cairn, pointing South, whilst bivying on the summit of Schiehallion to record the duration of the hours of darkness of midsummer night ’09, 2009-12, with Jim Hamlyn. Image courtesy of artist.

In the past, a lot of the lived experience of my work resulted in long and complicated processes of making. There are works that are directly durational in their actual making, such as Flurry, which marks time. A participatory work is Schiehallion where Jim Hamlyn and I made a pinhole photograph that recorded the duration of midsummer’s night that year at the summit of the mountain. These have a very direct relationship to experiences whilst actually in land. Recent works respond more to reflection and recollections of those experiences. Some have literary connections. Gravesend is the place where the narration of ‘Heart of Darkness’ starts, with Marlowe sitting and recounting the tale of his experience with Kurtz up the Congo.

Lesley Punton, Gravesend, graphite on paper, 2010. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: Could you talk about the Duration pieces? They make me think of a journey, where the days refer to the duration, or the process of making the work.

LP: The duration refers to polar night and polar day and the idea of time as something that is not quite fixed. I’ve always been interested in aspects of time – deep time and geological time – probably from the experience of spending a lot of time in hills.

Lesley Punton, Duration 2, oil & gesso on board, 2010-12 (photo credit L Punton). Image courtesy of artist.

MC: When did you start looking at the idea of the lived experience and venturing into remote places?

LP: I’ve always believed that you would make something that has some relationship to how you connect with the world. The intensity of the experience of walking and climbing mountains was something important and I became a bit obsessed with it. It felt unnatural not to do something with it.

Judy Spark, The things themselves, Two FM radios / transmitters with digital soundtracks, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: My route to making work about lived experience was through a concern with mechanisms like environmentalism that are established to get people to recognize the value of their surroundings. Environmentalism of any kind – whether related to ecology, renewable energies etc., – depends upon the scientific mechanisms that have created the problems that we’re facing in the first place. In the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve begun trying to find ways to think about how people engage with their surroundings. Conversely to Lesley, my landscapes might be right under my feet. It tends to be urban because that’s the environment I’m treading on all the time, and that’s how things come to consciousness.

MC: Could you explain the basis of your philosophical approach. It seems to be about being within a certain environment, perceiving what is around you, and letting these surface.

Judy Spark, Instructions for creating a gap, Printed text, 2011 – 12. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: A big influence was a Master’s in Environmental Philosophy in 2006 which broadened my thinking. There doesn’t seem to be much between the poles of not really caring about the place that you inhabit, and having a code of rules that are scientifically directed on how you should behave. We’re not used to working out anything in-between that is more personal. Trying to find a subjective response to things might actually turn out to have wider relevance than “just my own personal subjective response”. I became interested in the phenomenology movement and the idea of trying to describe actions or processes in a way that allows people to find something more direct and new. I think there are parallels with more indigenous or Buddhist experiences of the world which I can’t be a part of. I’d love to be, but I would only be putting my own Western perception onto them.

Judy Spark, Listening in the gap, Bound, printed text. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

MC: I had a conversation with Sarah Forrest and Virginia Hutchison, and we spoke about the subjective experience and values. When there is an objective framework such as environmentalism, it is easy to subscribe to it because it is clear what kind of values there are. When we move to the subjective, it opens the question of whether there are still values within this realm.

LP: As much as I might prioritise a lived experience and the subjective, my relationship with the audience is more objective. I’m always looking for a distancing mechanism. The act of translation in the artwork gives the potential for objectivity or a poetics of space, which the viewer could enter into with their own subjective experience. If I thought for one second that what I was making was self-indulgent work, I would run for the hills, literally. At the same time I have no interest in creating distanced work. While my work might be incredibly minimal, I hope that there is a poetic layer that subverts that sparseness.

JS: The notion of value is an interesting one because of the distancing that you talk about. I know that I have a bit of a drum to bang in some way, but I can’t use my artwork for that and I wouldn’t want to try. It really is about putting something out there and if it allows viewers to think about their own response to things, then great.

Lesley Punton, Flurry, silverpoint & gesso on paper, 2008. Image courtesy of artist.

MC: How did you meet and what led you to decide to collaborate on this exhibition.

LP: A mutual friend was planning on hillwalking in 2004 and we started regular weekend walks.

JS: We did talk about the possibility of showing work together for years and have had many conversations. When we secured the show, I became very busy. Lesley has a young son and we both work. The collaborative aspect probably starts now in the debriefing of what we’ve done.

LP: As we have individual practices, it was probably important that we had our time to make our own work.

JS: Now that we have put our work in proximity like this, maybe this is the beginning of the next stage

LP: Walking is a very interesting way to collaborate and to build friendships. There are extended periods of silence and these are different from the conversations you have when you meet somebody in the pub. You actively experience something together. I have made some works where I have collaborated with Jim Hamlyn, my partner. The notion of collaboration is still quite new for me in the actual making of artworks together. Up until very recently I’ve not formally collaborated.

Judy Spark, Orrery (gallium aparine), Graphite on paper, 2012. Image copyright and courtesy of artist.

JS: I’m usually a very isolated practitioner. I teach in an art school and that’s maybe where I get a lot of my energy. Collaboration is something I haven’t made a decision not to do. It seems to be closely connected to that thing of value. Maybe if I meet another artist whose work or practice, or something they say to me about my work or practice, chimes in a way. Maybe it’s to do with being a friend first.

LP:  I think collaborations grow organically. I don’t think you can just put two people together and say collaborate, do it now. It doesn’t work that way.

MC: Perhaps you need a lot of trust. It starts off from conversations and knowing that those conversations can take place even without the art.

LP: …and equality as well. If there’s an imbalance there, I don’t think you can collaborate, and that’s where your idea of trust comes in.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: cymbal (cast lead cymbal on stand). Image courtesy of artists.

These interviews will be published in two editions–check back in with us tomorrow for our interview with the artists from Back to the Things Themselves. This post features In the Shadow of the Hand which is on show at Market Gallery and presents new work by Sarah Forrest (SF) and Virginia Hutchison (VH). Reflecting on the process of evaluation and critique in the development of artistic practice, both artists create texts for each other that are cast in lead. The lead is then melted and recast into an object by each artist in response to the text, forming part of a series of exchanges exploring subjective responses to an objective call, and the relationship between object and text.

MC: Could you talk a bit about your individual practice? I saw Sarah’s work in the exhibition P is for Protagonist and couldn’t help but think of that exhibition when I entered gallery 1.

Virginia Hutchison, Excerpts from 7 sunsets (temporary intervention with gold leaf, IOTA public art projects, Inverness, 2010). Image courtesy of artist.

VH: A lot of my work is site or context-specific interventions in the public realm. Quite often it is objective or brief-led. Recent projects have required interaction between the work and people, and an exchange of skills. What has become more important for me has been the dialogue in the making of the work, for example with people installing the work and having conversations about the space and the work.  Through the conversations, I’ve become interested in the different roles, of whether I am the artist, or they are the artists because they help to make the work come to full cycle. That was what made us decide to collaborate. Both of us were dealing with relationships between viewer, artist, object, audience, and how all these roles shift. I was at the point when I was really quite keen to just reflect on all the work that I was doing.

SF: My practice is much more gallery-based and I do creative writing with texts published independently of the visual work. I was in an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and my starting point for my work was the voices of objects. In the run-up to the exhibition, I was undertaking a lot of research on the voices of objects and I became so lost in theory that I almost lost myself. The work I presented, Part 1: for the voice, was a white sculpture narrating with a pair of headphones. Everything had gone white, and it was about a voice that was missing. By that point, I had a desire to move away from intellectualizing, come back to a much more subjective space, and find different ways to talk about a creative practice. That was when we began speaking about evaluation and critique, in relation to the art object. I am interested in creative writing as a response to a visual experience and I think that’s when our conversation started.

Sarah Forrest, Part 1: for the voice, (2010), installation with a framed text, a monitor playing a video, a white sculpture made of plaster, paper, wire mesh and gloss paint which had headphones emitting a female voice attached to it. Duration 10.23 minutes. Exhibited in Days, a three-person show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Image courtesy of artist.

VH: I haven’t done a lot of creative writing myself but what I like is how it made me think differently about the projects I was doing. I thought that it was important to find a way to present a narrative of the conversations I was having. When we started off, I thought it was going to be very linear, when we had text, object, text, object, and one would follow one from the other. In reality, when responding to Sarah’s text, I was thinking of my text, and I was also thinking of what object she might be making in response. So many things started to feed in, including our conversations.

SF: We started off with texts that each of us had written or appropriated that were cast into lead letters in Edinburgh. We would respond to each other’s text with an object.  The size and weight of the object was dictated by the size and weight of the texts. It was a really simple relationship between text and an object, and a playful way to work and structure a collaboration. There was a point when I was making a symbol that was in response to the the the and I was asking for advice. We spoke about ideas of repetition and rhythm, the the the being like a stutter almost, and talked about the idea of making an object like a stutter. We began to collaborate in the making of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand: the the the (typeset text on paper). Image courtesy of artists.

VH: Even in the making of the work, we had to share our skills quite a lot. What I found healthy yet scary was letting go of ownership of something, as well as authorship. Although I know what texts I wrote and what objects I made, because Sarah has a text that sits with my object  – is it mine or her’s? Is it somebody else’s?

MC: I was interested in the decisions that both of you had decided to take, in relation to what you considered physical and immaterial within the exhibition space. The materiality of the objects could be very seductive just by looking at it. Yet these vanish into a two-dimensional screen. I personally found the texts very three-dimensional. One of the texts had instructions for a person to inhale and exhale and it made me feel my own body.

VH: From the standpoint of public art that I work in, issues of permanence are things I am always considering. What is permanent or temporary? It could be a day or 20 years. I like the swopping round, of the text becoming the object, and the object becoming quite two-dimensional. Once an object disappears, it has a different narrative.

SF: What is it that sticks with you when you’ve left the exhibition? What is the echo of the object and how do you narrativize that memory of the object?

MC: I think that because I’m unable to move around an object, it changes how my narrative of an experience is made. When the object is presented on a screen, perhaps it changes the way you remember it?

VH: I think definitely. Although it is projected on a lead screen, almost as the last remaining object…

SF: … and the size of the screen relates to the weight of the object.

Sarah Forrest / Virginia Hutchison, In the Shadow of the Hand (gallery image). Image courtesy of artists.

MC: An objective framework has a determined set of values. In shifting from objective to subjective evaluation, are there still values? For example, when you were talking about the conversations that had occurred, are you suggesting that for any kind of critique, there has to be a relationship between two people, or an emotional involvement?

SF: I think it’s a part of communication. For something to have value, there has to be a sharing of what is important and some kind of agreement on what things are important, which is what has happened in this whole process.

VH: I think you’re always going to have a relationship with somebody whom you’re critiquing or evaluating a piece of work. If it’s a media-driven thing then there is definitely a separation. I think that’s the problem – there is a separation when you are not encountering somebody on a face-to-face, real time situation. When you think about the context of making work, it might reveal a lot about the people that create it and how they have conversation with folk. Are they dominant in a conversation and does it reflect in their work? Does their work allow people to put their own selves into it in some way?

SF: That was always a concern with the project because it’s a call-and-response between us. We had to think about how it is interesting to someone else and not just about our personal relationship. The installation became important as a space where you can read and you can sit. I was quite aware of not becoming quite closed and this feels like an experimental exhibition. It’s the first time I’ve collaborated on an exhibition and the work, when presented, still feels very active. As soon as you present something as an exhibition it takes on a position, as a thing in the world.