Feature: Gangrel Bodies
Gangrel Bodies.
Jim Colquhoun
15 to 24 June 2005
PEACOCK visual arts for LOOK 2005. Art and the City
Glasgow-based artist Jim Colquhoun’s work unfolds around an engagement
with place and space and the experience this engenders. By walking through
a particular area, writing, taking photographs, talking to people and
drawing, an image of place filtered through the artists own subjectivity
emerges. Drawn to the margins, be they cultural, political, psychological,
social or spatial, his work blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction,
history and myth. It exhibits a skewed Romanticism, inflected with references
to popular culture, often in the form of pulp fiction, conspiracy theory
and dubious folklore.
Jim will encourage others to cast themselves adrift with him into the
collective unconscious of contemporary and historical Aberdeen. This will
take various forms, including organised ‘psychogeographical’
walks, a map detailing localities in which concupiscence and micturation
take place and the production of a pseudo-historical broadsheet, ‘The
Castle Spectre’ with allied urban camping performance. There will
be a complementary programme of talks by fellow psychogeographers and
a series of film screenings at the Belmont Picturehouse.
PEACOCK visual arts
21 Castle Street AB11 5BQ, t: 01224 639 539
PEACOCK visual arts reception provides up-to-date information on all Gangrel
Bodies events and activities throughout the project, as well as background
reading on the political and theoretical subtexts of the project.
The Castle Spectre
The Salvation Army Citadel, 26 Castle Street AB24 1UN
The artist will camp on the tower of the Salvation Army Citadel. This
cultural-spatial intervention is partly based on an old Norse practice
known as UTISETA (out-sitting), wherein people sat outside on mounds,
standing stones, mountains etc. The performance also references the idea
of the romantic artist/-hermit figure.
Concupiscence & Micturation: an experiment in Pataphysical
Cartography
A cartographic response to the ‘unorthodox’ ways in which
we use cities, those places where the private and the public have become
blurred will be mapped.
McKays of Queen Street
29-31 Queen Street AB10 1AP, t: 01224 643136
Mo-Fr 9 to 5:30, Thu 9 to 7, Sun 11 to 5:30
An installation of a range of films on walking and exploration at this
most traditional of outdoor equipment purveyors
Stewart Home. Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Oedipus Complex, 41 min
This film was made in Australia while Home was artist-in-residence at
Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts in May 2004. In the film
avant-garde techniques and the avant-garde obsession with death interweave
with reflections on the life and death of his mother Julia Callan-Thompson.
Images of his mum working as a fashion model and club hostess during the
sixties are cut against an at times deliberately dissociated soundtrack
that uses stories about her to explore the limits of documentary cinema.
This is simultaneously an expression of love and loss and an attempt to
draw out the ways in which the avant-garde Lettrist cinema of the early
fifties in France was commercialised in the later work of Godard, Marker
and Resnais.
Chris Petit/Ian Sinclair. The Cardinal and the Corpse. (1992), The Falconer
(1997), Asylum (2000)
Three collaborations between director Chris Petit and bookseller, psychogeographer,
poet and novelist Iain Sinclair about marginalized cultural figures, produced
by Illuminations Films for Channel Four.
Bill Thompson, ‘aberdeen’, audio installation, 8 hours
This soundwalk piece was recorded binaurally during one long continuous
exploration of Aberdeen. Throughout our day we filter out the sounds around
us in order to focus on going where we're going, doing what we need to
do… As a result, we miss the beauty of our ambient surroundings.
Due to the sheer length of the piece, it is hoped that listeners will
'get lost' within the work and not be able to predict when or where they
are within the soundwalk. In hearing these sounds 'out of context', listeners
are encouraged to 'hear' to them as though for the first time.
Tom Weir. Weir’s Way, approx. 20 min. each
Four episodes of the TV series featuring Scotland’s pioneering psychogeographer
as he explores Glen Affric, Wester Ross, Loch Torridon and the coastline
of Applecross.
Wednesday 15 June
Peripatetic Randomiser for the Pleasurable Negation of Spectacular
Space
A walk with Jim Colquhoun starting at PEACOCK visual arts, 2pm
The Peripatetic Randomiser is a device, which through the application
of chance, enables the deconstruction of habitual patterns of movement
through the city. Each participant will receive their own Randomiser.
Quatermass and the Pit (15), 6:30 pm
Director: Roy Ward Baker. UK 1967. 97 min.
Introduced by Jim Colquhoun
During excavations in London a large unidentified object is unearthed.
Within its walls Professor Quatermass discovers the remains of intelligent
alien creatures that attempted to conquer the Earth in prehistoric times
and, through their experiments on early man, altered human evolution to
its present state. Though dormant for many centuries, the power supply
from the excavations is being drained by the ship until its terrifying
force can be unleashed and the creatures can reinstate their violent dominance
over man.
The Belmont Picturehouse, 49 Belmont Street AB10 1JS, t: 01224 343534
Full Prize £ 4.00, Friends £ 3.00
Thursday 16 June
Culture from the ground: walking, movement and place making (2004-2006)
A talk by Dr. Jo Lee VENUE, 6pm
For the greater part of history, and today in much of the world, almost
all human activities have been carried out on foot. We will investigate
the links between walking and culture, using examples from around the
world and the city and surroundings of Aberdeen.
Dr. Jo Lee is a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen Anthropology
Department. His research looks into how walking around is fundamental
to everyday social life.
Friday 17 June
A Surrealist Deambulation
A walk with Jim Colquhoun starting at PEACOCK visual arts, 2pm
The Surrealists described their walking experiments as ‘automatic
writing in real space’ or ‘an exploration between waking like
and dream life’. The walks were essentially aimless wanderings in
‘empty’ territory. In the course of this walk we will head
deliberately towards the margins of the city and out into the countryside.
Saturday 18 June
The Salvation Army Citadel
26 Castle Street AB24 1UN, 10 to 2
A tour with Mrs. Margaret Ross, Salvation Army Director for Social Work,
and viewing of the artist’s campsite. Tea and coffee provided by
the Salvation Army.
A ‘notational walk’ with Ray Lucas
Starting at PEACOCK visual arts at 2pm, ending with a talk at 6 pm at
The Noose & Monkey (31-35 Rosemount Viaduct AB251NQ, t: 01224 640483)
This workshop looks at how we represent movement with inscription. It
is a complex act which appears at first to be rather simple, something
which we take for granted. What aspects of a movement do we choose to
record? The route, the actual movements of the legs, the encounters made
along the way? By taking the step of notation, a specific form of inscription
which contains instructional information, we allow the reconstruction
and recontextualisation of that walk. By making marks, we can make the
experience of the city available to our creative and descriptive processes.
The workshop begins with a short talk on notation and the strategies we
might employ, followed by a walking and sketching exercise. In a discussion
at the end observations can be shared and reconstructions attempted.
Raymond Lucas is an anthropologist with a background in architecture.
He studied architecture at Strathclyde, University and has an MPhil by
research in ‘Filmic Architecture’ from that department. Lucas’
current research is with the department of anthropology, Aberdeen university;
part of the creativity and practice research group, and is entitled ‘Towards
a Theory of Inscriptive Practices as Thinking Tools.’ This research
is looking at drawing, notation and diagrams as embodied processes of
knowledge and thinking.
Sunday 19 June
Sans Soleil (15), 1 pm
Director: Chris Marker. Fr 1982. 104 min.
A poetic documentary tour of Tokyo, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and San Francisco,
the film mingles personal reflections with the history of the world. The
female narrator reads letters sent by fictional Sandor Krasna, writing
from ‘another world’. The spoken word, synthesized sound and
haunting visuals investigate relationships between developed and developing
societies. Virtuoso editing and special effects conjure the disorientation
of a world traveller, journeying through cultures, secret rituals and
confusions of time. Masters of montage Vertov, Eisentein, Kuleshov and
Medvedkin have all left their mark on this beautiful film of impossible
memories, but Sans soleil still defies categorisation.
The Belmont Picturehouse, 49 Belmont Street AB10 1JS, t: 01224 343534
Full Prize £ 4.00, Friends £ 3.00
Tuesday 21 June
A walk with Stewart Home, 2pm
Starting at PEACOCK visual arts at 2 pm, ending with a talk at 6 pm at
the Fittie Bar (18 Wellington Street AB11 5BT, t: 01224 582911)
The walk will lead through the harbour to Fittie featuring audio recordings
from Stewart Home’s Cambridge Junction Torkradio project. The talk
will focus in particular on his novel ’69 Things to do with a Dead
Princess’ (Canongate 2002), which has been described as the strangest
work of fiction to be set in and around Aberdeen.
Stewart Home is a writer, artist, filmmaker and prankster. Home was born
in London in 1962 and the bulk of his novels use the English capital as
their setting. His rare one person gallery shows have to date been restricted
to London: ‘Humanity In Ruins’ at Central Space in 1988, ‘Vermeer
II’ at workfortheeyetodo in 1996, and earlier this year ‘Becoming
(M)other’ at T1&2 Artspace (a collaborative installation with
Chris Dorley Brown). In the eighties Home had a close association with
Transmission Gallery in Glasgow where he participated in group installations
such as ‘Desire In Ruins’ (1987) and organised ‘The
Fifth International Festival Of Plagiarism’ (1989).
Wednesday 22 June
A Situationist Drift with Jim Colquhoun, 2pm
Starting at PEACOCK visual arts
The Situationist Drift is a technique for defining the unconscious zones
of a city. A collective undertaking, that attempts to liberate the participants
from bourgeois society, or ‘a technique of transient passages through
varied ambiances’. Participants will be encouraged to respond instinctively
when striking a passage through the city.
Radio On (18), 6:30 pm
Director: Chris Petit. UK/West Germany 1979. 102 min.
Introduced by Jim Colquhoun
Following a young man (David Beames) as he travels to Bristol to investigate
the mysterious death of his brother, Radio On offers a unique, compelling
and even mythic vision of a late 1970s England, stalled between failed
hopes of cultural and social change and the imminent upheavals of Thatcherism.
As Beames drives, he encounters figures as rootless as himself: an army
deserter from Northern Ireland, a German woman looking for her lost child,
and a garage mechanic (Sting in an early singing cameo). Stunningly photographed
in luminous monochrome by Martin Schaefer and driven by a startling new
wave soundtrack, Radio On is ripe for rediscovery.
The Belmont Picturehouse, 49 Belmont Street AB10 1JS, t: 01224 343534Full
Prize £ 4.00, Friends £ 3.00
Friday 24 June
Premiere of new work from ‘aberdeen’ by Bill Thompson.