Thankyou

Gordon Dalton, 'Thankyou', 2011

Thankyou for not breaking down my door out of lust for a new post. The fact is that I haven’t spent any significant amount of time in Cardiff since early September, and my work here in Edinburgh has forced me to put this blog on the backburner for the time being. The good news is that I’ll be visiting next weekend, by which time so much will have changed at the g that I’ll be able to bring you something genuinely worth reading. I’d love to hear from you all in the comments beneath this post if you have any anecdotes of Dairy life over the past couple of months that you’d like to share. If not, sit tight, because I’m getting there.

Yours,
Luke

From the Dairy to where?

A cat in a car. Image: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/

I made my second visit to The Dairy on Wednesday, and I wouldn’t expect that anybody reading this blog needs filling in on the changes that have already taken place there: Ffotogallery’s first show there, Rick Davies’s ‘Invisible Landscapes’, has already been and gone. A note on the tents though – I visited the shelter erected to incubate WARP over the Autumn months, and found the lighting and general ambience to be utterly conducive to working through a crisis.

Speaking of which, I can reveal certain details about the new space that Chris and Anthony have lined up, and upon which they are ‘close to closing the deal’. Please don’t hunt me down for more – this is about as much as I know. The new venue may be ‘somewhat bigger’ than the old one, and may see the g dispensing with the necessity to consciously curate shows over three storeys. I’ll bring you more as soon as I get it.

Back to Pontcanna, and Chris has plenty to offer on the subject of the g’s first show for the transitional space. Richard Higlett‘s show at the Dairy will not, as previously advertised, be titled ‘Mobile Sonic’, but ‘Welcome to your world’. ‘Mobile Sonic’ refers to a part of what will be a multifarious and complex opus, only part of which will come under the g’s curatorial wings. Specifically, it refers to a work which will consist of a live band playing in a car. This car will be used in the creation of a film, to be shown in the Dairy alongside extracts from the working relationship Higlett shares with writer Leona Jones and, more mysteriously, an interview with a cat: ‘He had intended to interview the cat in the car but the cat doesn’t like the car’, Chris notes. After the show, this same vehicle will be offered up for proposals, with the artist suggesting it might be fitted with a loudspeaker and used for a wedding proposal, or something. Chris again: ‘He’d consider a proposal in Aberdeen if it were good enough’.

I ask Mr. Brown if ‘Welcome to your world’ is an indication of the g’s intention to produce a more expansive program from hereonin. ‘I don’t know if the program here is an indication of us growing,’ he responds. ‘Obviously, we’ve grown physically, but I’m really working for growth in ambition’ – all the while, he assures me, maintaining that the focus stays on recent graduates. ‘All will become apparent’, he signs off, ‘with the new venue’. Watch this space.

From the Vault # 3

The Owl Project: Simon Blackmore (right) and Tony Hall (left), performing at g39's 'Battle of the Bands', Spring 2001. Image courtesy g39

I may have peaked early in selecting this one a mere two weeks into the blog. This, according to Chris Brown, is ‘the Del Boy falling through the bar of g39′s history’:

‘So, the two chaps are UWIC 2001 graduates Simon Blackmoreand Tony Hall, aka the Owl Project. In this photo they’re making music with their log books (one of which has since been bought by Björk) as part of a Battle of the Bands event for our Spring Fête in 2001. After a day of hook-a-duck, pin the fig leaf on David, and other arty nonsense in the g, the evening’s proceedings played out in a labour club, a rough-around-the-edges sort of venue.

As with the rest of the day, the Battle of the Bands entries were all to a certain extent of an arty persuasion – the Owl Project perhaps being the most. Their performance you might describe as rural electronica – blips, samples and drones that they built to a crescendo wall of sound. Their performance was getting fed through the venue’s PA system, which was more used to chanelling cheesy karaoke of a Friday night, and was increasingly testing the system to its sonic limits. The performance was brought to an early and rude end when there was an exclamation of ‘Fire!’ from the back of the hall, to which everyone turned around to see one of the wall-mounted speakers on fire. So the hall was evacuated in a ramshackle way and the mediocre flames were dowsed. Everyone was let back in very shortly after and the evening continued (my nerves were totally shot by this point, I’ve never fully recovered) and the venue staff were very insistent that the fire was caused not because the speakers weren’t fit for purpose, but because of the atonal racket that had been blasted through them. Highly amusing in hindsight. One day I might even laugh about it. Definitely made it to the annuls of Cardiff mythology.’

From the Vault # 2

Tom Dale, 'Memorial', 2005/08. Image courtesy g39

A little digging around revealed to me the story behind this striking image. What struck me first of all was the way it resonates with a sense of immediate pre-gig anticipation – the moment just before the band come on, after the houselights have dropped and smoke billows across the stage. Finding out the title, however, lent the image a very different weight. This is (unless I’m very much mistaken), Tom Dale‘s ‘Memorial’, first realised in 2005 and installed for g39′s 2008 show ‘If you built it they will come’, an exhibition which commemorated 10 years at Mill Lane. The title is a good joke. Under its influence, the smoke pumping out of the smoke machine hidden somewhere within the microphone-laden oak-veneer MDF pulpits speaks less to the feeling of waiting for a performer to take to the stage, instead resembling the vapour trails of a recently, mysteriously disappeared orator. It’s a surreally comic moment, elegantly frozen in time.

Securing sanctuary

Poster for the movie M*A*S*H* (1970). Image: doctormacro.com

Thursday was move-in day at the Dairy, and everyone spent a lot of time talking about locks. g39 will be sharing the Pontcanna space (within a stone’s throw of Chapter, for those not in the know) with Ffotogallery over the coming months, an arrangement which came about quite fortuitously: Ffotogallery were looking for another of their Cardiff-based satellite spaces into which they could expand their programme over the summer months (“we’ve outgrown our shoes”), g39 were merely looking for somewhere to shack up; the Dairy answered both problems. It’s encouraging to see this coming together of two organisations with markedly – but not antagonistically – different aspirations in a time of mutual need. Which is why it seemed germane to mention locks in a blog that is emphatically not about practicalities – the long conversations about security seemed to me (in a manner which demonstrates my mild desperation to vindicate the title of ‘writer in residence’ that has somehow been bestowed upon me) to be a poetic metaphor for what this move is all about, which is securing some sort of sanctuary for the important operations that form g39′s responsibility to the Welsh arts community, at a time of resolute hostility towards the arts. This metaphor will become that bit more concrete when the g gets round to installing its temporary workspace, which will consist of three large, mismatched tents placed on the Dairy’s mezzanine level – 1 for the g, one for WARP, and one for “god knows what”.

It seemed, as the conversation topic shifted from issues housekeeping to those of programming, that far from being a dormant period in the g’s history, this could actually be an opportunity to do some really interesting things, the first of which will consist of attempting to ram a car through one the Dairy’s narrow double-doors as part of Richard Higglett’s ‘Mobile Sonic’ project. Ffotogallery have a great deal of events that are planned but as-of-yet unconfirmed, from a ‘day of sound’ with musician Murray Ward to an interactive psychogeographical research project run by the collective Come to Your Senses. As the lines will be blurred between Ffotogallery and the g over the coming months, this blog will be the place to find listings for all goings-on at the Dairy from now until Autumn.

From the Vault

Casey Raymond, 'Grotto of Miracles' (detail), 2010. Image courtesy g39

As part of the deal for my involvement in this blog, I was lent a CD of over 300 images from the g39 archive, all of which could be seen in digital slideshow form at the g’s final farewell. There will, one can safely predict, be times over the coming months when there will be little to report. At these times I hope to exhume some of the choicest images for your viewing pleasure. At present, the disk is a treasure-trove of beautiful, varied trinkets that I can profess to know precious little about. As the feature ticks on, I’ll be asking the g39 team to fill me in on how some of these enigmatic images came to be.

The image above, however, needs no explaining. I put it up first because out of 303 it is the image that bears the strongest resemblance to one I myself took, surreptitiously, on my camera phone. I warmly remember Casey Raymond‘s gingerbread grotto, constructed in the first floor gallery during the Christmas period of last year, where it provided a fuggy, mildly lunatic retreat from the deadening consumer spectacle swamping the rest of the city. I remember the smell in particular, a smell which flooded unbidden back into my mind when I visited Connie Viney‘s installation for this years Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show.

Drawn onwards

Chris and Anthony close g39 for the last time, 02/07/11

It’s both a privilege and a pressure to be tasked with the writing of this blog.  As many of you reading this will know, g39, beating heart of Cardiff’s artistic life for 13 years, closed the door to its Mill Lane premises for the final time on the 2nd of July, thereby entering into a period of transition and opening up to an indefinite future. It’s Getting There will serve as a document of this new era, but the stakes are higher than mere archiving. ‘We’re so busy at the moment that we have no time to think about the move on any level besides the practical’, Chris Brown admitted as we were specifying what shape the blog would take yesterday. ‘We need a more reflective record that we can look back on when we’ve completed the move’. This is where I come in. Over the coming months I’ll be pestering the team to divulge a little more about the transition, inviting them to express their hopes and fears as the plot thickens. Together, we hope to create a picture of the g’s future as it takes shape, a picture which should speak strongly and, with any luck, cheerfully, to these uncertain times. Wish me luck.

Luke Healey