IT WAS the much-recycled quote from the Lord Provost in 1947 on the opening of the first Edinburgh International Festival that decided the course of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. The new festival should be, said the Lord Provost, “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit.” In the wake of all-consuming world war, of deprivation and struggle, of devastation and destruction, culture was seen as the great hope for rebuilding international dialogue.
There is something very democratic in all this. The Art Festival, itself just 14 years old, has always been about bringing together Edinburgh institutions, in the sharing of art “wealth” to create something greater than its constituent parts. In the first few years, the festival might have been able to do little more than produce a publication mapping out all the galleries and their summer exhibitions, but it has evolved, as it was always meant to do, into something much more.
“It’s the time of year when people like to programme internationally,” says Festival Director Sorcha Carey. “There’s something about the sheer ambition of a whole set of different organisations across the city coming together to collaborate on a festival that automatically creates the conditions for exciting exhibitions.”
The Festival shows its colours in its unique Commissions programme and its ever-expanding Events programming, which includes Art Walks, Art Lates (a mystery tour around selected art galleries in Edinburgh, with live music) and the wonderful Art Earlies, which are similar – with a picnic – for kids.
The Commissions programme this year started from “a place of being aware that it’s the 70th Edinburgh International Festival, of really thinking about that moment in our city and that extraordinary sense of what seemed to be quite radical at the end of World War Two; that art and culture could play an important role in building dialogue after war.”
But in further research, Carey came across a 1917 pamphlet entitled “The Making of the Future” by the innovative Edinburgh town planner and polymath Patrick Geddes whose innovative ideas and impassioned plea for a new society after the first world war seemed very prescient. “He had such a vision for the world, international in outlook but very locally rooted in life, community and society. In the current climate, there seemed to me to be something very urgent in revisiting those ideas.”
Geddes’ approach was one of small scale interventions rather than large scale knocking down and redeveloping, something which has great resonance today with huge pressure on the city – as in other cities around Scotland and indeed, in our countryside – from developers keen to maximise profit on every square inch of ground.
Part of Geddes’ legacy in Edinburgh was in the creation of a network of green spaces across the Old Town and a concentration on the provision of play spaces for children, many of which still exist today. It is in this vein that the Festival have commissioned the artist Bobby Niven (whose previous work includes “Proceedings of the Society” at Taigh Chearsabhagh, North Uist, and The Bothy Project at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art) to create a temporary Artist’s Studio, “Palm House”, in Johnston Terrace Wildlife Garden, just below the castle, a space which is not normally open to the public, and one of many new venues this year. It will be used to house four different artist residencies over the festival period and host free children’s outdoor workshops every Friday during the Festival.
Carey tells me that they have chosen to work with artists this year who are already working in a contemporary expression of Geddes’ ideas. And so in Chessel Court, Toby Paterson will create a sculpture (“The Sociology of Autumn”) that is inspired by the sense of the collaging of layers of the city and its evolution.
In Chalmers Close, Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich create a giant, inflatable “Dragon of Profit and Private Ownership” with associated pageantry associated with Geddes anti-capitalist rhetoric. And Shannon Te Ao installs powerful video works in a former Magdalene Asylum for “fallen women who have deviated from the path of virtue and peace,” on the Canongate.
Elsewhere, there are Pop Up exhibitions and a continuation of the Platform series, presented at the former Fire Station Museum (now part of Edinburgh College of Art) on Lauriston Place, which gives an opportunity to emerging artists to present new work at the Festival. And the excellent Events programme continues to expand with performances by Walker and Bromwich – an inflatable dragon walkabout – a lecture from Shilpa Gupta, rare tours of Geddes’ Ramsay Gardens flat, guided art walks, and “A Summer Meeting”, a weekend of events exploring the legacy of the ideas Geddes’ promulgated in “The Making of the Future”. Marrying the fun and the thought-provoking, this is a festival that, despite being just 14 years old, more than holds its place in the summer Festivals jamboree.
Edinburgh Art Festival runs from July 27 to August 27. Full details at www.edinburghartfestival.com or from the EAF Kiosk, Gladstone Court, 179 Canongate, Edinburg
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