‘Craneway Event’ is a feature length portrait of the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham. Shot in the craneway of an abandoned Ford car factory overlooking San Francisco bay, Dean filmed Cunningham rehearsing his company in the massive hanger-like space. The film was made shortly before Cunningham’s death in 2009 and this will be the first UK showing of this landmark work outside London.

‘Craneway Event is the most extraordinary, poetic gift from one artist to another. It feels full of love.’

Sarah Crompton, The Telegraph, 17 May 2010

Event Details

To accompany Tacita Dean’s exhibition at Woodlands Terrace, The Common Guild presented two special off-site screenings of Dean’s highly acclaimed, film ‘Craneway Event’, in collaboration with Scottish Ballet.

Tacita Dean’s exhibition at The Common Guild presents a selection of works that can be seen as still lives. By using imagery of various natural forms, including trees and neolithic stones or ‘dolmens’ Dean focuses on the gradual processes of growth, transformation and demise.

Though primarily known for her 16mm film installations, Dean’s work ranges considerably in both subject and medium, withdrawing a significant and enduring component. Central to all of the works in the exhibition, and her practice in general, is an acute awareness of time and the weight of history that accompanies it. Using the still life as a means of observing temporality, Dean’s work often acts as a memento mori, reminding us of our own mortality, and the endurance of nature.

Dean often removes objects from their conventional context by blacking or whitening out extraneous information. Her films encourage extended examination through close-up footage or the illusion of real-time documentation. She invites us to linger in the scenes with which she presents us, often drawing us to the archaic or the near obsolete. Using editing to control the viewer’s perception of the subject, Dean occupies an area between sensual experience and forensic dissection, demonstrating her ongoing interest in the relationship between reality and fiction, and the subjective nature of history.

This exhibition of displaced objects explored space and time in a visual language that is almost sculptural. As curator Massimiliano Gioni has written; “I’ve always thought of Tacita Dean as being the Richard Serra of vision: her images are as dense and heavy as gigantic sculptures.”

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Exhibition Details

Event

The exhibition was accompanied by an off-site screening of Tacita Dean’s film 'Craneway Event' (2009) at Scottish Ballet.

Read the Commentary Dr. Dominic Paterson –

Read the Commentary Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith –

This exhibition comprises a new installation conceived specially for The Common Guild by one of the most influential American artists associated with the emergence of Conceptual Art in the late 1960 and early 1970s. Robert Barry was a pioneer of conceptual art, abandoning painting in 1967 to produce site-specific installations, many of which were almost invisible to the viewer. These installations and actions relied on language to indicate their existence, shifting the presentation and reception of the work from image to text.

Since the early 1970s 'language', or perhaps more correctly, 'words', have been central to Barry’s practice, which has since included typewriter drawings, wall pieces, slide projections and films as well as often cited ‘actions’ such as gas releases and telepathic pieces. Barry is now perhaps best known for his large-scale text installations known as ‘word spaces’, which cast a selection of words in a given space from an ongoing and ever-changing collection. Applied directly to the walls, windows and floors of the gallery, the words surround the viewer, reasserting the importance of the viewer at the heart of the art experience. As Barry explains, “Instead of trying to use text to convey an idea or meaning, I became interested in the individual power of the word to convey emotions or feelings.”

Although utterly conceptual in origin, Robert Barry’s work is essentially experiential. This rare opportunity to see his work brought the physical space between the words, the gallery and the viewer into focus.

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Artist Talk

On 3 September 2010, Robert Barry talked about his exhibition at The Common Guild ‘Words and Music’ at the Mackintosh Lecture Theatre, The Glasgow School of Art.

Exhibition Talk

On 11 September 2010, artist Neil Clements presented an exhibition talk focussing on his interest in the shift in Barry’s work from painting to text in the mid to late 1960s and its ongoing significance.

Read the Commentary by Neil Clements –

Read the Commentary by Ross Birrell –

‘Images or shadows of divine things’ is an on-going series of photographs accumulated since 2005 by Byrne. The modestly presented monochrome images of the United States share a distinct ambiguity; although made over the course of the five years leading up to the exhibition, the images appear to depict a much earlier time. Whilst evoking vernacular photographic idioms of American mid-century photography, cumulatively the series pointed towards the complicated relationship between time, appearance, and the photographic document. Anchoring the project with a reference to a text by the 18th century American theologian Jonathan Edwards, the work shadowed an American intellectual tradition stretching back to the Puritans which perceives the world as inextricably prefigured in the bible.

Gerard Byrne is an artist whose work regularly reconstructs found scenarios from the past, often drawing from television and magazine culture. Using video and photography, he explores how the future has been envisaged in the past. This exhibition accompanied, and was a counterpoint to, Byrne’s major new video work commissioned by and for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. Entitled ‘A thing is a hole in a thing it is not’, the project comprises four films that look at Minimalist sculpture as a pre-figuration of time-based artistic forms.

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Artist Talk

Gerard Byrne talked about his exhibition at The Common Guild ‘Images or shadows of divine things’ on 17 June 2010.

Exhibition Talk

Katrina Brown, Director of The Common Guild, talked about Gerard Byrne’s work including his commission for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art ‘A Thing is a hole in a Thing it is not’ on 24 April 2010.

Read the Commentary by Jonathan Griffin –

Martin Creed likes opposites. On and off, open and closed, big and small, in and out, light and dark — versions of something and nothing. His work often sets up extremes and by doing so he opens up the space in between. Utilising commonplace materials from copy paper and cardboard boxes to dining room tables and office chairs, he presents the spectrum of possibilities we are offered every day and highlights the absurdity that can be found in the ordinary. Creed’s simple gestures often achieve dramatic results, and although not always immediately obvious, his approach to objects and materials can change the viewer’s idea of them forever.

‘Things’ makes use of the domestic setting of 21 Woodlands Terrace, continuing Creed’s interest in playing with our perceptions of spaces and places whilst disrupting our expectations of the gallery environment. The exhibition included several collections of similar objects, carefully ordered according to size, highlighting Creed’s use of control while exposing the more off-kilter side of his practice. Creed is known for producing a range of works that interfere with the act of seeing itself, such as lights that go on and off and doors that close as soon as they open. At The Common Guild, Creed presents an equally testing work, drawing attention but denying access to one of the building’s greatest assets: its view.

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Exhibition Talk

On 13th March, Dr Fiona Bradley, Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery, offered her thoughts on the work of Martin Creed and his exhibition ‘Things’.

Read the Commentary by Dr. Fiona Bradley –