Glasgow Examined (West end) Exhibition (music mapped the terrain)

Circa 1996/97

me 1999 duffer t-shirt from Peter T

The inspiration:

The natural basis of time, the concrete experience of its passage, becomes human and social by existing for humanity. The limitations of human practice imposed by the various stages of labour have humanized time and also dehumanized it, in the forms of cyclical time and of the separated irreversible time of economic production. The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all-embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favour of a federation of independent times — a federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization of authentic communism, which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals.”

The world already dreams of such a time. In order to actually live it, it only needs to become fully conscious of it.

Guy Debord

We all have our own individual histories, I suppose nowadays it would appear we are recording them collectively through the tools of the spectacle but we celebrate mostly our vanity rather than our experience so our time is still commodfied. Oh well then, I suppose I better stop writing. But I can't get caught up in the complexities of what I am for or against as that would in itsself waste time and make for a painful experience and quite likely painful reading.

Instead I make my own interpration of Debords words in my work, it is an interpratation of my personal history within a public space, through a particular period of time. A federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously present. The west end of Glasgow has a wider context of meaning and within that are thousands of different opinions and ideas of what it is and what it represents. In my head it is just like a film set thats been used in various productions that I have been in, playing out the moments that are deemed significant in a rites of passage type of script, my own personal commodified journey ticking the boxes. Its meaning(the west end) to me will be very similar to that of others in some senses but the individual experience is mine and is time specific and my participation in the collective experience is why I have close friends and wider aquaintances.

And that's the basis of the work, trying to create images of Public spaces that relate to the individual and collective experience of those times. Every work has a title relating to a piece of music and every piece of music relates to those experiences, I draw over every image to create the individual history within the work, like printing my own personal map on the spaces.

There will be music at the exhibition, there has to be, because it is the collective experience of music that led me to the experiences from these times, music mapped the terrain.