The Cowboy and the Spaceman

ALISTAIR PEEBLES reports on the making of a short film by visual artist Colin Kirkpatrick on Orkney

ARTIST COLIN KIRKPATRICK, in collaboration with Peacock Visual Arts of Aberdeen, has now completed the first stage of an ambitious new film project in Orkney. It meant taking ten days off work last month as a wholesale supplier of “beans and bananas” to the local public, as well as no end of trouble getting the right kit for the spaceman part and a hectic schedule of “guerrilla tactics” against the weather, but it’s done and he’s glad that the two years of planning have at last paid off. So far, anyway…

Filmed on location in the West Mainland (a landscape often used by Pukka – as he is more often known – as a parallel for Montana and the Plains generally) the ten-minute short will be edited at Peacock over the coming months by Adam Proctor, their Digital Coordinator, who shot the film with him. It will be premiered at the Aberdeen gallery early next year as part of a one-man show of the artist’s recent work.

‘The Cowboy and the Spaceman’ will be his second work for screen. Its predecessor – in some ways its sequel – ‘Machair Cowboy’, was shot in North Uist over twenty minutes in 2003 with the assistance of Bangalore artist Raghu Rao. Pukka knew at the time that he wanted to make the longer film, but the swiftness of that simple project gave him, he admits, “a false sense of security” about tackling things on a larger scale.

Featuring Gaelic subtitles, ‘Machair Cowboy’ was, like the new project, driven more by ideas and visual reference than plot, and Pukka remembers that it seemed to go down well with many local residents. No doubt the universal appeal of the cowboy figure, and one in trouble at that, makes for a ready identification – perhaps especially in these flat rural places.

In addition to the new film, which is conceived as a piece of art rather than cinema, the Peacock exhibition will include photographic works, prints and sculptural totems: material of a kind familiar to those who saw ‘Cow Town’ (Pier Arts Centre, 1999) either in Orkney or at art.tm in Inverness, or who have followed the development of Kirkpatrick’s career since he graduated from Gray’s School of Art in the 1980s.

But the period since then has shown what effect the more or less uncontrolled exploitation of resources that Boulding identified as the “cowboy” outlook can have on the environment.

Though this will be his first solo exhibition since 1999, he has not been idle. He participated in the project section of Zenomap, new work supporting the first Scottish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and made that filmic breakthrough trip to the Triangle Arts Workshop in North Uist the same year.

He is also one of the artists shortlisted for the commission to produce a piece of public art for the New Shetland Museum and Archives development – so there’s all that as well as the beans and bananas, and not least of all a son, Daniel, now one year old.

And importantly too, a lot of his time has been spent doing his bit to try and lessen the damaging effects he has observed from the pressures that more intensive forms of agriculture and in particular salmon farming have imposed on his native environment. Though he has felt this as an obligation, nevertheless it’s one he is glad to have been able to ease himself away from lately. Those concerns continue to feature strongly in his art, however, not least in ‘The Cowboy and the Spaceman’.

“One of the reasons I was determined to make this film,” he says, “which is about our outlook on the planet and attitudes towards the sustainability of life, is that during some of my potentially most creative years as an artist I was fighting industrial expansion of the aquaculture industry here in Orkney. I’ve slowly withdrawn from that arena, partly because the Scottish Executive has been forced to adopt a more responsible attitude to many of the issues, but it’s something that drives me as an artist still.”

The working title of the film, he says, is taken from a seminal essay by land economist Kenneth E Boulding, ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ (1966). Boulding was writing during Pukka’s infant years, a period when the latter’s young imagination was being imprinted by Westerns on TV and the apparent “cowhand” self-image of his older male relatives. It’s beef country here too, after all, and he grew up among farmers.

But the period since then has shown what effect the more or less uncontrolled exploitation of resources that Boulding identified as the “cowboy” outlook can have on the environment. Kirkpatrick says he has seen “huge changes in local marine ecology” in his lifetime, identifying in particular the effects of large-scale salmon farming on wild fish populations.

In the film, the cowboy falls from his horse and has to go searching for it. Many classic tales begin just as straightforwardly, and respect for convention bids me keep silent about whether this quest is in any way successful, though as I noted above, the plot’s not the most important thing here.

A major character unnamed in the title is the landscape through which they travel

However I can reveal that the cowboy is joined in his tent that evening by the spaceman. He in his turn has landed in the sea, paddled ashore in a liferaft and come looking for civilization. Once again, I cannot reveal whether this character (or archetype) finds what he is looking for, but the two play cards as night comes down.

By contrast with the “cowboy” outlook on the environment – gazing and travelling over a landscape limitless in space and resources – Boulding described the world we live in or might have to live in eventually, from the point of view of the “spaceman”. Held in a tight fragile bubble and having to recycle virtually everything (or die), he is conscious as never before in human history of how small and fragile the bubble truly is.

As well as those two, nine “real people” make appearances in the film. Each having been told the story by the artist, he or she must choose either the stetson or the space helmet as the better indication of their relationship with the future of the planet. An interesting choice, and often only made with some difficulty. Many other people were involved in helping to make the film happen – like any film, no doubt – from costume-making to wrangling, props to moral support, and he’s grateful for the all the help freely given.

A major character unnamed in the title is the landscape through which they travel. The film locations are among the most scenic in Orkney, though not chosen for their tourist-picturesque qualities alone. Viewers will be as much aware of the symbolism in that aspect of the film, as they will doubtless pick up in relation to the human figures lost and wandering there.

In addition to Boulding’s essay, there’s obviously a wealth of reference here – literary and cinematic perhaps most of all. But perhaps we should wait till the film is out before saying much more. By that time Adam’s digital ingenuity will have worked its magic on colour and format, not to mention the addition of a suitable soundtrack and all the usual complexities of editing.

Adam has a long job ahead of him in that area, then, but he’s clearly committed: “I can honestly say that I would have long walked away from the project had Puck not been able to so passionately express his vision. I love the humour, iconography, nostalgia and strangeness of his current output and just hope I can get as excited about future artists’ projects my department will be involved with.

“The thing that most excites me about Pukka’s work is that while being so focused, there are also multiple layers at work which while seemingly disparate somehow complement one another. You find western iconography sitting alongside anthropological comment, humour with environmentalism… and it works!”

© Alistair Peebles, 2005