Oliver Gather in Shetland

15 Sep 2007 in Shetland, Visual Arts & Crafts

A Portrait of Dog Walking in Scalloway

ROXANE PERMAR reflects on the recent visual arts exchange that brought German artist Oliver Gather to do a spot of dog watching in Shetland

GERMAN artist Oliver Gather recently spent one month in Shetland at The Booth, the WASPS studio for visiting artists in Scalloway. His residency was part of the Scotland-Düsseldorf Exchange, an important venture supported and organised in Shetland by Shetland Arts Development Agency, in Glasgow by WASPS and in Düsseldorf by the Cultural Department.

Oliver is the fourth artist, following Birgit Jensen, Marcus Schwier and Rainer Eisch, to take up the Residency in Shetland. We are very fortunate to host annually artists in Shetland who bring high calibre visual art practices to us that are in step with the latest developments in contemporary art.

Oliver is the first artist to arrive in Shetland with a project that would depend on community participation and be completed within the month. His proposal pushed the boundaries of art projects realised so far in Shetland, not only for its subject but also for the way and degree to which it depended on people’s willingness to take part. While this could be a daunting task, Oliver proved well suited for the job, having wide experience over a long time testing the limits of art.

Oliver challenges the way we use our spaces, forcing us to ask ourselves questions when the rules are changed, even if only for a little while. Much of his work is concerned with the idea of territory, and this is very apparent in the ‘Dog Spotting’ project.

He says: “Not only are the dogs territorial, but the owners can be as well. Some of them will only take their dogs to certain places, whilst others are very aware of the places their dogs do like and don’t like.” With this project Oliver made visible these personal and intimate territories, which are almost invisible to outsiders.

Since the early 1990s Oliver has been creating projects that invite people to engage in different kinds of situations. In Scalloway Oliver invited all dog walkers to join his project, asking them to allow him to accompany them on their walks around the village while he plotted the route and talked to them about their favourite places along the way.

He took photographs of the owners with their dogs and made a map of their route, which he exhibited as part of the final event. Together the photographs and maps formed a portrait of the owner, their dog and their shared experience.

Oliver says: “I like to bring unusual things together to get people thinking about unusual objects in strange places.” And this mix is precisely what he achieved during his final event in the Scalloway Community Hall (30 August 2007).

He filled it with the project’s participants – dogs and their owners – as well as dog owners of all ages and their dogs from other parts of Shetland who, to their disappointment, hadn’t been included in the project for logistical reasons.

The Hall looked magnificent and provided the perfect backdrop for the his maps and photographs while giving ample room for strolling. At one end of the Hall, Oliver laid out a special treat for the dogs – homemade dog cookies, shaped by a cookie cutter, custom made by Christian Ahlborn, a colleague who travelled especially to Shetland to document the event.

My sense of the event fits the way Oliver describes his work generally as “a kind of performance art”, for the event worked, albeit somewhat bizarrely, as a living portrait of a dog walking ‘experience’ with all of us becoming the performers in this ‘enactment’.

I was very conscious of behaviour. Everyone, dogs included, was well behaved, happy and curious; proud to be in attendance. Some were socialising, while others were intently studying the maps and photos. The dogs altered the dynamics of our usual social experience. Everything was slightly askew – dogs led to introductions with people I might never have met. Potential frictions between dogs kept some folk at a distance.

The maps resemble abstract drawings, although the village residents and dog-walkers easily read them as representations of their experience of walking around the village. Oliver says: “The maps depict a personal and daily activity from a fresh and unfamiliar perspective.”

He used the same scale to represent the walk on each map, so it was possible to visually compare the walks, from the ailing dog whose map was a tiny circle to one drawing that reached practically from edge to edge on the page, apparently representing over three miles a day.

Oliver makes art that can take place anywhere and in any form provided it has meaning in relation to its place and context. It asks us to shift our expectations for art and to ascribe a different set of values to art where we include meaning and social experience alongside technique and aesthetics.

The key audience for the work – the participants and the immediate community of local residents – found clear and poignant meaning in the final event. They moved seamlessly through it, ‘making’ it as they engaged with it. Without its participatory audience, the work did not really exist, for, as soon as the Hall was emptied of its last visitors, the work was essentially finished.

Oliver’s project illustrates how the network of artists that is growing from the Scotland-Düsseldorf Exchange can help to bring innovative and exceptional work to Shetland. While Oliver is well experienced in the field of socially engaged art, nonetheless it is courageous to undertake a project that even in familiar circumstances entails a high level of risk.

This kind of work requires knowledge of the place, its people and its customs. Oliver was able to gain the necessary knowledge and insight into the Scalloway context in part from the network of artists developing with the Exchange programme.

Ultimately, though, wholehearted congratulations and thanks must go to Oliver, who has so skilfully created a project from afar that perfectly fitted his timescale as well as the logistical and conceptual dimensions of his context. It suited the village and its community flawlessly.

And last but not least, huge acknowledgement, too, must go to the dogs and dog walkers of Scalloway for the substantial part they played in the creation of this unique project. Well done and Spot On!