Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, 12 June 2008

Alistair Peebles and Alec Finlay (photo - Caroline Smith)

ALEC FINLAY, poet and maker, son of Ian Hamilton Finlay, has a residency at the new and Renewable Energy Centre in Blythe. He loves Orkney, where his father spent time maintaining roads – well, one road which went round in a circle.

He tells us that we are at the cutting edge of development here. The phrase strikes me as apposite. There are a lot of blades around, where wind farms are concerned. But this lecturer distances himself from the political and environmental aspects of the shall-we-shan’t-we-how-do-we-if-we-do debate over wind energy and the Orkney skyline.
He’s not an expert. He knows there are strong opinions for and against. He has his preferences, but he doesn’t live here, would never want to persuade anyone ‘further than they want to go,’, says turbine decisions have to be made by our community. It’s encouraging – if a little overwhelming – to hear that ‘the discussion itself is a work of art’ and that ‘debate gives intelligent refinement,’ that ‘Orkney is engaging in a culture of perception.’

We could be a model for Britain, depending on the way we embrace renewables. But it’s not the task of the artist to proselytise. ‘Artists are about being useless,’ – and yet, they’re also ‘the grit that makes the pearl.’ Why? Because of their way of seeing, of perceiving the possibilities inherent in what the world throws up as technology changes the world around us.

He’s inviting us to forget the debate and the practicalities. He wants to explore the turbines’ possibilities as an art form. He encourages us simply to accept their presence in the world and celebrate how ‘sublime’, ‘powerful’ and ‘truthful’ they are. He compares them to kites and windsocks.

They show us what we can’t see. Most energy sources are hidden – is it possible to choose that seeing it is better? He suggests too, that the artist can be a healer, allowing us to find possibilities in what seems impossible to come to terms with.

Art has always been about the tension between the familiar and the new. If you look at a photo of the first Russian Constructivist exhibition – the post WW1 development out of Futurism – you see windmill shapes just like those in the sequence of photographs Finlay shows us (the most striking of which is an image of Sanday windturbines by Alastair Peebles. The blades shimmer in the distance through a heat haze and the foreground is a sharp stubby black and blue boat funnel. Old and new juxtaposed.)

Constructivists were interested in the aesthetics of machinery. They investigated the balance between the material properties of objects and their spacial presence. In 1919 the movement split over Vladimir Tatlin’s plans for an enormous piece of public art, a steel and glass tower 400 metres in height. This rotating twin helix was to contain, among other things, a projector which cast messages onto the clouds on dull days.

Naum Gabo, Constructivism’s founder, told Tatlin, ‘either create functional houses or bridges, or create pure art. Not both.’ No understanding of the importance of the art inherent in architecture there! Gabo wouldn’t have liked the Pier Arts centre, which Finlay makes a nod to, describing the ‘knit between old and new’ as a useful way to approach his philosophy.

The tower was never built. Russia hadn’t enough steel anyway. But the story sticks with me as I listen to Finlay’s arresting and eloquent outline of his position with regard to the spatial and material qualities of windmills two centuries older than those Constable painted, and yet perhaps not that different, in terms of their technocological impact. Just much much bigger.

Another Futurist offshoot, from 1929, were a group who called themselves aeropainters. Their manifesto says: ‘the changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing to do with the reality constituted by a terrestrial perspective. ‘They were energised by planes, and the new views they provided. (How they would have responded to 9/11 would have been interesting.) This passionate engagement with what’s unfamiliar yet here to stay rings a bell too.

The unity of form and function windmills exemplify, in Finlay’s view, make them public art of the highest order. If the artist has a task, it would be to cross the bridge between science and the arts by interacting with ‘the thing itself, the form,’ and simply seeing what comes out of that creative process. Nothing is ruled out; it’s like playing; but what results is a rollercoaster of ideas.

He calls it ‘engaging with culture’ and the sense of wonder and enthusiasm is catching. He compares windmills to standing stones – they’re verticals which combine cutting edge technology with a purpose – to be conductors of ideas and values for their societies.

The strength of his argument lies in his commitment to accommodating the new, and the dynamic way he encourages us to do so as well. When he says George Mackay Brown described the islands as whales, and then speculates whether a wind farmed landscape here might be more like a porcupine, I laugh, because it’s what I think.

I like the whale shape and I don’t want lots of these prickly things disturbing the line of my land. But then I realise that all he’s doing is trying to shift our perception a bit. He’s not making an adverse comment, he’s playing with an idea. He might even quite like porcupines (and then I’m off on a track about poor misrepresented porcupines, just because they’re prickly, another story, but it describes how this man encourages you to think laterally.) [and while you may see a whale around Orkney’s shores in the natural ord r of things, a porcupine would be an alien invader – Ed.]

A windmill is a ‘contested object’ and that interests him. It’s also the ‘most imposing public sculpture in the world.’ Here again we see his indentification of beauty and function – the Arts and Crafts movement comes to my mind now. The ‘Angel of the North’ is wonderful; but it’s purely symbolic. A windmill can be beautiful and work, can give something practical back.

The poetry he paints on windmill blades has a profound simplicity – imagine watching the circle poem:

‘turning
toward
living’

endlessly reinventing itself. Or:

‘someone calling:
someone coming:
someone waiting.’

He has also been experimenting with colour, being ‘speculative.’ This is more dangerous ground, I think. He shows us a ducky little set of turbines at the Earth Centre in Doncaster. They look like seaside lollipops, all stripy and shiny. We see some pretty Danish ones. They are a world away from the forest of white on the Caithness peat. I meditate on the crucial difference between a single mill on the end of a croft – and a concrete-based farm of them, feeding the National Grid, on a populous island with few empty spaces and lots of vulnerable peat, mosses, birds. In a World Heritage Site.

I see the enthusiasm he has for ‘a painting that turns’, but I remember those sick-making cardboard spinners we had as children – you pull the string and the circle of colours melds into a blur. I don’t know Damien Hirst’s spin paintings but I bet they might be nausea inducing. Aeropainting surfaces again – he’s been thinking about how turbines might be seen, from above and below, if they were in colour.

The designs he shows are very Op Art, though there is a nice leafy one and a blue one which reminds me of those ornaments with melting wax in them which make globules of colour, constantly changing. But then he says : ‘what would it mean to use colour on small domestic windmills? Could you go down and choose one from B & Q?’

This really disturbs me. Capitalism is not famous for its taste. Remember when Maggie Thatcher draped her scarf over the new tail decoration for the B A planes? He doesn’t mention customisation – but I’m sure wouldn’t be against it, since he believes I think in art being free expression – but that could lead to windmills in Millwall strips and Elvis tribute windmills… perhaps that’s OK?

Garden gnomes I have developed an exasperated affection for – but something higher up on the sightlines? Then there’d have to be new planning laws about offensive windmills, racially, sexually or politically objectionable ones… the mind boggles. Finlay says it’s ‘a natural market development, that a fashion element will come in.’

Someone mentions logos. ‘Well yes’ he says. I hadn’t even thought of that. Calm down dear, I think, it’s only a commercial. Then I think what a snob I am. If they’re here to stay then people will customise them, as they customise mobiles and cars and everything mass-produced. Then I think, no, I’m not a snob. But I have to think about why I’m not. It has to do I think with the enormous presence these turbines have. Yes, they’re sublime. I like them, in empty open places, in Holland for example, or along the Baltic coast. But on a wee island? And coloured, on a wee island?

It’s a most thought-provoking interesting, intelligent disarmingly self-deprecating presentation. What it doesn’t in any way do is address the debate outlined in the post-talk discussion, over who owns Orkney windfarms, how many windmills are appropriate, if any, what size they are, what proportion of revenue they generate for us or what they do to the Neolithic outlines of the whale – land.

That’s for us to fight about. Finlay has his own ideas about community-owned, environmentally-pleasing structures, which work, are beautiful and liked, indeed, treasured. They might carry poems, or whine or whirr or sing or riot with colour – one design is a giant sunflower. That’s his task – to open us to the creative possibilities, to illuminate the debate from another angle. He certainly succeeds.

But the argument is still ours, and it’s a contentious one. We are some way away from commissioning a sunflower and certainly don’t want a bunch. Investment in marine technology might be a better way to go. Speculative, not community development is risky, since it may alienate those who have to embrace the upheaval in their sightlines. If we go down the windmill route, Finlay will be there, I’m sure, to make artwork inside science, make poetry out of technology.

He says they’re here in the world to stay. If the issue of ownership is balanced so that local people feel it is their own investment, the way is open, he says, for exciting developments.

I go out thinking about Edward Lear’s poem ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose.’ It’s about the invention which rocked early Victorian society – the train.

‘A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal black night –
A meteor strange and bright.’

The windmills seem to me to be as lonely, silvery and strange as those trains seemed then. We’re used to trains now. But there are none in Orkney. Small spaces can get very crowded.

Skying was hosted by Porteous Brae Gallery at the Pier Arts Centre, and sponsored by a number of local firms and public bodies: AJB Scholes; Aquatera; Scotrenewables Ltd; James Wilson (Orkney) Ltd; Orkney Today; Orkney Islands Council; HI~Arts. A video stream of the lecture will be available on Northings shortly.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Alec Finlay
• Porteous Brae Gallery
• Pier Arts Centre