Stellar Quines had been supported by the AmbITion programme (funded by Creative Scotland)  to undertake this work, for a number of reasons. First, by live streaming rehearsed readings and rehearsals, the company enables potential bookers and audiences to get an advance flavour of what their new productions will be like. Second, it’s very expensive to tour a production on the scale of ‘Ana’ and only a modest number of venues exist outside the major cities which could physically stage it, so a film version potentially gives the production a much wider and longer life. And, third, using 3D may—or may not—give those screen-venue audiences a more palpable sense of what the ‘real’ theatre experience would be like.

As readers of a previous blog will remember,  my one experience so far of a live satellite relay—‘The Nutcracker’ from the Bolshoi—was entirely positive, and I’d like the chance to have more such experiences. But, so far, Inverness venues are only offering ‘delayed’ relays—for example, of the National Theatre’s acclaimed production of ‘Frankenstein’. I have an odd reluctance to go to such presentations. It seems to me to be neither one thing nor the other—neither a film nor a live relay.

My sense is that there is, or should be, a substantial difference between a ‘filmed play’ and a ‘live relay’. In that Bolshoi relay, the camerawork was as simple and unobtrusive as possible, with basically just three camera positions: whole stage, a focus on one or two dancers, and the rare close up. That approximates very closely to the real theatre experience of sitting in the stalls and now and then using a pair of opera glasses. But a ‘filmed’ play should, I feel, be very different. It can, and should, make use of every opportunity that small, handheld, and remote cameras can offer to give a truly filmic experience—think of Scorsese filming the ‘The Last Waltz’ or his Stones movie. So simply offering a ‘delayed relay’ of a live show is for me an uncomfortable compromise.

But there are deeper implications here. Rural touring is very expensive. For even a small production, with only two or three actors and a couple of stage crew on the road, the total public subsidy per audience member may be more than for an audience member at an average Scottish Opera performance. Live, delayed and streamed relays offer (once the capital cost of the equipment has been met) a very much cheaper way of enabling remote and small communities to share in a high quality theatre experience.

Is that, however, the way we really want things to go? For very many years Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and its predecessor the HIDB, ran a scheme which provided additional funds to enable touring companies to meet the extra costs of touring in the Highlands and Islands. Sadly, budget cuts meant that fund was withdrawn a few years ago. But its existence was predicated on the concept that remoteness and rurality should not, by themselves, deprive those communities of quality live cultural experiences. Are they, are we, prepared to accept that now, in the name of financial stringency, we have to put quotation marks round that word ‘live’?

There is of course another argument that will increasingly come into play—the low carbon economy. It’s probably more energy-efficient to bring shows to communities, rather than expect the members of those communities to travel often very long distances to their nearest cultural centre. But will it be even more efficient to provide those communities, instead, with a virtual, digital version? Intuition says ‘yes’, but this may be a case where the counter-intuitive proves to be more accurate. Consider this: most such tours happen in the ‘down’ season from October to April. A touring production with five people visiting ten venues generates 50 bed nights in small communities at a quiet time of year, plus an equivalent number of meals, drinks, and incidental expenses. Multiply that by the number of tours and venues that take place across a year, and that’s quite a contribution to the local economy that will be entirely lost if there’s a switch to digital equivalents. And, to make the comparison truly fair, we also need to know how much energy this alternative satellite-relay process requires.

That counter-intuitive argument turns out to apply directly to the most apparently extreme version of the costly touring model—the Screen Machine mobile cinema. Though now operated by our sister organisation Regional Screen Scotland, the Screen Machine was developed, and originally operated, by HI~Arts to bring the highest quality cinema experience to the most remote communities, from Durness to Barra. If the live relay of plays model is about enabling small communities to share in a high quality urban experience, then the Screen Machine is about bringing the urban, arthouse/multiplex experience direct to those same communities.

Intuition would say that it’s very inefficient to use a huge gas-guzzling truck to bring movies to remote and island communities. But intuition may be wrong. A pilot survey undertaken by Carbon Diagnostics while the Screen Machine was in Ullapool for four screenings appeared to indicate that the carbon produced by the Machine on that trip was less than half what would have been produced if, as they said they would, many in those audiences had instead driven to Inverness to see the same films. One swallow doesn’t make a summer, however, and so, with funds from that same AmbITion programme, RSS and Carbon Diagnostics are now undertaking a more comprehensive survey to ascertain a broader and more accurate picture.

If it’s true that 7:84’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil kicked off the whole process of small scale touring in the Highlands, back in 1973 (some argue for earlier precedents) then perhaps we’re seeing the final stages of a forty-year process. But not if bodies like the Promoters Arts Network have their way . PAN’s Director Sam Eccles has been undertaking her own touring show, presenting to local promoters around the Highlands and Islands PAN’s bold and ambitious plans for the future—plans which, incidentally, also involve AmbITion support. So, let’s hope live theatre still has a healthy future in the Highlands and Islands, from Achiltibuie to Ardross, or Lochgilphead to Lyth.

© Robert Livingston

In HI~Arts we’ve been thinking a lot about what it might mean to be a ‘creative community’. In part that has been prompted by Creative Scotland’s ‘Creative Places’ awards, currently in the process of being judged for the second year. But we’re also exploring a more fundamental question of how culture works as a driver in terms of a community’s energy, cohesion, and sense of identity.

We all know a creative community when we see one. Some might say that the whole of Orkney is such a place—certainly Stromness is, and the island of Westray, and also the even smaller island of Papa Westray, with its extraordinary programme of ‘Papay Gyro Nights’.  Ullapool and the wider Lochbroom area is another, so is the island of Eigg. Indeed, most of the community land buy-out areas, whether it be Assynt or Gigha, tend to have a strong cultural character. What we’ve been thinking about are the factors that help to bring such a situation about, and how far they may be transferrable or replicable.

That’s probably why I’ve found myself on an External Advisory Group for the Scottish Government’s Review of Town Centre Regeneration. The Group’s work kicked off two weeks ago with a two day seminar in Kilmarnock, ably facilitated by Neil McInroy, Chief Executive of CLES. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies was new to me, but exploring their website, and the contents of their magazine, New Start, has led me to some interesting ideas, and one of those is the concept of ‘Third Place’.

It’s very straightforward. Where we live is our First Place, where we work our second. Third Places  are informal meeting spaces where we go to make social glue. They are essential to a healthy community. In the past, of course, churches occupied that central role within the community, and in many parts of the Highlands and Islands they still do, especially if, as in the church in our village, the formal service is followed by informal chat over coffee and biscuits. The classic English pub is another obvious example, staple of so many soap operas precisely because it can function as neutral ground where all the drama’s characters can interact.

When we bought our previous house in Anstruther we were nervous about being just across the road from a pub, imagining late night revellers and general rowdiness. We needn’t have worried. The Dreel Tavern was run by a London couple who ensured it had the feel of a classic ‘local’, with regulars propping up the bar, a roaring fire throughout winter, and good homely food for all comers. We ended up eating there most Friday nights. But in recent years pubs have been closing in their hundreds, and the percentage of the population who regularly attend church is a tiny fraction of those who actually profess some form of religious belief. So, reading about the concept of ‘Third Place’, I began to think about how far cultural centres can be third places. And it’s easy to name some that are: Taigh Chearsabhagh in Lochmaddy in North Uist is perhaps the most often cited example—after all it even houses the local post office—but Timespan in Helmsdale is another (and the biggest employer in the village). Nor do such centres have to be ‘not for profit’: most people would cite Ullapool’s emergence as a ‘creative place’ as having been kickstarted by Jean and Robert Urquhart’s vision of the ‘Ceilidh Place’ as a hotel and eating place that was also a haven of culture and creativity.

Indeed there may be times when the private sector is actually better than the charitable or funded sectors at creating a cultural ‘third place’, and I say that with no ideological intent. Balnain House is one of Inverness’s most important historic buildings. The group that set out to save its fabric envisioned it as the ‘home of Highland music’; but, probably because it was located on what was, at that time, the ‘wrong’ side of the river, its cafe, bar and shop all lost money, and it became unsustainable. Some time after its closure Kit Fraser opened Hootananny’s as a pub with music, bang in the centre of the old town, and more than a decade later it’s still fulfilling that valuable social function.

Similarly, in Kirkwall in Orkney the talented musical sisters Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley invested in ‘The Reel’ in a prominent central location, next to St Magnus Cathedral, as a cafe/bar, music shop, performance space, and site for classes, workshops, rehearsals and recordings. It’s a private business, but exercises a crucial and multifaceted function within the lively musical life of the islands.

We’ve just had a short break in rural Perthshire, which gave us the chance to experience two very good examples of cultural ‘third places’, one commercial in nature, one charitable. Though to define Pitlochry Festival Theatre by its charitable status would be very misleading—indeed the ‘commercial’ character of its productions has, in the past, been a reason for it not receiving Scottish Arts Council funding. Enter the theatre at any time of the day or night, even this late in the season, and it’s clearly a vibrant social hub for the area. But it’s social/entrepreneurial role goes well beyond that informal level, as it is also behind the local community company which promotes a range of tourism initiatives in the area, most prominently the annual ‘Enchanted Forest’  which, this year at least, fully lived up to its name.

And then, just a few miles away in Aberfeldy, there’s the Watermill  which combines in one handsomely converted historic building a gallery showcasing work of international standard (Paolozzi, Barns-Graham, Alan Davie, and Victor Pasmore, when we were there), with an award-winning bookshop and an excellent cafe. There seems little doubt that this thriving private business is the ‘third place’ for a large cross-section of the local community.

So, how does a cultural centre—a museum, gallery, theatre or arts centre—achieve the status of a ‘third place’ and so become of central importance to its community? I don’t think it’s straightforward. It’s certainly not just a matter of being an ‘ace caff with a quite nice museum attached’ as the V&A once notoriously promoted itself. The team behind the enlarged and rebuilt Pier Arts Centre in Orkney took the brave decision not to include a cafe in the new building, and thus avoid competing directly with existing local businesses. That may pose revenue challenges for the Pier, but it hasn’t stopped it, in its new form, becoming a wonderful focus of creativity and good fellowship, with an almost tangible spiritual quality about it (and that’s a word I use very rarely and hesitantly).

At the opposite extreme, I’ve written elsewhere of my experiences in the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow in the early 80s when, despite being in most physical respects a complete dump, it was such a vibrant ‘third place’ for so many Glaswegians that the scriptwriters of an early episode of ‘Taggart’ could refer to it as a rendezvous for two of their characters without further explanation. But a change of identity to the ‘CCA’ and the single biggest Arts Lottery grant given in Scotland turned the building into a forbidding temple of art, an impression which the current CCA team, under Francis McKee, are making great efforts to overcome.

As with the CCA, therefore, sometimes the greater the investment in the fabric of the building, the greater the distance from a sense of being a true ‘third place’. The enlarged An Tuireann in Portree on Skye opened with a great spirit of optimism but when some years later, in 2007, financial problems caused the centre to close, it had become sufficiently distanced from its wider community that there was no concerted campaign to reopen it, and the successor initiative, Atlas, was expressly designed not to be tied to a specific building.

For many independent museums in the Highlands and Islands, as elsewhere, there is a particular challenge: the need to charge admission to help to meet basic operating costs. Many such museums have seen visitor numbers plummet in recent years, but perhaps even more damagingly, they have also moved (conceptually speaking) to the periphery of their communities, unable to provide that crucial ‘third place’ function. In March 2011 the West Highland Museum in Fort William took the brave step of dropping admission charges and has since seen visitor numbers quadruple. It also has a very high rating on Tripadvisor, with many of the reviewers commenting particularly on the free admission. But only time will tell if this results in a viable financial model for the museum, or indeed for those of its counterparts still applying such charges.

All cultural facilities are under huge pressure to be more financially robust in these hard times. Sometimes this can result in some very crude pressures to ‘earn income’. As Balnain House showed, being good at running a music centre is no reason why the same people should be good at running a cafe, bar or shop. Perhaps thinking in terms of ‘Third Places’ will make it possible to approach these challenges in a more nuanced way, understanding and evaluating the ‘social capital’ wrapped up in a cultural facility’s assets and functions. And perhaps it can also break down those crude oppositions, between ‘charity’ and ‘business’, between ‘commerce’ and ‘culture’, between so-called ‘artistic elites’ and ‘ordinary folk’.

Almost thirty years ago we visited Dervaig in Mull for the first time, to see the original ‘Mull Little Theatre’ set up and run by Barrie and Marion Hesketh. On arrival we first went into what was obviously the original ‘village store’. There was very little actually on display, and what there was had a fly-blown, ‘beyond its sell-by date’ look. Apart from the elderly local woman behind the counter, we were the only people in the shop, and we left having bought nothing. A few doors down we squeezed into a tiny shop that was selling wine, coffee, cheese and books. You could sip coffee while sitting at a cramped table sampling one of the books. It was packed, and it was run by a Yorkshireman. There I go, falling into the trap of binary opposition: incomer dynamic/entrepreneurial versus local apathy/lack of energy. We need more subtle tools to understand how these circumstances come about, and how we can foster and sustain truly effective ‘third places’ in our communities.

© Robert Livingston

]]> http://northings.com/2012/10/16/how-to-come-third-and-win/feed/ 0 http://northings.com/2012/08/10/the-shock-of-the-neuk/ http://northings.com/2012/08/10/the-shock-of-the-neuk/#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2012 10:32:13 +0000 http://northings.com/?p=73527 Before moving to the Highlands we lived for twelve years in Anstruther in the East Neuk of Fife. In the mid 90s Anstruther and its smaller neighbour Pittenweem were sad places: empty shops along the harbour fronts, derelict domestic and commercial properties with little prospect of regeneration, and loads of houses for sale. It took us two years to find a buyer for our neat, practical Edwardian semi, even at a fixed price.

Scenically the East Neuk’s saviour, and commercially its nemesis, was Dr Beeching. Had the coastal branch line remained in place Anstruther would have been a reasonable daily commute from Edinburgh, and I’m sure that by now the very different villages that make up the famous ‘fringe of gold’ would have been linked by ribbon development and lost all their special character. But that same issue of accessibility has worked against economic diversification as the fishing industry has withered away.

In the last decade, however, both villages have revived hugely, and for two different but related reasons. Anstruther, like many east coast villages, gained a pontoon marina  in its old harbour, making it the furthest out safe anchorage on that side of the Firth of Forth. Now it’s a boom town. There are now three large fish and chip restaurants on the front, and on a busy day you can’t get into any of them. There are no empty properties, many derelict shells have been rebuilt, and there are lots of thriving local businesses.

Pittenweem’s revival has a different cause. Here a modest amount of inshore fishing continues, and the harbour is in any event less suitable for leisure-craft pontoons. Instead, Pittenweem has been turned round by art.

The Pittenweem Arts Festival  was launched 30 years ago by a small group of professional artists who had their homes (or at least their holiday homes) in the village–many taught in either the Edinburgh or Dundee art colleges. While I was working at the Crawford Centre in St Andrews, both Judith and I became involved in the festival, and in the memorable year of 1988 I collaborated on a deeply whimsical project with Crail-based composer Peter Davidson, and Hamburg-born, Pittenweem-resident artist Reinhard Behrens . I had jokingly once suggested to Peter that he should write the ‘Table Music for King Zog of Albania’ and he took me at my word, got a grant from the Scottish Arts Council, and wrote the piece for the Fife Wind Soloists. For the premier we concocted an elaborate back story for the piece, with installations by Reinhard of Albanian ‘memorabilia’, and my only attempt (to date) at stand up, portraying a demented German music professor. Our one rule had been that we should find out nothing at all about the real Albania, then the most obscure of all Iron Curtain countries. Ours was a dream Albania. We weren’t to know that the next year-1989-Albania, like the rest of the Communist bloc, would suddenly become a lot more visible to the rest of the world!

1988 was of course the anniversary of the Spanish Armada, and there is a strong tradition that the folk of the East Neuk, retaining Catholic sympathies, looked after the Spanish survivors of wrecked Armada ships as the fleet struggled round the north of Scotland. Certainly, locals often have a certain olive tinge to their skin…

To mark the event for the Festival Reinhard had turned a disused rowing boat into a replica galleon, and Fife Arts’ resident pyrotechnician had packed it full of fireworks. A torch-lit procession (the first, I think, in what became a regular feature of the festival) made its way from the centre of the village to the disused open air swimming pool where the ‘galleon’ was floating, and to the (somewhat inaudible) accompaniment of the Fife Wind Soloists playing (of course) the ‘Fireworks music for King Zog’ the replica went up in a true blaze of glory.

In the subsequent 25 years the Festival has grown to become a popular date in Scotland’s visual arts calendar. Its unique feature is that it hosts scores of different exhibitions in the widest possible range of venues: not just people’s houses, garages, and outbuildings, but all the very distinctive spaces that can be found in a historic, but still active, fishing port. So, aesthetic pleasure is combined with a childish delight in getting into places you wouldn’t otherwise see, or, alternatively, seeing familiar interiors utterly transformed.

Although we return to Fife regularly to visit old friends, I hadn’t been to the Festival itself since well before this explosion of temporary venues. So I was keen to get a sense of how the Festival worked, and whether it had any lessons to offer other communities that might be looking to achieve a measure of economic regeneration through the arts. Even outside festival time, the impact on Pittenweem is certainly obvious: new galleries, artists’ materials shops, and hardly an empty property to be seen.

We decided to avoid the traditional Friday night opening, which I suspected would be a bit of a rammy, and turned up at 11.00 on Monday morning. Already the field which acted as temporary car park was filling up. Friendly and efficient stewards showed us our parking place and sold us the essential Festival programme, with details of all 120 exhibiting artists. But, sensible though the edge-of-village parking arrangements were, they had one big disadvantage. If you made the mistake, as we did, of starting off visiting some of the displays close to the car park, you quickly got a false impression of the real quality of the festival. After four or five examples of depressingly poor work, we were beginning to wonder if the Festival was all hype and no substance.

After a reviving coffee we headed for the main invited exhibition, of work by John Byrne. This couldn’t fail to impress, so fertile is John’s imagination and so sure his technical skill. But even more impressive was a selection in the ‘Old Men’s Club’ of sculptures by Jake Harvey . This part-indoors, part-outside display was the perfect union of work and setting: right on the edge of the wonderful stonework of the Old Pier, Jake’s almost-but-not-quite abstract stone sculptures had a balance, a purity, a sense of wit, and a rightness, that was unforgettable. I wanted them to stay there as a permanent display, which would have been hard on the Old Men.

From then on it was one great display after another, often, like the Harvey, beautifully matching work to setting. Some artists were returning to their roots, like Lynn MacGregor, born in the village but now living in Northern Ireland. Others, like a group of seven photographers from London, had been invited to make work about Pitternweem and its inhabitants. Many more had chosen to move to the area to live and work in the village itself, or close by. Some of the most impressive work was in crafts, from locally-based makers to an invited cross-section of the best in contemporary Scottish crafts, curated by a regular colleague of HI~Arts, Tina Rose.

The mood was indeed festive, especially when torrential downpours appeared out of an almost clear sky, and everyone dashed for the nearest venue, no matter how small. Many displays featured a gratifying number of red ‘sold’ dots, even though the Festival still had the rest of the week to run. In four hours we got round less than a quarter of the venues and, in retrospect, missed some of the most potentially interesting. But we did see a marvelous display of art and craft work from Shetland, charmingly whimsical paintings by Angie Bee in a garden summerhouse so hot it needed four electric fans at once, and bought one of Hilke MacIntyre’s delightful sculpted ceramic tiles, entitled appropriately, ‘Just a Shower’. We ended our day calling in on Reinhard and his wife Margaret for tea, and enjoying the work on display by all four members of the Behrens family.

A number of thoughts coalesced in my mind afterwards. The first concerned quality. Had we been casual visitors we might well have been put off by those first few displays, got back in the car, and headed off to somewhere less crowded. Yet Pittenweem strives to be an inclusive festival, so the organisers must have difficulty in setting a quality threshold. Not inclusive enough, it would seem, as this year for the first time there is a ‘Fringe’ organised by artists who, to judge by their very good website , seem to feel that the official Festival isn’t doing enough for ‘Fife artists’ even though the vast majority of the official exhibitors are locally based. This has caused some controversy–Fringe exhibitors don’t pay for inclusion in the official marketing, as is tartly pointed out on the official website, yet benefit from the visitors it attracts.

The second concerns quality in a different sense–of display. Given that the Festival is run by volunteers, most of the displays were a terrific credit both to the organisers and to the individual artists. But there were some exceptions that let the side down, including the headline John Byrne exhibition, where the labels (stuck on the picture glass!) were often alarmingly dyslexic, and gave no indication of the dates of individual works, unforgivable when drawing from the fruits of an almost 50-year career.

My final point links back to Anstruther, and its new prosperity based on the harbour marina. Both ventures–the festival and the marina–are massively middle class in focus and involvement. Of course, regeneration needs money: to pay mooring fees, rent self-catering houses, buy meals and drinks, and, finally, buy art and craft. But you can’t avoid the feeling that Pittenweem in particular has gone the way that her sister village Crail went many years ago, and has become ‘gentrified’. Now it’s the few remaining fishermen, working on their boats in the harbour, who provide an exotic backdrop to the gallery-goers, and the incomers have become the dominant element in the population.

The Pittenweem Arts Festival is a great success and a huge achievement. But in economic regeneration terms, perhaps the greatest element of that success has lain in ensuring that Pittenweem remains visible. The designation of ‘book town’ and ‘craft town’ have had similar impacts in terms of visibility for the communities of Wigtown and West Kilbride. Other Fife communities, just a few miles from the East Neuk, have not benefitted from the same profile even when, like West Wemyss, their architecture has a similar picturesque potential. But they have not seen the same influx of culturally-inclined middle class incomers.

So there’s a balance to be struck. Those who have money are essential to the economy of the arts—either through direct expenditure or through the taxes they pay. But the arts are not for one class or group within society. It’s a relatively recent notion that the ‘high’ arts are socially elitist. My grandfather, a steel worker, had a passionate love of classical music which he passed on to my mother and hence to me. As recently as the 1950s the National Gallery in London would stay open late on Cup Final days because so many of those coming up to London for the match also wanted to see some ‘culture’. So while it may be inevitable that community regeneration through the arts needs the interest and investment of the chattering classes to oil the wheels, the challenge is to ensure that the end result is properly inclusive. In Pittenweem, as in other examples such as the St Magnus Festival, that’s perhaps best achieved through the huge numbers of local volunteers involved, and the various participatory programmes offered. I hope the population of Pittenweem as a whole is proud of their festival for what it does for the village—even those who have as little interest in the arts as I do in the Olympics!

PS:  my jokey title is a back-handed tribute to the memory of the great Australian art critic Robert Hughes, who died this month.  His TV series and book ‘The Shock of the New’ redefined how contemporary art could be tackled in the media, and almost everything he wrote, or presented, is worth reading or watching (except for his last book ‘Rome’ which is a sadly deficient potboiler).  His early collection of exhibition reviews was entitled ‘Nothing if not Critical’, a quote from Hazlitt, and an injunction I’ve always borne in mind.

© Robert Livingston

I am not unreflective about this passionate aversion. I know that it has a good deal to do with being bad at sports at school, and so being subject to the petty tyrannies of two sad, middle-aged PE teachers whose unthinking cruelties I cannot forgive, more than forty years on. And I have tried to get into the mind of the true sports fanatic. I read Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’ with real pleasure, but put it down no wiser about the basic question as to how someone as intelligent and educated as Hornby could waste his time on the idiocies involved in being a dedicated team supporter.

This leads me to want to make two points. The first is to deplore, by analogy, any campaign or strategy which talks of getting ‘everyone involved in the arts’. I’ve just Googled the phrase ‘arts for all’ and got 2,950,000,000 hits. You couldn’t pay me to go to a football match (well, you could, but it would have to be in four figures), so I have some sympathy with anyone who says ‘you couldn’t drag me to an opera’ because they know that they couldn’t stand all that yodelling in Italian or German.

Only some sympathy, because while, as a Glaswegian, I have been daily exposed to the beautiful game almost since birth, there is so little real opera shown through the media that it’s understandable if most people’s idea of the artform is Lesley Garrett in a Union Jack dress. But my basic point stands: art is no more for everyone than sport is. Everyone has the right to opt out, though my right to opt out of sport feels distinctly undermined just at the moment.

My other point is about ageism. With only a few exceptions, top end achievement in the Olympics, as in so many sports, is for the young. There were those, after all, who said that Murray could have beaten Federer if the older player hadn’t had time to recover his energy while the roof was being closed. Federer is 30.

Undoubtedly there is ageism in the arts, as in all walks of life, but it’s much less intrinsic than in competitive sport. Think of the wonderful Christopher Plummer winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar at the age of 82, or Jeremy Irons (64) acting young turks Joe Armstrong and Tom Hiddlestone off the screen in the BBC’s recent films of the two parts of Henry IV. I very much enjoyed a Herald interview this week with one of my favourite actors, Bill Paterson (67; he went to my old school, but not at the same time as me!), in which he talks about the pleasures and rewards of being an older actor, and reminisces about his experiences of working with the great George Wyllie, who died earlier this year aged 90. George only became a fulltime artist after retiring at the age of 58 from his post as a customs officer. In the 1980s I had the great pleasure of working with George on a number of projects, and in his sixties he had more energy and inventiveness than most artists a third of his age.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of the artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, whom I also knew in the 1980s as she was President of the Friends of the Crawford Centre, the arts centre I was running. Willie worked right up to her death at the age of 92, and each decade her art seemed to become more luminous and joyous.

I had meant to write before now about this year’s Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition.  which was a revelation for me, in the way it devoted so much of the wall space to ambitious installations by some 22 artists. Although these invitees were of all ages, it was the seniors who most impressed me, with artists like Doug Cocker (67), Harris-based Steve Dilworth (63), and the RSA’s former President Bill Scott (who sadly died at the age of 77 just before the exhibition opening), all at the absolute top of their game.

Of course, it can be argued that the late flowering creativity of older artists is such a well-known phenomenon, from Titian to Lucian Freud, that the real risk is that it’s ‘mid-career’ artists who can get overlooked. So it’s fitting that, for me, the most astounding work in an RSA show full of good things was a sculpture by Annie Cattrell (graduated GSA, 1984) entitled ‘Conditions’ . Words can’t describe, or photographs capture, the astonishing, magical, ethereal beauty and fascination of this piece, and if you miss its current showing at Timespan in Helmsdale, then, along with several other breathtaking works, ‘Conditions’ will be on show at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery from August till October. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. For me, Annie Cattrell has accomplished something finer, and more lasting, in this sculpture, than all the medal-winning achievements that will dominate the media in the coming weeks. (Though, grudgingly, I have to admit, that Bradley Wiggins is quite something…).

© Robert Livingston

The sausage and beer thing is interesting. Here, that would be very much a class divide—opera goers nipping into a local ‘greasy spoon’ before visiting ‘The Garden’ would definitely be slumming. Before a visit to the Vienna Volksoper, we dined in the Volksoper Café opposite, and were fascinated to see members of the Viennese establishment, dressed to the nines, tucking into their wursts and their long glasses of local beer.

Don’t get me started on the trains. In the course of 18 days we made ten separate train journeys across Bavaria and Austria, including connections, and all were on time, left from the platform noted on the ticket and, although mostly very busy, were never over-crowded. And they’re cheaper, too. And the stations are clean, bright, and full of great food outlets. Our hotel in Vienna, being very green, offered a ten per cent discount to those, like us, who arrived and left by train. Of course: it’s the only way to travel.

If the trains were cheap, so were the concerts, operas and ballets. In the city of Regensburg, which with a population of about 150,000 is roughly the size of Dundee, but has over 1500 listed buildings (the RAF never got round to bombing it) we went to see the local opera company. http://www.theater-regensburg.de For just 25 euros each we had great seats in the stalls, in a gem of a mid-19th century theatre, beautifully restored, to see a production of Richard Strauss’s Elektra, an opera that requires such lavish orchestral forces, and such star singers, that Scottish Opera has never mounted it, and probably never will. It was superb—great singing and playing, and an intelligent and powerful staging with a brilliant set. Scottish Opera’s Tosca, at Eden Court last week, cost £40 each for equivalent seats.

Even the Vienna Volksoper was still cheaper than Scottish Opera for a ballet version of Carl Orff’s warhorse ‘Carmina Burana’ that involved an on-stage chorus of 70 (plus at times a children’s chorus of 30), a corps de ballet of 25, three operatic soloists, and a symphony orchestra in the pit. I’d booked for the show thinking it might be a bit of a romp. It turned out to be an overwhelming artistic and emotional experience, and I don’t mind admitting I was in tears by the end. The production redeemed a great musical masterpiece from the degradation of Old Spice adverts, horror movies and Classic FM.

One interesting factor is that companies like the Volksoper, and indeed the equivalent companies in Regensburg and Salzburg, stage operas and musicals together in the same season, with the same company. In Britain, musicals tend to be the preserve of theatres, like the RSC or Dundee Rep. Linking operas and musicals is clearly to the benefit of each. The ‘musicals’ sensibility brought a tremendous ‘oomph’ to the production of ‘Carmina Burana’, while I’m sure those operatic voices will sound wonderful in the forthcoming 50th anniversary production of ‘The Sound of Music’.

Of course, there is the opposite end of the scale. We also stayed with an old friend in Salzburg, where the annual festival has some of the highest ticket prices in Europe. But what we’ve seen of those Festival audiences, on past visits and on films, suggests that those attending are doing so as much for social (or even business) reasons as for artistic purposes. Some of the men, in particular, looked as if they’d rather be somewhere else—the golf course, perhaps. At the events we attended—in Bamberg, as well as Regensburg and Vienna, the large (often sold out) audiences were emphatically there for the music—listened with massive attention, and responded with rapturous applause.

And sometimes a great experience can be free (apart, that is, from a small offering). In Salzburg the Dom (Cathedral) and the neighbouring Franziskaner Church, have live music as part of mass every Sunday. In the Franziskaner that means a Mozart mass and Church Sonata, with orchestra, organist, soloists and choir, beautifully integrated into the liturgical service. I first enjoyed this uplifting Salzburg Sunday morning experience as a student, 37 years ago—it was great to see the tradition continuing.

One aspect of price that is, of course, very different in Germany and Austria is the admission charges for galleries and museums. We’re spoilt here in the UK by our free admission, and I couldn’t help feeling again that we’re missing a trick. Once you’ve got to somewhere like Regensburg or Vienna, the cost of admission to a gallery is one of the smallest costs of your trip—less probably than you’ll pay for lunch. Few people are going to be put off, especially as most major cities have offers like the ‘Vienna Card’ which combines free public transport with discounted admission to dozens of venues. Now, technology should make it easy for galleries here to offer free admission to UK (or even just local) residents, through some kind of smart card, while charging a reasonable admission price to tourists. As public funding shrinks, this is surely an issue that needs to be revisited.

And using such technology could deliver tremendous visitor data, whether the card was being swiped for free admission or as part of a paid package. A decade ago we had a holiday in Amsterdam and bought the annual Netherlands Gallery card which, for a modest price, gave free admission to some 400 museums and galleries throughout the Netherlands. That meant that the specific visits—where, when, and how often—of every card holder could be tracked and accumulated. So much more robust than visitor surveys, and so much simpler for the visitor. By the way, we managed a neat trick by going back to Amsterdam the following year a week earlier and getting even more value out of our cards. Of course, as my colleague Sian pointed out, first we’d have to overcome the very healthy British dislike of being electronically tracked!

And there is also the question of value for money. Admission to the V&A’s current piece of Olympics propaganda, British Design 1948-2012, costs £12 full whack. In Vienna, we paid 12 euros for admission to the Albertina, a lesser-known treasure of the city which specialises in works on paper, but that ticket price covered no less than three major exhibitions.  2012 is the 150th anniversary of the quintessential Viennese artist, Gustav Klimt, and every major gallery has its own exhibition about him. The Albertina’s contribution explores his life and work through his drawings—over 200 of them. It was an utterly engrossing exhibition, which changed forever our perceptions of an artist too readily dismissed as kitsch. But after that demanding and inspiring experience, we were then faced with ‘Impressionismus’, another 200 works on paper by Impressionist artists from Boudin to Redon and Manet to Cezanne. This was by any standards a world class exhibition—the substantial section on Degas alone would have been an impressive exhibition in most contexts. After nearly three hours, mentally and physically exhausted, we couldn’t begin to contemplate the third exhibition, ‘From Monet to Picasso’. But we’d certainly got full value from the ticket price!

And that poses a question I’ve asked once or twice before? Can we have too much art? Of course, a resident of Vienna wouldn’t need to cram those three blockbuster exhibitions into one visit, as we did with only three days in the city, but I think they’d still have had to buy a ticket for each visit. So, did the exhibitions need to be so huge? Could we have understood Klimt’s remarkable qualities as a draughtsman by seeing only half as many works? Would we have felt we’d got value for money, and had an enriching experience, if we’d only seen that Degas section, and not the whole comprehensive survey. I suspect the answer to both questions is ‘yes’.

So why the epic quality of these, and indeed of several other exhibitions we saw on our travels, not to mention several which Judith has seen in London recently? I suspect there are three factors: the ambition (and obsession) of curators, the expectations of sponsors, and the need to create a media ‘buzz’. The trouble is that none of these factors take much account of the needs of the footsore, eye-strained, brain dead visitor.

Fortunately, not every celebration of Klimt had to be on this scale. Early in his career Klimt painted some of the murals for the great stair hall of the then new Kunsthistorisches Museumin Vienna. Usually you’d need opera glasses to study them. But for this anniversary year the museum authorities have constructed a scaffolding gantry that allows visitors to get up close and personal to these beautiful paintings, made on the cusp of Klimt’s maturity. Of course, they couldn’t leave it at that—there’s also an enormous, comprehensively documented, exhibition about how these works came about. But that’s in another room, you don’t have to go there, you can just enjoy the exhibition experience at its purest: getting to spend some time, at your own pace, in the company of great art.

© Robert Livingston

I firmly believe that the great strength of small and independent bookshops is that they bring to your attention interesting titles that you wouldn’t readily stumble across in Waterstones, or have recommended to you by Amazon. And so it was in the Ceilidh Place—I found a book I knew nothing of, Shetlander WJ Tait’s translation of François Villon’s ‘Testament’, published last year by the Hansel Press  which is run by an Orkney-based cooperative including the Shetland-born sculptor John Cumming. I’m pleased to be able to say that HI~Arts has been able to give both John and Hansel some support in the past.

Now I’ve had a mild fascination with the French medieval poet-rogue Villon ever since, as a child, I saw the wonderful Ronald Colman swashbuckler, ‘If I Were King’ (long overdue on DVD), and so the prospect of reading his poems in Shetlandic was both surprising and enticing. The introductory essays present a very interesting argument about the importance for a localised language such as Shetlandic to do more than just reflect, and comment on, the specifics of where it’s spoken—as most of Tait’s contemporaries writing in Shetlandic had done—but to engage with the international mainstream, and WJ (Billy) Tait, who died in 1992 with these translations unpublished, certainly does that.

It probably helps, as you read these poems, to be familiar enough with Shetland itself to have the sound of the language ringing in your ears, but even without that advantage, I’m sure the sheer rambunctious, energetic life force of the writing would come across vividly. I remembered how, without knowledge of Gaelic, I’d never been able to appreciate Sorley Maclean’s poems through his own (deliberately?) turgid English versions, until I read the lively translations into Scots by Douglas Young.

Regular readers will know of my, probably obsessive, love of the music-streaming service Spotify. The day after we got back from Ullapool, I logged on to an album by the Faroese composer and pianist, Kristian Blak. I’d come across his music many years ago when I’d been given two of his CDs by the Director of the Faroes Nordic House (and there’s another whole blog to write about the concept of Nordic Houses!). The album I chose had the intriguing title of Shalder Geo.  Now, I knew that ‘geo’ is the word in Orcadian and Shetlandic for a narrow inlet of water, and sure enough it turned out that on this disc Blak was mingling Faroese and Shetlandic tunes as his source material. The result was highly intriguing and affecting, reminding me sometimes of the best music of that influential Irishman, Michael O’Suilleabhain. This is one thing Spotify does really well—open doors to music that is at the same time both very local, and yet international in scope and appeal. After all, before heading for Ullapool, we’d had a little season of Galician folk music, courtesy of the Spotify ‘related artists’ function.

A couple of weeks ago two of our team had attended a Creative Scotland seminar on ‘International’ opportunities. They both found it a rather disappointing event, pitched at a very basic level. These two examples I’ve discussed here, that link Shetland to a much wider world, in both space and time, seem to me to offer genuinely intriguing models of ‘internationalism’. That is, they both spring from a state of mind that is open and outward-looking, not closed in and parochial.

Of course, these are just two examples that I’ve stumbled across in the past few days. I could also cite Stornoway-born writer Kevin MacNeil’s many links with Sweden  including his version of Torgny Lindgren’s play ‘Sweetness’ for Dogstar Theatre; or artist Lynn Bennett-Mackenzie in Gairloch who’s painstakingly developing an international artists’ residency programme Ceangal  with Indian-based artist Somu Desai; or the links with Norway and Bolivia (!) that will be explored in this summer’s St Magnus Festival on Orkney; or the extraordinary, ongoing international odyssey of Matthew Zajac’s play The Tailor of Inverness  .

As those introductory essays to Tait’s Villon poems remind us, there was a time when the seaways put Shetland—and much of the rest of the Highlands and Islands—at the centre of criss-crossing international networks. Now technology—Spotify, Youtube, social networking, even Amazon—is once again making the concept of ‘remoteness’ meaningless for artists who live—at least from the point of view of the Central Belt—‘on the edge’.

© Robert Livingston

This performance blew away, once and for all, the legend of the origin of the Goldbergs: that Bach composed them for a pupil, named Goldberg, to play to his insomniac employer. That’s patently nonsense. Not just because, if played properly, the work is far too stimulating to be conducive to slumber, but, as MacGregor showed, it is all of a piece. The idea that young Goldberg might have extracted a few movements, as and when, to while away the dark reaches of the night is wholly implausible.

But the fact that the legend has persisted for so long points to an early example of the deeply-rooted belief that music has to be ‘useful’. After all, in Bach’s time, most of it was: either it was embedded in church liturgies, or it had a role to play in civic and state occasions, or it was simply to aid the digestion—the origin, of course, of the term ‘Table music’.

Bach supremely demonstrated the uselessness of music, not just in the Goldbergs, but above all in the towering achievement of The Art of Fugue, which is so far from being composed for any particular purpose that Bach wrote it in ‘open stave’ with no indication of the instruments for which it was intended. But even after a subsequent century and a half of Romanticism, the idea that music should be useful didn’t go away. In the 1920’s the young Paul Hindemith declared that he was writing Gebrauchsmusik—explicitly, ‘useful music’—for social or political purposes, or for amateurs. In the next decade that high-minded aim would take a much darker turn, as totalitarian regimes in Germany and the USSR sought to stipulate that all music—indeed all art—must serve ‘the state’ or ‘the people’.

And still, today, stale old debates arise, about whether art is of benefit to society, or is simply ‘for art’s sake’. There are several ironies about this. The first is that, despite overwhelming evidence from throughout the world, governments and government departments fail to grasp the concept that the arts—and perhaps especially music—can have huge impacts on crucial areas of policy and expenditure: health, education, crime. It’s horrifying to realise that almost a decade has passed since we all hailed First Minister Jack McConnell’s speech on St Andrews Day, 2003,  in which he stated that:

Culture cuts across every aspect of government – it can make a difference to our success in tackling poverty, it can make Scotland a healthier place and it has a significant contribution to make towards our economy.

Creative Scotland has just announced a three year Arts and Criminal Justice Programme. An excellent idea. But I believe I’m right in saying that the sizeable budget will come from Creative Scotland’s own coffers. Surely one of the Scottish Government’s smallest budget areas shouldn’t be subsidising one of the largest? That’s hardly in the spirit of McConnell’s speech, where he challenged his various departmental Ministers to come up with proposals for how they would put culture at the heart of government.

The party of Government may have changed since then, but not the issue of the centrality of culture. As Neil Mulholland argued in a recent Bella Caledonia post , what is the Independence project, if not cultural?

So, instead of the Golden Age some of us hoped for back in 2003, of a flood of new resources for the arts from the big boys among Government departments, it seems instead that increasingly the arts have to prove their instrumental worth to get funded even from dedicated arts budgets. This despite the fact that it is also a decade since the Editor of the British Medical Journal argued that diverting just 0.5% of the NHS budget to arts activities would have hugely disproportionate benefits—a view supported at the time by a great number of medical professionals

But there is a further irony. The evidence I referred to is increasingly showing that almost any engagement in the arts can be beneficial. That is, these do not have to be projects designed specifically to achieve a particular end, such as boosting personal confidence, or diverting young people from anti-social behaviour. Just experiencing the live arts as an audience member is beneficial in many ways, both social and personal, both psychological and physiological.

Let’s take as an example what some would consider one of the most outmoded, or elitist, forms of engagement in the arts: the chamber music recital. I’ve written before about the excellent At One with Music series of lunchtime concerts in Inverness Town House. Inevitably, given that these are held on weekdays, the great majority of the audience is retired—indeed many of them appear very elderly and perhaps a bit frail, so a lunchtime concert offers an excellent opportunity that doesn’t involve travel in the dark. Most of those attending are regulars, and they tend to arrive very early, so there’s a real social buzz. Now, the superficial benefits of such social interaction are obvious, but here’s where we get into more difficult territory: Does the act of listening to great music have a direct physiological benefit? And is that benefit greater if the performance is ‘live’, not a recording?

Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about the much debunked ‘Mozart effect’ here. But I firmly believe that if one really listens to good music—and I mean genres such as jazz, traditional and world, as much as classical—then there is a physical involvement. Most obviously we react to rhythm. But I think we also became ‘in tune’ (pardon the pun) with the pulse of the music and, in the case of something as complex as Bach, with its unfolding architecture. And so, when the music ends, we experience an elation, an exhilaration, that can be profound, and lasting. The effect of a great concert can, literally, buoy me up for days.

Give me time and space, and I’ll happily extend that argument into different artforms: contemporary dance, for certain; theatre at its best, and even the visual arts. Randy Klinger, redoubtable founder and Director of the Moray Arts Centre, argues repeatedly and eloquently that his project is about re-establishing the pre-eminence of ‘beauty’ in our lives. Randy understands well how uncomfortable many people can be with that concept of ‘beauty’. In our post-modern, ironic, self-conscious society, making a baldly stated commitment to ‘beauty’ is a bit like announcing that you’ve found religion. In both cases embarrassing silences tend to follow.

But what if Randy’s right? Humans (and indeed Neanderthals) were already making art at least 40,000 years ago—indeed the earliest use of pigment has been traced back to a date ten times earlier than that. Music is certainly at least as old—the oldest flute so far discovered is also from 40,000 years ago. The very new science of evolutionary neurology will argue—as its proponents are already doing about religion—that humankind developed art because it conveyed some form of evolutionary advantage. Others will reject such a reductionist argument. But art is not even a uniquely human concept: just look at the bower bird!

So, finally, what I’m arguing is that the long running stand-off between the intrinsic and the instrumental values of the arts is simply pointless. Perhaps the single most famous piece of classical music of the 1960s was the Sinfonia by Luciano Berio, the third movement of which uses an extraordinary tapestry of texts, ranging from Samuel Beckett to student slogans from 1968. At one point these words surface from the aural maelstrom:

And tomorrow we’ll read that ‘Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto’ [or the composer and title of any other work included in the same programme] made tulips grow in my garden and altered the flow of the ocean currents. We must believe it’s true. There must be something else. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless.

That’s my credo. Art matters, it’s as simple as that. Or it would be quite hopeless. Last Saturday Joanna MacGregor proved that, in spades.

© Robert Livingston, 2012

Last week’s flying visit to catch part of the closing week of Celtic Connections offered the opportunities to sadly confirm one grumpy prejudice, and happily explode another. In recent years, few cultural topics have prompted more grumpy tirades from me than the refurbishment of Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, known as ‘Kelvingrove’ for short. As a youngster I was taken there on regular visits by both my mother and my primary school, and, once grown up, our very first flat of our own looked directly down the street to its outrageous facade. So, I had a lot invested, emotionally, in the reopening of Kelvingrove in 2006, after the largest refurbishment in its history. In the event, I hated what had been done to the collections so much that I’ve never been back since. For me, it was as if someone had scrawled graffiti on the surface of a great and much-loved work of art.

So, it was with some trepidation that I approached my first visit to the new Riverside Museum, the posh new home (and name) for what I’ve known, all my life, as the ‘Transport Museum’. Not least because, since the opening last summer, there had been quite a few negative comments in the press about aspects of the displays. Judith said to me, as we entered, ‘save the analysis for over lunch’, but she needn’t have worried, as I’d no need to suppress my grumpy side. I loved it. We spent four hours there, and I was entertained, enchanted and enlightened.

At the same time I can fully understand those who’ve complained at how some of the displays make it difficult to really enjoy the objects—the ‘Arnold Clark’ wall of cars, three high, for example, or the ring of bicycles, suspended in mid air, and half of them upside down. But I decided early on in my visit that the Riverside Museum is really a ‘Wunderkammer’, and as such has gone right back to the 17th century origins of the museum concept. Rather than present a taxonomic or consistent account of, say, the development of the tram or the internal combustion engine, the Riverside tells a series of discrete stories, and on the whole it tells them well. I’m usually wary of the use of videos in museum displays—not least because they can date so quickly—but here I thought they were mostly very successful, thanks in large part to the sensitive creativity of media company 55° .

I was particularly moved by two links to my childhood. First, seeing the boat used for fifty years by the remarkable father and son, Ben and George Parsonage, to pull bodies, living and dead, from the Clyde as officers of the Glasgow Humane Society. George was one of my art teachers at Whitehill Secondary School, and the video in which he describes how his father designed and made the boat, and how they worked together as a team, is a piece of archive footage that will never date. And then, just before we left, in the recreated ‘Main Street’ (which is, I admit, a bit cheesy), I found the interior of the Italian Cafe of my childhood, The Rendezvous in Duke Street, and sat again in one of the booths where, fifty years earlier, I’d have been enjoying wonderful vanilla ice cream with the most lividly red raspberry sauce imaginable. Bliss!

Our chief reason for coming down was the annual Transatlantic Sessions gig at Celtic Connections. We’re passionate fans of the programme, have never missed an episode of all five series, and indeed have watched many of them several times, but we’d never previously made it to the live version. And it was also our first chance to hear live one of the world’s great musicians, Dobro-player Jerry Douglas who, together with the great Aly Bain, is music director of both the series and the concert. And it didn’t disappoint. Sixteen superb musicians, almost three hours of music, not a single number that was dull or weak, and a unanimous standing ovation from a packed Royal Concert Hall. And the great thing about TS is that it never stands still. Alongside stalwarts like Bruce Molsky and Eddi Reader, the line-up featured mesmeric chanteuse Ruth Moody from the Wailin’ Jennies, and the astounding Raoul Mola, previously of the Mavericks, who has a voice that combines the power of Frankie Lane with the seductive charm of Tony Bennett. All in all, a truly great evening.

Except…

Except for the sound. We watch the TS programmes with the music channelled through our hifi, and we have one of the accompanying CDs. We know, therefore, the care with which the sound for TS is always balanced to bring out every line as part of a euphonious whole, by a superb team that includes my old Third Eye mate, Alan Young. But in the Royal Concert Hall, close your eyes, and you could have imagined that the musicians were playing at the other end of a very large aircraft hangar. It was aural mush. Worse than that, the sound was sometimes downright distorted. Canadian singer Tim O’Brien was first up, and the harshness of his amplified voice boded ill for the rest of the evening. Aly’s glorious sweet violin tone was often stretched out, and Jerry’s subtle accompaniments, with little riffs and phrases, often leapt rudely out of the sound mix.

I’d write this off as an unfortunate one-off, were it not that the same thing was true of my last visit to the Concert Hall, two years previously, to hear the Trilok Gurtu Band. In both cases I had a near-ideal seat in the middle of the stalls, so if the sound balance wasn’t right there, I doubt it was right anywhere in the hall. That this needn’t be the case was proved the following night when we went to hear the truly wonderful Omar Sosa and his band in the Old Fruitmarket. Now, this was many decibels louder than the TS gig, but the sound projection had pin-point clarity, and it was also an absolutely integral element of the music-making, as critical as the baseline or the rhythm. The result was that, despite being so much louder and in a more confined space, it was never tiring to listen to, whereas at TS I was torn between wanting the performances to go on all night, and longing for the aural barrage to end.

How can musicians of such world class skill and sensitivity accept such a distortion of their artistry? And why do audiences put up with it? Surely we haven’t become so aurally bludgeoned that we don’t notice? And of course this doesn’t just apply to this one venue. Crude amplification is too often the curse of live music-making. Enough is enough, I say! It’s time for both musicians and audiences to form a new CAMRA—the CAMpaign for Real Amplification. After all, the original CamRA was, I imagine, started by a bunch of grumpy old men.

© Robert Livingston, 2012

The first was a new publication from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. Entitled Great Crowns of Stone it’s an exhaustive–and exhausting–account of the 70 or so known ‘recumbent’ stone circles which are unique to the North East of Scotland. If you know of these at all, it’s likely that you’ll have seen such well preserved examples as Loanhead of Daviot or Easter Aquehorthies, but there are many, many more, some traceable today only by a single stone. The second is the National Gallery (of London)’s catalogue of its 50 or so 15th century Netherlandish paintings , a group which includes some of the finest gems in that wonderful collection.

As well as being superb examples of the bookmaker’s art, beautifully designed and illustrated, these two books have much in common. They both display a level of scholarship, and a thoroughness of research, which are simply astounding. Of course, both are ultimately team efforts, but one person—Adam Welfare and Lorne Campbell respectively—has had the mammoth task of pulling all this vast erudition into a manageable order. Of course, you don’t actually read such books: only a specialist in the same field could actually read every paragraph and absorb and understand the phenomenal level of detail. But working through each, reading key sections and dipping into others, still reveals more information than it would have seemed possible to accumulate on these two very different and distant subjects.

And yet what is the outcome of this immense scholarly endeavour, this herculean piling up of data? Only to conclude that, in reality, we know far less on either topic than anyone previously thought. Great Crowns of Stone goes carefully through all the past theories about these stone circles—that they were Druidic temples, burial mounds, observatories and astronomic calculators–and politely but firmly demolishes them all. These circles have been surveyed to within a fraction of a millimetre and, in many cases, excavated not once but multiple times, each successive excavation putting right some of the errors of its predecessor. Yet it seems we can make fewer definitive statements about the original nature and purpose of these evocative structures than at any time in the past two centuries.

Exactly the same seems to be true of the discipline of art history. Take not just the most famous painting in this catalogue, but one of the best loved paintings in any British collection, the so-called ‘Arnolfini Marriage’. The Introduction notes the disparity in our levels of knowledge: the first ever catalogue to the National Gallery’s collection, back in 1843 gave this painting just 6 lines; the present volume devotes 38 pages to the same work. The author knows more about fifteenth century interiors, furnishings, and fashion than would seem possible at this distance in time. He examines in astonishing detail the biographies of five separate Arnolfinis all active in and around Bruges at roughly the right time. And yet what conclusion does he come to? The male subject may not be an Arnolifi at all, and if he is, we can’t be sure which of those five he is, and we have no idea who the woman is.

Worse is to follow. He comprehensively debunks the theory, championed between the wars by the great art history guru Panofsky, that the double portrait celebrates a marriage, rubbishing all Panosky’s attempts to find marriage ‘symbols’ in the furnishing of the room. It’s not even a betrothal, just a plain ‘double portrait’. So, as with the recumbent stone circles, we are now less certain about this famous painting than at any time in the past two centuries.

I’m reminded of Eliot’s lines from the Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Nuclear physicists often deplore the lazy way that we lay people apply Heissenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty to matters outside the specific field of particle physics. The essence of the Principle is that the more you know about a particle’s velocity, the less you can know about its position, and vice versa. And that’s it. But it seems to suit the zeitgeist of the times to see the application of Heissenberg’s idea in all aspects of life. I even know of a music group which wonderfully calls itself the Heissenberg Ensemble because of uncertainty as to whether they’d hit the right note… (actually, they’re much better than that!).

Consider the vexed issues of climate change, or wind power. The mountains of accumulated data on these two vital and controversial subjects are now so huge that anyone who wants to can mine them selectively to tell the story he or she wants to tell. Manmade, or natural; vital renewable energy, or wasteful blots on the landscape. You pays your consultant and you takes your choice. And the Internet just makes it worse: instead of taking cognisance of the authoritative view of an established critic, of books, music, or theatre, we now must take an overview of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of separate opinions. The more data, the more uncertainty.

If this is a sobering thought, it’s one which, sadly, doesn’t seem to trouble many of our politicians, who continue to issue bold soundbites with a confidence often born of ignorance, an ignorance, moreover, that could often be overcome by a quick session of googling—pet cats and asylum seekers, anyone?

© Robert Livingston

While the garish, neon-lit beach front of ‘amusements’ and casinos is just as ghastly (in a fascinating way) as on our last visit some 15 years ago, making the town seem a modest eastern counterpart to the hell that is Blackpool, things are nonetheless stirring in Scarborough. Just five years ago Scarborough Borough Council announced an ambition to make the town the creative centre of the Yorkshire Coast, launching the plans for what is now the Woodend Creative Workspace , so it shouldn’t be a surprise that in our day trip we were planning to take in a concert, an exhibition, and a play, rather than donkey rides and sandcastle building (though a little of the latter did get done as well).

First up was the concert, at the early hour of 11.00. On our travels, we rather pride ourselves on enjoying music fit for the location: Mozart in Salzburg, Strauss in Vienna, Flamenco in Seville, Zarzuela in Madrid, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra playing a home gig in Amsterdam. To that august list we must now add the Scarborough Spa Orchestra playing their daily (yes, daily) morning concert in the Sun Court of the beautifully refurbished Scarborough Spa. Celebrating their centenary next year, the Spa Orchestra proudly proclaim themselves to be the last seaside orchestra in the UK, though ‘orchestra’ is perhaps a rather grand term for a ten-piece ensemble (somewhat reduced from its original complement of 35 players).

Now, I normally run a mile from anything called ‘light music’, even though as a child I was a sucker for ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ on the ‘Light’ programme (now Radio 2). But here the mix was perfect. A warm, sunny day (the ‘Sun Court’ is, as the name implies, open to the skies), deckchairs to recline in, a clutch of highly competent and flexible musicians complete with red and white striped blazers, and some very skilful arrangements of tunes familiar and unfamiliar. It was all utterly charming and thoroughly enjoyable. And the audience for this, just one of the nine concerts the orchestra gives each week over the summer, numbered, by my count, well over 150. Well, the fact that the ticket price included lunch in the Spa Cafe was probably an added inducement. I may have been the only person in the audience under 60, but if I’d been spending the week in Scarborough, rather than just making a day trip, I reckon you’d have found me in the Spa Court most mornings, tapping my feet to ‘Zing went the strings of my heart’ or a medley from ‘Patience’.

Next stop was the Scarborough Art Gallery to catch an exhibition of prints by Howard Hodgkin. I’ve always loved Hodgkin’s boldly-coloured, life-enhancing, semi-abstract paintings. But we assumed that his ‘prints’ would be on a smaller, less ambitious scale. Nothing of the sort. The largest exhibits were six feet cross, made up of multiple, perfectly registered sheets, a terrific tribute to the skill of Hodgkin’s technician collaborator. Scarborough Gallery is a former private, albeit very grand, house, and the suite of rooms is just the right scale for these works, especially as the large windows (blessedly free from light-excluding blinds) afforded such marvellous views of the town as a counterpart to the artworks.

This was a truly glorious exhibition—as I said to Judith, I felt I’d died and gone to heaven. And it was clearly proving to be a big draw, as at least half a dozen other couples were going round at the same time as us.

When I looked at the visitors’ book I was surprised to see—though I suppose I shouldn’t have been—that the comments were roughly 50/50 favourable or negative, with quite a few of the ‘a child of five could do it’ variety. How to explain the sheer jolt of intense pleasure which Hodgkin’s work gives me? Perhaps people just try to read too much ‘meaning’ into these pictures. It seems to me that Hodgkin is really quite simple in his approach, celebrating the sheer sensory ‘zing’ (that word again) of existence.

We then wandered round some of the less touristy parts of town, and there’s clearly still a lot to be done for Scarborough: so many derelict houses, so many shops of the ‘Poundland’ variety, such a contrast with the much more prosperous Whitby just 20 miles up the coast. But if Scarborough is going to be regenerated through the ‘creative industries’, then at the heart of that process must be the Stephen Joseph Theatre, and the work of Alan Ayckbourn.

We were fortunate enough to have come to Scarborough during the premiere run of Ayckbourn’s 75th new play, ‘Neighbourhood Watch’. Let me refer you to the theatre’s website for the story of how, 15 years ago, the theatre opened after a massive conversion of a former Odeon cinema, to continue the tradition of ‘theatre in the round’ which Ayckbourn’s mentor, Stephen Joseph, had originally set up in the town’s public library.

Ten days into the play’s run, and on a sunny mid week evening, and yet the 400-seater auditorium was packed—so much so that Judith and I and our friends Fran and Wol had to take four individual seats, one on each of the four sides, which at least gave us plenty of scope for comparing notes afterwards. The play was funny, thought-provoking, and bang up to date in its theme of ‘do it yourself’ law and order, and the performances were pitch perfect. Ayckbourn sometimes gets unfairly labelled as a populist, traditionalist playwright (just as, in contrast, Hodgkin can be unfairly considered an obscure or elitist artist). But for me ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ did exactly what good theatre should do—engaged with real ideas and issues while thoroughly entertaining audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

So, a grand day out indeed. Scarborough is roughly the same size as Inverness, and with a similarly large rural hinterland. Our day out showed how, with the right mix of ingredients, arts of high quality can be accessible and engaging, and contribute very significantly to a town’s tourist appeal. All it needs is a few people of vision, and public bodies prepared to back that vision. The Spa Orchestra showed how effective a revitalised local tradition can be. The success of Ayckbourn’s play demonstrated that you can locate something of national resonance in a town that, as Nicholas Crane’s ‘Town’ programme on Scarborough kept emphasising, is at the end of the line. After a short English tour, ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ is off to New York to be part of the ‘Brits off Broadway’ Festival, and it’s already garnered four star reviews from two London broadsheets. Not bad for a ‘bracing’ holiday resort.

© Robert Livingston

It got me to puzzling over the appeal of zombies, in films, on TV, and now in outrageous rewritings of literary classics  After all, this version of the undead, that we’re all so familiar with, is a pretty new phenomenon. I’ve not been able to trace any earlier reference than the 1954 publication of Richard Matheson’s novel ‘I am Legend’, subsequently filmed with Charlton Heston, and more recently with Will Smith. Prior to that, as in the classic Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur movie ‘I walked with a Zombie’ the concept had stayed fairly close to its Voodoo roots.

Of course, it was George Romero’s stomach-churning 1968 movie masterpiece ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which defined the current model of the Zombie as a crazed, flesh-eating monster which attacks in hordes. In the mid-70s I saw this at our Student Film Society and was scared and disgusted in equal measure, though evidently not as much as the female students sitting on either side of me, both of whom left lasting weals where they had gripped my wrists in terror at key moments.

Romero was—is—a very canny film-maker who knew exactly what he was about. I’ve a fondness for his much less well known 1973 movie ‘The Crazies’ which is a devastating metaphor for the behaviour of the US army in Vietnam. Perhaps part of the appeal of zombies is that they are so blank, they can accept almost any layer of interpretation. The second movie in Romero’s original trilogy, for example, set in a shopping mall, has always been seen as a critique of American consumerism.

But now zombies are everywhere, to the extent of eclipsing vampires, whom I’ve personally always found more interesting. Vampires, of course, unlike zombies, have a long and rich folk heritage which Bram Stoker drew on (with a canniness equal to Romero’s) for his defining novel. I think Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ is an under-rated masterpiece even if, perhaps, an accidental one—Stoker may have wrought more effectively than he knew. At a time of mass immigration from the East, of new discoveries about germs and infection, of nervousness about the rise of the ‘new woman’ (exemplified in Stoker’s Minna Harker, with her stenography, the strength with which she supports her shattered husband, and her courage in confronting the Count, and yet at the same time she too has been ‘infected’), ‘Dracula’ pulled all these together into an incredibly potent, and still powerful mix. No screen adaptation has really captured that power, though the 1977 BBC adaptation, with its surprise casting of Louis Jourdan as the Count, for me comes closest, and it’s available on DVD.

A completely different set of metaphors is unpacked in Elizabeth Kostova’s intriguing 2005 novel ‘The Historian’ where the survival of the vampire through all the vicissitudes of the 20th century in the Balkans becomes a telling image of how the ideologies that have tortured that region—Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Islamism—can’t be killed off by conventional means.

So, apart from indulging myself, what is the relevance of all this to culture in the Highlands and Islands? First, that we perhaps don’t make enough of some of the darker folklore and traditions of the area, and here I’m going to offer a totally unashamed puff for my colleague Peter Urpeth’s strange novel about shamanism in present day Lewis, ‘Far Inland’ And of course in 1990 NVA’s life-changing Glen Lyon epic ‘The Path’ blended Highland and Eastern mythologies to unforgettable effect. As Peter’s novel hints at, and as the School of Scottish Studies recordings used in ‘The Path’ revealed, some very dark and primitive ideas and concepts remained current in parts of the Highlands and Islands until well into the last century.

Secondly, Open Book’s recent tour of ‘Macbeth’, which I caught in Eden Court a couple of weeks ago, reminded me forcefully that great art never loses its relevance. Without in any way making an overt point, Marcus Roche’s taut and energetic production, using just six actors, had huge resonance for the current situation in Libya and Iraq, where hated dictators cling on with increasing violence to the last remnants of their power. ‘Macbeth’ might at first have seemed an odd choice for the first round of the new North of Scotland Touring Fund, supported by Creative Scotland, LEADER, and HIE, but this production proved that playwriting doesn’t have to be new to be topical.

In stark contrast, just ten days later I decided to leave Illyria’s open air production of ‘Twelfth Night’, at Brahan Estate, at the interval. This was the sad case of a director who couldn’t trust Shakespeare to be relevant, and so rather than bringing out the play’s innate humour—and its poetry and romance—he had to get his laughs largely at the play’s expense, with pratfalls, crude sexual jokes, and laboured rewritings of Shakespeare’s words (‘and in sad cypress let me get laid’—I ask you!). In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a zombie had wandered on to the stage—an undead Benny Hill. Now there’s a scary thought.

I was down in Inveraray to visit that remarkable open air museum, Auchindrain Township which gives a unique insight into the way Scottish rural communities lived and worked before crofting. Auchindrain’s Development Manager is an old friend and colleague, Bob Clark. Back in the early 90s Bob had been working for the Scottish Museums Council (now Museums and Galleries Scotland) when I was working for the Scottish Arts Council, but we hadn’t seen each other in the intervening years as our careers had taken us in different directions.

In the two years he’s been at Auchindrain, Bob’s already started introducing the arts on to the site as a powerful tool in helping to interpret its history. The Walking Theatre Company produced a site-specific piece that included the (true) story of Queen Victoria’s visit to Auchindrain, and co-opted the present Duke of Argyll to step out of the audience to play his ancestor greeting the Queen. And Bob’s had local fiddlers playing informally, outside one of the cottages as they might have done when the site was still a living community. He’s even had the local shinty team learning the old skills of their predecessors in order to be able to play on an ordinary rough field that had not had the benefit of years of heavy-duty rollers to smooth out its irregularities!

Twenty years ago, Bob and I were effectively the means of liaison between our two national agencies, and that kept us pretty busy. This was a time when the relationship between the arts and museums sectors was a particularly close one. Large and small museums the length and breadth of the country were willing bookers of a wide range of touring exhibitions which were being created and circulated by SAC client galleries and arts centres. Such exhibitions were often a godsend to museums in helping them to encourage repeat visits, or develop educational projects. In my previous role as Director of the Crawford Arts Centre in St Andrews we’d regularly produced such exhibitions, touring them to museums from Kelvingrove to Shetland. It was a helpful source of income, but more importantly it would justify the expenditure of funding and resources on the exhibition in the first place, and knowing it could have several showings would make it worth investing in a printed catalogue or some audio-visual aids.

But the links between arts and museums went much further than just circulating exhibitions. Scottish Arts Council funding, for a few years, supported a wide range of innovative arts projects in museums, from performances by dance, music and drama companies, to artists’ residencies, and from new commissions to creative learning projects, in schools and with adults.

It was something of a halcyon period in Scottish culture. When the SAC helped to bring a new nationwide photography festival , Fotofeis, into being, many museums were ready and willing to be involved, and indeed some of Fotofeis’ most successful projects were hosted in regional museums like the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. The climax of this inter-agency collaboration was the preparation of the Charter for the Arts in Scotland, published in 1993, and led by the SAC, but with full participation by the Scottish Museums Council, and also by the Scottish Library and Information Council. That ground-breaking document, the result of copious consultation, set the agenda for arts funding in Scotland for the next decade.

And yet, it didn’t last. By the mid 1990s the dedicated funding schemes had dried up, and, on the whole, museums stopped being venues for imaginative arts events. The process of Museum Registration (now Accreditation) came to dominate the thinking and the time of many Museum Directors and Boards. The rise of the Curator meant that SAC-funded galleries were often more concerned with offering highly distinctive programmes that boosted their own identities, and the interest in sharing touring exhibitions diminished. I think we were all the losers.

Of course, it’s not all bleak. The National Galleries of Scotland have had a long-standing outreach programme, and the Exhibitions Unit of the Highland Council has been one of their most consistent partners, resulting in such treats for Inverness as the Venus Rising exhibition back in 2005  . More recently the Artist Rooms programme, a collaboration between the Art Fund, the Tate, the National Galleries of Scotland, and collector and curator Anthony d’Offay, has brought some of the finest 20th century art not only to Inverness but also to Helmsdale, Thurso, Stornoway and Orkney.

Our own Crafts Development programme, led by Pamela Conacher, has had a highly successful partnership with the Highland Council Exhibitions unit, resulting in substantial summer programmes of exhibitions, small and large, in Inverness Museum and Gallery, both this year and in 2010. Those seasons have given terrific opportunities for those makers involved in our Making Progress mentoring programme, not only by showcasing their own new work, but also by putting it in the context of some of the best contemporary crafts from across the UK.

Detail from Caroline Dear's 100 Ropes, Making Progress Exhibition July 2011

My short tour of Argyll this week also included my first visit to Dunollie, the home of the chiefs of the Clan MacDougall since the 12th century. Most people who know of Dunollie at all would know of it only as the broken tooth of a black keep which the Mull ferry passes as it leaves Oban harbour. But just inland is a fine mansion dating back to the 18th century, the earliest part of which dates from 1745, and will shortly open as a museum and visitor centre .  The Project Director, Catherine Gillies, has bold and ambitious plans for involving the arts in Dunollie, as an absolutely integral part of their remit. So perhaps the pendulum is swinging back once again, and we’ll soon have as productive a relationship between arts and museums as existed twenty years ago, back before Bob Clark or I had any grey hairs.

© Robert Livingston

That’s an extreme example of an enforced restriction. But often simply the norms of gallery-visiting can militate against the full experience of an artwork. This was brought home to me forcefully last Friday, when, after a morning of meetings in Glasgow, I had decided to catch a later train north, allowing me to see at least part of the British Art Show, or BAS7 as its organisers refer to it. The British Art Show has been held roughly every five years since 1979, and each time tours to several cities. It is said to be ‘widely recognised as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British Art’.

And there’s where the problems begin. Today’s artists are increasingly working with moving images, and indeed a number of them have now made the transition to mainstream cinema, such as Steve McQueen with Hunger and Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere Boy. That’s not how video art started out. The grand master of the video installation, Bill Viola, creates pieces that are either short (5-10 minutes at most) or are circular, and the viewer can start to engage at any part of the cycle. That fits comfortably with the experience of viewing a ‘static’ picture or sculpture. But, at the CCA, its share of BAS7 included three videos which were, essentially, narrative (one was even directly referencing sitcoms) and therefore demanded to be watched from beginning to end. To do that with all three, I calculated, would have required two and a quarter hours of my time, and that’s assuming that it was possible to phase the starting times of all three appropriately!

I did step into the middle of each, and watched them for long enough to appreciate that, if I was going to get anything of substance out of them, it would be essential to start watching from the beginning. Now for me the essence of the gallery/exhibition experience is movement: the rhythm of moving through a space, stepping back, then forward for a closer look, then scanning round the gallery as a whole, and moving on to the next work, or at least the next work to catch my eye. In an exhibition I’m simply not in a mental state to sit still for as long as it would take to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (and possibly for as little reward).

So, should artists and galleries instead make these works available on DVD to watch at leisure on home TV? Well, no, that’s not the answer either. Some of these works require the setting of a blacked-out, soundproofed space, and the sheer scale of a large projection screen, and many of the artists, I’m guessing, would argue that it’s the very context of the gallery setting which defines the videos as artworks.

So this seems an intractable problem. Artists are making artworks which, by their very nature, and by the norms of gallery-going, are unviewable by all but the most dedicated, or by those with a great deal of time on their hands. But at the CCA one artist, at least, has turned this problem into a virtue and in making a video that is, almost by definition, unwatchable in its entirety, has created a masterpiece–perhaps the Sistine Ceiling of the video age.

Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ is a 24-hour-long video that is made up of thousands of clips from old movies and TV dramas from around the world which show watches or clocks, or reference times of day. These have been edited together in sequence so that, if shown in ‘real time’, the video functions as an actual clock, marking the passage of time for those viewing the film. Sometimes the ‘clock’ theme is hard to spot. One shot of 60s London street traffic puzzled me until I spotted that there was a clock on the facade of a building in the far distance. I’m sure, if I’d been able to look closely enough, that it was at the right time.

If that were all, it would be an astounding piece of collation and editing, but perhaps nothing more. What makes ‘The Clock’ a riveting work of art is the poetry, wit and humour with which Marclay has assembled his multitude of clips. Themes will emerge and disappear, such as train journeys or mealtimes, and tiny mini-dramas will present themselves through the interaction between the clips.

Let me try to explain how this works. In black and white, a young Karl Malden drives a convertible up to a house and starts yelling obstreperously for his ‘baby’ to come down and join him—they need to be somewhere by 2.00 (there’s the time reference). ‘The Clock’ then cuts to Vincent Price, in colour, sitting on a garden bench and, though clearly in a completely different film, so angled that he could be assumed to be observing Malden’s boorish behaviour. Here’s where it gets really clever. The soundtrack from the Malden clip continues behind the Price clip, so that Price’s obvious increasing annoyance and impatience seem to be a reaction to the noise Malden is making. That’s just a few seconds out of twenty-four hours. Given my limited timetable, I only had the chance to watch less than one fiftieth of this astonishing epic, but even that was an unforgettable experience.

And here’s where we come back to my theme of unviewable art. ‘The Clock’ runs for the full 24 hours of the diurnal clock. But, of course, the CCA keeps normal gallery hours and is only open between 11.00 and 18.00. It is, simply, impossible to see the work as a whole, even if you wanted to, except for one day, 18 June, when the Centre will remain open for the full 24 hours. Bring a flask and some sandwiches.

And of course it’s harder still to see even enough of ‘The Clock’ when it’s just one exhibit in an exhibition that’s so large that it needs three separate galleries to house it: CCA, GOMA and Tramway. Moreover, it can be difficult to present such immense catch-all surveys without the prop of some sort of theme. BAS7 has the rather pompous and obscure sub-title ‘In the Days of the Comet’, taken from the title of probably the least-read of H G Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ (though I do have a copy, I can’t remember if I’ve read it). The organisers do attempt to justify this choice of title, but I’ll settle for ‘pompous and obscure’, as that’s how I found much of the work in BAS7.

Fortunately, my schedule for the afternoon included another exhibition which restored, as Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ had also done, much of my faith in contemporary art, and the use of video as a medium. I had played a small part in helping artist Victoria Clare Bernie to get a residency at the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s research laboratory at Dunstaffnage, north of Oban, and this exhibition at Street Level, ‘Slow Water’ was the outcome of that residency. The ‘unviewable’ issue came up again here, as the core of the exhibition was three videos, each lasting about 40 minutes, and shown sequentially. But fortunately, although the films clearly have a linear flow, they are not narrative as such, and I found I could get a great deal out of them from even partial viewings. That’s because, without hitting the viewer over the head, Bernie nonetheless clearly conveys the underlying ideas and philosophy that drive her work, and especially because the resulting films (unlike almost everything I saw in BSA7) are reflective, quiet, and very, very beautiful.

© Robert Livingston 2011

This past week, I’ve had a good demonstration of the riches on offer in Inverness, and of the variety of venues in which this cultural fare can be enjoyed. It all began on Sunday evening with the MIDAS Songwriters Showcase at the Ironworks.  Now, it’s not for me to praise one of our own events, so I’ll just say that there was a great array of Highland talent on display, and take the opportunity instead to praise the Ironworks team for the excellent setting they provided for the event, which showed the musicians off to best advantage. When HI~Arts started working on music industry development 15 years ago, I doubt if any of us involved then could have imagined that the biggest custom-built music venue to be created by the private sector in Scotland would be in Inverness, but that’s the Ironworks and we’re lucky to have it.

Two evenings later, Eden Court’s Empire Theatre was the venue for Jasmin Vardimon’s dance theatre piece 7734 As it happened, I didn’t enjoy the performance: for me it was too unremittingly bleak, with no sense of catharsis or release. But I’ll back to the hilt Eden Court’s decision to programme such demanding work, and enable audiences to make up their own minds. And there was no denying the superb skill and commitment of the performers. Again we’re fortunate to have Scotland’s largest single-site arts centre here in Inverness, making it possible to see such international work on our doorstep.

Of course, there’s no hard and fast boundary between Inverness and its hinterland. So when we travelled over the hill to Glenurquhart Village Hall on Thursday night, we found quite a few Invernessians had also made the journey out. The draw was the Budapest Café Orchestra,  on their first Highland tour. The name’s deceptive—they hail from Harringay, and none of them is Hungarian—but the music was thoroughly authentic: just what you’d expect to hear from a MittelEurop café orchestra, if the members happened to be four of the best musicians you could find anywhere, and decidedly off the wall to boot. Now, by Highland standards Glenurquhart can’t be described as ‘remote’ (no matter how remote it seems from Harringay!), but there is a special frisson to hearing this kind of music in this kind of intimate setting, especially when promoter extraordinaire (and Northings contributor) Jennie Macfie provides such an exceptional welcome, this time even extending to a goulash supper before the music started.

Then, as if it hadn’t been a rich enough week already, on Friday I caught the lunchtime recital at the Inverness Town House. This was presented under the auspices of At One with Music, which is something of a one-man-band effort by James Munro, who programmes these monthly concerts right through the year, mostly focusing on young artists, and with a judicious mix of classical and traditional content. This time the guest was a young Estonian pianist, Kristi Kapten, one of a number of rising stars whom James has brought up from the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow  She proved to be an exceptional virtuoso, presenting a demanding and largely unfamiliar programme that was well beyond the kind of light ‘Classic FM’ fare that the idea of a ‘lunchtime concert’ might conjure up. After dispatching Berg, Liszt and Prokofiev with strength and clarity and barely a pause for breath (and all from memory), for her encore she scaled new heights with the 10th of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes. How much confidence do you need to keep your most impressive performance for your encore?

I have to admit that the Town House is not a favourite venue of mine—too much visual clutter and external noise—though there’s no denying its architectural splendour and fine acoustic. But if the curiously disguised busking piper out on the High Street had started playing five minutes earlier than he did, I fear murder might have been done.

So, to paraphrase the great Garrison Keillor, it’s been a quiet week in Inversnecky, where all the venues are active, all the artists are intriguing, and all the audiences have a terrific menu of opportunities to choose from.

© Robert Livingston 2011

Holocaust Memorial

Judith and I are old enough to have parents who were adult during the War. My father was in the RAF in the Western Desert (and so the Libyan place names in the news just now have an extra resonance for me). But for the multitudes of young people we saw in Berlin, that war is as many as three generations behind them. What does this mean for the traces of what happened in Berlin between 1933 and 1945?

That question hit us full on, during our first walk around the city, when we visited the remarkable Holocaust memorial, or to give it its full title, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Designed by American architect Peter Eisenman, the Memorial covers the equivalent of two football pitches and consists of 2177 grey concrete slabs, all of the same length and width, but varying in height from 0.2 to 4.8 meters. We had expected this to be a solemn scene. Perhaps there would be Jews from many parts of the world silently remembering lost family members, or perhaps there would even be extravagant displays of emotion, as at the Temple Wall in Jerusalem. Well, maybe it was just because it was an Easter holiday, and the sun was shining, but what we found was much more like a huge outdoor party or picnic. If anyone was feeling sorrowful, I didn’t see them.

Moreover, the blocks almost demand to be climbed on, and the gaps between them are narrow enough to tempt the bold to use them as giant stepping stones. A resigned security guard was employed full time in stopping people from doing this, with a weary courtesy. Not, I think, because of a perceived lack of respect, but from health and safety concerns and a fear of falls. When I was a student, abroad for the first time, I was upbraided by a gendarme for taking my shoes off to ease my sore feet while sitting under the Arc de Triomphe. I had offended against French civic pride. That was not, we felt, the issue here.

And it seemed to us entirely right that the Memorial should be used in this way, as a combination of park, adventure playground, and picnic site. It didn’t change the Memorial itself, which does not mourn or teach, but simply exists. Penetrating deep into the grid of narrow lanes between the blocks, as they reared up taller and taller, was an unsettling experience, but also good fun—other visitors would flash past as you peered down the grid rows, like something out a silent movie or a dream.

This seemed a good symbol for Berlin as a whole. I’ve written before about my admiration for how Munich has succeeded in putting its past behind it, while not trying to hide or ignore it. That is Berlin, only squared, because Berlin is also recovering from the Cold War and the Wall. And that era too has become a subject for entertainment and pleasure, no more so than in the figure of Ampelmann the distinctive image of East German traffic lights, which is now an affectionately diversified design icon. We bought the mug, and the key-rings.

After all, what is the alternative? That an entire city becomes a permanent site of commemoration? On the one hand, there are still plenty of opportunities to absorb the history, such as the excellent outdoor exhibit the Topography of Terror which, disconcertingly, includes on one location both a surviving stretch of the Wall and the site of the SS Headquarters. But other sites have been effaced, for very good reasons. I had walked through a fairly nondescript 80s housing estate, thinking it was oddly close to the centre, when at the far end I found a ‘historical map’ and realised that these quiet apartment blocks were built on the site of Hitler’s bunker and the Reich Chancellery. Some things are best not commemorated.

‘Lest we forget’ say countless war memorials throughout Britain. But a few days ago the very last surviving combatant of the First World War died. What, therefore, are we now remembering, when those who suffered through that war are no longer with us? There are many in the Southern States of the US who give the impression that they would like to refight the American Civil War. Terrible atrocities were committed in Kosovo just over a decade ago, in the name of a defeat suffered by the Serbs in the Fourteenth Century.

Are we so very much better? Controversy is being stirred up again with the proposal for a Redcoat memorial at Culloden, and the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn in 2014 has been designated—in a surely rather bizarre conjunction—as Scotland’s next ‘Year of Homecoming’. When does the proper function of memory and commemoration turn into unhealthy obsession? Shouldn’t we just ‘get over it’?

Just last week a court in Munich finally found the 91 year old John Demjanjuk guilty of complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews. The Holocaust Memorial may be an intriguing playground for its younger visitors, but for an older generation, this is clearly still a matter of unfinished business.

I came across this useful term recently on an American website .  Cultural Omnivores, it seems, are those who regularly participate in a wide range of cultural activities, making little distinction been ‘high’ and ‘low ‘culture. Cultural Omnivorism is associated with the baby-boomer generation, that is, those born before 1955 (so I just squeak in). And, inevitably, that generation is starting to die out, and in America at least that’s causing a major drop in audiences, as each lost CO leaves behind a particularly large hole in attendances.

I thought I should try to track just how far my own Cultural Omnivorism goes. We’d both had a very heavy week last week, so a Saturday devoted to Rest and Recuperation, with a little light shopping, some household chores and gardening, and some cooking, seemed the ideal day for such an exercise. Here then is my (far from comprehensive!) Cultural Diary for Saturday 9th April 2011.

Breakfast: we listened, via Spotify, to Vaughan Williams’ ‘London’ Symphony, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. I’m having something of a Barbirolli season on Spotify at the moment—I’ve been a fan ever since I just missed hearing him live when I was a teenager, as he died (too young for a conductor) a week before he was due to conduct the SNO in Glasgow.

Shopping: we dropped into Beauly Library and I discovered a magnificent Taschen publication on the travels and photographs of Burton Holmes, the man who invented the ‘travelogue’.  I’d never heard of this extraordinary man, who in the first half of the 20th century travelled all over the world and gave over 8,000 illustrated lectures about his travels.

Once home I pored over his amazing hand-tinted colour photographs while listening to the last act of Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ in the famous Knappertsbusch recording from Bayreuth in the 60s—I’d picked up the CDs a few days earlier in a charity shop for a fiver.

Lunch: we sampled the Dutch minimalist Louis Andriessen’s opera ‘Writing to Vermeer’, setting a libretto by film-maker Peter Greenaway. This is the kind of serendipity Spotify throws up—I’d come across this while hunting for something else entirely. We agreed it was rather haunting.

Gardening: I had to strim a lot of long grass, so with my MP3 player’s earphones under my ear defenders, I listened to podcasts of the latest of David Attenborough’s wonderful ‘Life Stories’ and a recent ‘Last Word’, Radio 4’s obituary programme.

Afternoon: I finished reading the last edition of the London Review of Books. The new edition has been gazing reprovingly at me from the kitchen table for some days now. They come fortnightly, and usually demand to be read from cover to cover. I’m afraid this time I cheated and skipped a very lengthy and demanding article on the politics of Brazil by the formidable Perry Anderson.

Dinner: I’d discovered that Spotify has a huge catalogue of comedy, so while cooking we listened to ‘An Evening (wasted) with Tom Lehrer’ which was still sharp, even shocking, and wonderfully funny after more than 50 years. Then over the meal itself we listened to some 70s jazz-funk from the great Brecker Brothers, which prepared us nicely for:

Evening: the magic of Freeview allowed us to finish our dinner without rushing and then sit down to a delayed STV screening of ‘Mamma Mia’. Now, Abba songs have been a guilty pleasure of mine, I’ve been in love with Meryl Streep since ‘The Deerhunter’, and I’ll watch anything Colin Firth does, so this was, I have to confess, a treat.

Later, as a palate-cleansing sorbet, we listened to four Nocturnes from a remarkable CD set called ‘The Real Chopin’, his complete works played on pianos from the 1840s, and bought from Amazon for a pittance.

Bedtime: before going to sleep I finished Carlo Lucarelli’s crime novel ‘Carte Blanche’, which I’d requested from the library after it had featured on BBC4’s excellent documentary on ‘Italian Noir’.

Far from suffering cultural indigestion, I slept like a log and woke with Abba songs in my head.

Now there are three points I want to make about this (far from untypical) diary, and none of them is about my cultural gluttony, or the vagaries of my taste.

The first is about the sheer excellence of what we had access to that day. The Barbirolli and Knappertsbusch recordings, though made back in the 60s, are still reckoned by most critics to be the best ever versions of those two major works. Tom Lehrer remains the absolute acme of sophisticated comedy with music. And, whatever its merits, ‘Mamma Mia’ was, until ‘Avatar’, the highest grossing movie ever in the UK. Too much quality for just one day? Should I try to have the occasional ‘culture-free’ day, as I aim to have alcohol-free days?

And then there’s the sheer accessibility, much of it inconceivable even ten years ago: from Spotify to podcasts, from pausing live TV to requesting library books online. Most of the technology used, moreover, was either cheap or long-lived. A £15 FM transmitter links the Spotify on the PC to any FM radio. My MP3 player cost less than £30. My Hifi includes an amplifier that’s over 30 years old. Our Freeview-cum-hard disk recorder is entry-level, and our TV is over 6 years old and hence pre-flatscreen.

And so, finally, what does all this mean for the future of live performance, seeing that we aging Cultural Omnivores can have access to this wealth of the present and the past so easily and cheaply in our own homes? Well, I’ve long believed that the future of live performance lies in fewer actual performances, but each one a real event in itself. In a way, that’s what you get in the Highlands and Islands. Each visit, of a major orchestra, of a dance company, even of Essential Scottish Opera, is a distinct event—no one is locked into a weekly subscription where live art can so easily become mundane and taken for granted.

What about my own situation, then? Am I addicted to culture? I’d rather think that it’s the medium I exist in, and that without it I’d be like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I guess that’s what it means to be a Cultural Omnivore, and proud of it.

Last week he was prompted by Niall Ferguson’s current Channel 4 series on the triumph of the West to go back to that programme’s namesake, Kenneth Clark’s mould-breaking ‘Civilisation’, to disinter Clark’s own definition of the term ‘civilisation’—a definition which seems particularly relevant in these confrontational times.

Clark has come in for a lot of stick since ‘Civilisation’ first aired in 1969.  As not only a DWM (dead white male) but, even worse, a tweed-clad toff and (perhaps his greatest sin) father of the repellent Alan Clark, he’s been an easy target.  But, viewing some of the programmes again recently, what comes across to me is Clark’s lack of ego—the diffidence and absence of dogmatism with which he presents his ideas, which were overtly labelled in the series’ strapline as ‘a personal view’.  By comparison too many of today’s ‘big hitter’ presenters—Schama, Starkey, Graham-Dixon, Ferguson himself—can come across as strident and inflexible, brooking no disagreement with their forcefully argued stances.

‘Civilisation’ quite literally changed my life. I was 15 when I saw it, and thanks to my mother and a couple of good art teachers I’d already acquired some interest in art history, but it was Clark’s sweeping and engrossing survey—not forgetting AA Englander’s sumptuous camerawork—which led directly to me putting ‘art history’ down as my first choice when, a year or two later, I filled in my UCCA form for potential university courses. And so my choice of career was set.  Moreover, it was only a few years ago that I realised that our choice of holiday destinations, over the past two decades and more, had been subconsciously shaped by my long term desire to visit the highlights of the series, from Chartres Cathedral to the Arena Chapel and from the Alhambra to the Chateaux of the Loire.

As a scholar, Clark’s reputation has declined over the years, and I doubt if many of his books are widely read today, indeed apart from the ‘book of the series’ most of them seem to be out of print. But perhaps it was exactly this rather lightweight quality which made him such an ideal TV communicator.  Anyone who finds Clark stuffy, by today’s standards, should be shown some earlier manifestations of the TV academic, from the heavily jocular ‘Animal Vegetable Mineral’ to the ‘de haut en bas’ handing down of opinions of The Brains Trust.  By comparison, Clark was lucid, direct and, as I’ve already suggested, modest even when presenting his strongest arguments.

Just three years after ‘Civilisation’ completed its first run on BBC2, its iconic status was already being challenged by a rude upstart: John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing’, which infamously opened with the casually-dressed, curly-haired Berger apparently  taking a Stanley knife to the head of Venus from a Botticelli masterpiece.  In the short term Berger’s series of visual essays were seen as more radical, and were perhaps more influential—Judith tells me that the book of the series was the bible for all her fellow art school students in Newcastle—but, for me, ‘Ways of Seeing’ has dated much more obviously than ‘Civilisation’.  Even though Berger—unlike Clark—still has a status close to that of a secular saint, his views as expressed in ‘Ways of Seeing’ now seem modish, contrived, and really rather obvious. I wonder how many of today’s star presenters will seem equally specious in a few years’ time.

Ironically Niall Ferguson’s series, forty years on from its model, offers an explicit justification for focusing primarily on Western civilisation—exactly the imperialist ‘fault’ for which Clark has most often been criticised. But, unlike Ferguson, Clark never sought to justify the parameters of his ‘personal view’ by arguing for the factors which made the dominance of the West inevitable (what Ferguson regrettably calls his ‘killer aps’).

So, what was the key ingredient of ‘civilisation’ which Laurence Demarco went back to Clark’s opus to rediscover? It is, quite simply, ‘courtesy’—a virtue which I can’t help preferring to Ferguson’s rather aggressive triumphalism.

© Robert Livingston

But this week’s Oscar ceremony got me thinking on a different tack.  Not so much because of the four Oscars awarded to ‘The King’s Speech’ where, whatever its very considerable merits as a film, one can’t help suspecting that the USA’s curious obsession with the UK Royals, and that imminent wedding, had something to do with it.  No, it was the list of nominees for ‘Best Picture’ that really struck me.  Surely this must be the strongest (and longest) list of Best Picture candidates in years.  It’s not just that many of them, including ‘The King’s Speech’ could be considered as ‘independent’ (in approach, even if some were still made within the Hollywood system), it’s that so many of them are literate, imaginative, serious and quite demanding of their audiences.  ‘Inception’ is the only real ‘blockbuster’ in traditional terms, and although I found it a lot less interesting than all the hype suggested, it’s still streets ahead of the abysmal ‘Avatar’, last year’s ‘big’ nominee.

And then there’s the move away from the reliance on digital effects. With the obvious exception of ‘Toy Story 3’ none of the nominees for Best Picture uses 3D, or even uses CGI in a substantial way (Christopher Nolan is one of a band of directors—JJ Abrams of recent ‘Star Trek’ fame is another—who now do as many visual effects ‘in camera’ as possible).     Strong storytelling is a common factor, as are a sense of place, and a focus on character inter-action.

So I started thinking about other areas where there might be evidence of ‘dumbing up’.  The Highlands and Islands media were full, last week, of stories about the extraordinary demand for tickets for the tour by Mumford and Sons, winners of ‘Best Group’ at the Brit Awards.  Here in Inverness, I’m told, the queue from the Ironworks stretched all the way down Academy Street.  So I employed the ever-useful Spotify to listen to the album that’s caused all this fuss.  And it’s great.  Memorable, individual, literate (again), imaginative.  It’s not that Mumford and Sons are necessarily better than previous winners of this title, it’s that they hardly fit any normal template for a successful pop act.  Their roots are in 70s folk and the early days of prog rock.  They unashamedly reference Shakespeare in their lyrics. Many of the songs don’t even use a drumkit.  Their knowledge –and understanding–of the past fifty years of popular music is extraordinary for such young artists (Marcus Mumford is only 24).

What about TV then?  Surely we’re still awash in a depressing flood of talent and ‘reality’ shows and soaps?  Well, as someone once said, thank goodness 95% of TV is rubbish, as it’s hard enough keeping up with the 5% that’s good!  We forget how the supposed ‘golden’ days of TV—Civilisation, Play for Today, Z-Cars,  Brideshead Revisited—also involved huge amounts of dire stuff: game shows, sitcoms that were so offensive they’re now unwatchable and possible illegal, endless American and pseudo-American ‘dramas’ that did little more than fill airspace. Now we have the astounding glories of BBC4 quietly infiltrating, and influencing, the ‘mainstream’ channels through repeats on BBC2, we have American dramas like ‘The Wire’ and ‘Deadwood’ that can match anything the BBC has produced at its best, and we have (who’d have thought it?) subtitled European crime dramas becoming must-see cults.  OK, the most popular drama of the past year, ‘Downton Abbey’, may have been a cosy throwback to the days of ‘The Forsyte Saga’ and ‘Upstairs Downstairs’, and its storyline may be very much plotting by numbers, but it has  a density of visual references, character and dialogue that demand that audiences really pay attention.

And while Radio 3 may be on a slippery slope to populist hell, Radio 4 has never offered a richer mix of food for the mind.  ‘Start the Week’ recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary, and it was startling to appreciate the stark contrast between the lightweight piece of fluff that Richard Baker used to present, and the serious forum for intelligent debate over which Andrew Marr now presides.  Plus, the uncompromisingly intellectual ‘In Our Time’ was (and may still be), the BBC’s most downloaded podcast programme.  Outside the immediate field of BBC Radio, I have a particular fondess for the podcast series ‘Philosophy Bites’ which, without the advantage of broadcast promotion, long ago achieved its millionth download.

Last week we were among a packed audience at Eden Court who gave a spontaneous and richly-deserved standing ovation to the Rambert Dance Company. Eden Court Director Colin Marr has proved that you can build a large and enthusiastic audience even for something as apparently esoteric as contemporary dance, by ensuring that people have the chance to see and experience the very best examples of the medium.   The huge age range of the audience for last week’s performance (including many wildly excited school students) was a telling demonstration that quality needn’t be equated with elitism.

And what about books? We’re just coming up to World Book Day, Liz Lochhead’s appointment as Scotland’s Makar drew huge press attention,  and the Highlands and Islands are now home to an ever growing plethora of book and writing festivals.  Judith and her book group are currently reading Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’.  Now this is definitely one of the more challenging of recent Man Booker prizewinenrs—very long, elliptic, and requiring a fair amount of prior knowledge of Tudor power politics.  But its popularity with the reading public seems to have endured far beyond the normal 15 minutes of fame allotted to the average Man Booker winner.

Of course, you may incline more to the ‘glass half empty’ school of thought, and no doubt you could counter every one of my positive examples with a negative counterpart every bit as depressing as the downward slide of Radio 3.  And it may be that, once this current tide of optimism has washed over me, my natural grumpiness will kick in, and I’ll totally agree with you.  But for now, I’d like to think that—to steal the title of another of this year’s Best Picture nominees –The Kids are All Right.

‘Nordic Noir’, as it’s coming to be known, seems to be breaking down—finally—the British dislike of subtitling. The big popular breakthrough has of course been the three Swedish films of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, but even before that BBC4’s screening of the two Swedish series based on Henning Mankell’s character Kurt Wallander had won a substantial following, not least because the Swedish originals were so much better than the BBC’s own versions starring a theatrically moody Kenneth Branagh.

We’ve had to get used to the fact that the long British run of dominance in TV drama that ran, at least, from the original ‘Forsyte Saga’ and ‘Play for Today’ until ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and ‘The Boys from the Blackstuff’, had long since been taken over by American television. I can still remember the extraordinary thrill of watching the first episode of David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’—there had been nothing so bizarrely original on British TV since ‘The Prisoner’ 20 years earlier. Since then we’ve had ‘The West Wing’, ‘The Sopranos’, ‘The Wire’, and so much more—dense, rich, intelligent dramas that demand a huge commitment of time from the viewer.

Now it looks as if Scandinavian TV is seizing what little reputation British TV drama retained. Comparing the Swedish ‘Wallander’, or the Danish ‘The Killing’ to ‘Silent Witness’ or the recent dire adaptations of the Aurelio Zen novels, is like comparing Raymond Chandler to Mickey Spillane. But have the Nordic countries only now reached such heights, or is it just that in the English-speaking world we’ve been unaware of the riches available to audiences watching in those minority languages? After all, Ingmar Bergman’s two late masterpieces ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ and ‘Fanny and Alexander’ were originally made for TV before being edited for cinema release.

Of course, Continental Europe has a very different attitude to ‘foreign language’ films and TV programmes. Subtitling is rare. Dubbing is the norm. Indeed, in some countries it’s so much the norm that even native language productions are post-dubbed—that’s why so many Fellini films, for example, have such an odd disjunction between sound and vision: all the dialogue was dubbed in afterwards in a sound studio. Indeed so much foreign language material is dubbed that in some countries actors can make a very good living out of becoming expert in matching their speech to the lip movements of another language.

In Britain we remain—thankfully, in my view—wholly resistant to dubbing. But maybe, as a result, we’re missing out on some terrific foreign TV and films.

When we were staying in the Trastevere area of Rome many years ago we came across the only English-language cinema in the city—perhaps in all of Italy. I fear that, as far as I can tell from the Web, Cinema Pasquino has now closed . It existed primarily for the benefit of Italian English-language students, and with the advent of multi-language DVDs I suppose that particular need has gone. Visiting it was like a step back to the fleapits of my childhood in the 60s. The same rather greasy individual not only sold us our tickets but also reappeared at the Intermission, in a purple jacket several sizes too small, to sell ice creams from a tray. Ceiling tiles hung loose. The cueing numbers were projected (3-2-1)before the film proper. It was a comedy—Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan Murder Mystery’—and as the only native English speakers in the audience, it was distinctly odd to be the only ones laughing in advance of the subtitles.

That same year, 1994, I had an equally bizarre experience of extreme dubbing. I was teaching on an arts management course in Krakow, and on the TV in my hotel I was astounded to see ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ dubbed into Polish. Actually, ‘dubbed’ is a generous term: a single-voice narrator had simply been overlaid on the original English soundtrack, which was still distinctly audible underneath. I’ve asked Poles about this peculiar technique, and they tell me that, yes, the result was still very funny. Which probably says more about the originality of the Pythons than it does about the skills of the Polish narrator.

Of course, one reason why these subtitled Nordic programmes are so acceptable to British audiences may be that Swedes, in particular, tend to be slow-spoken and laconic. BBC4 has also shown two excellent film versions of Andrea Camilleri’s wonderful ‘Inspector Montalbano’ novels. But voluble Sicilians rattle off their Italian at a terrifying rate. Keeping up with the subtitles meant missing much of the wonderful Sicilian locations, never mind crucial elements of the plot.

This is an issue which can also affect the subtitling of Gaelic TV programmes. A few years ago BBC Alba made a superb series about Gaelic emigration. By visiting the descendants of the original emigrants on their home territories around the world, and celebrating their achievements, the series radically rethought attitudes to the Clearances. But the knowledgeable presenter was as loquacious as, say, Simon Schama, and it was hard work to keep up with the flow of fascinating knowledge. Which makes me wonder how a subtitled Schama comes across to non-English speakers. And of course BBC Alba is one area of British TV where, for children at least, dubbing is very much the norm. Padraig Post, anyone?

Last weekend we were at Eden Court as part of a packed audience to see that excellent film ‘The King’s Speech’. Now, you could say that this is a really useful film if you suffer from a speech impediment (or work as a speech therapist!). At least one commentator on the Internet Movie Database took that reductionist line, and so dismissed the film as being of a very minority appeal! Or you could be a bit more sophisticated and argue that it shows us how, with courage and perseverance, we can overcome our weaknesses and be of value to others. That, I imagine, would be Alain de Botton’s position.  And there’s no doubt that the film is very uplifting in that respect.

But to view such a rich and complex film—or indeed any serious work of art—in those linear terms is surely to diminish it. If the film ‘tells’ us anything (and it’s not clear to me that a work of art needs to ‘tell’ us anything at all) then surely it is also about the sheer contingency of history: how different would the course of events have been if Edward VIII hadn’t met Wallis Simpson, or if George VI had not met someone who could help him overcome his stammer, and enable him to become a figurehead for Britain’s resistance to Hitler?

And of course it’s also about that perennial theme, common since the time of Shakespeare, ‘uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’, and about the changes in the meaning of monarchy in the 20th century (something too subtle for some of the American IMDB commentators, sadly). And then it’s about male friendship, and the difficulties of articulating one’s feelings, man to man, and about the contrast between our inner life and the exterior shell we present to the world. And the diminishing power of spoken rhetoric in the world of the soundbite. I could go on.

The point is that none of those elements alone explain why I think ‘The King’s Speech’ is a great film—a view clearly shared by a very large percentage of the population. Of course one can also argue that it is a beautifully crafted film—intelligently written, sensitively acted, and directed with imagination and a close attention to detail. All of that is true too, but could still have resulted in something that was ultimately dull and worthy, or of only minority interest.

No, ‘The King’s Speech’ touches a nerve in so many people because all those factors—the subject matter, the underlying themes, the craftsmanship—come together to be distilled into something very much more than the sum of those parts: sheer, cinematic, magic. And that of course is ultimately indefinable and unpredictable. As one of the stars of the film, Geoffrey Rush, says in another of his great roles—Philip Henslowe in ‘Shakespeare in Love’–It’s a mystery!

So to come back to de Botton’s argument, if we view something like ‘The King’s Speech’ only in terms of its positive and utilitarian values, then we miss almost everything that truly makes it exceptional.

Look at it another way. My favourite weekly podcast is undoubtedly the Mayo and Kermode Film Reviews on BBC 5Live. Mark Kermode is of course a huge fan of horror movies—the gorier the better. Now it’s hard to see where this genre fits in de Botton’s hierarchy of values, though there are fans out there who’d have you believe that it is useful to know how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Britain has always had a problem with horror, first banning American horror comics back in the 50s, and then, in the 80s, there was the scare about ’video nasties’. Perhaps this is the other side of the coin from de Botton’s argument—if it’s the role of the arts to be useful in a positive way, then we surely need to deplore and ban those artistic products likely, as the saying goes, ‘to corrupt and deprave’. Even though, surely, an essential role for the artist is to be disruptive and contrary. No wonder Plato wanted to ban poets from his republic.

But, despite occasional high profile stories in the tabloids, there’s little or no evidence that watching horror movies has any harmful effect whatsoever. As Kermode says, the people who make these films are often the nicest in the film industry—it’s the guys behind the big blockbusters who’re really nasty!

So, do I really think, with Oscar Wilde, that ’all art is quite useless’? Well no, and I don’t think Oscar did either. It certainly isn’t utilitarian in the sense Alain de Botton means, but I have a profound belief in its impact, it’s just that I don’t think that impact lies in anything so obvious as the linear ‘meaning’ of a work of art. As I’ve written before, evolutionary psychology tells us that we are pre-programmed to see patterns everywhere, as a fundamental survival skill. It therefore follows that, just as our sense of taste guides us to things that are good to eat, so, as well as keeping us alive, patterns that are particularly pleasing will affect us at a very deep—usually sub-verbal–level. That’s obvious in music and the visual arts, but I think it’s equally true in the way that all the elements can come together in a piece of theatre or a film—what Wagner termed a gesamtkunstwerk.

The trouble with all of this is that it’s very hard to fight for when you’re stuck in the bear-pit that public funding has become. Though there are some signs that the Coalition is moving away from New Labour’s obsession with targets and statistics, public funders still want to see outcomes that are tangible and measurable. And that’s precisely where the arts are at their weakest. It may be easy to argue that a suitably high-minded film like ‘The King’s Speech’ ‘made me a better person’, but my case is, that this is the wrong argument.

Readers of my favourite magazine, ‘The Word’, were asked to vote for their favourite track of 2010. The winner by a long way was Cee Lo Green’s ‘F**k You!’ (my asterisks), and despite its explicit (and potentially offensive) title it is a joyous, exuberant, life-affirming four minutes of perfect pop music. Just as in ‘The King’s Speech’ all the elements have gelled to make something special. And I just about guarantee you’ll feel better for listening to it.

Footnote: earlier in the week I was in Aberdeen Art Gallery for a meeting, and so managed to see the current BP Portrait Award exhibition Now I’ve always had a problem with this Award, and this time round I worked out why: it seems to me that too many of the selected artists are trying to produce work that fits the Awards’ ‘house style’—hyper-realistic, technically superb, and/or quirky in subject matter or handling. There was much to admire, but little, for me, to love. Then, the first painting I saw when I stepped out of the exhibition was a small nude in an interior painted in 1920 by Dorothy Johnstone .  This had everything that I’d been missing among all the ferocious technique of the BP portraits: directness, integrity, a perfect balance. I wanted to snatch it off the wall and slip it under my coat. How had the artist achieved this? Don’t ask me –It’s a mystery!

© Robert Livingston 2011

So it’s curmudgeonly of me to admit that I’ve got rather tired of the conventional panto format, the type that dominates the big theatres, with celebrity stars, slapstick, garish costumes and sets, and lots of current popsongs. But I do enjoy a good Christmas show, one with a ‘proper’ story. Back in the 70s the Glasgow Citizens led the way in getting back to story-based pantos, with no big stars and no variety turns, and in the 80s Stuart Paterson wrote a series of fairy-tale adaptations with panto elements which, for a time, dominated Scottish stages—his beautiful version of ‘The Snow Queen’ was revived by the Royal Lyceum this Christmas.

Recently, some theatres have come up with an effective and economic way of staging Christmas shows by going into partnership with touring theatre companies. So, in the past few years, we’ve enjoyed Lickety Spit’s ‘Molly Whuppie’ and Mull Theatre’s ‘Katie Morag’ at the Byre, and Wee Stories’ hilarious ‘Jock and the Beanstalk’ at the Traverse. At this point I’d better come clean—Judith and I don’t have any children to take to these shows, we just enjoy indulging our own inner infants.

This Christmas, we managed to dodge the train cancellations and get to and from Edinburgh safely to enjoy a long weekend of no less than three Christmas shows, all delightful, and all very different. In fact, so rich were the offerings on display in Edinburgh this festive season that we could have stayed for a week and gone to a different show every night (Judith was particularly sorry to have missed ‘Hairspray’ at the Playhouse). Perhaps this was just too rich a menu: despite rave reviews, none of the performances we attended had sold out.

First up was Chris Hannan’s new play ‘The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain’. This was one of these coproductions I’ve referred to, between the Traverse, the Belgrade Theatre Coventry, and English Touring Theatre, an arrangement which made possible a truly epic production with a cast of thirteen and terrific sets and costumes, including the scariest giant puppet I’ve ever seen, and thrilling fight sequences.

This was in many ways an anti-panto. Conventional pantos, despite all the cross-dressing and innuendo, have lost any power to shock. Originally, 200 years ago, panto was a deeply subversive genre—think ‘Spitting Image’ crossed with ‘The Young Ones’—but now panto no longer challenges the status quo—it is the status quo. The Three Musketeers stands that on its head with a dark, rumbustuous, vulgar and genuinely offensive tale that had the audience, young and old, shrieking with stunned delight.

The nearest this show comes to a Dame is a Scottish-accented, kilt-wearing, high camp Porthos who, for some bizarre reason, is convinced he’s pregnant. Every conventional panto has a slapstick setpiece built around, say, a laundry, or home decorating. In this anti-panto, that scene is Porthos ‘giving birth’ to an increasingly outrageous list of items, culminating in a set of pink bagpipes. And as if that wasn’t enough, this leads on to a parody of the Nativity that is so gloriously blasphemous that it would be guaranteed to equally offend the Pope and Ian Paisley.

Not for the faint-hearted then, but we loved every minute of it, as the whole show was delivered with unflagging energy, wit and commitment. And at its heart was a serious and moving message, about the redemptive power of love—the same message, coincidentally, that drove our second show of the weekend, Marsha Norman’s and Lucy Simon’s marvellous musical version of ‘The Secret Garden’.

I got to know Lucy Simon’s superb score for this musical from a CD of the British premier, staged by the RSC in 2001, but I never expected to see a production in Scotland. All credit, then, to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre for their bold ambition in mounting a new production, and, in doing so, coming up with an almost flawless staging with so much emotional impact that it had me welling up within the first fifteen minutes.

In many ways this could hardly be more different from ‘The Three Musketeers’, in being a sensitive and faithful adaptation of a great children’s classic, delivered with a complete sincerity that avoided all the obvious sentimental traps. But it also had a lot in common with the Traverse show, not only in its core theme of the power of love to thaw cold hearts and mend broken ones, but also in its reliance on the magic of traditional stagecraft—drop curtains, revolves, trucks, imaginative lighting—rather than on the new technologies of holographs and 3D projections that seem to be taking over pantoland.

I envy any child for whom either production was their first experience of live theatre—each show will have lit a flame that will stay bright for the rest of their lives. Certainly, the children around us at ‘The Secret Garden’ sat spellbound throughout its two hours, even the pair in front of us who had been texting right up till the lights went down.

Our third experience of the weekend was very different. I’ve written in an earlier blog  about the success of satellite relays of live performances, but until now I’d not had the chance to see such a relay for myself. So when I found that, on the Sunday, the Cameo cinema was presenting a live relay of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ from the Bolshoi in Moscow, this was too good a chance to pass up.

The experience was as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be, but it was also oddly surreal in several ways. As you wait for the show to start, you sit in the cinema auditorium, watching the Moscow audience taking their seats in the Bolshoi auditorium (I hope it lacked the smell of drains that hung around the Cameo!). Then, after a brief introduction, we saw dancers limbering up behind the curtain, watched the stage manager cue ‘lights down’ from the prompt corner, and off we went. But of course, as a cinema, the Cameo has surround sound. This meant that whenever the Bolshoi audience applauded (which was frequently), the sound of their clapping was all around the Cameo audience, some of whom involuntarily joined in. This was very odd—it felt as if one audience was haunting the other—but were we the ghosts, or was it the Bolshoi audience?

The filming was simple and straightforward—simpler than I think it would have been for a permanent recording–and so approximated quite closely, I imagine, to sitting in the middle of the Bolshoi stalls and using opera glasses for the big solos. And it was a privilege indeed to see such fabulous dancing so clearly. I was moved more than I expected to be—by the time the final grand pas de deux came along I was almost as affected as I’d been at ‘The Secret Garden’.

So, how important is the sense that this relay is ‘live’, that you’re sharing this experience not only with the Bolshoi audience but with hundreds of thousands of others around the globe? I’d say it’s a major factor, even though I can’t dismiss the unworthy suspicion that it would be easy to fool us all. After all, year on year the BBC is happy to televise something called ‘Carols from King’s’ on Christmas Eve, just a couple of hours after ‘The Nine Lessons and Carols’ are broadcast live on Radio 4. There’s nothing in the Radio Times to suggest that the two broadcasts are different, but they are: the TV version is a completely different event, recorded specially days (perhaps weeks, for all I know) before the ‘real’ service. I applaud the determination of King’s College not to spoil a unique event with all the paraphernalia of TV lights and cameras, but I deplore the BBC’s willingness to mislead its audiences.

In fact, in the light of the success of live satellite relays to cinemas, it’s perverse of the BBC to be moving in the opposite direction. As I mentioned in my last blog, the finals of major music competitions like Cardiff Singer of the World, BBC Young Musician, and Choir of the Year, are all now pre-recorded and edited down to fit a convenient slot in the TV schedules, thus losing almost all sense of occasion or anticipation. And even the nightly concerts on Radio 3 are now almost all pre-recorded, with announcers sitting comfortably in the studio, instead of sharing the concert experience with the listeners.

But there’s another aspect to consider about these live satellite relays. Remember that the NESTA report on the National Theatre relays found that the cinema audiences recorded a higher emotional engagement with the play than did the audience sitting in the actual theatre. Years ago, we had the exciting experience of seeing the English Medieval Society doing their thing at Linlithgow Palace. For someone who grew up on Ivanhoe, Richard the Lionheart, and Sir Lancelot, this was terrific stuff: jousting on huge caparisoned destriers, and archery that showed how English bowmen won Agincourt. But most of the children present paid little attention, or looked bored, and I realised this was because all the action was simply too far away, with none of the immediacy of close ups and surround sound.

There’s a danger then that these live relays might undermine the genuinely live experience by offering that crucial extra immediacy. After all, musicals like The Secret Garden are already performed with every cast member miked up, even for the spoken dialogue, and there have been serious suggestions that the only way to make classical concerts more attractive to younger people is to amplify the orchestral sound. Heaven, as they say, forfend.

So, after my ‘Nutcracker’ experience, do I think that these satellite relays are a wonderful way to open up the great theatres of the world to a wider audience, or are they a pernicious example of a creeping global culture? Both, of course. After all, so far most of these relays concentrate not only on familiar works, but also on very conventional stagings of those works. The Bolshoi’s Nutcracker production, fine though it is, dates back to 1966 and has hardly changed in the intervening years. Mathew Bourne this isn’t. And the Met in New York is infamous for its conventional (many would say, stuffy) productions.

But we’re just in the early stages of this technology. Perhaps, like the Internet, it will become more democratic, and offer a level playing field to enable smaller venues and companies also to reach out to a global audience. That’s certainly what Shetland Arts hope for their major new music and cinema venue, Mareel, opening later this year.  And if they’re right, then we’re on the verge of a very exciting new way of presenting the arts.

 Oh yes we are.

 © Robert Livingston, 2011

Winners The Wellensian Consort (photo: Choir of the Year)

After all, choral singing has rarely been so popular, partly thanks to the ‘Glee’ phenomenon. Over 125,000 singers from more than two thousand choirs took part in this year’s competition. And, even in its truncated and non-live format, the final was as inspiring and uplifting as ever. You can take it for granted that the technical accomplishment and the musicianship will both be of a very high order. What was fascinating was the youth of so many of the members of the final six choirs, the huge social, demographic and geographic range that they represented, and the fact that many of those finalist choirs had formed very recently, with less than two years of working together to reach such an extraordinary high standard.

Of course, there’s a very strong choral tradition in the Highlands and Islands, especially in the Gaelic world, but also through a host of local choral societies. Think of the St Magnus Choral Society which, under Glenys Hughes’ direction, brings together a remarkable body of singers from a total Orkney population of just 20,000. But is enough being done, across the area, to ensure that young people get the chance to become involved in singing, and will funding cuts further reduce the opportunities for singing in schools? Although they didn’t win, for me the most impressive choir in the final of Choir of the Year was the Warwickshire Schools Boys Choir, which fielded no less than sixty incredibly disciplined and enthusiastic young lads, with a director who clearly deserves an OBE in the next Honours list.

Mind you, age is no barrier to singing. There’s a wonderfully eccentric and touching Norwegian film called ‘Cool and Crazy’ which tells the true story of how a male voice choir is the one factor which holds together a small community in the far north of the country, where the fishing industry has collapsed. At least two members of that choir were, at the time of filming, in their 80s.

And I’ve returned to singing myself, for the first time since 1972, when I was the Pirate King in my school’s end-of -term production of ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. I’ve been taking lessons with opera singer Reno Troilus, and it’s been a fascinating and scary experience, as within just a few weeks of starting he had me tackling arias by Bach and Handel which I’ve loved for most of my life, but never thought I’d be able to sing. Not that I’m quite ready for any public appearances yet…

So, come on BBC, give music its proper due and don’t be ashamed of the wonderful projects that the Corporation actually supports! After all, if we’re all supposed to be active members of the Big Society, what better model could there be than taking part in amateur, communal music-making, where each participant suppresses their own individuality in the interests of achieving a greater whole? As the Psalmist said, ‘O let the nations be glad, and sing for joy’.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

Dennistoun Library (© Scottish Libraries)

Dennistoun, where I grew up, was a microcosm of that quality, a square mile of fine buildings in the City’s East End, from grand mansions that would have graced a Hammer Horror movie, through sturdy semi-detached villas such as the one I grew up in, to elegant neo-Georgian terraces, and finally classic red sandstone Edwardian tenements, complete with ‘wally’ closes. And Dennistoun seemed to have a church in almost every street, encompassing every architectural style from Romanesque and Gothic to Scots Baronial and Art Nouveau. Even the schools I attended, primary and secondary, were splendid examples of the efforts of the Glasgow School Board: light and airy classrooms, skylights, open halls surrounded by galleries. And the view from my bedroom included the graceful Italianate campanile of a sadly now-demolished church. It’s no wonder that my love of architecture started early.

But the architectural gem of Dennistoun was, and is, not a church but the Public Library, which, I now discover, was—by a large coincidence–designed by the Inverness architect, James R Rhind! For most of my childhood this was very much my home from home, which I would often visit two or three times a week. When I first started using it, the interior must have been little changed from when the library was built. So vivid are my memories of that old library that, 45 years on, I could draw a plan of the children’s section and mark where the Biggles books, or the Rosemary Sutcliffs, or the bound copies of ‘Knowledge’ magazine, were to be found. Especially, of course, the shelf where newly returned books were placed, the site of many near-riots to get hold of an unread ‘Tintin’!

In the mid 60s the library had a major makeover. Dark panelling and upright chairs were replaced by light wood, hessian, subdued lighting, and armchairs. Undoubtedly the new arrangement was more comfortable and welcoming, but I always missed the rather solemn grandeur of the original layout, which was undoubtedly more in keeping with the building’s grand façade. But then, by this time I had discovered a true palace of books, the Stirling’s Library in the city centre, housed in the magnificent splendour of the former Royal Exchange, and now the home of the Gallery of Modern Art. There I discovered a wealth of art and music books, and a huge range of foreign literature in translation. By the time I was sitting my O-levels I’d already read many of Thomas Mann’s novels, and, intrigued by the elegant twelve-volume format, the whole of Proust’s ‘A la Recherche’.

Later, of course, I would discover the wonders of University libraries, central and departmental, and then, when I started work in Inverness, and was commuting by car from Fife on a weekly basis, my lifeline was the terrific array of unabridged audio books on offer in our branch library in Anstruther. By comparison I found Highland libraries initially disappointing, but over the years the service has improved immensely, and I’m now a huge fan, especially of access to the entire catalogue on line. Library staff must be sick of hunting out books I’ve reserved from branches across the Highlands! Inverness library is just round the corner from our offices, which is very handy, but I also love visiting Beauly library at weekends, and, despite its bijou size, it always seems to have something I’ve been looking for, or, even better, something completely unexpected. I suppose, on average, I read (or listen to) four or five library books a month.

Now, across the UK, many, many libraries are under threat. Even at the height of the 70’s crisis, with power cuts, three-day weeks, and the army poised to put down civil unrest, no-one seriously suggested closing libraries to save money, and I remember thinking at the time that any such closures would mark the beginning of the end for a civilised society. Now, of course, there is the argument that the Internet has largely replaced the need for public libraries. No way, in my view. The Internet is great for answering quick questions, or taking a rapid survey of a topic. But it is useless for reading in depth. And that’s what we’re in danger of losing: the ability to absorb and explore themes and topics in all their rich complexity. Last week BBC4 showed a 90 minute documentary based on Robin Lane Fox’s book on the origins of Greek Mythology, ‘Travelling Heroes’. It was an enjoyable travelogue with a few interesting points, but Lane Fox’s arguments seemed very weak without the sheer weight and subtlety of evidence amassed in his book.

And, lest it seem like I’m making a hopelessly idealistic and academic case for the value of libraries, let me also argue that in the best genre fiction you can find a wealth of ideas and information about history, politics, world affairs, and the human condition. After all, Jean Plaidy’s novels still provide a far more accurate introduction to the world of Tudor power politics than that wretched TV drama full of anachronistic bodice-ripping.

Back in the 70s I began to amass a library of my own, and our joint collection now runs to some 4,000 volumes. I used to have at the back of my mind the apocalyptic notion that, when civil society finally fell apart, at least we’d have something to read. Now that nightmare scenario seems a little bit closer.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

That’s just long enough for me to notice that many of my colleagues (some of whom I’ve known for over thirty years) are, like myself, just that little bit greyer, with a few more lines showing.  Of course, that may have less to do with advancing age than with the uncertainty of the times (as Indiana Jones said, ‘It’s not the years, it’s the mileage’).  But there’s no avoiding the fact that many of those in charge of the arts in Scotland are no longer in the first flush of youth.

Why should that be surprising? Is it not normal that those at the top in any given profession should bring to their posts the advantage of the experience and wisdom gained from years in the field? As a T-shirt sometimes worn by one of our team states, ‘Youth and enthusiasm are no match for age and cunning’.  But it was not always thus.  Back in the 70s and early 80s (yes, during that last period of immense financial and political upheaval) the arts in Scotland experienced a veritable explosion of growth, with new arts centres, galleries, theatres and arts organisations popping up all over the country, from Gracefield in Dumfries to the Pier in Orkney, and from the Crawford Centre in St Andrews  to An Lanntair in Stornoway.

So great and rapid was this expansion that it offered huge opportunities to a youthful cohort of artsworkers to advance their careers.  I became Director of the Crawford Centre in 1983 at the age of just 28, and my successor was about the same age when she took over from me in 1988. The Head of Visual Arts at the Scottish Arts Council, back in 1983, was in his early 30s. That was the norm. Running the arts was a young person’s job. And that was true even at the highest levels.  Sir Timothy Clifford was only 38 when he took over the National Galleries of Scotland in 1984.

A corollary of this phenomenon was that arts people expected to change jobs regularly, and move about a lot in order to do so.  In the first half of my career to date, between 1976 and 1993, I worked for seven different organisations, while living in Glasgow, Dundee, Exeter, St Andrews and Edinburgh (twice).  Then, at the start of the 90s, something changed.  We all, as we entered our 40s, began to stay put.  Mortgages to pay, children (though not in my case) to raise, the need for a sense of stability—all these must have been factors.  And the result is, we’re all still where we settled 10, 15, 20 years ago.  Few of us can equal the record of artist and printmaker John Mackechnie, who started working at Glasgow Print Studio in 1978 and has been Director since 1983, but he’s only an exceptional example of a common trend.

The problem was that in the 90s the expansion in the arts world began to slow down.  National Lottery funding may have created a wonderful network of new buildings, but it didn’t bring many new organisations into being.  And, in its way, the Lottery contributed to this issue of longevity.  If you’ve taken anywhere between five and ten years to see through a major capital development, with all the angst that involves, then it’s only reasonable that you should want to stay on to enjoy the result!

Another, perhaps more surprising, factor was that salaries in the independent arts sector began to overtake those in the public sector.  When I joined the Scottish Arts Council in 1989 as an arts officer, I was on the same salary as I’d had as Director of the Crawford Centre, with the added advantage of overtime! By the end of the 90s, those salary levels were very different, and even some heads of department were earning less than some Chief Executives in the independent sector

So, even if we wanted to, where were we to go?  When you’re young, a change of scene, and a chance for new experiences, are welcome, but as you enter middle age the upheaval of another move (with all the belongings you’ve managed to accumulate) seems to weigh heavily in the balance against the pleasures of a different challenge, especially if there’s no raise in salary, but only a sideways step.

The end result is that, for someone starting out, a career in the arts is now a lot less attractive than it was thirty years ago.  If those of us at the top are staying put, then there’s little scope for those below us to step up, and so on all the way down the career ladder.  Which means every job oppportunity that does appear is hotly contested, and newcomers are caught in the Catch 22 situation of being unable to get a job—or even an interview– without having prior experience.  And so the only way to get that experience, for many, is to take an unpaid internship.

Of course, I’m as guilty as everyone else.  This coming January, I’ll have been with HI~Arts for 17 years—half my working life–and I’m now the longest-serving employee. At least, with a development agency, the job is always renewing itself, and the organisation is very different from what it was even as recently as five years ago.  So it’s still stimulating, surprising, and sometimes scary.  No scope for complacency, especially at the moment.

So, do I think this dominance of the sector by a bunch of ‘grey panthers’ is a wholly bad thing? Not entirely.  There comes a point when, as the saying goes, ‘you have a brilliant career behind you’, and you stop worrying about saying what you think, or about making a nuisance of yourself.  The last thing Creative Scotland needs at this time is a bunch of wussies who’re too nervous to say boo to a goose.  It’s telling that the Cultural Alliance, which has been so effective in speaking to the Government on behalf of the arts community, was co-founded by Jan-Bert Van Den Berg, who’s been at Artlink longer even than I’ve been at HI~Arts.

And, on the other hand, there’s also the advantage, as the T-shirt says of ‘age and cunning’.  As this months’ Artoon reminds us, we’ve been here before, and those of us who lived through the last lot of bad times are perhaps better equipped to guide our organisations through the shoals ahead, than those who’ve only known the relatively prosperous years that the Lottery made possible. And some of us are even old enough to hold on to some of the ideals that Thatcher tried to sweep away with her belief that ‘there is no such thing as society’.

Ultimately, though, the profession needs new blood. We can’t rely on exploiting newcomers through unpaid internships, no matter how well-structured and valuable those may be.   At some point in the future, all us mature oaks will be felled, and we need to be nurturing the saplings now.  What we need is an equivalent of Roosevelt’s ’New Deal’ which saw thousands of artists, writers, musicians and performers across America  brought on to job creation schemes.  Even at the height of Thatcherism  at least one arts centre director, still in post, got his break through just such a scheme.  The benefits, to the people of Scotland as a whole, would far outweigh the cost.  But will whichever Government sits in Holyrood after May have the courage to take such a step in the face of the inevitable media outrage?  Maybe they will, if all us grumpy old arts bureaucrats make enough noise.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

Sculptures at Seacliffe (© Fran Collins)

For a start, the obvious response is ‘yes, but who’ll get to see it?’ On a very wet Wednesday we went into Edinburgh to revisit the National Galleries’ two marvellous Festival exhibitions (see back a blog or two). If you’re not entitled to any concessions, admission to ‘Impressionist Gardens’ costs an eye-watering £10. Now, any exhibition with those two words in the title is always going to pack ’em in regardless, and sure enough the galleries were crowded, even though the Festival had ended the previous weekend. But the equally wonderful Christen Købke downstairs, though a very much smaller show, nonetheless costs £7 if you have to pay top whack, and for many I imagine that will cause a certain hesitation if Købke’s ravishing work is unfamiliar to them.

At the end of the week, on our way home, we stopped off again in Edinburgh to see the survey of Edward Weston’s photographs at the newly reopened City Art Centre. This is an exemplary exhibition, lucidly curated and beautifully presented, and the work, often very small and rather dark, is also often mesmerising.

But it is a minority taste, and on a Saturday afternoon there were perhaps half a dozen other visitors over the two floors of the exhibition. Perhaps the admission price of £8 had something to do with it. I first got to know Weston’s work when I began working at the Third Eye Centre thirty years ago, and we hosted a touring exhibition from the recently established Stills Gallery. But that exhibition, of course, was free.

You can see the vicious spiral in prospect here: if such a high admission price puts people off fairly specialist subject matter like this, then the City Art Centre, like many other galleries with high overheads, will be tempted to put on more ‘blockbusters’ that are guaranteed to bring in the crowds. After all, Glasgow Art Gallery has just broken all records for its art exhibitions with a survey of the Glasgow Boys (being Glasgow, this is more modestly priced at £5). But it’s only a few years since an earlier, excellent survey of many of the same artists’ work was on at the Dean Gallery—did we really need another one?

Just the day before, in Haddington, we’d stumbled on an excellent example of the kind of arts venture that’s soon going to become increasingly hard to fund. At the long-established Peter Potter Gallery we met two artists who were putting the finishing touches to a project initiated by the Dunbar Arts Trust, which had involved the local community in ‘Knitting Dunbar Harbour’. Now, I don’t know whether the end result was craft or art, amateur or professional, high or low, but it was certainly wonderfully inventive, great fun, and a huge collaborative achievement, and I’m sure that the undertaking of it will have had beneficial impacts within the community of Dunbar that will be long lasting. But how do you measure and assess those impacts (especially if they are long lasting), and how therefore do you put a value on them?

We had rendezvoused in Haddington the previous Saturday with our friends from North Wales with whom we were going to share a self-catering cottage (kindly recommended to us by artist Kirstie Cohen after she read my blog about North Berwick—it belongs to her parents). The great restored church of St Mary’s seemed an obvious landmark to aim for, and we all met up there only to discover that, six days later, as our holiday ended, the inaugural Lammermuir Festival would be launched in the kirk with a concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. A quick phone call booked us tickets, and it proved indeed to be a fitting climax to our break—‘beautiful music in beautiful places’, as the Festival’s strapline put it.

As the Festival’s Chair said in his opening speech at the concert, this is perhaps a rash time to launch a new festival, and it was good to hear him pay tribute to East Lothian Council, whose early support had made it possible to bring on board major private donors and sponsors. But for how long will any Local Authority be able to continue to justify such support, as schools and care centres close? Even though, if the new festival is the success I expect it to be, it will have a significant economic impact on the area (we’ll certainly be planning a return visit)?

Of course, it’s absolutely true that artists will go on making art, whatever happens, and whether or not anyone sees it. I feel a Zen paradox coming on here: is it still art if nobody other than the artist gets to see it? On our first full day at the cottage we had walked down to the beach at Seacliff which is just one of the many truly fabulous (and often empty) beaches on this stretch of coast. We made our way round a rocky outcrop, and stumbled—almost literally—on an extraordinary sight: the rocks, pebbles and flotsam of the beach had been used to construct scores and scores of little abstract sculptures.

The more we got our eyes in, the more of them we began to spot, until finally we realised that there was a second, and even more ambitious, group at the other end of this short stretch of beach. I have no idea who the artists were—perhaps a summer school from Edinburgh College of Art—but I am quite certain that they were artists, and that there was more than one of them. The combination of aesthetic judgement (in the use of colour, texture and scale), technical skill (in achieving some dazzling feats of balance, and moving around some pretty hefty stones), and invention (in creating witty echoes of animal and plant forms) pointed to artistry of a fairly high degree, and the sheer number and variety could not have been achieved by one person. Some of the structures were so delicately poised that it was hard to believe that they’d survive even one high tide. The next two days were dominated by gale force winds, and after that we couldn’t bring ourselves to go back and, perhaps, see these joyous creations in scattered ruins.

This was art at its most basic–in materials and location—its most playful, and most private. The four of us may well have been the only people (apart from the makers themselves) to see the whole installation intact. Yet for us all the experience was almost on a par with that of seeing ‘Impressionist Gardens’, perhaps all the more so because we hadn’t expected it and didn’t have to share it with thousands of others. We could pretend, for a moment, that it had been placed there for our own special benefit, like Mad Ludwig of Bavaria putting on productions of Wagner for which he was an audience of one.

I can’t bring these assorted reflections to an easy conclusion. All I can say with any certainty is that the way we encounter and experience the arts is going to change radically in the near future. We’ll be paying more to see a narrower range of work. Large sections of the community will increasingly find themselves excluded–by price, by context, or simply by lack of access—from meaningful, enriching cultural experiences. We’ll need to rely much more on the kind of private patronage that made the new Lammermuir Festival possible, and hope that those private patrons won’t want to interfere too much in programme content or presentational style. But, to end on a more positive note, it may be that the Internet will make it possible for us each to become much more closely involved in the actual funding and creation of individual events and works of art, and thereby make possible a sense of discovery and engagement similar to that we experienced on the beach at Seacliff. That new approach could be achieved through crowd-funding and micro-patronage. But those concepts—new to me until just a few weeks ago—will have to be the subject of a future blog.

PS: if the makers of the Seacliff sculptures read this, do please add a comment below!

© Robert Livingston, 2010

And if your eyes have just glazed over at the sight of terms like ‘strengthening communities’, ‘cultural organisations’ and ‘social enterprises’, then I don’t blame you. We arts bureaucrats have to use this kind of language all the time, but it’s not exactly user-friendly for the uninitiated.

When I joined HI~Arts at the start of 1994, ‘enterprise’ was the buzz word. The old HIDB, much loved by some, excoriated by others, had recently morphed into Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and all its area offices had become Local Enterprise Companies, or LECs. Now those LECs themselves have gone the way of all bureaucracies, and we’re back to talking about HIE’s ‘Area Offices’. And the term ‘enterprise’ itself has now been prefaced by ‘social’ to create the rather mysterious—for artists and artsworkers at least—new concept ‘Social Enterprise’. This of course parallels the similar shift in terminology at a national level, from the Scottish Arts Council to Creative Scotland.

Keynote speaker at the HISEZ conference was John Bird, founder of the Big Issue, and he was in no doubt whatsoever about the purpose of social enterprises: they are about creating opportunities for ‘the poor’ to get out of the ‘giving’ trap and start to make their own futures. (I know what he means, but his continued use of the term kept reminding me of John Cleese as Robin Hood in that little masterpiece, Time Bandits: ‘Have you met the Poor?’ see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=167IhlXnN2Y ).

Now, that model of a ‘social enterprise’ works very well if we’re talking about Blindcraft (which,founded in 1793, probably counts as the world’s oldest SE), or Ness Soaps – businesses which use their retail trade to create employment opportunities for those who might not otherwise find a job. And there are a few specialist arts organisations which also clearly fit that model, such as Moray-based Out of the Darkness theatre company.

Screen Machine 2

But most funded arts organisations are themselves recipients of ‘giving’. They are the deserving poor. They often exist, after all, to address ‘market failure’. That is, they needed public funding in the first place because the activities they undertake can’t readily function in a commercial marketplace. Opera is the most obvious case (though Ellen Kent seems to do quite well out of staging ‘commercial’ opera productions), but perhaps the most overt example here in the Highlands and Islands is the Screen Machine mobile cinema (founded by HI~Arts but now operated by Regional Screen Scotland). The Screen Machine exists to bring a high quality, up to date cinema experience to small and remote communities, especially on islands.

Now cinema is a commercial artform. But providing cinema to remote communities is not a commercial proposition. If a commercial operator could do the job, they would be doing so. However, if RSS tried to raise more of its income through trading, rather than public funding, it would face a stark choice: either raise its ticket prices to an unacceptable degree, or take the Machine out of its normal circuit to undertake commercial hires. Both strategies would run the risk of undermining the basis of the Machine’s existing public funding.

And the other complicating factor is this: is delivering the arts in itself a social ‘good’? That is, does, say, a professional theatre company qualify as a ‘social enterprise’ if its main activity is, like the Screen Machine, touring productions to rural communities? Or does an arts organisation only qualify for the term if it uses its arts activities, like Out of the Darkness, to serve a more immediate social need?

These are far from academic questions. HIE’s Strengthening Communities teams, centrally and in the former LEC offices, are now dedicated to supporting ‘social enterprises of growth’, and HI~Arts is charged with building capacity in those cultural organisations which might have the potential to meet that definition. How many cultural enterprises will be able to step up to this mark? But, viewed another way, how many cultural enterprises can afford not to start thinking like this, as we enter the worst public spending environment in living memory?

If the financial meltdown was the equivalent of a Chicxulub meteor, then which cultural organisations will be the dinosaurs, and which will be the proto-mammals, emerging to occupy newly-vacant evolutionary niches?

And in an environment in which even libraries are threatened with closure, and even police officers are facing redundancy, how do we make the best possible case for both the innate and the instrumental values of the arts?

These are just some of the questions which, I’m sure, will be aired at the HIE/Creative Scotland conference ‘Old Maps and New’ (www.hi-arts.co.uk/HI-Arts%20Services/Conference-2010.htm), also in the Centre for Health Sciences, on November 12 and 13, and which HI~Arts is organising on HIE’s behalf. Places are limited, so book now to add your voice to the debate!

© Robert Livingston, 2010

Edwin Morgan (copyright www.edwinmorgan.com)

It’s one thing to regret the passing of such writers, ‘full of years’, who both continued working till the very end. But I was already mourning the loss of historian Tony Judt, who died earlier this month at 62, at the height of his powers, killed by Motor Neurone Disease. Judt’s masterwork ‘Postwar’ is simply one of the best history books I’ve ever read. It may seem perverse to describe a 900-page account of Europe after 1945 as ‘exciting’ and ‘unputdownable’, but ‘Postwar’ is both. Judt was also an engaged intellectual in the best sense, arguing cogently and forcibly against the grain on issues like Zionism and Enlightenment values. It’s sad that most people will only have heard of him because of his disease, principally through the remarkable and brave interview that he gave to BBC Radio Four just weeks before his death.

Sir Frank Kermode was of course Britain’s foremost literary critic for almost fifty years. His writing was always subtle and insightful, but also lucid and accessible. But I honour him especially as the inspirer of the London Review of Books, that good deed in a naughty world, which brightens my life when it arrives in the post every fortnight. Kermode wrote over two hundred articles for the journal, the last only weeks before his death, and his name on the cover was always a guarantee of something special.

And what can I say about Eddie Morgan that hasn’t already been said, especially in Robyn Marsack’s sensitive obituary for the Herald? I did have the privilege of meeting him on several occasions, but he led such an interactive life as a writer that there will be few people in Scotland’s cultural scene who can’t claim that! In the early 1970s he came to my school to give a reading, he was one of my lecturers in First Year English at Glasgow University, and then when I worked at the Third Eye Centre in the early 1980s, he was closely involved in several of our projects. Judith and I have very special memories of an evening at Theatr Clywd in North Wales, where we were accompanying three of Scotland’s poetic giants—Morgan, Norman MacCaig, and Iain Crichton Smith—as they gave a poetry reading to complement Third Eye’s touring exhibition Seven Poets. Each formidable on his own, together the three were devastating, trading bon mots, witticisms and insults as if they’d spent their lives in a poetic ménage a trios. I’ve rarely laughed so much or with as much delight.

I moved away from Glasgow in the early 80s, and regrettably didn’t meet Eddie again. But a few years ago–and after he had been diagnosed with cancer–I wrote to thank him for his latest collection, the superb ‘Cathures’, and especially the poem ‘Pelagius’, which begins ‘I, Morgan, whom the Romans call Pelagius…’ and which is a wonderfully humane credo to stand, as Pelagius stood, against St Augustine’s reductionist, destructive philosophy of Original Sin. I wasn’t looking for a reply, but Eddie sent me a page-long, handwritten, considerate response, which was entirely typical of him.

Personally, I think it’s unfortunate that the reports of Eddie’s death were overshadowed by the overblown obsequies for that other notable Glaswegian, Jimmy Reid. It’s not often that you see the full version of Glasgow’s motto: ‘Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word.’ Well, Reid was certainly a skilled and, for some, inspiring preacher, albeit in a secular cause, but I can’t help feeling that it’s through the words of Edwin Morgan—that least preachy of writers—that Glasgow will flourish longest in the international consciousness.

To bring matters full circle, Eddie’s ‘Pelagius’ was first published in the London Review of Books. In the LRB’s current edition (published, of course, before the death of either Kermode or Morgan) Barbara Everett writes an encomium to Shakespeare. She borrows Erasmus’s habit of referring to ‘Saint Socrates’ and, in the light of his unique achievement, suggests the Bard might be occasionally invoked as ‘Saint Shakespeare’. On that principle, I don’t think it’s too excessive to grant Eddie the title denied to his heretical avatar Pelagius, and think of him as ‘Saint Morgan’.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

The National Gallery of Scotland

So this time I seized the advantage of having a morning meeting in Edinburgh to take an afternoon off, and catch the National Galleries’ two flagship exhibitions for the Festival. Admittedly, my heart had sunk somewhat at the prospect of ‘Impressionist Gardens’, and it was the Christen Købke that I was really looking forward to. After all, did we really need yet another Impressionist exhibition, recycling once again the images familiar from a thousand hotel rooms and a million jigsaws and chocolate boxes? Well, the answer proved to be a resounding ‘Yes!’. This is a magnificent, overwhelming, and thoroughly surprising exhibition, and a triumph for NGS.

For this exhibition offers a very different perspective on Impressionism. I trained as an art historian, and yet out of the almost 100 paintings on show, I’d seen less than twenty before, even in reproduction, and even fewer ‘in the flesh’, so to speak. That’s because this exhibition treats Impressionism as a truly international movement, featuring artists from Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Scotland, England, Ireland and the US, as well as the familiar French core of the movement (though even here there were Monets and Manets that were new to me).

The result is little short of revelatory. Instead of being the tight, short-lived movement centred on Paris that’s described in John Rewald’s classic ‘The History of Impressionism’, we have instead an international style and technique that span some seventy years, from the 1860s to the 1930s, and two continents. I guarantee that you’ll be bowled over by artists you’ve never heard of. Some visitors might be disappointed at not finding more of their favourite pictures, but I hope they’ll be consoled instead by the opportunity to gain a completely fresh insight into art’s most over-exposed movement.

Mind you, going round this huge exhibition is a bit like eating a whole box of hand-made Belgian chocolates at one sitting: so much colour, so little sky, so much sheer, unadulterated, pleasure. Fortunately, downstairs at the Royal Scottish Academy a soothing contrast awaits, including a painting that is almost all sky. In its way this survey of the work of the early 19th century Danish painter Christen Købke is equally revelatory, just much smaller and quieter. Købke’s meticulous technique was thoroughly classical, but his vision was astoundingly ‘modern’, in his fondness for unexpected, even eccentric, viewpoints, and his uncanny sense of light. His masterpiece, a deceptively straightforward view of a street in a Copenhagen suburb, made me think of Vermeer’s great ‘View of Delft’ in the moving way it transcends its mundane subject matter—yes, it’s that good.

There’s a theory that, in purely technical and chemical terms, there was nothing to prevent photography being invented long before it was. Instead it emerged when it did—almost simultaneously in a number of forms—because it was ‘needed’.

Købke’s paintings are superb examples of the aesthetic that drove that discovery of photographic techniques, and perhaps that’s why he’s not better known: his crisp, acutely, minutely detailed renderings of the world around him, and especially his very natural and psychologically perceptive portraits, were exactly what the ‘art’ of photography would so quickly supplant, thereby (in the standard version) allowing Impressionism to emerge to ‘save’ painting as a valid artform.

The irony of seeing these two exhibitions together is that Købke’s painstaking hyper-realism now seems, to me, to have much more in common with the bold, loose handling of Monet, Manet, or their multiple followers, than either painting style has with 19th century photographs. Faded, battered, monochrome, hampered by long exposures, such photographic images now seem part of a far distant, unreachable past. But Købke’s street, and Manet’s gardens, still sing with a freshness and immediacy that make their bit of the 19th century part of a continuous, almost tactile, present.

Footnote: much is being made of the ability of ‘Toy Story 3’ to make grown men weep. I find, though, that sad things rarely move me to tears. Instead, it’s images of happiness that make me well up. I can sit dry-eyed through Mimi’s tragic death, but the moment in Act 1 of ‘La Bohème’ when she first falls for Rodolfo will get me every time. So, if you have the same kind of reaction, be warned, and take a pack of tissues to both exhibitions. Otherwise you will be, in C S Lewis’ phrase, ‘surprised by joy’.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

'Arbiter of Elegance - a Biography of Robert Adam' by Roderick Graham

First, some statistics. The Festival succeeded in reducing the overall number of works entered, by reducing the limit per applicant to two works, rather than three, so they got a total of some 350 entries, as opposed to the mammoth 550 we had to go through last year. Yet the exhibition is almost twice the size, and uses not only the original venue of the Court House, but the Seamen’s Mission as well. And I have to admit that, even after close inspection, there were only a handful of works that I felt wouldn’t have got our seal of approval last year.

So, fewer entries, yet many more selected artists and works, while maintaining the overall standard. Quite an achievement for just the second year of the Open. And the standard of hanging and presentation is high, with clear printed labels for every work (something many other opens shy away from, producing instead irritating printed lists and numbered works). Yes, it’s true that using screens in the Seamen’s Mission was far from ideal, but at least the screens themselves were as good as I’ve seen, and the hanging went for clever and sympathetic juxtapositions. And all the prizewinners seemed very worthy choices.

Equally gratifying, on that point, was the solo show by last year’s overall winner, Ruth Nicol. Ruth was still a mature student last year, and I presume that these new works formed her degree show. They show a real growth in confidence even from last year’s high standard, and fully justify the policy of offering such a solo show to the overall winner.

I had to miss the second half of the Festival, as I’ll be at a conference in Wales (which may lead to a future blog) so I was only free to chair two of the Festival’s literary events, but both proved to be a great pleasure. I’ve been reading Andrew O’Hagan’s articles in the London Review of Books since his first, back in 1994, but until now I’d read none of his novels. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his friend Marilyn Monroe is certainly one of the strangest books I’ve read in a long time, and I wasn’t sure how a conversation about it would go, in front of an audience. I needn’t have worried. Andrew is in both senses a ‘natural’ performer—in that he talks easily and readily, and that he comes over very directly and without pomposity. Not surprisingly, just about every copy of the novel on display had gone by the end.

My other chairing duty was a very different matter, Roderick Graham talking about the life and work of Robert Adam, subject of his latest biography Arbiter of Elegance. I had a personal interest here too. As ‘Rod’ Graham the author had had a previous life as Head of Drama for BBC Scotland, and as a humble ‘extra’ (Ricky Gervais style) I had been, quite literally, a spear carrier in Rod’s production of his own play about the last days of the Earl of Bothwell. I’ve dined out ever since on how I got to beat up a young Brian Cox with an eight foot halberd…

As with Andrew O’Hagan, my chairing duties could not have been easier. Roderick Graham spoke fluently and with only the briefest of notes, for a very entertaining forty minutes, and each question, from me or the audience, encouraged a new flow of urbane anecdotes and unlikely facts, such as: what we think of as ‘Adam’ fireplaces were really made by a Dutchman called Rysbrack. Once again copies of the book—hardback this time—were flying off the selling table.

Like so many festivals across the Highlands and Islands, the success of the Nairn Book and Arts festival is a tremendous tribute to the huge voluntary effort involved, as well as to the herculean efforts of their part-time administrator! And what a good venue the Nairn Community Centre is—flexible and welcoming. Long may the festival flourish.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

Detroit, it turns out, has been subject to a level of devastation comparable to that of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But because the destruction has happened over years, not days, we know next to nothing about it.

Detroit, home of Henry Ford and the motor car, and of Motown and punk, was once the US’s fourth biggest city, but its population has now declined from two million to less than 800,000. Freeways are eerily empty. The great temples to the motor car—the iconic factories of Ford, General Motors, Packard—lie in ruins. Whole areas of the city are either reverting to prairie, or have become urban war zones as bleak as anything in John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’.

In fact, and I’m sure deliberately, Temple’s wonderfully artful and knowing film kept echoing such images from culture. I thought of the accounts of Rome at the start of the Renaissance, with a population of just 30,000 eking out an existence amid the remnants of imperial grandeur, or of Gustave Doré’s final illustration to his 1872 book ‘London’ which depicts a future New Zealander, as imagined by the historian Macauley, meditating on the ruins of the great Victorian metropolis, with trees growing around the shattered dome of St Paul’s.

Temple’s film shows us that the apocalypse is indeed ‘now’. This is a world in which civil society seems barely to exist. Many of the city’s largest buildings are now beyond saving because they’re being progressively dismantled by illegal wrecking crews for what scrap they can scavenge. 47% of the population are illiterate. The resonance for the rest of the world is almost too obvious to need pointing: this is the end result when rampant capitalism is allowed its head, this is what happens when greed and short-termism rule over all other human concerns.

But are there also lessons closer to home? The most obvious is a warning of the dangers of relying on mono-industries. That’s a familiar trope for the Highlands—look at Fort William, Kinlochleven, Invergordon, and look also at the social problems resulting, as in Detroit, from transplanting a labour force from elsewhere and then leaving them with no alternative employment opportunities. It’s taken a generation to tackle those problems in the Highlands. Shetland was facing a similar prospect back in the 60s with the decline of fish processing, and was saved by the advent of the oil industry. Now, sensibly, people in Shetland are beginning to look at how the creative industries need to be built up to be ready to take up some of the slack as the oil bonanza leaks away.

One single comment in the film had a particularly chilling resonance. As white families moved to the suburbs the city’s tax revenues declined. First to go in the schools were the arts and music schemes and teachers. With nothing to distract them, it was said, was it any wonder that the young people turned to drugs and crime? As current campaigns are highlighting, are we in danger of making the same mistake here? If anyone doubts the beneficial effects of a lively music scene, they should go and talk to young people in Stornoway.

It was also very telling that, as Judith pointed out as we watched, almost everyone interviewed in the film was a writer, a musician or an artist. These were the tale-bearers. They were holding the collective memory of Detroit in their care—quite literally in the case of one black artist who had turned an entire city block into an ongoing installation. But they could also see the glimmers of hope for the future, they could envisage a different way of living.

And this was, despite its Gothic bleakness, a film that ended on a note of hope. Throughout the film Temple kept cutting to a group of black men wearing identical ‘fatigues’ and sitting in an obviously institutional setting. As they talked, with great articulacy and insight, about the follies they had committed in their youth, including drug-dealing and fire-raising, the kneejerk assumption was that they were all convicts. But at the end of the film Temple pulls off his coup de théâtre. Far from being confined at the State’s pleasure, these men, it turns out, are all working for a social enterprise, Goodwill Industries, and they’re beating the scavengers at their own game, systematically dismantling buildings, recycling everything they can, and making dangerous ruins safe. One guy said he was earning as much at this work as he had on the car assembly line.

Social enterprises are very much flavour of the month in the UK, and particularly in the Highlands and Islands. For those who are sceptical that the idea is no more than a mask on a failing system, it’s worth bearing in mind that Goodwill Industries have been going since 1921, and so are no flash in the pan. On the contrary, in Detroit GI are taking over from GM as a major employer.

The final images were the most telling of all. Former car workers, whose parents and grandparents moved to work in Detroit’s factories from the rural South, are now reverting to subsistence farming. The centre of what was once the cradle of mass production, of what became known, in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and elsewhere, as ‘Fordism’, is being given over to crofting.

In researching this blog I was interested to discover that it was an American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, who coined the famous phrase ‘I’ve seen the future, and it works’, after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1921. Steffens was an early campaigner against the corporate corruption that already dominated America’s cities, and in his enthusiasm for what he thought was a valid alternative, he failed to spot that the Soviet system was adopting the worst and most dehumanising aspects of Fordism. Well, ‘Requiem for Detroit’ shows a future that certainly isn’t working, but it also gives a new, and very immediate, meaning to the phrase ‘the green shoots of recovery’. As Voltaire said, we all need to cultivate our gardens.

© Robert Livingston, 2010

What kind of TV event would get you out of bed early—a General Election, the Oscars, the Olympics? For me, many years ago, it was an opera. At 6am one Sunday morning in 1992 I was huddled before the TV in pyjamas and dressing gown to experience a live relay of the last act of Puccini’s ‘Tosca’. This was, however, no ordinary relay. The producer had had the bold idea of staging the opera in the three actual Roman locations in which it is set (all largely unchanged since 1800, the period of the opera), and, even more ambitiously, at the times of day at which the action was supposed to happen: noon, evening—and dawn.

Even at the time my inner cynic wondered if this was all a huge scam, and the whole thing had been pre-recorded, but in a recent TV film the great tenor Placido Domingo talked about the nerve-wracking process of coping with the complex technology while performing to a global audience numbered in the hundreds of millions. And I saw again the scene that was burned on my memory: Domingo, as the doomed Cavaradossi, stepping out on to the roof of the Castel San Angelo in the pearly morning light, the dome of St Peter’s behind him, and beginning to sing his last great aria, ‘E lucevan le stelle…’. Pure magic.

A few years later I was taking part in a planning session organised by the Scottish Arts Council to envision what the arts would look like in the coming new millennium. Partly inspired by my ‘Tosca’ experience, I was one of a bolshie group who argued that in the future there would be fewer performances, but that, thanks to emerging digital technology, each performance would be ‘experienced’ by many more people, and that this use of digital relays would become a major source of income for orchestras, opera and ballet companies, and theatres. The old guard dismissed this scathingly—nothing, of course, could replace the frisson of actually being there! How wrong they were.

It began, not surprisingly, with the Metropolitan Opera of New York, which had, many decades previously, pioneered live radio broadcasts of its productions, and subsequently taken up the opportunity of satellite technology to send those broadcasts round the world. Now the Met relays these live performances to cinemas in 40 countries to be screened in High Definition video. This has proved enormously successful. Performances at the Cameo cinema in Edinburgh regularly sell out despite a ticket price of £25. Champagne, I believe, is consumed.

Now, you could argue that opera, being larger than life, is made for the big screen. After all, there have been opera films as long as there has been cinema (yes, even silent ones!), and nowadays most opera recordings are made as DVDs, rather than audio-only CDs. But it now appears that this system works equally well for ‘straight’ theatre.

Last year the National Theatre in London launched ‘NT Live’, adopting the Met model and sending live relays of stage performances to digitally-equipped cinemas throughout the UK and abroad. Cannily, they chose Helen Mirren in Racine’s ‘Phaedra’ as the first production. Now, I’ve been in love with Dame Helen since at the age of 15 I first saw her on stage at Stratford, so I’m not surprised that the relays sold out in advance, and that, on the night itself, over 50,000 people in the UK saw the performance, and many more abroad. But the NT Live programme has continued successfully with less stellar casts, including relays of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ (hardly Shakespeare’s best known comedy) and the stage adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s teenage novel ‘Nation’.

NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) has just produced a report based on the first two NT relays, and it makes fascinating reading. It includes one astonishing finding—that the audiences in the cinema venues recorded significantly higher levels of emotional engagement than did the audience in the theatre itself!

Now that seems at first entirely counter-intuitive. But think about it. Most people are not habitués of live theatre, and those that are, go mostly to musicals and pantomimes. And what do those two theatrical forms have in common? Amplification. Now, I’ve been going to ‘straight’ theatre for over forty years, and my hearing’s still very good, but, even so, sometimes in large auditoria like the Eden Court’s Empire Theatre I find myself straining to hear the unamplified voice. We’ve just got too accustomed to everything being ‘loud and clear’.

But another finding in the NESTA report offers hope to the traditionalists: a large number of those at the cinema relays stated that they would now be more likely to go and experience ‘real’ live theatre. So, it seems to be a win/win situation—the National Theatre reaches out to audiences across the UK and it encourages those audiences to think they’d also enjoy a true theatrical experience. So it looks like HD live relays are here to stay. Indeed, they may even be a way of keeping open otherwise marginal cinema venues, as the box office returns for one live relay can be the equivalent of those for a week of conventional film screenings.

Finally, the NESTA report stresses that the crucial factor is the sense of sharing in a ‘live’ event. That, like me swaddled in my dressing gown, the cinema audiences are sharing in an experience ‘as it happens’. Curiously, the BBC seems to have missed this point entirely. Not only are the finals of major competitions—Cardiff Singer of the World, BBC Young Musician, Choir of the Year—regularly edited down and shown a day or more later, to fit the exigencies of ‘schedules’, but even that staple of Radio 3, the evening concert, has been mucked about. No longer do we have an announcer conveying the atmosphere in the hall, the hush as the conductor steps up to the podium, the (hopefully) warm applause, and then the interval with its own special twenty minute feature. Now, the concerts are broadcast days after they took place, the announcer never leaves the studio, and the interval, and most of the atmosphere, are edited out. Most of the time, one might as well be on Spotify.

What does all this mean for the Highlands and Islands? Well, most obviously, any local auditorium that is being equipped with digital projection equipment should be considered not just as a cinema but as a ‘digital venue’ in a much wider sense, including, of course, live sports relays as well. But there’s a more intriguing possibility. At the moment these HD live relays are global or national events, based on the recognised brands of world-famous companies, with big name casts or popular titles, or both. But, as the technology becomes more accessible, and as such relays become more of the norm, what scope will there be for the small, independent theatre company or venue?

Take the case of Dogstar Theatre’s ‘The Tailor of Inverness’. Mathew Zajac’s one man play about his search to find out the truth about his father’s life was a huge award-winning hit at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe, and went on to tour to Australia and Sweden, as well as round Scotland. And it’s likely to come out on tour again to meet continuing demand. But performing the play must take a lot out of Matthew, both physically and, given the subject matter, emotionally. And it’s self-evident that it only really makes sense with him playing the part. Suppose that, instead of going out on tour again, Matthew could reach a similar size of audience, and Dogstar could earn a larger fee for less cost, by presenting the play in an HD relay to venues in the UK and abroad–staged in the Eden Court’s One Touch Theatre, of course. ‘The Tailor of Inverness’, coming live from Inverness. Now, that would be worth getting out of bed for!

© Robert Livingston, 2010

Innovative Craft at Dovecot Studios

It’s been a funny old festive season. We’re culturally programmed to long for a white Christmas (that Irving Berlin has a lot to answer for!), but when it comes, chaos ensues. Among all the many other victims of this prolonged period of exceptionally bad weather, spare a thought for all the cultural venues that must be losing out at what, at least for theatres and cinemas, should be their busiest time. With most Scottish Arts Council funding at standstill, Local Authority funding often reducing, sponsorship deals crashing, and (of course) fuel bills rising, anything that then affects the box office income as well is just another among a positive rain of blows which the cultural sector is having to withstand.

Judith and I did at least make it to Edinburgh for the weekend before Christmas (and thus before the snow locked everything down). We were very seasonal, and took in both It’s a Wonderful Life and The Red Shoes at the Filmhouse. Both these classics were in digitally restored prints, and it was my first experience of fullscale digital projection (as opposed to projection from conventional DVDs, now the mainstay of most small film festivals and film clubs). Well, I was suitably overwhelmed. I doubt if even the original audiences back in the 1940s enjoyed these films in such pristine condition, given how quickly and easily 35mm prints can be scratched, marked, and shortened. The lustrous black and white photography of It’s a Wonderful Life was a particular revelation, and seeing this Christmas perennial on the big screen emphasised what a dark story it tells—it’s really much more of a film noir than a cosy family favourite!

The timing for experiencing these digital prints was just right, as the Screen Machine goes back out on tour this month fully equipped with top of the range digital projection, just in time for James Cameron’s much-hyped Avatar. Most cinemas are hedging their bets with digital projection, and keeping 35mm projectors alongside their new digital counterparts, but given the Screen Machine’s inevitably small projection booth, that isn’t an option. So from now on, every film shown in the mobile cinema will be in sharp, crisply focused digital. And that should open up great possibilities for a much wider choice of programmes for Screen Machine audiences, as well as the thrill of 3D.

While in Edinburgh I also had my first chance to visit the fine new exhibition space IC: Innovative Craft, based in the former Infirmary Street Baths, just across the road from Robert Adam’s Old College (and next door to Infirmary Street School, where in 1976 I was stage manager for two Fringe shows from my alma mater, Glasgow University). This is a beautiful space, and the three exhibitions on display were of stunning quality. The building also houses the relaunched Dovecot Tapestry Studio, so it was appropriate that the main exhibition, Follow a Thread, focused on contemporary approaches to the tapestry medium.

Now I often have a problem with the craft/visual arts cross-over. There are many makers of the very highest quality who somehow stumble when they attempt to make work which they consider is ‘art’ not ‘craft’. The technical ability may be outstanding, but the artistic concept can often be weak, even bathetic. Somehow, that doesn’t happen so much in tapestry, perhaps because as a medium it has a longer history of being thought of as ‘art’ (think of those Raphael tapestry cartoons). And so it proved with this exhibition, which married breathtaking technical achievements with exciting and thought provoking artistic concepts. IC: Innovative Craft is clearly going to be a regular stop on future Edinburgh trips.

Once back home, and the car safely dug in through a foot of snow, we settled in and barely moved for the two weeks of Christmas and New Year. Christmas Day for us was in one sense very traditional, with buck’s fizz, salmon and scrambled eggs for breakfast, and turkey and all the trimmings for Christmas dinner. But in another way it was very different. Our soundtrack for the day came, not from the BBC, but from Spotify. The MacGarrigles’ Family Christmas Album over breakfast (perhaps the best Christmas album ever?), Heifitz encores while preparing dinner, and, for the meal itself, the recording of last year’s Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge. And, later in the break, as the snow continued to fall, we sat by the fire with our books, and explored the music of Arnold Bax, whose wintry Celtic soundscapes seemed ideal for the weather and the season. On Spotify, again, of course.

Christmas TV, apart from some treasures on BBC 4, seemed very disappointing. Is it just because I’m getting older that the funniest thing I saw all season was the ‘play’ in the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special, repeated from the early 1970s? And, for those Whovians who read my last blog, wasn’t David Tennant’s much-anticipated departure from the role of Dr Who just a bit of an overly complicated, overly sentimental, anti-climax? Of course, one MP has already objected to the talented Mr Tennant’s ubiquity over the season, with some 75 appearances (counting repeats) over a three week span. And what maybe underlies that ‘eggs in one basket’ approach is a sense of desperation and lack of direction on the part of the BBC and other broadcasters—with so many alternatives on offer, like Spotify, just how do you make the Christmas schedules special?

The best response to being snowed in, of course, is to turn to books. I can thoroughly recommend William Dalrymple’s new book on India, Nine Lives, and I’ve also been enjoying two Scottish classics—Johnson’s and Boswell’s accounts of their Highland tour, in the cleverly collated edition by Ronald Black for Birlinn, entitled To the Hebrides, and John Buchan’s Witch Wood, almost the last of Buchan’s novels I’ve got round to reading, and apparently his own favourite. Buchan’s historical novels are much less well known than his thrillers but they contain some of his best writing, and in some ways perhaps they have stood the test of time better than the sometimes embarrassing Imperial attitudes of the Hannay adventures.

Now it’s back to work, a new decade, and (let us hope) soon a new cultural agency in the shape of Creative Scotland. Perhaps it’s been beneficial that the weather has enforced inactivity, and a chance to reflect, and look back, before launching into all the changes that 2010 will bring.

© Robert Livingston, January 2010

Last month Sarah Jane Smith nearly got married. That might not sound like earth-shattering news, but for a dedicated Whovian, it would have been a deeply traumatic moment. For those not in the loop, Sarah Jane Smith is, for a multitude of fans, the finest of all the myriad companions of Dr Who, through his various manifestations in space and time over the last 46 years. In a comeback that must surely be unprecedented in the annals of TV drama, not only was the character of Sarah Jane reintroduced to interact with the current, reinvented Dr Who, but she was played by the same actress, Elizabeth Sladen, returning to a role she had first taken on over 30 years earlier.

So successful was that initial comeback that the ever-resourceful Russell T Davies created an entire spin-off series around the character, The Sarah Jane Adventures, for BBC Children’s television. And it was in an episode of that series that, a few weeks ago, Sarah Jane came within a gnat’s crotchet of sealing the knot with, of all people, Nigel Havers. Of course, it all turned out to be a dastardly plot engineered by a multi-dimensional troublemaker called the Trickster. Fans everywhere breathed a sigh of relief as the wedding ceremony collapsed into time holes and space warps. As The New Adventures of Superman proved, a few years ago, marrying off your central character(s) is rarely good for ongoing dramatic tension, especially when they’re a super-hero.

I’m indulging my lifelong love of Dr Who (yes, I really did hide behind the sofa for that very first episode in 1963) for two reasons. The first is to make the very simple point that The Sarah Jane Adventures is a colourful, witty, intelligent, over-the-top riposte to those who say that children’s television is in serious decline. On the contrary, there’s some brilliant work going on right now in the world of CBBC and CBeebies, and you don’t have to be a parent (I’m not) to relish it.

The bigger point, and where I can bring the matter back to the Highlands and Islands, is that the Sarah Jane phenomenon, and indeed the whole reinvention of the Dr Who franchise, is a wonderful example of the merits of continuity and the long view. For years Whovians world-wide clamoured for the reintroduction of their hero to the BBC schedules, and for years benighted bureaucrats ignored their demands. Until, that is, a Welsh wizard proved them wrong and delivered a world-wide hit that has, almost single-handedly, reinvigorated BBC family drama.

Sadly, we live now in a world of the quick fix. ‘Innovation’ is the buzz word. And every ‘innovative’ project is expected to show quick results, or risk being condemned out of hand. In the arts, funding from all public sources is increasingly tied to short-term themes and initiatives, and the impacts of those themes and initiatives are assessed almost before they’ve been completed.

HI~Arts, on the other hand, has had the excellent fortune to work for almost twenty years now with Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and to be allowed, through that time, to take the long view. We started a music development project, called MIDAS (like the Tardis, an anagram, for Music Industry Development and Support—many thanks, Phil Cunningham!) way back in 1996. Its aims are still being carried on by our sister company Go Events, and the Go North annual showcase, itself now ten years old. In the 13 years since the launch of MIDAS we’ve seen the emergence of Rock Ness, Tartan Heart, and Loopallu, all initiated and run by people who were involved in MIDAS from the early days. And those same people now run the Ironworks in Inverness, one of the best custom-built popular music venues in the country.

This month there have been celebrations for the 75th birthday of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Back in 1977 Max and a few like-minded visionaries started Orkney’s St Magnus Festival, and I’m sure that in those early years there were times when they could have been forgiven for throwing it all up and walking away, given some of the scepticism and even hostility they encountered. Now, the cultural life of Orkney—and of Scotland—is unthinkable without it. Sadly, the Northlands Festival in Caithness wasn’t given the chance to make it beyond its tenth birthday, and it does seem that events like these do need at least a decade to bed in successfully.

And also this month dancer and choreographer Frank McConnell, and composer and singer Michael Marra, revived, for the Year of Homecoming, their theatre piece A Wee Home from Home—the first time it had been restaged in 21 years! And, like Sarah Jane herself, the show wore its years very lightly indeed—in fact, for those, like me, who didn’t see it first time round, it could have been devised yesterday, so fresh, inventive and relevant did it seem.

Like Dr Who, we all have the capacity to regenerate. The St Magnus Festival is about to do just that—its long-serving, and inspired, Director, Glenys Hughes is standing down after the 2010 event, and the Festival is boldly splitting the post in two to take a new approach to running the event—change within continuity.

As we move towards the establishment of Creative Scotland, maybe that should be our mantra—change within continuity. It would be a great shame if any babies got thrown out with the bathwater, after all. And while it might be a bit ambitious to hope that the current recruitment campaign for the Chief Executive of Creative Scotland will attract a Time Lord, we can at least hope for someone with the vision to look back as well as forwards!

© Robert Livingston, 2009

The Raploch

North Berwick is the most beautiful town in Scotland. As of last month, that’s official. But I didn’t know that when, for the first time in my life, I headed there last week. Previously, for me it had been nothing more than a cluster of buildings glimpsed from the train. So I was glad to have the chance to see up close how fully justified that new title seems to be. I think a long weekend break may be in order soon…

I was visiting this paragon among communities to take part in two workshops at the annual conference of ‘Vocal’, the Voice of Chief Officers of Cultural and Leisure Services in Scotland—or, to put it another way, those senior Council staff whose brief includes the arts.

It was a very good conference. The setting, the grand, Victorian, Marine Hotel, might have suggested some sort of indulgent jamboree (and it is true that some delegates were rather late retiring on the Thursday night), but the proceedings were focused, practical, realistic, and, at times, genuinely inspirational. Culture Minister Mike Russell opened proceedings on the second day with a typically canny speech. Given his own professional and personal credentials as a cultural practitioner–as producer and writer–Mike Russell should need no aides to prompt him on the priorities of his remit. Instead, he has the knack of pulling the rug out from under his audiences, by presenting back to the cultural sector those very arguments which that sector has been trying for years to get across to politicians, at both local and national level.

So, on this occasion, he picked up on the debates at the conference about how well—or badly–Local Authorities measure the positive impacts of the sizeable sums they spend on cultural provision, and he turned the argument on its head: think, he said, what the negative impacts would be of not investing in culture. In what is clearly going to be a long period of limited resources, elected members may think that they need to concentrate on what are crudely termed ‘frontline’ services. But they will do this at their peril. Not investing adequately in cultural provision may prove to be much more costly in the long run.

The workshop I was participating in then offered an immediate and arresting example of the power of this argument. The Raploch, in Stirling, is the location for what may possibly be the single most important cultural experiment in Scotland today: Sistema Scotland, or, to give it its local title, the Big Noise.

As is now well known, El Sistema is the extraordinary Venezuelan programme which now involves over 100,000 children and young people, mostly from impoverished and deprived backgrounds, in over 100 youth and 55 children’s orchestras. Its flagship internationally is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, whose appearance at the 2007 BBC Proms was, by general agreement, among the most exciting concerts ever broadcast.

Sistema Scotland is the brainchild of Richard Holloway, Chair of the current Joint Board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. It is being piloted in the Raploch partly, I suspect, to test out concerns that such a remarkably successful programme might not necessarily transfer to a first world country with different kinds and degrees of deprivation. Fortunately, just 18 months in, the first signs are highly encouraging, with half of all the children of nursery and primary school age in the Raploch already involved, by their own choice, in the programme, and much anecdotal evidence of the huge impact on individual children, and their parents.

But the killer argument may yet be the economic one. The cost of training each of the children involved in the programme is about £2,000 per year. But with the cost of each young person caught up in the criminal justice system easily running to six figures, Sistema Scotland only needs to divert two or three such young people a year from a future path of ASBOs and Young Offender Institutions to justify its costs in the hardest audit terms.

And the other intriguing aspect of Sistema Scotland, as of its parent programme back in Venezuela, is that it works precisely because classical music is the focus. In other words, an artform often dismissed as elitist, old-fashioned and irrelevant, may yet prove one of the most important tools in the processes of social change and personal growth. The reasons are self-evident: appreciating classical music, let alone playing it, requires concentration and patience. Playing in an orchestra requires high degrees of both self-discipline and team spirit. Already, in children as young as five or six, the Big Noise is showing major behavioural changes in terms of reducing hyperactivity and disruptive behaviour, and encouraging focused attention and awareness of others. The X Factor, this is not.

Classical music saves the world? Perhaps. But in the medium term let’s hope at least that the Big Noise helps the Raploch inhabitants to feel as proud of living there as the good people of North Berwick must be in being part of Scotland’s ‘most beautiful town’.

© Robert Livingston, 2009