The WIP #8: Memory and Desire
The Week in Photos (17-23 February 2024)
If you take a lot of photos it is, paradoxically, the unphotographed moments that become precious. Memory is crowded out by snapshots and you have to cling to the fading mental image of the things you forget to capture. Who can now remember what Sauchiehall Street looked like before it was ripped up?
Memories and legacies were on my mind on Monday as Tam Omond and The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence unveiled a plaque on the door of the CCA1 in honour of Derek Jarman, who died 30 years ago. I had a great time listening to his film, Blue, a couple of weeks ago and was happy to celebrate his exemplary art, activism and life.
As well as his films, Jarman is famous for Prospect Cottage, his garden in Dungeness, which is full of odd rocks and stones. Here is the back of a house in Woodlands with similarly odd brickwork.
If you have even the most rudimentary of public personas, it is necessary to have a zone of privacy to which you can retreat. The public self can get on with whatever it needs to do while you rest in private. My post on Nan Goldin articulated my discomfort with making intimacy a subject of my photos. The trade-off is that intimacy is what people want to see on social media. No one cares about your landscapes, we want to see you … take off the mask.
It was a joy to have my Sister, Brother-in-Law and Nephew in Glasgow for the weekend. Here they are in formal poses at the Riverside Museum.
When I told Ellis Luxemburg that I was giving my family a full cultural tour of Glasgow they said “Well, that should take all of twelve minutes” but we managed to take in Sam Ainsley at GoMA, Chinese New Year in George Square, Tramway, and Queens Park Railway Club, as well as having lots of nice food and fun chat. It was a memorable weekend.
35 years ago, Jarman staged an installation at the Third Eye Centre (the precursor to the CCA) consisting of two men in a bed, surrounded by barbed wire cage, with tabloid headlines of the time vilifying HIV+ people, and a set of tarred and feathered mattresses on the walls.