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Small gold leaf sculpture by Lauren Printy Currie for a 16mm film

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The football player skates across the battlefield On folly and performance, For the artist Rowan Markson at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 3 June 2017,

Alex Hetherington, (Stirling, Scotland and Amsterdam, NL), May 2017 Follies are at different times the definition of ugliness, objects of unsuitability, modes of flamboyance and whim, accrual of want and obsession, enactments of luxury, declarations of transcendence and territory, the substance of hallucinations, reflections of faith. They exist, for the most part, at the extremes of 'taste', good or bad; portmanteau forms of reason and vision, illusion and vanity. In some places follies can be termed as 'famine follies', having materialised as a solution to economic recession and are presented as an obsolete task to unemployed labourers and artisans. A capitalists' venture to keep workers occupied, obedient, malnourished and mystified. In other examples they give expression - as in the case of American broadcaster Bill Heine's 25ft painted fibreglass basking shark which has appeared to have crashed down through the roof of his terraced house in Headington, Oxford, and become embedded into an upstairs bedroom - to senses of "impotence, anger, desperation". His folly is a visible means of protest. Or arrogance. 1 But by any definition 'folly' derives from 'folie' the French word for madness. Known for his theoretical drawings and written texts, like 'The Manhattan Transcripts' and 'The Screenplays' developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which 'he set out aspects normally removed from conventional architectural representation, like the complex relationship between spaces and their uses' Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi believed that 'there was no architecture without events, actions or activity.' 2 The buildings that result from his 'incompatible theoretical positions' bond film, literary and political critical thinking with architectural experimentation. He makes spatial - and interstitial - devices that enfold around, and intensify, a building's interior action and happenings, uses and occurrences, events and experiences. Tschumi's buildings, which include Vacheron Constantin in Geneva, Parc de la Villete in Paris and the Blue Condominium in New York City, might demonstrate that a folly is a form of what French philosopher Jacques Derrida termed 'deconstruction' and exists as an attempt to interrupt or disrupt dominant cultural narratives. Or they might just be about a visionary environment and magical apparitions and magical purposes, a desire to materialise an intangible fata morgana. Ferdinand Cheval, a French postman who lived in Hauterives, a town within the Drôme department in Southern France, spent thirty-three years of his life building 'Le Palais idéal'. Cheval began the building, a fantastical cross-pollination of styles and references, and frequently referred to as an example of naïve or outsider art, at the behest of a kind of performative moment, a physical and psychic intervention, in April 1879. He reported: "I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause. In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves... I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn't thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful; I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight... It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate...I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and architecture." 3 Cheval's Palace, like Sarah Winchester's expansive, expanding mansion in San Jose, California, a project of non-stop elaborate inexplicable construction over thirty-eight years, occurring during the same time period as Cheval's design, is built from supernatural intervention, imagination and a manic desire to invent. While more recently, in 2012, Pierre Huyghe, a French artist whose work embeds fictions into recollections and realities, excavates the psychological character of living systems, and instigates self-generating structures free of the artist's desires, out of his control, in raw display, particularly with zoological ecosystems: dogs, fish, and in one video work a monkey wearing a human mask, produced the sculptural piece 'Untilled, Liegender Frauenakt, Reclining Female Nude'. This folly, sited, originally in a disused part of a Baroque garden park in Kassel, Germany for the quinquennial visual art exhibition Documenta 13, consists of a bee colony replacing, or engulfing, the head of a reclining (sleeping?) female figure rendered, somewhat impressionistically, in grey marble. What is represented by this colony and its bees is an ingestion and dispersal of ideas: philosophical, feminist, humanist, anomalous, experiences of the external world feeding, like honey, the imagination and vice versa. It is an expression of how things make their appearance, often arising out of other discarded cultural debris, out of the places of dreams. The bees swarming around the head suggest forms of empathic participation, the artist having 'enlisted' the insects into this study of the shifting systems of our "collective (un)consciousness." 4 Meanwhile Huyghe's piece 'Recollection (Zoodram 4)' from 2011 sees a hermit crab 'enlist' or 'scavenge' a replica of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi's 'Sleeping Muse' from 1910 as the shell to the crustacean's asymmetrical abdomen. This underwater folly, smaller in scale to some of the grander apparatus described elsewhere here, and representational of art and its plundering of its past for style, reference and inspiration, is a display of 'refunctioning' and sets an object, aesthetically and purposefully, out of time. Entwined in a symbiotic embrace, in stylistic collision, transient and dissolving, object and animal exert a right on how they might choose to exist free of external conditioning. By the way the title of this short piece of writing comes from a Bernard Tschumi text on how he illustrates the processes of 'meaning creation'. 5 While at the same time, through the absurdity of his conflicting description, its character, the footballer, journeys back to meaninglessness. The text has recorded its own inability to hold reasonable substance. Like a folly this line of text is the simultaneous production and disarticulation of meaning. And in these contradictions is its resistance to the possibility of a singular encapsulated reading. In its exertion to exist, through its sleight-of-hand distraction of classification, that traditions and conventions have imposed, the folly evades disqualification. 1 Bill Heine, The Headington Shark, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Heine retrieved 20 May 2017 2 Archtiecture et Disjonction, Bernard Tschumi, 2014, HYX, Orléans, France 3 Ferdinand Cheval's letters to the archivist Andre Lacroix, http://www.facteurcheval.com/en/history/ferdinand-chevals-letter.html retrieved 20 May 2017 4 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung), 1991, Routledge, London, England 5 Post-Structuralism in Video Games, LB Jefferies, 14 September 2010, Pop Matters, http://www.popmatters.com/post/130849-post-structuralism-in-video-games, retrieved 20 May 2017

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The football player skates across the battlefield On folly and performance, For the artist Rowan Markson at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 3 June 2017, Alex Hetherington, (Stirling, Scotland and Amsterdam, NL), May 2017

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Edition from the research project in China, 2017

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Pure Movement, The Hallucinating Edge, The Men are referred to in the text as, materials from trip to China, republishing text on Raqs Media Collective, Shanghai Biennale, April 2017

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Most beautiful room in the world. EAMIF, 2016

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Edinburgh Artists' Moving Image Festival. The Most Beautiful Room in the World. Some note and thoughts. 1/2/2017, distributing from 6 February 2017. Derek Jarman, GLITCH, Emma Finn, Edward Thomasson, Jamie Crewe et al.

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Five Propositions Toward a Scottish Collection of Artists’ Moving Image

Something I observed on when presenting a set of works from Scotland in China was an insistence by an audience member that artists’ s film and moving image only emulated independent or experimental cinema and I intuitively know that some forms of storytelling or attempts at narrative evade the screen, that the material on screen are the ‘workings’, ’framings’ ‘attachments’, ‘contradictions and ambiguities’ of storytelling to find ways to articulate what cannot be expressed in that way, with those methods found in cinema, and that there are resolutely different kinds of screen, it is not just a method of transportation, the edge of narrative I have come to understand from film and moving image that some subjects and ideas cannot be expressed only by what happens through and on screen, although most films do, some films are porous, circuitous, askew, that perhaps the opening or concluding parts to their experience might happen off screen held in a gesture, a phrase, an object, materials brought together, a performance and dispersed or distributed differently, I am intrigued by where the content sits, where it spills out, where it stops, and where the artists first draws herself to the subject, what other things pass through that makes the subject more porous, rather than less, so that the subject is expanded by artists gaze or activity, the subject is slackened, unattached, made transparent, I am understandably interested in the subject of learning with its difficulties, its repetitions, mistakes, returns, disciplines and influences, the meaning of learning, to learn a skill, learn a language, learn from the learning of film, I am interested in the elsewhereness of learning, and that hallucinating edge of concentration, focus, inside the thing, I am drawn to gestures of the hand, That line between fiction and reality that I discuss and present so frequently in my curatorial ideas, working with films and video by Rosalind Nashashibi (Lovely Young People, Jack Straw’s Castle), Lynsday Mann, Anna Lucas, Anne-Marie Copestake, Allison Gibbs, and Sarah Forrest to name a few. Modern Edinburgh Film School is a fiction, it’s a false space, but is held together by forms of reality and engagements that allow it to be occupied by different presences, express the content by holding it within an object, alternative ideas of film held in an object or pursuable activity, expanded fiction, disrupted, interrupted documentary, I am interested in how film discusses subjects like sculpture and ideas of ‘sculpture on screen’ how one thing can been seen through another, I am interested in how this film and this artist presents voice, time, tense, the present tense on screen, and the strange anomalies in the English language that describe the past as now, like looking at a screen of the past, The woman described on-screen in this work moves from imagination to reality, and in some of the descriptions of her actions and words brought to mind the narrator in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a voice-over detailing wholly fictionalised letters he wrote in the capacity of a fictionalised self, the still, the moving image, freeze frame, and the sound… How this work worked in CURRENT in China in Mingsheng, at Pure Movement at K11 Art Foundation in Wuhan and at The Hallucinating Edge in Beijing, I have travelled with this work, Pure Movement “In this screening artists engage with the performance of non-verbal gesture. expression and movement in physical, imaginary or illusionary spaces. The apparatus of the camera is evident in these works, drawing the mechanical or digital technologies of the lens closer to that of the operation of the eye and in turn to the workings of the mind.” Hallucinating Edge: “In this screening artists explore different methodologies for the expression of their subjects which lie between real and imagined worlds and across past and present. This includes holding up mirrors to their own lives and the potential to create and inhabit alter-egos. Familiarity of subject and the mysteries of new discoveries overlap and in doing so stage and represent new possibilities.” I am interested in how Sarah Forrest attaches and detaches the voice from the screen, that it points to objects and materials off-screen, It brings to mind, some of other works and approaches for example Daria Martin’s Man and Mask, 16mm film from 2005, Daria Martin’s Soft Materials from 2004 and the interaction of intelligences in objects and touch, materials have intelligences, Corin Sworn’s Faktura, the nuances of movement, physical relationships with the inanimate, Lauren Gault’s sculptural and video works Granular and Crumb and Here Bianca! from 2013 and in the same year Georgina Starr’s Before Le Cervau Affamé, bounding ceramic objects, voice, intention, moving image and hallucination (from sleeplessness) together, and of interests I have in the use of film and moving image to be depositories for sculptural materials and the observation of properties of substances and their behaviours under different conditions, but also to demonstration films, oscillating between fiction and reality at imperceptible speeds, that might include Anna Lucas’ Gustav Graham and Lee from 2011, and Lucas’ recent film Workshop from 2016 imitating the cinematic screen-wipe through the movement of objects and surfaces and on-screen descriptive texts prefaced by the phrase “she said”, and Anna Lucas’ 2010 film Things that have had stories rubbed out, with collaged sequences of objects as screens and surfaces as blank screens, as even on a white page, there is something to be seen, everything to be seen My proposition for the collection is Sarah Forrest’s, The Pot, 2015, HD video with sound, 5 min 10 sec

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Modern Edinburgh Film school x Ross Fraser McLean, thinking heart 2016, images courtesy of RFM