Artist in Residence

Mark Wallinger: bear or suit?

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Roll up, roll up, and witness the spectacle of the great "bear man": last year’s Turner Prize winner, Saatchi protégé and former Goldsmiths student Mark Wallinger is tonight narrating a retrospective of his work. The notorious bear suit, which Wallinger donned for several consecutive nights and lumbered around a glass-walled no-man’s-land set in a Berlin car park, being alternately waved at and stared down by baffled members of the public, polarised aesthetics and realisation. A decisive interrogation of individual and social identity, certainly, it was also, as Wallinger explains, quite a sweaty job: having spent the first night practically blinded by dripping sweat, his subsequent adoption of a headband only compounded the problem. Quite what this signifies in relation to the symbol of the bear as cultural emblem of Berlin is anybody’s guess.

The bear aside, Wallinger’s best-known work to date is State Britain, which appeared in Tate Britain in January 2007 and to which a sizeable section of tonight’s talk is devoted. The installation recreated the space occupied in Trafalgar Square (already a space within the artist’s remit, given the millennium-commemorating appearance on its fourth plinth of Ecce Homo, Wallinger’s understated statue of Christ) by peace protestor Brian Haw until the passing in 2005 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. This act declares any unauthorised protest occurring within a kilometre radius of the Palace of Westminster to be illegal.

This was no small task. It was vital, says Wallinger, to trace the copyright for every single item appearing in Haw’s protest, from the obvious (Banksy prints) to the apparently inconsequential (the numerous teddy bears left by well-wishers). This preoccupation with minutiae extended to all aspects of the project: sufficiently "ageing" the placards for the installation presented another problem, which was apparently addressed by slopping them in puddles. That the Tate itself straddles the border between illegal and legal protest space—a claim which has been disputed, but to which Wallinger resolutely sticks—lent the project an extra dimension which installations of it elsewhere have been unable to fully replicate. It was through institutionalising the constitutionally abhorrent that Wallinger was able to once again foreground the mythologisation of the incidental which works such as Threshold to the Kingdom, in which human traffic through the arrivals gate at an airport is depicted in slow-motion and soundtracked by Renaissance composer Gregorio Allegri, also explored.

After two such ideologically decisive projects, where can Wallinger go from here? “Give me a chance!” he laughs when asked about the work he’s undertaking during his current residency in Edinburgh, adding that a three-month stint in Rome culminated in the authorship of a single limerick. Another question about the direction he expects his subsequent work to take is met with a similarly guarded response. Wallinger’s apparent coyness to disclose details of forthcoming projects is perhaps understandable: supposedly on a retreat of sorts in Edinburgh, his stay thus far has been marred by inevitable press interest.

However, notes Dr Clémentine Deliss, coordinator of the Randolph Cliff scheme, a desire to appreciate the artist as a Turner-scooping "big man" detracts from the more pragmatic aims of a project as strongly orientated towards students as to the names it attracts.

Bringing these two aspects together, the Randolph Cliff scheme is the exciting result of a collaboration between the Edinburgh College of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland to forge new links between final year and postgraduate students and internationally acclaimed artists. Since its establishment in October, students have had the opportunity to work alongside Austrian Franz Graf, Christian Flam from Germany and, at present, Mark Wallinger himself.

As well as treating the guests to a champagne reception and housing artists in a plush Georgian apartment with a picturesque view of the Dean Bridge—generously provided by the co-curator and founder Charles Asprey—a lot can be learnt, it seems, by established artists from burgeoning ECA students and vice-versa in an initiative which embraces creative freedom. Speaking to April Mellor, a final year undergraduate in Sculpture and PA to each of the residents at Randolph Cliff, she was keen to advocate the importance that the initiative brought to the artists as well as the students involved: “It provides a time for them to think and they can perhaps create a prototype of an idea.”

In the first two-day workshop with Franz Graf, students dived straight into working together with the artist on a collection of drawings of anything and everything. After it proved impossible to link these together, the drawings were discarded and the film of the entire proceedings created by April became the final and unexpected work of art.

For many students, this sort of collaboration is also a foot in the exceedingly tight doorway to the competitive art world, where communicating with leading artists is invaluable experience for their future careers. The scheme encourages the partnership of artists from varying backgrounds in music, sculpture, fine art and nature-based courses; it is a continual aim for artists, April explains, “to be constantly reacting and adapting to art around us.” In relation to her own projects in sculpture, she perceives in Wallinger’s installations a certain fluidity that is also being achieved in modern sculpture as it becomes more involved with its viewer.

During the most recent collaboration, Wallinger and his partner, the sculptress Anna Barriball, surprised the students with a mystery escapade last week to Lord Elgin’s estate in Fife. It was Lord Elgin who donated the Athenian plaster casts exhibited at ECA. Unfortunately the retreat-like aspect of the residency was somewhat disrupted for the highly in-demand Turner prize winner, who left Edinburgh as soon as he arrived to fly back to Paris and then London, albeit returning soon after. But despite being busy and frequently absent, Randolph Cliff participants describe Wallinger as genuine, humorous and attentive. “What’s surprising is that he still doesn’t have a full time assistant. He is very down to earth,” says April. After all, nothing could be more down to earth than taking his students to a local fish and chip shop at the end of a thought-provoking excursion. Nothing, perhaps, except for the work of the artist himself.

Returning to tonight’s discussion of State Britain, April notes how Wallinger’s personal description of his work on the project could not but stir students to think differently towards the relationship of art and politics. Referring to a video screened tonight which contrasts the heavy-handed clearing of Haw’s space with the painstaking dismantling of the installation at the end of its run in the Tate, she observes how this “immortalised the protest. It can never be put away. It is so inspiring to make something which authorities can’t control.”

What is implicit here—the idea of art as breaking boundaries and laying foundations for the future—coheres strongly with the aims of Randolph Cliff. Its membership of Future Academy, an international federation of art colleges at the forefront of research in contemporary art, has already put ECA firmly on the map, taking students across the globe to work alongside artists in countries like Japan. Its ability to attract names such as Wallinger through the Randolph Cliff offshoot means that perhaps soon Edinburgh will proudly wave its own banners as a leading artistic hotspot in its own right. And, in the meantime, it might just inspire more than the odd limerick.

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