An Exclusive from our friends over at The Commonty:
Last week we posted a short film by John Wallace about his attempts to discover what Bill Drummond said in Dumfries when he performed his lecture Why Andy Warhol is Shite at Greyfriars Church on November 8th as part of The Stove’s Inbetween: Dumfries event. Bill Drummond is notoriously camera shy (as John found out) – but today The Commonty received an anonymous package containing film footage of Bill Drummond apparently on the Auld Brig in Dumfries… There is no explanation with the footage, and we can only assume that either Bill was practicing for his performance, or that this was one of his legendary acts of contrariness to give a filmed interview to a stranger (or even one of the things a previous audience had voted that he should do).
In any case, we are truly grateful to our anonymous filmmaker and present for your pleasure – exclusive footage of Mr. Bill Drummond telling us why he believes Andy Warhol is Shite:
World-renowned contemporary artist Bill Drummond was in Dumfries last week where he presented a performance lecture called ‘Why Andy Warhol is Shite’. Eaglesfield filmmaker John Wallace was there that evening, but was ejected from the venue at Mr. Drummond’s insistence that his work not be recorded in any way.
Below is Wallace’s account of his attempts to discover the truths Bill Drummond was sharing with Doonhamers last Thursday night:
My childhood was spent in Galloway. Its hills, rivers, and tidal flats formed my understanding and love of the natural world. The Biblical stories I learned before I could read mixed freely with the tales and legends learned about the land around me to the point that Galilee and Galloway were one and the same. Was it the Boy David who confronted Goliath at Loch Trool, or was it Robert the Bruce who faced the Philistines on the banks of the Jordan? When I learned about Saint Ninian landing at the Isle of Whithorn, bringing Christianity to our heathen forefathers, I assumed he was one of the Apostles and that he had just sailed across that Sea of Galilee. As for Tam o’Shanter, was he Old or New Testament?
At the age of 11, my family moved away. But that heady brew of wild landscape, Biblical stories, poetry, a sense that one was put on earth to do the right thing, and the temptations of the flesh were always at hand has infiltrated and informed everything that I have done or attempted to do since. And then, of course, there was the work ethic.
And on the subject of work, everything I have done since the late 1990s has been framed within the context of The Penkiln Burn. This, in one sense, is an old-fashioned publishing house and, in another, an online brand as artwork. The Penkiln Burn is also a small river that rises in the Galloway Hills and flows down into the River Cree at Minnigaff. It was on the banks of the Penkiln Burn that many of my boyhood adventures took place, a place that still fires my imagination to this day.
I am aware that if I had spent my teenage years in Galloway, my sense of it would be totally different, and that I would have probably viewed it as a cultural backwater that I could not wait to escape. But that was not the case.
As for Dumfries, that was another country altogether.
By Bill Drummond, 3 October 2012.
A truly memorable film of Parton to Kirkcowan by way of Newton Stewart aboard a steam train way back in 1965 – accompanied by the track ‘Madrugada Eterna’ by The KLF.
In 1973, Bill Drummond was coming to the end of his first academic year at Liverpool School of Art. He was studying painting. He loved painting. He wanted to spend the rest of his life painting. But something was troubling him. He thought that even if he became a successful painter, or even a great painter, all it would mean was that his paintings would hang on the walls of a rich man’s apartment in New York.
The young and idealistic Drummond instinctively felt that this was not what art should be about. He put down his paintbrush, walked away from the easel, and out into the streets of Liverpool, in the hope that he could discover a way of making art that… The rest of his professional life to date has been about trying to work out what the “that” might be.
Some months before he laid down his paintbrush, he had visited the first Andy Warhol retrospective in the UK. It was at The Tate (Britain). The exhibition had blown him away. But over the next twelve months, what had initially done the blowing began to trouble him. The troubling progressed to the point where he thought what Andy Warhol represented was everything that was wrong with art in the world at that time.
Mr Drummond is standing in the Penkiln Burn (near Newton Stewart) with a salmon and bluebells.
All the first-year fine art students were expected to write a 4,000-word history of art essay on a topic of their choice. This essay was to be handed in by the end of the first academic year. Although he had a title for the essay, he was unable to put more than a few unconnected words on the page.
Most of the several hundred thousand words that Drummond has written and published since the summer of ’73 have been a continuation of this uncompleted essay. What he hopes to present in Dumfries will be a 45-minute performance lecture based on where he is at with the essay at the moment. The working title is, as it was then, the now rather naïve: “Why Andy Warhol is Shite.”
You can be part of the audience for Bill’s lecture ‘Why Andy Warhol Is Shite’ by coming to Greyfriars Church at 6 pm on Thursday, the 8th of November (free).
The artist collective The Stove has put together a week-long programme that celebrates Dumfries and offers people the chance to be part of the future of their town. Six specially commissioned art projects will be presented in public spaces, accompanied by public performances and talks from leading thinkers, as well as film screenings and concerts.
Highlights include:
‘Why Andy Warhol is Shite’ – A performance lecture by international artist Bill Drummond.
Street Shrines – New work around Dumfries by one of Scotland’s leading street/public artists, Mike Inglis.
Greyfriars 1 – The world premiere of Suzanne Parry-John’s song cycle about the Nith and the launch of artist Lisa Gallacher’s bespoke clothing collection.
Nithscoping – Environmental artist Hannah Brackston invites an investigation of Dumfries’ river.
Also, look out for Marion Preez’s blue ‘Frames’ around the town, and whatever you do – don’t miss ‘The Lost Supper’, a simultaneous voyage back in time and into the future, with great food!
