If you are walking round Dundee over the next week and you see newspaper billboards that contain unconventional headlines, passengers laughing to themselves on a bus while listening to headphones or people dancing in the street, the chances are you’ll have stumbled upon the first Dundee Live public art and performance festival.
A few years ago, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design graduate Jonathan Baxter initiated Dundee Artists in Residence or D-AiR with the aim of enabling existing organisations, individual practitioners and collectives to work in partnership across the city.
Difficult to get the head round at first, D-AiR is not a place or a group and it has no base or home. Instead, it is an entity that allows creative people to work together, collaborate and network under one umbrella.
It is Jonathan’s hope that there can be greater creative opportunities within Dundee by opening up dialogue and encouraging inclusion. He describes D-AiR as a “social sculpture” that believes we all have creative responsibility for our lives.
Since September, D-AiR has been running projects and events looking at life in the city by engaging local artists and people who are generally interested in the creativity of any kind. Activities have included exhibitions, performances, reading groups, residencies, field trips, temporary public artworks, skill-sharing workshops and urban gardening.
This has culminated in the Dundee Live festival that will see public art, events and exhibitions, curated by Jonathan Baxter flooding the city over the next week or so. D-AiR has purposely prioritised non-art spaces so that people are able to engage with the activities while going about their normal routines, perhaps even making them pause to look at what’s going on.
“A lot of people who graduate from Dundee leave the city and haemorrhage out and what we have tried to do is build up a network and community to encourage people to stay, integrate and recognise the resources that are available here,” Jonathan explained. “You can provide a context and an opportunity, support and friendship then people can work as a collective.”
“With Dundee Live, what we are saying is the city is always in performance the tide comes in, the tide goes out, people walk down the street, people watch each other, you’ve got the seasons; snowfall, sunshine.
“We’re just encouraging people to notice for a moment and perhaps we will help you notice. It’s about being more aware, more creative and more alive.”
Since last year, Jonathan has been working with the circulation department of DC Thomson collating The Courier headline bills that are released to newsagents every day of the week. These, he says, document the highs and lows of city life, and his work will be on display at the Central Library.
“What we are going to try and do is present them as a sort of video or film so you can see the city in performance all these different, incidental, sometimes tragic events. People will be able to look back on the year and see what was going on. They are art if you say they’re art. On the one hand, you walk past them and get their information, but if you have a perspective of the whole year then you begin to realise it’s like a drama.”
In fact, the Central Library is a bit of a hive of D-AiR activity. Located in the Leisure Reading section between the ‘Fiction’, ‘Non-fiction’ and ‘Scottish Interest’ genres there will be a number of art works on display, including a mural, a video piece about the demolition of the Menzieshill multis and an investigation of maps.
Helen Angell-Preece has also been working in partnership with DC Thomson, this time to create a series of words and phrases that will be printed on paper and displayed on The Courier billboards outside newsagents in the city.
She says she’s had good feedback in the past when the billboards have been shown in the context of an art gallery but, this time they will be out in the street alongside regular ones sporting that day’s headline.
Helen explained, “Showing my work in the Dundee Live context is the opposite of my installation work, which is inspired by architecture and urban experience. I usually take elements of how a city or environment makes me feel, or gives me a sense of being, and I recreate and intensify that experience for the viewer in a gallery installation.
“With my piece (My Location is) … Wherever you … (happen to be) I am adding something to the urban environment quite small and unobtrusive which may make a small space, a beat of time, when a passer-by notices something unusual, out of the ordinary, and because the messages are personal, they are shocking and unlike the news headlines which we become inured to.”
She has created a map of the city (see above) showing where the billboards will be located so that people can look out for them on their journeys or even follow the trail.
“Using a map to locate yourself, even in your home town, is like being in a new place or environment where you take more notice of your surroundings,” Helen went on. “I hope the elements of My Location … draw attention to the architecture along the route they are located not in front of grand civic buildings, but around streets and closes that Dundonians have inhabited for centuries.”
To sum up the festival, Jonathan uses the words of innovative 20th century Scottish academic Sir Patrick Geddes, who taught in Dundee for a number of years: “But a city is more than a place in time, it is a drama in time.”Dundee Live runs until July 17 at various venues across the city. For more information visit www.d-air.org