by Dr Alex Hale and Dr Gina Wall
This Case Study highlights some of the work that Dr Alex Hale (Historic Environment Scotland) and Dr Gina Wall (The Glasgow School of Art) and their collaborators have undertaken in the Garnethill Park in Glasgow. The Garnethill Community Bread Oven (built using salvaged materials after the 2014 fire in The Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Building) and the plane table survey made of the park (Hale et al) in 2018, form the basis of the case study which seeks to share the collaborative practice-based methodology of art/archaeology or ‘ar(t)chaeology’ (Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås).
This case study presents the material-philosophical positioning of salvage aesthetic, as an alternative to ruin porn (Pétursdóttir & Olsen 2014). This method of ruin- reformation (Wall & Hale 2020) deconstructs the clear demarcation between waste, spoil and originary structure. Through this case study we explore how this modality of ruination and reuse signifies value, memory, trauma and meaning. We have examined various spectral structures that teeter on the surface of the park and furthermore, which are mapped in poetic visual form arising from the planar survey as anachronistic disturbances.
Our practice encompasses mapping and counter-mapping (Schofield et al, 2014), with a view to enabling the reader to explore the park through the lens of ar(t)chaeology. This, for us is a practice that hybridizes the practical methods of art and archaeology, and through them pays close attention to the surfaces of the world. We are particularly interested in the archaeology in and of the present, its rejection of problematic, modernist tropes of archaeology, such as excavation, and its attendant interest in the uppermost layer of the world as a surface assemblage (Harrison, 2011). Through this case study we draw to the reader’s attention spectral moments and ghostly disruptions, using counter-mapping to surface alterity and marginalised histories. We understand that this way of working gives the case study an open-ness; it gives itself to differential openings of time.
Across Dalhousie Street, following the imaginary flow of Dieter Magnus’ now dry water feature to the bottom of the park we find that behind a Heras fence lies a spectral structure in stone, wood and iron. At the moment, the oven is fenced within a Heras cage, hovering on the liminality of past and present, of use and redundancy. The fence surrounding the oven forms a line, a perimeter, a boundary between its body and us. A physical barrier that fixes and delimits the site of ruin and re-formation, but rarely is the line itself a thing of focus. Through a process of re-search, we slowly bring the fence and the bread oven into focus. The bread oven itself is built upon rubble filled gabions marked with chalk, on top of which lies a concrete slab surmounted by a brick oven and roof of wood and shingles. The painted marks on the broken surfaces of the sandstone rubble imply a correlation technique, a forensic attempt at reconstruction. The markings are tags which track the previous relational arrangements of the sandstone, configured as a library of international significance built in the early 20th century. The oven is a spectral hybrid which has undergone successive re-collections, haunted by retrospection and turning over, revealing what we might call a heritage future, future heritage; an afterlife: the ‘dead-alive’ of the park-as-archive.
References
https://canmore.org.uk/site/361406/garnethill-park-glasgow
Harrison, Rodney (2011) Surface Assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present. Archaeological Dialogues 18 (2) 141-161. doi:10.1017/S1380203811000195
Behzad Khosravi Noori and Magnus Bärtås
Pétursdóttir, Þóra and Olsen, Bjornar (2014) Imagining Modern Decay: The Aesthetics of Ruin Photography. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1 (1) 7-56. doi.org/10.1558/jca.v1i1.7
Schofield, John (ed.) (2014) Who Needs Experts, Counter-Mapping Cultural Heritage. Routledge.
Wall, Gina & Hale, Alex (2020) Art & Archaeology: Uncomfortable Archival Landscapes. The International Journal of Art & Design Education. 39 (4) 770-787. doi.org/10.1111/jade.12316