Visual Art
Reviews TO GET ON
Glasgow Print Studio. until Sat 12 Feb 00
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Fagen explains why modern music is so '1: u : l .A' 21.. :2 z, " l.‘ »- .tv» important to contemporary Scottish culture: t :w H v: _ " 'v rw 11‘1"“. ‘The most shocking thing about this work was T3329" :’ fl: Aw " "‘w?’ :v .' 1 RAW when, after two months of having these two outta? v= 1,. " f. A" l Burns songs, re-imagined, reverberating around my head, I saw the new year stuff, with men in kilts and the whole biscuit-tin mentality that so
While a nation should not be ashamed of a complicity buried in its history, it should nonetheless be aware of it. Graham Fagen‘s audio-visual installation, Clean Hands, Pure
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Heart, reimagines Scotland‘s place in the history of the slave trade, using cultural tools vital to a modern Scotland. The Burns songs ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘A Slave's Lament’ are merged in a composition produced by modern dub legends Adrian Sherwood and Skip MacDonald and performed by Ghetto Priest. ‘This is about taking something in our cultural heritage (Burns) and finding currency in it. It re-addresses what Burns is about, and if he was alive today, I think he would be doing something like what Adrian Sherwood does,’ says Fagen.
With its cutting edge dub soundtrack, Clean Hands, Pure Heart draws our attention to Scotland’s barrier-bursting club culture. Anyone searching for the culturally inclusive Scotland of countless government PR exercises could do a lot worse than look to the producers, artists and DJs that make its musical landscape so vibrant.
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this work is very important. What we are seeing is a young, Rastafarian black man performing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Slave’s Lament‘, two songs by a white man of the empire. That’s very powerful.’
Attempts at pan-historical atonement through music often turn out as grindingly patronising statements. On this occasion, however, the authentic, harmonising influence of dub in the artist’s life (and in the music of modern Scotland) obviates any heavy-handedness that may have marred the work. As Fagen points out: ‘History has allowed this understanding of how cultural differences work. It is right to say that this is about atonement, but it’s also about how Burns understood the plight of the slave, even when he was a part of the culture that created the slave industry.’ (Johnny Regan)
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