The NVA Trilogy: Changed My Mind (part 3)

ALAISDAIR SMITH

By the time that I arrived back in Glasgow, I had changed my mind. 

It's not that part two is wrong. It is just that the article's existence tells me that Hinterland is more interesting than I implied.

I mean, it inspired me to write a rant. 

"I thinking you are over-thinking again, Vile."

I'm sorry if my intelligence frightens you, son. But you can always stop reading this now. 

Because my critique of Hinterland is not a critique of the event, but of the society that gives it context. Actually, getting me to feel that passionate, that reflective on the absence of spiritual revelation suggests that the installation has more depth than I admitted.

Look, I was happy enough when I was walking up the hill through the woods. I felt like a pilgrim, The shock of boredom that came when I stopped to see the performance in the seminary exposed the emptiness of the rituals that have replaced religion. 

You see, I think part 2 is a good review. It is evidence that Hinterland made me think. I can handle the aesthetic experience being uncomfortable - wasn't that exactly why I loved Vanishing Point's The Destroyed Room? There was little theatrical pleasure in the actors' awkward conversations, but that bold performance made me recognise my complicity in a drowning world.

Unfortunately, there is no fucking way NVA are going to use my review in publicity. And that tells me all I want to know about the problems of criticism. 

I did not see beauty in the brutalism of the architecture, nor poetry in the graffiti, nor evocations of spiritual redemption in the exposed electricity. I saw a reflection of a society that is bankrupt, decaying, in denial about its materialism. I mourned the loss of Christian sensibilities. 

I recognised the problems of thinking about the sacred within late consumerist society. So I ranted at the event. 

The thing in itself is not the thing, the thing is the thing-in-itself experienced in the mind of the observer. Meaning, maybe art, is the product of the moment of engagement. Hinterland has no meaning when the audience have gone home. 

The NVA Trilogy: Unconsidered Outrage (part 2)

ALAISDAIR SMITH

Welcome consumer drone. We hope that you enjoy your designated post-spiritual experience. Please do not smoke during your time within the compound. 

Please follow the paths around the official ruin, and observe decorum at all times. There will be moments for you to stop and peruse the official ritual performances and the remains of the spontaneous visual art. 

Please maintain an appropriate serenity.

Welcome consumer drone. There is a pornography of the post-industrial. Come and experience the seminary in all its naked glory. 

It shows the lot. The curve of Romanesque ceiling arches. The Bauhaus inspired outer walls stripped for your pleasure. We have scored music that evokes the purity of medieval polyphony and the revolutionary roar of Stravinsky. You shall experience a post-spiritual transcendence.

Please refrain from climbing on the architecture or wandering off into the woods. Please remember the experience of other consumer drones is not enhanced by your chatter. 

In the event of you having taken LSD or been to a religious retreat at any point in the past thirty years, please inform the authorities, since this may interfere with your enjoyment.

Thank you, consumer drone, for joining us on this journey into the absence of meaning and depth. We are aware that the use of competing semiotic systems – such as graffiti and the Christian overtones of the building – may suggest that the void is not omnipresent. 

These feelings will fade very quickly, and we suggest watching the jaded ritual of men in black masks to return to a more satisfactory sense of mild disappointment.

We would like to take this opportunity to state that the two characters in the ritual are nothing like Darth Vader, nor is their performance an emo version of the parade at Disneyland. 

It is as fucking vacuous as you would realise if you weren’t deluding yourself that experiencing art in some way gives you a moral superiority, you fucking hopeless cunts. 

Keep consuming while your betters destroy the civilisation that has allowed you to abdicate responsibility for your fellow human and replace the ecstatic terror of religion with another ramble around a predetermined event.

Angus Farquhar, Creative Director of NVA said, “Almost 50 years on from the day the seminary opened, we are witnessing the first positive steps towards a new purpose, one that accepts loss and ruination as part of the site’s history creating an evolving arts programme for local people, all of Scotland and visitors attracted to this iconic site from around the world.

“We are setting out to ensure that the imaginative re-use of this great late modernist structure reflects the same social dynamism and ambition with which it was conceived, based around a spirit of working progressively to improve what we can and imagining a better world. It is NVA’s intention to preserve a raw sense of otherness, excitement and revelation.

“Hinterland will offer everyone a chance to visit the Kilmahew/St Peter’s at a key moment in its evolution and it promises to be the must-see arts event of 2016 leading on to the delivery of an important new creative and heritage resource for progressive public art in Scotland and beyond… You want to be able to say that you were there at the start of what promises to be the most significant arts development for a generation.”

Journeys Beyond @ TheSpace

Wac Arts is a dynamic charity that works in imaginative ways to support gifted young people facing exceptional challenges to discover their talents and fulfil their potential through arts and media programmes created at the charity’s London home at Hampstead Town Hall. 

By empowering young people to change their world through a range of arts and media activities, support and guidance, Wac Arts aims to improve the lives of young people, however long that journey takes.

Wac Arts’ success has been tested over 35 years – amongst our Alumni they are proud to count Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominee Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Oscar nominee Sophie Okenedo, world famous jazz musicians Courtney Pine and Julian Joseph and four Mercury and Mobo Award winners including Ms Dynamite and Zoe Rahman.