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.”

The NVA Trilogy: Heading Out to the Critical Hinterlands (introduction)

The first rule of critic club is: do not discuss a show until the review has been written. This prevents members of a production overhearing an opinion that may be contradicted or developed within the subsequent review. Besides, it avoids getting a slap off a cast member’s brother when a critic mentions that their performance recalled Donald Sinden’s black-face Othello in terms of authenticity and unintentional comedy.

But also: sometimes the opinions are not clear until the review has been written. I mention this because I thought that Hinterland seemed okay when I was walking around the seminary in the woods. I did try to forget that many of my fellow critics had wanked themselves dry over it, and the level of expectation this gave me probably didn’t help… 

I was expecting the absence of god to give me a blow job. I didn’t think much of the music, thought the lighting and staging was solid but hardly imaginative (casting shadows off an imposing ruin isn’t ground-breaking, but…).

It was all functional, a fairly nice way to spend an evening but, for all its site specific grandeur, there is a lack of content, of meaning… or rather, no development of the raw materials. An abandoned seminary suggests the decline of religion and the departure of God, especially if it has spent twenty years being derelict. Still, three stars and a nice fish supper back in Helensburgh, eh?

Then I wrote the review. Possibly I liked the phrase ‘consumer drone’, but by the end of the piece, I appear to be going ape-shit at the society that contains events like Hinterland. I am not sure I fully endorse my opinions – I had a nice time, and NVA’s site-specifics make a change from well-made plays or solo live art fun. But… it’s a site-specific review, innit?

As dusk falls to darkness amongst semi-ancient woodland on the Firth of Clyde, Hinterland invites audiences to experience one of Scotland’s most iconic 20th century buildings transformed using sound and light to symbolise its rise out of monumental ruination into a new creative life.

In a historic moment, the wider public will discover the ruins of St Peter’s seminary for the first time, fifty years since the modernist masterpiece was built. Hinterland will subtly re-animate the skeletal concrete superstructure with monochromatic light, projection and a specially commissioned choral work by composer Rory Boyle, performed by St Salvator’s Chapel Choir from the University of St Andrews.

As protagonists within a living sculpture the audience is able to move freely through the seminary’s main spaces, encountering the subtle integration of polyphony, projection mapping and light installations playing out on and around the surfaces of the degraded superstructure.

Hinterland is the name for both the inaugural event and the planned permanent cultural resource, presenting a public statement about the site’s future use as a national platform for progressive public art, looking towards 2018 when the partially restored buildings are fully opened. 

The event follows an extensive programme of work to make the building safe for future use led by Reigart Contracts. This transition has revealed stunning architectural details that have been concealed beneath debris for the last 25 years.


Hinterland, NVA’s ambitious scheme to reclaim the future of the world-renowned St Peter’s seminary and its surrounding landscape represents the last chance to save what is widely recognised as Scotland’s and the UK’s most important modernist building. Designed and built by Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein of the renowned Gillespie, Kidd and Coia architectural practice, St Peter’s seminary was completed and consecrated in 1966 and went on to win MacMilland and Metzstein the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal for architecture. However, after 30 years of decline the buildings are now registered as one of the World Monuments Fund’s most endangered cultural landmarks.