Photo: Hemingway and Castro in Cuba*
I was interested to receive from David Harding the book,
which he wrote in collaboration with Ross Birrell and Douglas Gordon “You like
this garden?”
It was a gift in return for my giving him a copy of PaolozziRevealed.
His work in Cuba brought back my own experience of the
country. On a brief visit I shot some
video footage, which resulted in a couple of videos now up, on my YouTubechannel.
Only one am I
pleased with -Guests from the Future-
but it has got the
least hits on YouTube. Not sure what that tells you about (a) public taste) or
(b) artistic merit.
More importantly
though it reminded me of the time I worked with Cuban performance artist TaniaBruguera now an internationally acclaimed artist and political activist.
We were in the same
class at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and she was in the throes of
developing Burden of Guilt, an epic performance piece and she needed recordings
of sheep. Well, I come from Wales and would be going home for Christmas so I
did some recordings of sheep on the family farm. These were later used in her
performance though after they had been manipulated in the sound studio I hardly
recognized them!
There was one
surreal morning in the School of the Art Institute when the building was filled
with the sound of hundreds of sheep being moved from one field to another. It brought folk scurrying out of their
offices to find the source of the commotion.
These memories came flooding
back yesterday after reading David’s book.
* I took this photo of a photograph in Ernest Hemingway's house in Havana.
