Christopher = Bearer of
Christ
Matthew = Gift of the Lord
Dooks = Keeper of Ducks.
Between 2003 and 2005 I was one of the resident artists at
the resource and gallery stills, smack bang in the centre of
Edinburgh. The idea was that we got free training and
access to equipment that would have normally cost us a
small fortune. There were eight of us and I was the only
fella. During this time I would eventually produce video
installations, but my first year was obsessed with the
art/songwriting collision. I was listening to a lot of
music made by art school graduates Jarvis Cocker, Franz
Ferdinand (who I was losing faith in) - but my favourite
album at the time was "Any other City" by
art-post-new-wave-cum-glasgow-school-of-art-allumni Life
Without Buildings. I had a little crush on singer Sue
Tompkins voice, truth be told. Not that she really sang.
She sounded like Altered Images playing a call and
response stream of consciousness babble. Wonderful. I'd
heard the band on John Peel.
Back at Stills, a lot of my fellow artists had come to the
art world through different angles (I nearly typed angels
there, that would have been nice wouldn't it!?) and my
angle was quite oblique, having produced lots of film
making, but not too much experience within the classic
white cube gallery set up. The other thing was, was that I
never had a 'studio' as such. I'd been using a laptop for
such a long time that the powerbook was my studio,
containing photographs, lyrics, multitrack recordings,
films and videos and so on. But there was much to be said
for an actual physical space for me to eat, sleep, meet and
collaborate in. Welcome to Duckstudio. I wanted to make a
real mess in there. Crack some eggs.
Duckstudio was a space where I created a huge blackboard in
a small exhibition room in the gallery and thus manifested
a 30-day 'residency' of living in the space every day - I
would clock on and off in there, like people with proper
jobs - I had romantic, virtually communist notions
of a regimented socialist art residency where people would
come off the street see the work and collaborate with me.
The title "Duckstudio" had come from my minimal research on
my surname - apparently, one of the explanations of "Dooks"
could mean "Keeper of Ducks"
I wanted to live in Duckstudio for 29 days and on the 30th
day perform a live song set in front of an audience. I had
sang in public only once before. The Duckstudio project was
terrifying, but it was good that I was in a gallery as it
could be passed off as, er, experimental if it was poor.
Was that outloud? I installed a sofa from my own flat,
bought a cheap microwave from the £50 quid budget (Deirdre,
the director at stills wasn't too keen on my re-heated dhal
smells wafting through the gallery!). I was set. If we
build it people will. And they nearly did.
"What has this got to do with art" I often asked myself in
Duckstudio. Well, here's what. Initially I wanted to take
people's lives off the street, simmer their experiences
down to a few verses and sing songs like a proper resident
songsmith artist. The "working out" of the songs on the
blackboard would be the visual art if you like. And every
day, I posted new lyrics and tunes online. I started a
blog. I had images from the blackboard posted online as
soon as I made the chalkmarks. I even had a few people
looking at it online!
But there were two annoying problems. The first was the
fact not many members of the public came into the studio
off their own bat. They had to be coerced in. I hadn't
really allowed for the fact that a studio painted black (so
I could write in chalk anywhere). Teenagers paint it black
for a reason. It began to feel a bit staged and false. I
needed to keep it real (!) so I changed tack. The second
problem was that my manifesto stated I would write a song
each day. But I couldn't play an instrument. I forgot to
mention that. I couldn't actually play. I could just about
sing and make up melodies fairly easily, but my fingers
were never trained to hit keys or strings and such like.
So I was bailled out by four friends who created some
initial backbones to help me make the songs sound like
songs. But who would I collaborate with if the public were
scared? So I made an executive decision with myself that
the songs would be about the other seven artists alongside
some other tunes I had made during the year, which were
looking for a home. So I wrote seven songs about seven
artists. The subjects were incredibly varied: ebay,
fertility treatment, anorexia, nostalgic cinema, the
afterlife of a pensioner, hallucinagenic dreams, teenage
pregnancy. whatever the artists were doing, I'd write a
song about it.
The sister event to Duckstudio was "A Keeper of Ducks Sings
For You" where around 50 people came to hear the songs
performed live. One of the board of directors of the
gallery said he was a fan of "atonal singing over a pretty
bed of sound" and that he quite liked it. Next time I do
this, I thought, I'm gonna learn to play the guitar...
