Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 128

Sorcha Carey, Director, Edinburgh Art Festival
Often the role of the artist is to sit out of time from the rest of society.
They are often anticipating and expressing things that society as a whole
only begins to feel collectively quite some time later. Then you have those
magical moments when a work does perfectly express the mood of a time.
Interestingly, if you think about it less in terms of the contemporary practice
now, and look back over �� years of making and producing culture in this city,
it is often only in looking back that you see in a work a very clear expression
of a particular mood and a particular moment that wasn’t necessarily felt
right then.
An artist in some ways sits slightly outside, slightly on the edge of society.
They’re part of society. They’re born of society, but they’re observing.
This year the Edinburgh Art Festival is going backwards to look forwards.
We are going back �� years before the foundation of the Edinburgh
International Festival, reflecting on some of the other thinking that was
going on in Edinburgh that may or may not have put in place, a community,
a society that was open to hosting an international festival in ����.
I was absolutely flabbergasted when I came across a pamphlet by Patrick
Geddes called The Making of the Future, written in ����, which was so relevant.
What is shocking about it is that the war is still going on and he had just lost
his son. Despite the horror, despite his antimilitarism, he also understood
that war was necessary, that when it is a global conflict, it is a world’s way of
saying we have to destroy ourselves in order to be able to build something
new. It’s a really shocking image. When you talk about anger and anxiety, that
is a very different take—seeing a necessary energy that can be channeled
and galvanized and reformed into something new.
This idea also applied to creative production. It is a well-established mode—
artists channeling these societal moods into creating something. Anger can
be productive. But I think artists are angry before societies are.
Geddes was not an artist but he was a creative thinker. When he gave his
farewell lecture to his students in Dundee, he said he wanted to allow
everyone to see like an artist and that an artist always begins with the art
of seeing. It was not first about making or production. Observing and the
seeing were the critical actions. He was also interested in the conditions that
would allow a city to see itself in action and allow citizens to see themselves
in the context of their city, region, country, and world.
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