Final touches to the edit

Still working on the video, we could continue to work on this for another week but time is rapidly running out. So we are adding titles, credits and considering licensing the video and thinking about copyright v copyleft issues.

We have decided to use a Creative Commons license with some rights reserved.

Nine Critiques from Dundee 6.

Billy and Bruce have adopted a new trade for the week...

ART CRITIC

Over the next week I'll be asking them the question

BUT IS IT ART?

Bruce is currently reading this book....

6. Prisoners Interventions

Temporary Services working with Angelo

Imagine that your house spans six by nine feet, your mattress is just two inches thick.

You are known to your neighbors by an identification number, and items most consider crucial to everyday existence are outlawed.

How do inmates in prisons like this make such lives bearable?

In 2001, the artists' collective Temporary Services asked an incarcerated artist named Angelo to share with them the ways in which inmates adapt to their confinement. Angelo responded with over one hundred pages of meticulously detailed ink drawings and text.

The resulting compilation, Prisoners' Inventions, is a unique guide to prison life, covering subjects ranging from how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich in a locker to how to chill a soda using a toilet. Many of the documented items—such as cigarette lighters, condoms, even alarm clocks—are considered contraband, and Angelo includes anecdotes describing their creation and use. Prisoners' Inventions provides powerful testimony to life "on the inside" as it is endured by over two million individuals in the United States alone.

"I’ve just finished working as project worker at the Perth prison visitor centre..... I’m surprised how many people I'm dealing with are artistic. Many write, doodle and draw well. They’re often natural with colours. It’s amazes me how many are good artistically." Philip Malcolm LIFE group

Link to Temporary Services page

Nine Critiques from Dundee 5.

Billy and Bruce have adopted a new trade for the week...

ART CRITIC

Over the next week I'll be asking them the question

BUT IS IT ART?

5. Graffiti

Art or crime?

Street art or vandalism?

Or a trendy fashionable upmarket product?

"I've known about Banksy's work but I have never really paid much attention to it, I got to look at his book WALL AND PIECE. I like his work, I much prefer seeing this kind of graffiti than advertising billboards around the city. I like to see murals on walls, it adds colour to a neighbourhood, like they do in Belfast. " Bruce

Most art we have encountered has been in an urban setting, but we discovered this road sign whilst driving down the A1 near the village of Shilbottle.

The artist responsible for this 'intervention' required a quick turn around, the only material used was a small piece of black insulating tape. No damage done.

The question is, is it art, or plain vandalism?

We dedicate this to our mate Chris Graham.

What about these road signs?

Sticker art in Nottingham

See the Wooster Collective website for a celebration of street art

Nine Critiques from Dundee 4

Billy and Bruce have adopted a new trade for the week...

ART CRITIC

Over the next week I'll be asking them the question

BUT IS IT ART?

4)Reverse Graffiti Project

Paul 'Moose' Curtis

"I tell people I make pictures by cleaning"

" A simple and ingenious idea" Billy

"He can come round and clean the front of my house" Bruce

Work -In-Progress - Boots Camp

Some background information on the project from Billy and Bruce...

The idea for this project came from working closely with the library substance and alcohol mis-use group. One of the talking points has been about the way some pharmacists treat Methadone users, as well as the high supervised dispensing charges and distribution of "Methadone" in relation to the amount of prescribed users.

We did our research and the most accurate and up to date information can be found in the Drugs Misuse Statistics Scotland 2009;

Prescribed users per 1000 population

Tayside = 46

Scotland = 96

That's nearly 10% of Scotland that are prescribed Methadone on a daily basis...

Bruce and I were stewarding at a football match earlier this year, we looked at the size of the crowd ( about 5,500) and started to envisage the amount of Methadone users in Dundee. That really put it into perspective for us.

Then we noticed that in some areas pharmacies are opening several stores just in one street. Take Albert Street in the Stobswell area, we noted Boots have two pharmacies within a few hundred metres of each other.

We started to think about the daily charges x 5,500. Thats a lot of money being made on a daily basis. The pharmacies charge extra for dispensing as well as the actual cost of the medicine.

Unsupervised between £1.75 - £2.65 per day

Supervised between £3.10 - £4.06 per day

We looked at both the pro's and con's of the dispensing service and the idea of coming up with an alternative service to rival its sillyness was born...... which began as a street performance and is now being edited into a video.

It will be premiered at the Visual Research Centre (downstairs at DCA) as part of the Nine Trades of Dundee Final Gathering on Saturday 17 July. We hope you will come and see it, the event is on from 10.30- 17.30.

Taking over the world?

Nine Critiques from Dundee 3.

Billy and Bruce have adopted a new trade for the week...

ART CRITIC

Over the next week I'll be asking them the question

BUT IS IT ART?

3. The Inconsistency of Everything

Harminder Singh Judge

Current exhibition at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham

"I was impressed by the look of the building from the outside, it was inviting, it made you want to go in. It felt spacious with the glass windows/ walls in the cafe area and I liked the rock star style head on the wall with the guitars." Billy

" It's crazy how they thought it was art. I got it... well some of it. Very creative, colourful contemporary art. At first I thought it was not my cup of tea, but I read some background information on it and it's started to grow on me" Bruce

"Harminder Singh Judge describes himself as an artist trapped in a perpetual love triangle with religion, art and pop culture. He has a deep interest in the visual and conceptual mixing of religious mythologies with personal experience, pop culture and folklore."

Link for New Art Exchange