Town Artist: An Interview with David Harding

David Harding, born in 1937 in Scotland and trained at Edinburgh College of Art, had recently returned from living in Nigeria when the town of Glenrothes hired him in 1968. Harding worked as Glenrothes' Town Artist until 1978, when he became a senior lecturer in the "Art and Design in Social Context" program at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon. In 1986, he set up a new course called "Environmental Art" at the Glasgow School of Art. Moira Roth teaches art history at Mills College in Oakland, California. —Eds.

The Poetry Path, David Harding in collaboration with poet Alan Bold, Glenrothes Scotland, 1977

Moira Roth: Do you have a sense of how many town artists there are in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland?

David Harding: Yes—not many, because I define the Town Artist very, very specifically as someone who is employed in a city department of architecture and planning, and involved in the process of the making of that city. Also, someone who has a long-term and full-time commitment to it and its community; by that, I mean three or four years at least. And there aren't many of these sorts of Town Artists. Mainly what has happened in Britain is that the social development and recreation sections of city councils have employed artists. There must be, I think, some 20 or so towns in the U.K. that employ artists in ways other than for, say, graphics and exhibitions. These artists are employed mainly to contribute to social and cultural development.

It may be that the first example of an artist being involved in the new towns of Britain was Victor Pasmore in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Peterlee, a town in the north of England. Pasmore was employed as a consultant to work with the architects on designing the buildings of the town. He would visit in short bursts and played a very dominant role. From my point of view, I don't think it was wholly successful work because the houses ended up looking like Pasmore paintings—black and white with the odd spot of color, so that it was said that if people put up colored curtains it would spoil the composition.

In the mid-'60s two other New Towns (this has been specifically a New Town phenomenon) employed artists for some environmental work. So there are one or two precedents.

MR: How did you come to Glenrothes and what was the town like?

DH: At art college in the '50s, I sought out collaborations with architectural students, and from then, I suppose, I have been committed to working with the built environment. When I came back from four years in Nigeria, I worked on my own for a year or so doing a number of urban works. I then wrote to towns in Scotland saying why don't you employ me as your artist. A few months later Glenrothes advertised for an artist "to contribute to the external built environment of the town," one who would work with architects, engineers and planners.

When I went to Glenrothes in 1968, the population of the town was 25,000. The town was planned to revitalize the coal industry in the Fife Region, but the coal mine that was developed for the town actually failed. The town then had to diversify. As time went on, electronics became the main employer; Glenrothes is now known for its electronic technology. The population of the town is now around 40,000, so it has grown by 15,000 since 1968. The visual character of the town was of low-rise, low-density, mainly council [project] housing of no real distinction.

MR: What was the political and social climate of the area like? And your own politics?

DH: It is significant that Fife is a very socialist part of Britain; it returned the first communist member of Parliament and there are streets named Lenin Way, Gargarin Avenue, etc. [laughs]. The Labour Party councilors on the Glenrothes Development Corporation were very much my supporters. I suppose I was going there with a half-formed vision of the artist as artisan. I was a socialist, but I was also a "nationalist" in the sense of being interested in the preservation of minority cultures, of which my own, Scottish/Celtic culture is one. The erosion of small cultures is detrimental to the world. In those terms, I brought these views to Glenrothes where I was at pains to rediscover and restate cultural forms from Celtic and Pictish history.

When I came to Glenrothes, I was employed, as it were, as a civil servant in the town under a contract with retirement at 65. There were doubts about where to place me, and I suggested I should be part of the Planning Department. This was a sensible idea because it meant that I could attend planning meetings and be involved in early discussions with planners about the shape of the town. After a couple of years, I feel an historic decision was made in the town. It was part of the planning briefs which came out of the planning department to the architects and engineers. It contained a clause which said that "the artist should be consulted at every stage of the development." That was an ideal, of course, but it was something that one could fall back on if wanting to make a fuss. I decided to live in a housing project in the town because it was important to experience the kind of environment one was contributing to. I set up my workshop in the city's Direct Labour yards. Also, after a couple of years I joined the Builder's Union because I realized that most of the work was taking place on the building site, and that identifying myself with the men who were working on the building site was politically very important. I tried to create opportunities for the building workers to display their, often, latent skills by using only the materials of the building site, so much so that many of the works were executed or completed by them.

MR: What was your pacing in the job over the ten years you were in Glenrothes?

DH: Initially, I worked very slowly and at a small scale. I made small insertions and interventions in the town, meanwhile building up people's confidence in me and finding out how the town operated and how to finance the work. What one finds is that you can find these avenues of money when you are in the inside. And so, in that respect, money was never a problem. In fact, the year before I left, one housing architect phoned me up to say that he had 15,000 pounds spared from a contract and could I use it in a residential area which was just being completed. The other thing is that in a situation like this, when one has access to money, one doesn't have to send what one is going to do for approval before one gets the money. Many of the actual works that I proposed didn't have to go beyond myself, the job architect, the engineer and the community.

MR: All in all, you once said you orchestrated about 250 works during the ten-year span in Glenrothes. Incidentally, what language do you like—orchestrate, direct, inspire, coordinate or what?

DH: Possibly orchestrate [laughs]. That number of 250 applies to today, as more works were created, after I left, by my replacement and other artists. For the size of the town, that seems a great number of works—they range from the very small (what I term bijou), brightly colored mosaics to extremely large works. One might get the impression that surely a saturation point must be reached, but actually, from the experience of Glenrothes, that is not the case. The built environment can soak up as much as we can give it in terms of visual art.

I should stress also that I took on art students who worked with me during the summer; I also took on a number of 16-year-olds who were unemployed. They came and worked almost in an apprenticeship situation with me for two years. One of them painted a mural, which in 1977 was probably the first punk mural in Britain. Incidentally, they were all paid. Then, most importantly, I had one graduate student a year, sometimes two, who would work with me for twelve months in a kind of atelier situation. They were paid a salary by the town. Also, the town was intent not only on developing the visual arts but also other arts as well. One of the things we did was to set aside a cottage in the town where a writer could come and live rent-free. Several writers came: an actor-writer, a filmmaker-writer and three poets, including one who wrote the Poetry Path. They often made a direct contribution to the environment of the town: The theater person got involved with the theater events in the town, a film was shot in the town, etc. Another idea which we realized was to develop workshops and houses for crafts-people in old stables in the town.

MR: Can you talk about the impact of all this on the town?

DH: That's difficult because to really deal with that one would need a detailed survey. However, one can pick up hints. For example, people would write letters to the development corporations, which said, "Why do other parts of Glenrothes have artworks and we don't?", or in the fact that people identified with the works, and would actually look after them and clean them. Most of these housing areas lacked any significant character of their own and the works became an important part of an otherwise monotonous environment. They became reference points and meeting places. Games have developed around them and, in time, I would hope that one or two of them may stimulate some sort of ritual attachment.

MR: How did your Town Artist role effect you?

DH: It re-emphasized the importance of the context for art. As the job developed, the work became increasingly related to the context and the site. For me, the base of art was broadened and democratized with the recognition that there should be cultural democracy, which means lots of cultures existing side by side.

MR: Styles too?

DH: Yes. Of course, some of the things I was doing intuitively and innocently in Glenrothes, I now see as fundamental to public art—in the public-art practice and theory being developed in America and Britain in the mid-1980s. Artists need to work in collaboration with architects and engineers and need to think in terms of urban spaces not as physical spaces only, but as places people live in, and that the social context is as important as the physical context.

MR: What has the impact of your work been?

DH: The first thing to stress is that the art world did not realize what was going on in these "Town Artist" situations. When we were working away, deepening the philosophical base for public art, little was known about it. It is in the years since I left Glenrothes that there has been more public interest. A recent development in the U.K. has been the move to create residencies for artists to make public artworks, replacing the simple public commission.

I visited Seattle recently and talked with Richard Andrews, the man who has made Seattle world-famous for its public-art program. In his recent essays and lectures, he stresses the point that there is no longer any use whatever simply buying artworks and arbitrarily placing them on sites. The artist has to be there him- or herself in person so that the work can really become "site-specific." In other words, to make the "context half the work."

In terms of Glenrothes as a model, it is not easy to apply the town model in America. In Britain, we have a tradition of government intervention. Many labor councils in Britain are actively involved in financing and supporting the arts in a way that just does not happen in America. So, it may be that the Glenrothes model would not be of much use here. What may be the element to be learned, however, is that of Glenrothes being yet another example of the importance of site-specific artworks. In Australia, on the other hand, a place rather similar to Britain socially and culturally, a number of towns have created places for artists in much the way I worked myself. I was invited to Australia in 1982 to encourage this. While I was there, I did a great deal of lecturing and consultation. A lot of interest was shown in the concept of the Town Artist.

MR: Why did you leave Glenrothes?

DH: I never intended to stay there indefinitely, certainly not until I was aged 65 [laughs]. I felt it was essential that Glenrothes should have a change of artist, and this in fact happened when I left in 1978. I needed also to step back from what I call "the front"—you know, having been for ten years on "the front." Creativity on demand, so to speak. I needed to step back and review the situation and try and deepen the philosophical base of public art and community art. I wondered whether it would be possible to pass on the Glenrothes experience; to develop a way of teaching that would make creating art in a context not the impossibly difficult thing that most art students leaving art school feel it is.

MR: And what have you found since teaching in Dartington College of Arts?

DH: I would not claim that I am teaching students to be Town Artists. What I do see the course doing is breaking new ground in terms of art teaching. We are insisting that students look to the "context" and respond to it outside the studio and college. Whether they will do it later on is another matter.

MR: Are you content with primarily teaching?

DH: I very much want to continue to make art in the way I made it in Glenrothes. The probem is that there aren't many such opportunities. [Harding moved to Glasgow School of Art, to be a part of the school's Fine Arts degree. The city of Glasgow is presently in the throes of urban regeneration.] I want my course, through my own work and my students, to play a part in this exciting process.

MR: You mentioned the impact on you of your work in Nigeria, where you were teaching at a college of art in Lafia.

DH: One of the things that struck me in Nigeria was the very important fact that I could not import European culture to the people I was working with. They were developing their own art, and I certainly wasn't going to import Picasso or Van Gogh to them. Nor was I going to raise Eurocentric perceptions of composition, color, form, organization, proportion, perspective or things like that. So, I simply became an enabler; I organized the opportunities for them to do their own work. Being sensitive to cultural imperialism was a major factor I took from Nigeria to Glenrothes. Also, there was a tradition near where I stayed in Nigeria of modeling mud walls, and we worked together on painting external walls. That element of getting people to actually contribute to the external environment of the place in which they live is the other main thing I brought with me from Nigeria to Glenrothes.

MR: Do you see your idea of a Town Artist as relating to the Renaissance concept of the artist?

DH: Yes. There exists a contract drawn up between a client and Ghirlandaio in which there are very detailed specifications about what the artist can do in terms of painting an altarpiece. The contract specifies how much ultramarine paint can be used, the amount of gold leaf and a series of other restrictions. My interest in this is that within those limitations, the artist could create a timeless work of art. Is it possible for artists in the 20th century to work also within certain limitations?

MR: What other models do you find in art history or political theory?

DH: I tend not to go back into art history as much as to look at other societies—non-Western societies such as those in Nigeria. It is almost a cliché now that in those societies the artists were an integral part of society in the sense that they "arted" but also did farming. I suppose it is that integration of art and society that I see more as the model for the kind of thing I was proposing in Glenrothes.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring 1986.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002