Artists notes : 2008
Display : A contemporary Art exhibition within a contemporary Arts festival.
(Display, curated by Jérôme Cotinet-Alphaize, took place in 2008 in the French city of Tours as part of a larger arts festival.)

In July of this year Jérôme Cotinet-Alphaize will present a semi-retrospective exhibition of my work within a free Arts Festival taking place in the French city of Tours. In my experience arts Festivals are not the easiest of environments in which to show contemporary art, budgets (at my level) are limited and the demand for art that both satisfies the perceived attention of the public and that of press and politicians is high; what invariably is wanted is a spectacular ‘display’.
Jérôme Cotinet-Alphaize knows this very well, and of course we will be giving the public something spectacular in the form of Dear Prudence, a six-meter high climbable sculpture. Dear Prudence will ‘cut us a little slack’ as they say, giving us space to try less spectacular but equally subtle works around the city.
Jérôme Cotinet-Alphaize’s artistic proposition to the city of Tours is direct; ‘Contemporary Art on Display’ for in truth that is the reality. He asks, ‘What is an art work without its support structures and white walls?’ (I also ask myself this!), and ‘What can happen to a banal art work when it is simply placed within a banal shop window?’ Both questions are as old as the hills in the art world, but the festival is not the art world and the experiment is worth repeating, and so I will be showing some works in shop windows and see, along with the public, what happens to them.
Such tactics are in a way a kind of test, to see if an art work can still operate, without it being designed specifically as a ‘site specific’ or ‘socially engaged’ work. We will see what the public makes of the hastily built wooden shack (Les Periades Bivouac, 2008) that’s trying to pass itself off as a mountain refuge on 'Rue George Sand'.
But few artists make works simply for others, artists are interested to see what they themselves can learn or discover from their work. Artists look for kinks or threads within their work that some how validate their endeavors to themselves. Exhibiting work in public, particularly several works simultaneously from different periods (as will be the case in Tours) is a good way to reveal the subtle links that connect one work to another.
The key work in Tours will be Dear Prudence. When I first began working on Dear Prudence two years ago my attention was directed specifically toward making a sight specific work relating to the location of Mont des Arts in Bruxelles. The word Prudence was simply a rather old fashioned word used by the British mountaineer Edward Whymper from whom I borrowed the text. But slowly the word Prudence led me away from the mountain and back into popular culture due at first to the reference to the Beatles song (Dear Prudence was written by John Lennon in 1968). The song is about Prudence Farrow, the sister of the actress Mia Farrow. Prudence Farrow was with the Beatles while they were study Transcendental Meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India but she spent most of her time alone in her room. Lennon, who was worried that she was depressed, wrote this song for her, inviting her to "come out to play". As a work Dear Prudence has still some way to go before it truly ‘transcends’ and traverses both the mountain and popular culture, but the principle is established and has begun to influenced other works. The same thing occurred with the Starmaps in that they have led to works based on pop songs of David Bowie. The latest of these Bowie works was made specifically for this free Festival in Tours and simply involves the changing of words such a “we” to “they” in the lyrics of a song called ‘Memory of a free festival’ from 1967. This simple change creates a sense of distance and detachment within the song, more so than in Bowie’s original. The work entitled ‘If We were They” is a comment on the idea of the free festival; a dream of a utopia long since past.
Research into falling, a common diversion for a climber, caused me to look more closely at Yves Klein’s work and to discover that he was possibly the father of the free festival with his proclamation in Dimanche; ‘a Sunday for everybody’. This investigation led to the work ‘Natural born world shaker’ a tribute to Klein involving a drawing of a graffiti bomb (paint can) with the letters IKB (international Klein Blue) written on its side. This and the Bowie drawing are being reproduced as posters and will be distributed freely around the city during the festival.
To return to my original point, what I find fascinating is that all of these works that are more closely relating to city or urban cultures, came from a practice-based research focusing on mountains! I have not pinned down this ‘mountain effect’ and I am sure it is not necessary to do so. But it is clear that it is central to my work, keeping it (for me) exciting and surprising.
The curator Jérême Cotinet-Alphaize, and myself will have little idea of the effect our work will have on the individuals attending the festival. Our work is as much for ourselves as it is for them. Maybe the best one can hope for is to echo the words of Yves Klein from his newspaper Dimanche when he wrote
“I wish that on this day joy and wonder will reign, that no one will get stage fright, and that everyone, conscious as well as unconscious actors-spectators of this gigantesque presentation, should have a good day.... I know that everything inevitably is going to work out very well for everyone...” Yves Klein. 1960.
“I know that for everyone everything is going to work out fine”. It would make a good work.

neal beggs 2008.