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EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL, THE
ENLIGHTENMENTS, EDUCATION PROJECT

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL,
FILM COMMISSION FOR THE SPACE, DUNDEE & TRAVERSE, EDINBURGH

The List Link

Lives and works in Glasgow & San Francisco FUCKING SELECTED... HELL, YES

Solo Exhibitions
Heavy Influence, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Magazine 09, Edinburgh Art Festival, 14–30 August 2009
A Million Lies performance at Reveal/Reset, Edinburgh Art Festival, InSpace, Art Late, Edinburgh, 27 August 2009 (*)
Garlands, The Park Gallery, August–September 2008, with Janie Nicoll with the installation Mineral Park, featuring: Zefrey Throwell, Desirée Holman, Lewis Holleran, Lucy Keany, Anne Colvin, and John Vitale
House/Lights, Park Gallery, May 4 2008
Meddle with the Devil, with Janie Nicoll, Park Gallery, Callendar Park,
April–June 2008
The Consequence, Alex Hetherington and Janie Nicoll, Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow, 2007
HOUSE/LIGHTS (a revival), Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, July 2007
The Fictitious On Kawara, Emerged [chronicler], Glasgow, UK, 2004

Group Exhibitions
Warehouse of Horrors, +44 141, SWG3, Glasgow curated by Ben Fallon, 1-15 November 2009
Embassy Screen, The Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh Annuale, 20 June- 5 July 2009
Sarah Winchester Made Me Hardcore, film screening, File 2009, July–August, Sao Paulo, Brazil
OPA 0.2 Festival, Bios, Athens, Greece, May 2009
I Am Kurious Orange, David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco May 2009 (Curated by Anne Colvin)
Sarah Winchester Made Me Hardcore, live performance, HALLelujah, Glasgow, curated by Janie Nicoll, April 2009
File Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Oi Futuro Cultural Center, March–April 2009
The Colony Room, New Langton Arts/Tart, San Francisco, Sept-Oct, 2008
Fool’s Gold, Caravan of Horrors, the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, October 2008
Another Roadside Attraction, Shoreditch, London, May, 2008
Hatch, Bradford, November 2008
Live Art Falmouth, Falmouth, UK, June 2008
The Sparky Show, Schroeder Romero / Winkleman Gallery, New York, 2008
File 2007, Sesi Gallery, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2007
Videononstop, La Isle, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 2007
Visions in the Nunnery, The Nunnery, Bow Arts Trust, London, UK, May 2007
Freshfest, Bracknell, UK, January 2007
winterwhite, Pretty Blue Sky, Chicago, USA, December 2006
Magazine, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2006
File 2006, Sesi Gallery, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2006
60 Seconds of Play, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta, USA, 2006
With screenings in Atlanta, Savannah, Athens, Georgia & Brooklyn, NY and New Delhi, India
Resonate, East Kilbride Arts Center, UK, 2005
File 2004, Sesi Gallery, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2004
Members Show, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, UK, 2000
RC, Albion Street, Glasgow, UK, 1998
Travel Light, Birmingham Arts Trust, Birmingham, UK, 1998, with Fabienne Audeoud

Bibliography
Alex Hetherington: House/Lights, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Rosie Lesso, AN Magazine, July 2007
I Am Kurious Orange, David Cunningham Projects, Orlando Santos, Interface, June 2009

Grants/Awards
Creative Lab, CCA, Glasgow, April 2009
Glasgow Visual Arts, 2009
Alt-W, New Media Scotland, 2008
Scottish Arts Council, Professional Development Award, 2007-08
Hope Scott Trust, 2007
Scottish Arts Council, Professional Development Award, 2006
Robert Brough Travel Scholarship, Paris, France, 1990

Projects
Critical Writing
Annette Ruenzler: The power to faint at will - or not, Sorcha Dallas, The List, May 2009
Jimmy Robert, Grey Flannel Suits Any Man, Sorcha Dallas, The List March 2009
AN Interface
The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Space, Tate Liverpool, UK, December–February
San Francisco: On Ben Shaffer, Anne Colvin, Julio César Morales
The Way that We Rhyme: Women, Art and Politics, Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco
Joan Jonas, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of things, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley
Starship: Written on spiders, Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
Skank Bloc Bologna, Number Two (Langton Edition), Tart, San Francisco
Once Within a Room/Phantom Rosebuds, New Langton, San Francisco
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, PS1, NYC
Minty Donald: Glimmers in Limbo, Tramway, Glasgow
Catherine Sullivan, Triangle of Need, Metro Pictures, NYC
Fabric of Protest and Turner Prize 2007, Tate, Liverpool
Three Years and Counting, Tart, San Francisco
Superhumanatural, Douglas Gordon, RSA, Edinburgh
An Magazine
Straylight Cavern, Cooper Gallery, Dundee, AN Magazine, February 2009
Minty Donald, glimmers in limbo, Tramway, AN Magazine, April 2008
Others
Prices, Cathy Wilkes, The Modern Institute, Matt Roberts Arts, London, 2008
On Brigid McLeer, Vexations, Site Platform, Site Gallery, Sheffield, January 2008
Three Years and Counting, Shotgun, San Francisco, September 2007
“All the Wild Children”, essay for Magazine Map, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2007
Catherine Sullivan, CCA, MAP, February 2007
Mark Raidpere, Shifting Focus, Tramway, MAP, November 2006
On Nadim Karam; Gina Saccone; Nina Edge; Adam Nankervis at Liverpool Biennial, Independents, Liverpool, October – November 2006
Like it Matters, CCA, Glasgow, Stretcher, San Francisco, US, 2006
Glasgow International, Stretcher, San Francisco, US, 2005 (www.stetcher.org)
Goya Vs Yoko Ono, Map, Edinburgh, UK, 2005
The Tramway, Shorts 5, Polygon, Edinburgh, 2002
Ellen Cantor, Transmission, Black Dog, London, 2002
Digital Dialogues, San Francisco Art Institute, Stretcher, SF, US, 2001
Stephen Skrynka: Tunnel, Sculpture Matters, UK, 2000
Continuum 001, CCA, The List, UK, 2000
Become Like Me, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, The List, UK, 2000
Group Show, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, The List, UK, 2000
Neil Bickerton/Lorna MacIntyre/Knut Asdam, Transmission Gallery,
The List, UK, 2000
Crack is Wack, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, The List, UK, 1999

Publications
Yuck N Yum, Dundee, April 2009
Praktika, Deveron Arts, Huntly 2008
Fool’s Gold #2, edited by Lucy Keany, Edinburgh, January 2009
Flit Magazine, Portland, Oregon, October 2008
Mineral Park, The Park Gallery, Falkirk, 2008
Fool’s Gold #1, edited by Lucy Keany, Edinburgh, June 2008
The Village Voice, Falkirk Residency, February 2008
Skank Bloc Bologna #1, TART, San Francisco, February 2008
The New York Times, January 2008
The Consequence, Shaking Hands with the Devil, by Sarah Smith, UK, 2007
Notebook, Current Gallery, Baltimore, US, 2006
Prog:Me, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2005
Friends and Friends of Friends, Baltimore, US, 2005

A Million Lies; Once and Only Revealed After Death

Inspace, Edinburgh
27 August 2009

Reviewed by: Orlando Santos

According the dramatic treatment for Alex Hetherington’s new three-channel video and performance work A Million Lies Once and Only Revealed After Death, the action follows a wildly complex narrative including the sea shanty Shallow Brown, who was called shallow because “he was shallow in his heart” written by HE Piggott and Percy Grainger to the life story of eccentric American gun heiress Sarah Winchester who built a sprawling family home based entirely on superstition and a belief she was haunted by the spirits of the gun that made her fortune; an email scam to share in a fortune of twenty dollars following the death of a wealthy engineer based in Nigeria; a job email scam to join the crew of a ship that will sail the ocean on the whims of a wealthy client and the story of American industrialist James Deering and his ornate Miami estate Vizcaya which contained his vast film collection from the Pathéscope archive on now defunct 28mm film stock and the story of a criminal John Deering, who in a bizarre experiment allowed his heart to be monitored during his execution by firing squad. The action moves, in a humorous re-enactment of one of Sarah Winchester’s daily séances, on board Moonbase Alpha from the 1970s TV series Space 1999 where a crew member hallucinating due to extended confinement on the satellite adrift in the universe uses psychic powers to find a habitable planet, he performs the séance in defiance of the base’s Captain who prevents the crew member from using technology to scan for this new ‘home world’. Realizing he has been hallucinating all along the crew member relinquishes his desires. Finally an extract from Jayson Blair’s biography is read; Blair was a disgraced New York Times journalist who was found to have falsified his news reports and features, particularly stories from the first Gulf War. The extract reveals the moment that his employers confront him with his deceptions.

Surrounding this work, and crucial to its reading is Hetherington’s deployment of two film works by the American artist Catherine Sullivan, The Chittendens and Triangle of Need. Hetherington wrote reviews of these works at screenings and installations in Glasgow, Scotland and New York and underlying this treatment of view to review, review to view, from page to screen is an analysis of identity and its theft and corresponding analysis to Nicolas Bourriaud’s thesis on ‘Postproduction’ tactics, which ‘frames contemporary art within the operation of discjockeys’. Hetherington becomes synthetic DJ, remixing Sullivan’s work making it into an element in a play list, where identity, the identity of his broad range of characters, both real and fictional and of Sullivan herself become material to inhabit and dismantle in this exacting screenplay that finally surmises the weakness of identity and its values from external and internal sources: in the email scams temptations or the wealthy industrialist confined to view the world via film stock, the fortunes desired are the same desires that will oppress, that superstition and skewed belief systems will not liberate but confine, the hallucinating crew member disfigured by his desire for escape or Jayson Blair’s news stories desiring reward, fame and recognition before truth and transparency. Hetherington orchestrates inside this work statements about resources and means and in particular to the art world itself. He compares his shooting schedule for his production alongside a brief analysis of Sullivan’s works.

I enjoyed Hetherington’s use of the three screens in the work that orchestrates a series of sequences where he brought together a cast of actors in different period costume to play out multiple roles in white studios and opulent stately homes, to his use of accents, pre-recorded voices and a vocoder to read out the email scams, making them all the more weird and uncomfortable. Equally I enjoyed the running use of Frank Capra’s film It’s A Wonderful Life, edited by the emerging Scottish artist Lewis Holleran. Capra’s film used the line: As though he never existed and this sentiment runs neatly through the work as characters from myth, cinema, theatre, art and melodrama appear and disappear almost simultaneously. The use of the ‘zombie’ physical motif is most pertinent on occasion: the dead from email scams brought to life in tragic circumstances, but who never existed in the first place used as traps to steal the identity of the living. The works speaks of gullibility, vulnerability and fallibility; his screens speak about surface, gesture and empathy and the intention of drama.

As with most of Hetherington’s recent output complexity, a vigour of research and intensity and sensitivity toward synchronizing and colliding disparate materials are key elements to his widening practice, particularly in live art, and in accompanying blog web sites and short run publications, which on the night included a handout A3 print, Sarah Winchester Made Me Hardcore, which lists celebrities with fake names, including ridiculous sounding gay porn stars, stars from rap music, ventriloquists and individuals famed for their duplicity.

These are rewarding experiences, acutely beautiful, intense, and sometimes totally impenetrable.

Writer detail:

Orlando Santos is an American writer currently based in Europe

Venue detail:
Inspace
Crichton Street, Edinburgh UK EH8 9AB

My practice, which is predominately performance and video-based, scrutinizes through forms of appropriation and postproduction specifically researched pre-existing materials often as the result of writing about those materials. These pre-existing materials are normally works that investigate gender, behaviour, memory, identity and status, these works also often collage or juxtapose multiple sources in their origination and most recently have investigated artwork made by female artists, which includes Catherine Sullivan, Trisha Donnelly, Elizabeth le Compte, Joan Jonas among others. I work with imitation: inhabiting the processes of another,  improvisation, re-enactment, the synchronization of different materials, authorship, research and collage and employ constant re-editing, manipulating and re-arranging to look at the construction and establishment of identity, meaning and knowledge.

037 'Warehouse of Horrors'
Curated by Benjamin Fallon
Presented with Embassy

Preview Saturday 31.10.09
19:30 - 21:30
01.11.09 – 15.11.09
Weds – Sun
12:00 – 18:00

Marc Bijl
Beagles and Ramsay
Olaf Breuning
Neil Clements
Alex Hetherington
Alan Holligan
Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy
Lyndsay Mann
Jonathan Owen
Emma Pratt
Aida Ruilova
Catherine Street
Chris Walker

Supported
by the National Lottery through the Scottish Arts Council.

Preview The Skinny

Performance, August 18 2009, at the installation Heavy Influence, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, featuring Alex Hetherington and Chris McCann. Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2009.

ESW, 25 Hawthornvale, Newhaven, Edinburgh, EH6 4JT.

3 screens, silent


Dramatic Treatment for A Million Lies; Once and Only Revealed After Death (Triangle of Need)

PERFORMANCE, 27 August 2009, Inspace, Edinburgh

Two folk singers are presented to an audience, a male singer and a female singer; they present three songs: an email scam is reinterpreted into a fake language that uses word forms from Swedish, Japanese and The Muppets, it has been written in the style of a man with incredible wealth whose desire is to resurrect a lost species, perhaps Neanderthal, his obsession with this recreation is non-specific; the second song is based on the life of the gun heiress Sarah Winchester and a proposal that the psychic who told her her fortune, which saw her indulge her wealth in a non-stop architectural project in San Jose, California, was actually a con artist seeking a vast share of her fortune; the third song is a new setting of the sea shanty Shallow Brown, from an arrangement by Percy Grainger and HE Piggott from 1908/1910. Shallow Brown, who was a sailor, and of a multi-racial background, known then as ‘challo’, and ostracized for his identity, was notorious for his philandering at different ports of call during his adventures at sea. It was claimed he stole the identity of different people at each port of call allowing him to create elaborate narratives for himself, employing these pretences to seduce women. The setting changes to Shallow Brown as he finds himself in the ship’s hold for an unnamed crime. Meanwhile Percy Grainger’s musical notes from his arrangement of the shanty are read, indicating that Brown received his moniker because he was shallow in his heart. In the hold Brown imagines the life of an immensely wealthy woman who he would seduce, fall in love with and eventually steal the fortune from, his time in the cell allows his imagination to run riot, however he is unaware that he is actually dreaming about the life of a real person, Sarah Winchester, and he has now entered her imagination. Sarah has become a prisoner to superstition, incredible wealth and a desire to remove herself from the public scrutiny, she indulges her every whim and lives out a life saturated by her superstition, she is motivated by a desire for immortality and conducts daily séances that reveal her future. She understands that the spirits killed by the gun that made her family fortune are returning to haunt her and during a psychic reading in Boston is informed that she must never stop building her home in order to protect her from these spirits; her home by the time of her death has become vastly complex, labyrinthine and enormously indulgent, the result of 38 years of non-stop additions, remodelling and adaptations. Sarah, on her death, leaves her fortune to a niece who receives the news of her new fortune in a letter delivered by Sarah’s family lawyers. The letter is read, but it is actually an email scam from the present and it has been rewritten attempting to share a ‘fortune’ of $20.50. A series of spirits in the form of Scotch and Bourbon are drunk by the narrator. The email scam read is the same one used by the American artist Catherine Sullivan from her work Triangle of Need, which the narrator viewed in New York, and also wrote reviews of, published in a series of online and print magazines. The spirits he is drinking are actually hallucinogenic and he enters the imagination of Catherine Sullivan. At the same moment a woman on screen reads out the dosage of tranquilizers she has taken to stem the severity of her panic attacks brought on by the stresses associated by her bullying repulsive employer. Sullivan’s dramatic treatment of Triangle of Need is read briefly concentrating on James Deering an early 20th century industrialist in Miami who built an opulent estate from his huge wealth; he is also a film collector and his wealth allows him to retreat from real life yet viewing it through films from the Pathescope collection of short films, in now redundant film formats. The films show normal scenes from everyday life, scenes from anthropology, just general footage. The narrator mentions an ice-skater seen in the original Triangle of Need film by Catherine Sullivan and also a similar ice-skater in a film made by the Scottish artist Wendy McMurdo. All the while we see scenes from Frank Capra’s film It’s A Wonderful Life, re-imagined by the artist Lewis Holleran, who has removed the scenes which see the central character George Bailey ‘experience’ life as though he had never existed. Holleran’s film appears in the list of films James Deering collected. A different man named Deering appears, a criminal, and death row inmate, who allows an experiment on his heart to take place at the moment of his execution. In this moment he imagine a life outside of crime, confinement and imprisonment. He understands at this moment of death, the shallowness of his heart. These ideas of confinement and desire find themselves within one of Sarah Winchester’s daily séances, none of which have ever been recorded. A second scam email is read, this time a job offer to join the crew of a ship that will sail the ocean, the ship is apparently the property of a company that specializes in indulging the whims of the wealthy, meanwhile the perpetrator of the scam alludes to the good quality nature of its proposed victim. The action moves to Moonbase Alpha from the TV series Space 1999. The crew of this space station based on the moon have been blown out of earth’s orbit and are now adrift in the universe. Alone and isolated they plan to inhabit a new planet. Years into their journey a crew member believes he knows where they can find a habitable planet, but the Captain of the space station is unconvinced and secures any attempts to locate this, as he believes, fictional planet. He locks down any tracking devises, any navigation devices and any technology that would allow them to scan for this new home. He fears raising hopes and desires of the crew members. Suspicious of his Captain’s motivations and now without the technology to seek this planet the crew member devises a séance to find it location. The séance proves futile and the obsessed crew member, now realizing he has been hallucinating due to extended confinement, demands that all the screens and technologies are switched off forever. Finally, a new character appears, the disgraced New York Times journalist Jayson Blair, who was found to have falsified and/or plagiarized his news stories; he describes the moment when his employers confront him with his deceptions.


The distribution of Alt-w awards is managed by New Media Scotland and funded by Scottish Screen and Scottish Arts Council.

Video for Warehouse of Horrors, Curated by Ben Fallon, November 2009, Glasgow, UK

Marc Bijl, Beagles and Ramsay, Olaf Breuning, Neil Clements, Alex Hetherington, Alan Holligan, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Lyndsay Mann, Jonathan Owen, Emma Pratt, Aida Ruilova, Catherine Street, Chris Walker.

SWG3, Glasgow, 1–14 November

Raw footage from the opening of HEAVY INFLUENCE at ESW, 14 August 2009. Shot by Dan Brown. DJs Janie Nicoll & Rachel Thibbotumunuwe. Hetherington will develop performances and film screenings around pre-existing material which will build in layers, constantly changing during the exhibition. The concept of virtual spaces will be exploited by connecting the artists and activities in Scotland with equivalent artists and activities in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

With: Jim Colquhoun.

Text from House/Lights, The Wooster Group, Gertrude Stein, Dr Faustus Lights the Lights. From an installation, The Consequence, Alex Hetherington and Janie Nicoll, Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow 2007. Also presented live at; Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 2007 and Meddle with the Devil, The Park Gallery, Falkirk, 2008; rescreened Bios, Athens Greece 2009.

Cigar smokers

Cut from Triangle of Need, filmed at the CCA, Glasgow, Creative Lab residency, April 2009, actors Cath Whippey and Stephanie Black,

I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone (not even myself) but my business. Though I am very rich, I was never generous, I was always hostile to people and only focused on my business as that was the only thing I cared