by Jose Maria Rosa and Maria Bleda
The opening exhibition falls under the auspices of the "Stirling 700" enterprise and shows a set of photoworks, each a framed double photograph of a local battle site, subcaptioned with the name and date of the battle site.
This work is far from the tradition of battle depiction. The photographic medium eschews painted heroics of traditional warfare (although some theorists have made much of the parallel development of modern warfare and photography). But these works also position themselves in opposition to the old photographers' ideal of capturing a decisive moment. The works by Jose Maria Rosa and Maria Bleda concern a draining of significance, accomplished by juxtaposing caption and photograph to emphasise that the unity of the original event is lost. Revisiting fields which were battle-sites so long ago demonstrates their distance in time and space.
The artists' projects in their native Spain have produced similar sets of photographs, both on the themes of battle sites and on their footballing surrogates in the goalpost series.
But while the current and previous series occupy one recognisable oeuvre, do the context and the social function remain the same? Is there not a great difference between a work on home territory in Spain and a commission abroad in Scotland?
Let us take the Spanish battleground works. To think of warfare in the Spanish context is to think predominantly of the 1936-39 conflict in which the people and land were riven by the simultaneous flashpoint of revolution and civil war. This experience informed the successful Francoist regime over the following 40 years, both as a suppressed experience whose validity must constantly be denied and the constant rumble of low-level guerrilla action used by the regime to justify its continuing repression.
Yet this conflict is entirely missing from the Spanish Battlefields series. When one looks at the exhibited catalogue with that fact in mind, it is an eerie absence: battlefields are depicted across 1,000 years of history - battlefields crossed by Moors and the Napoleonic armies; but apparently not by Franco's army or by the militias. This omission could be a deliberate act or a refusal to take a perspective, out of convenience or conviction. It may even be an admittance that some battlefields do retain the capacity to incite a passion which would overflow the coolness of the series. But omission it surely remains.
Shifting to the commissioned work, there is no shortage of battle-sites around Stirling. However, with the symbolic exception of Bannockburn, their modern significance is low. The Battle of Stirling Bridge has been boosted from a numerically insignificant 700th anniversary into a major joint venture between the Council and a gaggle of consultancies and enterprise quangos. Does it have any presence other than as a logotype? The commemoration's origin in a conflict, a friend-foe confrontation, is too intense for liberalism, especially in its current managerial form. As a result, they replace the conflictual with the celebratory. In the last resort, the events are spectacles celebrating the institutional joint venture more than anything else.
The programming of the photoworks by Rosa and Bleda might be seen as complicit in the disguise of conflict or it might be seen as a corrective reminder that, whatever the publicity, once conflict has lost its meaning, a battlefield is just a field. But the act of photographing a battle-field in that way loses its significance if that is already the way the wider population see it.
That, I suspect, is the basic perception which will be brought by the majority of people who climb the stairs to view "Battlefields" and who may then leave with a "So what?" shrug.
It is slightly unfortunate that it falls to a exhibition dealing with denial of meaning in this way to situate The Changing Room as a vital location. Such exhibitions are perfectly legitimate, but usually draw their power from a distinctive position relative to simultaneous, past or future exhibitions. However, I look forward to The Changing Room being built into a venue for a variety of exhibitions, originated both within and outwith the area.
September 1997