Corriedoo

 

This week I was pleased to receive the first issue of the Corriedoo newspaper. Back in 2017, Helmut Lemke and Kerry Morrison moved to Scotland, and by 2022 they had renovated and launched the BYRE in Corriedoo as an innovative artspace, hosting exhibitions, performances and residences. The Corriedoo newspaper is the new platform to communicate news about the BYRE and their practice; a practice, as the paper notes, of “Improvisation is not a skill but an attitude.” I have proffered previously my view that Helmut is the John Cage of our time, while it over-eggs and distorts the analogy to imply that Kerry is the Merce Cunningham, I believe that the creative partnership and expressive dialogue between Kerry and Helmut carries that significance, qua vision and the importance of their life in art. Of course, we live in world of such barbarous temper a Cage figure is outright marginal. Maybe that is why the BYRE is so important. 

I joked with them that the BYRE is in ‘the middle of nowhere’, but on reflection, looking at the state of the world and the state of what Marcuse called ‘the commodity form of culture’ – maybe the reservoir space for art’s unfettered autonomy is the middle of nowhere and in the era of surveillance capitalism, nowhere is the liminal space of least constriction. But the dynamic has to be more than simple withdrawal, indeed in pursuit of art as truth-value rather than exchange-value, “art as human activity [happens] in a political context with political consequences.” In this sense “a place is not a statement of localisation; it is, in fact, to the contrary, a statement of de-localisation.” (Sylvain Lazarus)

The peripherality of Scotland is no accident; similarly our relocation to Portugal was a move to an edge space. I’ve not written about this here, and will expand on it in a future blog, but it is our plan to move to a property with land, accommodation/workspace for artists’/writers’ residences and an exhibition space. We have in mind something more like Safn than Little Sparta, or Corriedoo Byre.