Alan Hathaway
forever and just for one day
17 July – 20 August 2022 at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow G42 8DN
Exhibition open by appointment
As part of the exhibition a series of three improvised performances curated by Fritz Welch will take place in the space at 20 Albert Road on 6, 13 and 20 August.
6 August: Jessica Argo and Fritz Welch
13 August: EGO DEPLETION with special guest Benicio del Trainwreck
20 August: Fritz Welch
It’s no lament to say that the future lies behind us – the question, crucially, is what we will do with it, where we will take it.
Lester Bangs
For 20 Albert Road the artist Alan Hathaway has created something that is simultaneously a painting, a bedroom wall and a stage set. The exhibition and accompanying risograph publication, titled forever and just for one day, employ and reconfigure found imagery connected to David Bowie, specifically a performance of the song Heroes on Top of the Pops in 1977 and a series of concerts given at the Apollo Theatre in Glasgow in June 1978.
Pop – its visuals (record sleeves, posters, clothes) as well as its sound – was where Hathaway first encountered art and for him, as for many others, Bowie’s music and the multiple identities that he adopted in the 1970s made life a little less ordinary and suggested ways of becoming some other kind of self. The act of becoming a fan was for Hathaway analogous to that of becoming an artist – making the most of fragments of experience, re-presenting and re-configuring them through material processes. His work experiments with analogue and digital video, screen-printing, chance and play. It seeks to capture a sense of the collective unconscious, the ghosts of our lives coming back to haunt us, and investigates how our cultural memories are shaped not just by the production qualities of an era (black and white, mono, certain kinds of drum sound or recording ambience) but by subtle properties of the recording media themselves (photographic or film stock redolent of the 1970s or ‘80s).
The philosopher Simon Critchley has argued that David Bowie’s music expressed a truth, but one that was inauthentic, completely self-conscious and utterly constructed. It created an illusion whose fakery is not, however, false but one that can save us from ourselves, from the banal fact of being in the world. This place can be escaped, forever or just for one day.
Alan Hathaway is an artist who was born in London and is now based in the north east of England.
www.alanhathaway.com
