1. projects

      • THIS OUR STILL LIFE


        Edgeman
        Andrew Kötting

        Notes on a far from still life
        by Gareth Evans

        In the culturally deforested landscape of maverick, visionary, eccentrically English film-making and all-round pranksteresque art / life business, Andrew Kötting more often than not stands alone, not dissimilar to the last remaining strong trees he often places prominently in his uniquely realised, cross-platform artworks. Just into his 50s, he has spent the last three decades constructing an edifice of artefacts in all media that speak to a range of concerns they would not normally be possible to corral within a single oeuvre. From dadaist shorts (Klipperty Klopp) to national circumnavigations (Gallivant), from lo-fi and brooding family collapse (Smart Alek) to cross channel swim doc (Offshore), and from inflated paternal exorcism (In the Wake of a Deadad) to Calvinoesque French-language family feature (IVUL), Kötting’s filmography, let alone the installations, bookworks, multi-media mash ups, sound pieces, concerts and physical production tests, speaks to a restlessly inventive and equally driven psychology entirely at odds with the script development limbos of contemporary production.

        London-based (Peckham’s Pepys estate) until a few years ago, and now gone coastal in St. Leonards, Kötting’s talent is built upon four key strategies or thematic foundations: collaboration, family, endurance and the non-urban (countryside is not the term, nor landscape (too ‘other’) – Kötting’s is a visceral cohabitation with place). The first is the given mode of practice; constant dialogues in all areas of making with a regular band of artistes, with loyalty here the key (on all sides). Family is the work, the bedrock bottom line. In subject, inspiration, reasoning and framing, Kötting’s own background and his own domestic alliances shape everything he does.

        Endurance provides the fuel, strange as that may seem. Mental, material and physical challenges inform and imbue the work with the energy needed to continue. Kotting has spoken movingly about the radical shifts in life priorities occasioned by the birth of his daughter Eden two decades ago. Born with the very rare Joubert’s syndrome, Eden’s condition placed enormous pressures on Kötting and his now wife, artist Leila Macmillan. Confirming an interior resilience that was already present if not fully deployed, Kötting redirected his hours towards a way of making, living and continuing that centred Eden and her needs in an unfolding trajectory of creativity unprecedented in British art, whatever its medium.

        Major projects in this line have included Gallivant, Mapping Perception and now This Our Still Life, filmed in parallel with Eden’s growing, and in the French Pyrenees where the family summer (and winter) in an old semi-converted mountain farmhouse. Utilising multiple image formats, it’s a warm, intimate and remarkably expansive new place & person portrait. In it, Kötting seeks to claim for the ‘home movie’ the same aesthetically invigorating and philosophically enquiring status that the established ‘road movie’ genre occupies.

        That he succeeds so movingly in this is testament to his profound engagement with the subjects of his exploration. Kötting understands instinctively that, in these unsettling and transformative times, the local in both heart and hearth needs to be radically reimagined as the prime locus of our needs and search for belonging. By translating the source co-ordinates of his emotional life into a narrative of resonance and reach to audiences far beyond immediate familiarity, he tells the enduring tales of weather, topography, architecture, family and their attendant loves – time embodied in both land and the actions it holds – with a lightness of touch that digs deep indeed.

        Released now by the BFI, it’s genuinely heartening to think such a distinctive film can still find wider purchase on cinema screens. This sense of Kötting finally being acknowledged for the radical humanity of his making continues. His new feature Swandown, describing a delirious passage by swan pedalo from Hastings to Hackney via the south coast, inland waterways of Kent and the Thames Estuary, in partnership with London magus Iain Sinclair, is in post production and will appear in 2012 as a charm against a corporate Olympic culture and a celebration of real people in ‘real’ places.

        Given this, and all else this most idiosyncratic of makers manages to fit in meantimes, it could well be that the Kötting edge is becoming finally more and more central to our thinking about what art can do, and how it can look and work, in this most unsettled of eras and nations.

        Gareth Evans is a writer, editor and curator

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