What is real at Jupiter Rising?

In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance
Sgàire Wood
14.08 – 18.10.26

The bus, Park’s of Hamilton, drops the crowd, elf-eared and fairy-winged, on the roadside opposite the Artland’s gates. En route to the festival, the elves and fairies sausage-roll down Charles Jenck’s tellytubby hills. The pools between the ‘Cells of Life’ are dyed turquoise. The sun above is a quarter of yellow in the corner of a too-blue sky. There’s some pygmy goats over a billy goats bridge. We wonder if later they’ll be able to hear junglehussi from their pen.

This year’s Jupiter Rising X Edinburgh Art Festival is curated by Glasgow-based artist, performer and ‘Sgàireoke’ host, Sgàire Wood. In a recent interview with Fest Mag, she said that Jupiter Artland reminds her of The Prisoner, a British sci-fi series from the ‘60s set in a pastoral village whose population is mostly happy, though they have numbers instead of names and can’t tell their prison guard from their neighbour.

At 5.47pm we cross off ‘vogues’ from our Jupiter Rising bingo card while sitting on a hay bale in the X MUSE Sunset Bar. Robert Wilson, live-in co-founder of Jupiter Artland and heir of Nelson’s Pharmacies (purveyors of ‘holistic wellness’) orders a Red Stripe from the bar. Later, we see Nicky Wilson sporting a ‘Global Feminist’ t-shirt by the Boob Bar. Our prison guards or our neighbours? We’ve got six hours to wonder before the bus back to Glasgow.

Most of the performers are Glasgow-based, handpicked by Wood from her circle of artist friends who are also performers, musicians, novelists, poets and the like. Among them are Poisonous Relationship, aka Jamie Crewe (artist), Princessa Mangione III, aka Shola von Reinhold (author), and junglehussi, aka Matthew Arthur Williams (photographer). The first we see is the DJ and producer, naafi. She plays a set that moves from sparkly ambient towards a James K kind of tech-house. It’s very danceable but the crowd are too shy or sober to move anything more than their wrists under the skylight of the Glasshouse. We agree this must be the audience ‘holding space’, and cross it off the bingo.

While queuing for a veggie chilli dog (the chilli is cauliflower mixed with sriracha) I overhear someone wonder why the festival is so tame this year. Maybe erotic reptilian performance art will help? We slither through a packed crowd to watch Holly O’Brien’s latex alien mermaid performance, of Haghill gallery, Horsepower fame, before realising we’ve mixed up our erotic reptile performers, silly us. We slither back out, resolve to catch the second half, and head to The Ballroom, where a bottleneck of other tardy Desert Kingsnake fans has formed between the hedges. We cut across the grass and wait by closed doors. Sober signs inform us there will be ‘No photography. No touching. No propositioning.’

Inside, Kirstin Halliday languishes as our snake on a red-lit leather couch. They shed their skin in a reverse-anthropomorphic strip tease (the snake grows legs, is human). Their transformation is complete later, when they take up the Sgàireoke mic for a wonderful rendition of ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’ by Charlene, a 70s Motown singer who dropped off the face of the earth in the early 80s. A slimy ponytail is the only remnant of Halliday’s reptile self. Later we spot O’Brien in the crowd in human form. Both encounters resonate, in an accidental kind of way, with Wood’s artistic preoccupation with artifice and authenticity.

Her festival curation is both an ideal party and a real life case study for the themes in her accompanying exhibition, In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance. In it, Wood destabilises the symbolism of flags, crests and coats of arms to rupture their ever-closer relationship to violent nationalism, sectarianism and other exclusionary identities. Through three symbolic mascots of her own – a pelican for piety, a peacock for pride and a crane for vigilance – she mimics the gilded pomp of those symbolic identities. The blood of the pious pelican for example, so-called according to a Christian myth that claimed the bird draws blood from its own breast to feed its young, is fake. The vigilant crane balances atop a pile of rubble, clutching a prayer book in its white gloved hand.

Wood makes explicit the fantasy thinking required to understand identity only through symbols like colours on flags and crests on banners. It is an identity moulded on illusion, a performance posing as reality. An artificial self is mistaken for an authentic one, with no awareness there ever was or could be a difference. In a shield of false eyelashes, Wood makes the line between artifice and authenticity explicit.

I spent most of the festival trying to differentiate the artificial from the authentic. Cauliflower sriracha chilli, reserved tables by the fire pit…The Wilsons as the noble benefactors of Scottish queer and experimental art? Artifice. Sgàireoke, lesbian reptiles and Glasgow’s queer club scene? Authentic. There is always, I suppose, a dissonance between the art and the means that fund it. When public funding is so strapped, there’s few tempting alternatives for less well-off artists and art organisations but to cosy up to Wilson characters (i.e. eccentric but comparably, mostly benign millionaires). At Jupiter Rising though, the dissonance was hard to ignore.

At 11.30pm, we head to the Wild Kitchen in the hopes of crossing ‘something foraged’ off our bingo card before the night ends. There’s a few people sitting on logs, real logs, around the firepit. Staff are piling hundreds of £4 marshmallows into plastic storage tubs, so we ask for two. They tell us to take as many as we want. Soon there’s at least ten of us burning marshmallows over the flames and I wonder if someone might start singing ‘This Land is Your Land’.

By home time, our bingo card is only half full. We saw no dogs in bags, heard no Madonna karaoke, though we did catch ‘John’s’ cover of ‘The Ballad of Chasey Lain’ from the Bloodhound Gang’s 1999 album Hooray for Boobies. There’s still, at least, some unexpected things at Jupiter Rising.

We wander back past the goats and the tellytubby hills by the light of our phone torches. The bus picks us up off the side of the road just after midnight. All the elves and fairies are in tow.

Evie Glen is a freelance journalist living in Glasgow. Her writing is concerned with understanding contemporary Scotland through its people, culture and arts.