Richard Demarco
RICHARD DEMARCO has personally experienced every Edinburgh Festival since its inception in 1947, as well as contributing to its history and innumerable manifestations of the visual and performing arts, plus conferences, symposia and master classes, to underline the importance of introducing an academic dimension into official International and Fringe programmes so that they integrate completely and significantly as they did in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and into the ’70s.
The Eighties began with an inevitable confrontation between the ethos of The Demarco Gallery and the ethos of the Scottish Arts Council. Joseph Beuys believed that ‘everyone is an artist’. Did that include those criminals serving life imprisonment? The Scottish Arts Council believed that art was firmly controlled by the concept of an art industry, that, indeed, art was part of a leisure industry and that the Minister of Culture was also the Minister for Tourism.
Richard Demarco has always believed that art and education are two sides of the same coin and that is why the Arts Council of Scotland came to the conclusion, in 1980, that Richard Demarco had ‘brought dishonour to the meaning of art, brought dishonour to the meaning of art in Scotland, and brought dishonour to The Demarco Gallery’ and, for that reason, he did not deserve to be supported by annual central government funding.
Richard Demarco has also always believed, from his ten years of experience as a primary and secondary school teacher (1957–1967), that the use of the language of all the arts expresses the incontrovertible fact that, as Joseph Beuys maintained, every human being possesses a birthright to be creative.
All expressions of art, particularly on the highest level, are a gift and, indeed, ascend to the condition of prayer, in gratitude for the gift of Life. As a gift, it cannot be attached to a price tag. He acknowledges the fact that his experience of the Edinburgh Festival, from his boyhood to this troubled computerised world of the Third Millennium, is a blessing upon his life and, indeed, a blessing upon Edinburgh as the city of his birth.
The Edinburgh Festival came into being against all the odds when the pain endured by humanity in the aftermath of World War II seemed insufferable. A small group of friends were eager to support Rudolf Bing’s belief that Edinburgh could become an ideal British version of Austria’s pre-war Salzburg Festival. They took the language of art most seriously as the one language given to human beings which could begin the process of healing the wounds of global conflict. Ironically, therefore, without the suffering caused by the Second World War, the Edinburgh Festival could not have come into being. According to the Lord Provost, John Falconer, as the first Chairman in 1947, the Edinburgh Festival was an expression of ‘the flowering of the human spirit’ and therefore ‘it was in no way a commercial venture’.
When Richard Demarco asked Joseph Beuys to explain the quintessential nature of his art, Joseph Beuys replied succinctly ‘my art is my teaching’. In 1972, The Demarco Gallery’s experiment in education through all the arts was entitled with the use of two words – EDINBURGH ARTS. It was inspired by Black Mountain College, the American equivalent of the Bauhaus, and by Edinburgh as the world capital of all the arts.
From 1957 to 1967, Richard Demarco was the Art Master of Edinburgh’s Scotus Academy and worked closely with his colleague, Arthur Oldham, who was the Academy’s Music Master. Together, they firmly believed that every Scotus Academy boy was born to be creative. Richard Demarco extended his Scotus Academy art room to be identified with the Paperback Bookshop created by Jim Haynes in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From the year 1963 to 1967, Richard Demarco became the Vice-Chairman of what was in fact a slight enlargement of the Paperback Bookshop.
This came to be known as the Traverse Theatre Club and was housed in an 18th-century eight-storey tenement in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket in close proximity to Edinburgh Castle on the historic Royal Mile. It was also, under Richard Demarco’s directorship, Scotland’s first art gallery focused completely on the international art world and the need for a powerful dialogue between Scotland and the European art world on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
As such, the Traverse Theatre Club established an international reputation for both the visual and performing arts. However, when Jim Haynes moved his concept of the Traverse to London, the Traverse spirit of internationalism continued to shine bright within the Edinburgh New Town house of what was to be known as The Richard Demarco Gallery. It was actually the Edinburgh version of Roland Penrose’s London-based Institute of Contemporary Art. It seemed inevitable that, in 1972, The Demarco Gallery should become a ‘university of all the arts’ in collaboration with Edinburgh University’s Schools of Scottish Studies and Extra-Mural Studies.
In 2013, Richard Demarco was invited to the European Parliament in Brussels. There, Martin Schulz, as President of the Parliament, awarded him a medal as a European Citizen of the Year. His European citizenship is well defined in the publication entitled Demarco 2020 as a celebration of his 90th birthday.
The Demarco Archive is a large-scale collaborative work of art – a unique Gesamtkunstwerk. It exists predominantly in nature. It could, therefore, be compared to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gesamtkunstwerk of Little Sparta. It exists in a farmscape known as ‘Stonypath’ in the landscape of Lanarkshire.
EDINBURGH ARTS linked the Edinburgh cityscape with the farmscape of Kinross-shire. Meikle Seggie is a working farm. It is a point of departure which leads to a journey through time and space to the Apennine farmscapes of Richard Demarco’s Roman ancestors around the town of Picinisco, near to the Abbey of Monte Cassino and the city of Cassino.
Picinisco existed in Roman times, close to the villa of Cicero. The citizens of this village are known as ‘Ciceroni’ – the children of Cicero. They have become famous as artists’ models as a direct result of their lifestyle as farmers and shepherds. In this world, mankind has related to the extreme forces of nature from pre-historic times. As proof of this thought-provoking fact, there exists pre-historic rock carvings of shepherds and their sheep in the mountainous wilderness around Picinisco.
By focusing on The Road to Meikle Seggie, Richard Demarco is responding to a need to celebrate his Roman forebears who once regarded Scotland as the north-western frontier of the Roman Empire. Richard Demarco regards himself as a teacher, mainly on primary and secondary levels, using the language of all the arts. This provides proof positive that Scotland remains, from its earliest history, a unique and important manifestation of the cultural heritage of Europe.
