In 2000 Trevor Avery collaborated with Nigel Mullan on Subterranean Landscape Blues, a New Media Scotland Commission that premiered at Art.tm in Inverness. Exhibition installation of digital and museological pieces based on the history and present day impact of the oil industry and militarism on the Highlands of Scotland, and on the Cromarty Firth in particular. The focus of the film and installation centred on Twentieth century military underground oil storage facilities in the hills above Invergordon. Little known and not filmed until this project the cathedral sized caverns stored oil for the British Navy and were connected to the dock at Invergordon by underground pipelines.

Also showed at Glasgow Film Theatre and Belmont Cinema, Aberdeen.

The following gallery notes accompanied the exhibition installation:

“The five key participants in the filming of “Subterranean Landscape Blues” were, among other things, adopting the role of “detective”. What function we see them carrying out was first characterised by Thomas Huxley in 1882. In this essay he described the ability to visualise an animal from the tracks it had left behind as “retrospective prophecies”. He argued that prophetic reasoning rests in the same procedures whether they are applied retrospectively or not. So, are the “detectives” in “Subterranean Landscape Blues” continuing the noble tradition of “retrospective prophecy”?

In 1882 Huxley wished “that there were such a word as “backteller!” because he thought the word “backteller” stood “as the best way of describing the procedures of “the retrospective prophet” who “affirms that so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen”. By the time Huxley was publishing his essay on “backtelling” perhaps the most influential “backteller” of all, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, was in the process of establishing his reputation in the pages of The Strand magazine.

As a narrative form constructed around the provision of a trail of clues and their delayed decipherment, the methods of detective fiction are similar to the scientific mode of conjecture. Like the palaeontologist, the detective must reconstruct a past event – the crime – on the basis of its remnants. Just as for the palaeontologist, bones may be “all that remains” for this purpose, so a “detective policeman” as Huxley put it “discovers a burglar from the marks made from his shoe, by a mental process identical to the restoration of extinct animals from fragments of bone”.

“The museum of anthropology illustrates the natural history of “Man” (and “Woman”); the narratives of archaeology are called on to bridge the gap between the fields of anthropology and history, whilst the museum of history proper is to preserve “those material objects which are associated with events in the history of individuals, nations or races or their condition at different periods in their national life” (Gordon Goode Brown, 1896).

“The museum and gallery of art is like a history museum but with a special orientation. They illustrate, in a manner peculiarly their own, “not only the successive phases of the intellectual progress of races but also their sentiments, passions and morals, habits, customs, dress, implements and minor accessories of their culture often not otherwise recorded”. (ibid.)

Not until the late 19th Century did the museum and gallery come to be regarded as a separate cultural institution deserving of its own form of architecture. Where museums and galleries are custom built, even now, the desire to provide the visitor with a linear route is a strong one. Its continuing influence from the 19th into the 21st century is still evident. But where did this linear route come from?

The museum and gallery were to show the “elementary” logic of piecing fragments of the past together and presenting it in an understandable, linear format. Specialists are employed to make sure that interpretations and “routes” are laid down in museums so that the visitors can experience “self improvement” to a form of enlightenment. These routes are highly managed.

Another Space, as the name suggests, operates mainly, but not always, in “other spaces”. These spaces are outside the “white cube” gallery (a twentieth century invention and anything but “neutral” as the white of purity suggests). It was a deliberate decision to film the “detectives” at work in “Subterranean Landscape Blues” because we knew it would be being presented in galleries where the “detectives” double up as security guards, in more ways than one.