Last week, Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery hosted a collective poetry reading inspired by the artist, Mark Wallinger’s, Adam.  The poem forms part of his current exhibtion at the Gallery, now in its last few days.  Adam is a ‘found’ piece created from 33 first lines of poems beginning with ‘I’ from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.  Visitors were invited to choose one of the poems to read, declaim or sing – or simply to join in as a listener.  Mark began the evening with a reading of Adam, followed by members of the audience and gallery staff.  A lot of the poems were rather sombre yet the tone of the evening was light and the event was touching for its bringing together of strangers and ages.  There was some excellent singing and a real sense of serendipity when it was agreed that each member of the audience should read a verse from the longest poem, Sydney Thompson Dobell’s The Orphan’s Song, and it turned out there were the exact number of verses as people.  Mark hadn’t conceived of such an event when he created the poem but it was clear that he was delighted with this evolution of his work.  It was an evening that not only took Duchamp’s philosophy of a work of art requiring the viewer to complete it, but one that also then added an entirely new layer to the piece.  A most enjoyable event and an idea that will hopefully be used again at future exhibitions.