The office, the residency and the work soon will be located at that place. The farm needs attention, especially the garden. For all involved in working and living there, there is an obligation to connect to the ground. Every morning the staff works on the land. Every residency artist works on the land and has to deal with this land and the soil and the plants live on that soil. Or deal with the dears that eat the fresh salad that wasn’t meant for them. This place has ADSL and belongs socially to the village Coniston. But that is a long walk and the Lake District is a lot of driving. “Welcome to the Lake district” Lisa said when Kathrin was setup by all the driving. You drive there and come because the place is known by the artists that come and go and tell about it, the staff is known and welcomed at a lot of art-dinner-parties (also in London). Myvillages.org knew about them before we ever saw the Lake District. But the object itself has an own dynamic, lets look at the FARM AS AN OBJECT this land does something with you, it brings you down to … yes to what? What does the soil do? Karen can talk about soil with English words I've never heard before, but she uses gloves when she works in the garden.

THE FARM steps into the tradition of art and here specific into a sculpture tradition that is spatial made possible by the FORESTRY COMMISSION. Adam is since 1999 director of Grizedale Arts, he stepped into a tradition of sculpture – was and is Grizedale Arts moving away from that tradition and is the farm the last step? It went from sculptures in the woods – sculptures made by wood, or inspired by the woods - to a more social engaged practise and a lot of performing artists in (non)locations somewhere in the area, to a farm.
Interesting is that the last physical sculptures in Grizedale / added since 1999 / are mainly based on house structures see e.g. FAT, Paul Dodgson and Jo Coupe. So if I was an art historian looking for an oeuvre in the woody head of Grizedales Arts than I could say: `to go from that last sculptures based on house-forms towards a farm is spatial big but historically a logical step.` But I am not writing lines, nor interested in oeuvres, nor interested in the “being different” of a place like Grizedale. Being different is a strange goal connected to art, I hope we can get rid of that habit. In art I like to fit to locations, to the ground, to add and to move on. In the move there can be a critic but this is constructive I hope, and opens spaces not labels them. If a location is too far out I have to quite and go home. The farm feels close to art and to farming, but it is a strange thing. Just want to look what it is and what it does in a very basic form and from there see what you can add to it. Want to add what is following the line but triggers / myvillages.org can add things in the way it works already or wants to work…

Posted by Wapke Feenstra on 12/05/07 at 21:14 : 0 Comments

Topics: 'add things' 'being different'

I came by plane:
During take off and landing a young man imitates a sheep. The English mates laugh loud and drink another beer.

Countryside also means living with animals and monsters.
We said before the rural is (can be) a cruel place. Going for details, difference and preciseness is what I needed when I left myvillage to study elsewhere. The Lake District is such a different place, don’t get it at all. This English people look quite familiar to me, but I have not idea where I am. This place is also cruel but in a touristy way: it is over marketed and over signed. Tourist places can make me very moody, we are lucky it is not the season. Where are we? Grizedale Arts, Lawson Park what is it?

After the first –one day- visit to Lawson Park (September 2006) I bought the book “the lamp of beauty’ by John Ruskin and was occupied with this book and especially with his opinion on Dutch Landscape. “Dutch Light” is read as a disinterest in the lower live. Ruskin: “I should attach greater importance to this rural feeling [in Dutch landscape] if there were any true humanity in it, or any feeling of beauty. But there is neither. No incidents of this lower life are painted for the sake of the incidents, but only for the effects of the light. You will find that the Dutch painters do not care about this people, but about the lustres on them. Paulus Potter, their best herd and cattle painter, does not care even for sheep, but only for wool; regards not cows, but cowhide. He attains great dexterity in drawing tufts and locks. Lingers in the little parallel ravines and furrows of fleece that open across sheep’s back as they turn; is unsurpassed in twisting a horn or pointing a nose; but he cannot paint eyes, nor perceive any conditions of an animals mind, except it’s desire of grazing. Cuyp can indeed paint sunlight, the best that Holland’s sun can show; he is a man of large natural gift, and sees broadly, nay, even seriously; finds out – a wonderful thing for men to find out in those days - that there are reflections in water, and that boats require often to be painted upside down. A brewer by trade, he feels the quite of a summer afternoon and his work will make you marvellously drowsy. It is good for nothing else that I know of; strong; but unhelpful and unthoughtful. Nothing happens in this picture, except some indifferent person asking the way of somebody else, who by this cast of countenance, seems not likely to know is. For further entertainment perhaps, a red cow and a white one; or puppies at play, not playfully; the mans heart not even with the puppies. Essentially he sees nothing than the shine on the flaps of their ears.”
I like to look at the Dutch light, I like the passion for the lower life in the critic of Ruskin, I like the signs and the postcards that sell the landscapes of the Lake District, and for the same price I can hate them. Moods and opinions are shifting by looking at these things. The good thing is that we still can see the paintings of Cuyp and Potter. They are material. Looking at material and dealing with things I like that in art. That you can walk away and the thing is still there and when you come back, you have to deal with the thing again.
Lets see what objects can do to us and how we can differentiate our views and acts by using them – rethink resee reuse reshape re re rethings

Posted by Wapke Feenstra on 12/05/07 at 21:07 : 0 Comments

Flights from Liverpool are not sustainable, although the captain tells us of great news – Easy jet are planting trees to offset the carbon toll – frankly about half way through the flight, with a plane load of hysterical liverpudlians - that’s staff and passengers - all squeaking on in their cheeky chappie voices and laughing like Stan Boardman voice trained hyenas, for 2 hours - you don’t give a fuck about global warming, you wouldn’t give a shit if the entire universe caught fire and vanished like a burning Amaretti paper, if the other thing it’s impossible to comprehend that the universe is in disappeared down a cosmic plughole in a roll top bath with claw feet. You would merely experience a gentle sense of relief, a light but warm wind on your face and a gentle lapping of lakeshore waves about your bare feet - kind of a feeling.

I was in this air born tube of skallys as I was speaking at a conference in Barcelona, this had seemed like a good idea back in a wet and cold Lake District January, only trouble was I didn’t really look into what the conference was beforehand and I don’t think they really checked me out. My talk went down like a base jumper without a parachute, a kind of collective ‘are you telling me I ‘ve just run over my own child’ sort of response, no questions just a desperate ‘please get him of the stage before I become a puddle’ collective look. Recently I have been getting rather disturbingly enthusiastic responses to my talks so I really wasn’t ready for this and found it a rather awkward. Post talk none of the previously friendly people would talk to me, I walked through the crowd as if I had suddenly gained a force field that kept people a strict 10ft from me.

All in all it was one of the strangest conference style events I ve ever been to - imagine an Artist Newsletter (artist support agency) conference on how to get on in sculpture, maybe called ‘Making it Big’. The date is mid 80’s, the event is in multiple languages and the speakers have been selected by a room full of monkeys with a typewriter.

The guy who was MC was hyper friendly, every time he passed me – hand flapping, Groucho Marx walking - he would indicate two rather straight Americans with the words ‘doze guyzere kcrazy, a’m tellink yu, my got yez, dere crazzie’ the two besuited artist/managers of the Hudson river sculpture trail (100 miles of very big sculptures) look back blankly each time. Having seen their talk I am inclined to agree with the MC but possibly for different reasons. The question and answer section of their talk became a series of one upmanship anecdotes on moving large sculptural weights, ‘ I brought 30 tons back from Careara, 2,000 bucks shipping, 100 bucks to the fork lift driver, slip a couple o’ hundred to the guys in customs’. This sure aint critical theory.

Another presentation about a sculpture trail in Andorra called ‘Men of Steel’ features 7 men of a certain age making steel sculpture to celebrate the – now closed - iron mines of Andorra. One piece is a frieze of cut steel of vaguely figuerative forms. One cant help thinking how thrilled the miners must have been, how they would (given the chance) have sat for hours musing on the human condition, contemplating the man/earth transformation conundrum. Maybe the legacy of the mines is better expressed by the many monumental objects it has contributed to situated around the world, now these shipping tonnages I suspect may just piss on the tonnages we had already heard of. I look at this stuff and wonder why on earth anyone wants to do it, it looks hard, they tell us it’s hard, these are big things, they need death defying installation, I just don’t get it. Maybe I ve been in the art world too long and have lost any simple response I ever had to the meaningless object but does anyone actually even like these things? d’Suvero, Chilleda, these are the leaders in this field, their subject seems to be ‘exploring space’, wresteling with the pure problems of sculpture. (There are lots of references throughout the day to the word space and the exploration of it, I always hear it as outer space and momentarily think ‘oh that sounds good’ ‘exploring urban space’, ‘a journey into space’ Space is the place – no they didn’t say that’s a Sun Ra film).

The highlight talk was a close run thing between a man (traffic planner I think) that talked at length about roundabouts and the placing of art on them. Mainly he showed examples of dangerous, disproportioned, aesthetically displeasing…. there was a long list of things that were wrong and a very short one on things that were right. It was pretty funny for quite a long time (about 15 minutes –the talk lasted about 40), the range of works seemed to encompass examples of the art shown throughout the day. By this time in the conference I was considering that the whole thing maybe was a spoof, that some art people had set me up, maybe something to do with the Big Art Project (Channel 4 reality art programme in the making).

This talk was followed by Magdalena Abakanowicz, like Marina Abromovitch in her delivery and to some extent content. Her lecture started with a totally wild suggestion that all people of the world no longer had to worry about hunger of other physical discomforts (I think she meant Europe). She then stated ‘munkindt aulshow now haz zee chapacity tu exshterminate heemzelf einshtantly’ all delivered in a stacatto Russian Dalek voice. Sadly the talk then declined into a description of how she made her sculpture groups and the ease of shipping vast tonnages with only a brief return at the end to the Dalek manifesto. She also showed a classically poor quality piece of film documentation of a Butoh dance piece she had made in Japan, which was rather amazing – she was rather amazing full stop. Of course it was all that post war everything is shit and hopeless Beckett stuff so beloved of that generation, mankind is a mutant headless zombie type thing living in a hole, bag, bin, concrete shoes you know the sort of thing. Then I remembered that we all loved that ‘life is shit and then you die’ thing back in the day when art had only the serious message, then around 1978 someone made this terrible T shirt that said ‘Fuck art lets dance’ and then everything was alright. It really reminded me of being at art school in the 70’s.

The other talks included a presentation from the woman who advised Barcelona on public art acquisitions who seemed to be presenting her child’s home work – ‘Some sculptures you can see in Barcelona’ – in which she managed to omit Gaudi and many other of the sculptures most people would associate with Barcelona in favour of an lengthy romp through Victorian building decoration of the most dismal nature, I overheard someone describing her as an academic – Crapademic.

Possibly the most painful talk covered the works done for the 92 Olympics 8 bad examples of works by the usual suspects - still it was a long time ago and that kind of thing was kind of new then, i.e. conceptual works in places where people would not have any interpretation to explain what a series of numbers meant, or how the word born meant something different in another language. Here’s the line up for info - it is a classic; Plensa, Kornellis, Baumgarden, Ruckrheim, Horn, Merz, Munoz, Turrell, obviously one expects to see Weiner at the end of any list of artists of that period but no, here he was pioneeringly absent. The talk was equally classic, extremely long winded vague notions about understanding urban space as an environment that can be changed by the intervention of a connection to space as a understanding of.. I think it might have been a round, you know London’s burning, fire, fire etc. The rather nice conference organizer had to try and translate this shambles, he had a bit of the Robert Wagner about him, she a little of Mrs. H (Hart to Hart – 80’s TV show) ‘when day met it wus moirder’. So many people left that the organizer had to stand up and ask anyone else wanted to leave that they should do it now, generating a gurgeling drain unblocking exodus. I stuck to it not wanting to be rude and thinking how rude I could be about it later – the more I suffered the ruder I could be - without guilt. The recurring thought was that we would shortly be suffering a similar series of works for our own blood sucking, life draining celebration of the animal within (Olympics).

In the afternoon the MC changes his ‘Doze guyz are kcrazee’ to ‘you kcrazzee, my got yez, yur crazzee I’m tellink yu’ and he takes the opportunity to introduce me to all the crazy people at the conference none of whom want to talk to me (that’s how bad it was). I had dinner alone.

It all makes me think about these mini art worlds, no one at this conference knows of any of the artists I know, I don’t know any of their work or the names they reference. This is madness and it’s replicated madness, many times over, multiple mini worlds all self perpetuating not even interested in each other. What use is all this, and really what a waste of all this effort and skill. I think the problem is that the ‘other’ seems such a threat, mix all this up and it could start to get interesting.

I think my interest in the relationship between these many cultures is right, it’s what makes me keep going but this ‘coal face’ does make me wonder. The name of my talk was ‘Ways to be Useful’ ,pre talk the American guys saw the title and said ‘well there aint no way we can do that’ - Doze guyzre kcrazee.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 11/05/07 at 08:11 : 2 Comments

Travels with Grizedale Arts Deputy Director Alistair Hudson 03/07

On a plane to China again. 20 Curators on another crusade. This time the cause is Connections Through Culture, building lasting relationships between cultural organisations in the UK and China; though the political impetuous that drives us forward, that throbs deep in some cortex, is there’s gold in them their hills.

Connections though Culture is a joint initiative between the Department for Culture Media and Sport, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British Council with support from the Scottish Executive.

I’ve been on one of these trips before in November 2005 and the itinerary for this is the same gruelling, relentless tour of galleries, dealers, museums, studios, handshaking, functions, speeches. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun, enlightening, humbling and all that, but ultimately a little bit shallow. They feel like forced encounters and it’s difficult to navigate away from that. My cynical angel on the left shoulder keeps telling me the Chinese are laughing at the endless streams of curatorial crocodiles filing through, wanting a piece of the action. The more reasonable one on my right tells me that this is diplomacy in action. This is how we prevent wars.

I’ve been asked to join the group mainly to speak at the International Curating Forum in Beijing on Saturday. After Beijing I’m going to go off-piste to Guangzhou to meet with Vitamin Creative Space, with whom we are developing a project. Then after that it’s back home to get on with the stuff that pays the bills. I’ve had to cut this trip short as we’re so busy at home, building Greasy Poles, artists visits, public art strategies, fundraising, building a new office, running a farm, planning our project for Rochelle etc. It’s the downside of a small team like Grizedale that you can never find the balance between the grafting and the pioneering and the flag waving.

Cynical angel has just pointed out that I’ve conveniently and swiftly moved on from developing a project with Vitamin after we had agreed that all this China malarkey is just a bit sordid. Well obviously it’s not as clear cut as that.
I’ll have to come back to that.

Lumbering over Siberia in the dimmest light of predawn I can’t resist the mental flash of us as WWII action heroes approaching the drop zone. Blacked up faces and empty swag bags. Grab as much Chinese Contemporary Art as you can boys then head for home. It is all slightly sordid, but kind of inevitable.

We always used to joke on these kind of mass art world jaunts to Venice, Munster, Istanbul and where-ever, that if the plane went down you’d wipe out the art world. I suppose it was said in semi-deluded semi-seriousness, but now it’s a complete joke. There’s China now. And it’s getting big.

At a recent board meeting, after announcing we were going to work here, Claire Bishop couldn’t understand how we could do it. But we’re all Chinese now, we’re all in it together. Not least me; my wife is Chinese and so are my children back home. I eat Chinese, speak Chinese (badly) and worry about how its thirst for world resources is going to affect us all. I don’t think that I would have said in 1907 that I don’t want to, or won’t have, anything to do with America.

16 March

Upon reaching the hotel at 2.00pm we have 20 minutes to check in before our guide takes the group round the Forbidden City as an introduction to the Chinese context. Having seen the City before I decide to skip and go to bed. I’m knackered and nauseous after being on the move since 7.00 am the previous day. A cup of tea and a mooch in the park fit the bill better, especially before tomorrow’s symposium.

It would have been good to see the FC again though, I love the spectacle of it and it’s mix of history and fakey. The sheer volume of tourists there is just as much as a wonder of the world as the buildings themselves. And to add spice this time the palace museum within the walls is hosting a British Museum exhibition; a kind of Now That’s What I Call the History of the World Volume One. It marks a key moment as the BM tries to rebrand itself as the World’s Museum, a counter-imperialist move to maintain its collections through an outreach programme of global proportions. A bit like Grizedale really.

17 March International Curating Forum

Topics:
Curating international work for a different cultural context
Presentation and interpretation
The relationship between artist and curator

Chinese Speakers:
Fan Di’an, Director National Art Museum of China
Wang Huangsheng, Director, Guangdong Museum of Art
Lu Jie, Director Long March Space
Gao Shiming Professor, China Academy of Fine Arts
Pi Li, Director, Universal Studios

UK Moderator; Claire Lilley, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

UK Speakers:
Alistair Hudson, Deputy Director, Grizedale Arts
Jo Lanyon, Director, Picture This
Laura Pottinger Director Bedford Creative Arts
Tom Trevor, Director, Arnolfini

On the top floor conference hall of the National Art Museum of China the scene is quite United Nations, with podium, extravagant flowers, desk mounted name placards, translators’ booth and radio headphones providing the simultaneous translation.

This is serious. In a rash moment I had listened (I’d like to think in a Benjaminesque way) to that angel on the left and titled my talk I’ve got a Brand New Complex Harbinger: The Curator as Farmer. Realising that jokes, never mind references to the Wurzells are going to be lost here, I adjust to Curator as Farmer, Farmer as Curator.

As we alternate between Chinese and UK presentations it’s clear there’s something amiss. The British are giving case studies, the Chinese are talking theory, what seems to me like 90’s art theory, though the translation both ways is so bad it’s flattening out all the nuances.

Also the whole thing is so comically formal that there is no room for any discussion. Each speaker speaks for 20 minutes. After 18 mins a bell rings to warn you your time is nearly up. Then there is a further 10 minutes for questions also demarcated by the bell. This ten minutes is actually about 3 after the technicalities of making the translation work. I’m assuming that they don’t have Just a Minute in China, but surely some kind of cultural osmosis has taken place here.

Also another gulf opens up. All the UK curators are from the public sector. All we seem to talk about is audiences, engagement, social context and all that jazz. The Chinese contemporary art scene has no public sector and no public funding, they are all effectively art dealers bolstered by post colonial theory and the Economic Miracle. They don’t give a shit about audience. They have the most rampant and testosterone fuelled art market on the planet and they’re having fun. And good on them – I’m almost jealous.

The PHD students in the room are clearly intent on what the Chinese Uber Curators have to say, some of sections almost bristling with boybandfan electricity when the likes of Lu Jie, Pi Li, Fan Di’an and Qiu Zhijie speak.
Lu Jie’s address comes across as slightly aggressive. These boys are on a roll.

Fan Di’An summarises that the Chinese speakers spoke about big ideas and the British spoke about the small things. This time there is a bristle of something from us, particularly me, as I was talking about the end of art as we know it, which by my books is pretty big. But I don’t think Beijing wants art to stop being what it is just yet.

Interestingly the students are coy when it comes to asking questions in the sessions, maybe a little bit overawed by the big hitters. But afterwards many of them speak to the Brits and we get the feeling there is a new generation of thought emerging which is against the orthodoxy of the Chinese speakers.

18 March
798 is Beijing’s East End art zone. A Stalinist Bauhaus designed munitions factory and industrial zone on an epic scale. It’s like Shoreditch, Hoxton, New York’s Chelsea and Berlin’s Mitte all rolled into one and pumped full of drugs.
It’s Sunday and busy with people wandering between the galleries – both Chinese middle youth and the ubiquitous clusters and crocodiles of Euro Curators shopping for their programmes with black note books or Blackberries.

The first time I came here I was wowed, of course. But also developed a running gag with a couple of my fellow curadors, which basically involved going in to each gargantuan gallery space, holding out arms wide and with and with a gentle nod of the head proclaiming “great space” in an exaggerated and overdrawn Euro accent.

And this still holds true as each gallery we visit gets increasingly cavernous. Pi Li’s Universal Studios is an aircraft hanger size gallery which was a not for profit space until they realised there was no point in being not for profit. So now just run for profit.

Pi Li is not there and his Dutch business partner gives us an impromptu talk and guides is round the Chen Shiuoxing installation – which is classic commercial gallery style turns a light, small animated video piece, which is quite fine by itself, into a whopping great museum installation that presumably requires hard labour, heavy engineering and several tonnes of steel. Congenial and amusing in that particular Benelux way, he is a refreshing antidote to the bullishness we have experienced to date. Again that good old English question of ‘who is your audience?’ pops up. He smiles. I cringe a little. A few collectors with buckets of cash, that’s who and that’s all you need.

But I like Universal Studios, it’s doing good things and the artists are interesting. For all my angel’s mocking, it’s is not just there to make money, it’s just that it can and it’s the best way to get things done round here.

So onward and upward and to the Ullens Foundation. Guy Ullens has made billions from Weightwatchers and now has collected the world’s weight in Chinese art. Not wanting to deprive the world of access to his collection in a bunker somewhere in Switzerland he is creating the most mammoth gallery you have ever seen in 798’s largest factory space.

I saw this space on my first visit before they started work. It’s a modernist concrete cathedral like two Tate Moderns glued together. That time I met the Director Fei Dawei, who along with Bev Byetheway, has one of the best names in art.

This time we just see the site office and are given a talk in front of the architect’s model (about the size of a ping pong table) by Colin Chinnery. I met Colin at the Guangzhou Triennial when he was an artist and working for the British Council. He’s half Chinese with a thick Scottish brogue and he’s now the deputy director and director of programme for the Ullens. He talks with unfettered passion about the project, to make China first world class professional standard museum. There is clearly a bottomless pit of money behind this and Colin can do whatever he wants. You can understand his glee and we all look on with open mouths, envy and a slight gigglyness in the face of the project audacity. It has all the hallmarks of the ultimate Bond baddies’ base. Except bigger than anything Blofeld could ever afford.

To add to this scene you have to bear in mind that Colin, stood before the model with saucer eyes, is, well, short. And, all dressed in black, bears an uncanny resemblance to Peter Sellers’ in Dr Stranglove. Clare from Yorkshire Sculpture Park asks is the building will be big enough for his ego. “Probably not.” Replies Colin, jovially.

What this will all do for Chinese art is very intriguing, as it will be the first major non-commercial space hosting art for art’s sake. It may help to move away from the dullness of all that art produced for a demanding client base, but equally could develop another Saatchi scenario, albeit 100 times the scale. Watch this space for now, but if there are any budding curators reading this, I’d send your cv in to them now if you fancy an easy life of no holds barred space filling. No. Expense. Spared.

Before a reception at Long March Space a quick pop in to Platform where David Thorp has curated a David Blandy show. Ahh. This seems to be all (as in completely) work commissioned by Grizedale Arts on the back of his residency, yet not a Grizedale mention in sight. This is fairly usual but disgruntling none-the-less.

The British Council have organised a party in Long March Space and it’s pretty good with Pecha Kucha (think art lecture Karaoke) on a terrible sound system. The booze is flowing and there’s a decent buffet with decent dim sum and cake. The vegetarians in our midst go crazy as this is the first time they have been catered for all trip.

Lu Jie, the director of Long March Space is not here as he’s flown off to California, even though he only just flew in from somewhere else on Friday. He’s apparently taken something like 90 flights in the last year. Better or lesser hands could make a good joke/art project about the Long March and carbon footprints.

I’m not sure here is the place to analyse Long March as it’s a complex case study but central and representative to the whole Chinese Contemporary Art boom. See their www.longmarchspace.com for further details, but you might say that on paper they are/were very close to Grizedale in terms of philosophy. Certainly before going to Beijing everyone kept saying that we must go and see them. But they are also a very different animal. Having emerged from its origins as process and artists’ collectivity, political and social activism etc, it is now one of the main galleries on the scene. A heavyweight, Gagosian style, in a space that reminds me of Victoria Miro, maybe a bit bigger.

Like Gagosian and all, they even have entrée level gallery girls who are so really nice and incredibly like so hospitable in that todally American-international way. Ju Lie’s assistant is super helpful, super trendy and super friendly, translating and joking along as she introduces us to artists and guests at the party. Amongst them are Davids Blandy and Thorp.

Davids Blandy comes up and we have a natter, shortly to be approached by the aforementioned galleristas:

Gallerista: “Heeyyyy, like you did like that really cool stuff over the road, right?”

David: “Errr, yep.”

Me: “Hello, I’m Alistair from Grizedale. We commissioned the work in David’s show”

David “Oh yeh, that’s right, you commissioned the main piece. Oh yeh and the New York piece. Oh actually and the big photograph as well. Oh yeh, actually everything in the show!”

19 March
At the airport I say farewell to my fellow curators, who are off to Shanghai, and I head out alone, Scott-like across the concourse over to check in zone A.
After the grey, cold, dusty and harsh ruthlessness of Beijing (even though I like it like I like Berlin), Guangzhou fills me with a smile. This is partly because I feel relieved at the freedom of having my own schedule, but also because its on the cooler side of warm and sunny and breezy. The taxi ricochets around the lanes of the motorway the way Chinese taxi drivers like it, overtaking on the hard shoulder and avoiding two pile ups in short succession. Normally I’d be in a ball on the floor, but with the air so clement, some Sino-reggae on the radio and the windows fully down, there is a definite tropical balm thing going on.

Arriving at Vitamin, this mood is maintained. It lacks pretence, being hidden away in a sweat shop block behind a multi-coloured food market, selling spices, dried mushrooms, char sui bau, snakes and fluffy white bunnies, slaughtered to order by a man with an axe and a bloody apron.

Having been here twice before it’s also like a seeing good friend again. Compared to Beijing galleries the space is less fussy, less try hard, yet the work more considered and dare I say poetic. In Beijing the catalogues are big and heavy and in colour. Here they are penguin paperback affairs, gently written and clearly with something to say.

Zhang Wei the director is busy in a meeting in her office and her husband and co-director Hu Fang is in Vienna. They’re just a busy as all the others in China, but the mood is much more relaxed. For the first time on the trip I have moment of quiet, sit down nest to sunlit window in the gallery, take in the work and listen to the back drop of noise from the market outside. This is like being in Venice, apart from the fact that the space is crossed with soil stacks from the floors above and every so often there is the distinct slatter clatter of human slurry rattling down the pipes.

I’m here to continue discussions on a project for the village of Nanling in the upper reaches of Guangdong province. The mountain village and its surrounding primordial forest park have been acquired by a property developer to build it up as an eco tourism project – building hotels and a visiting audience, whilst maintaining the natural environment and the village culture. It is at once medieval and supermodern, a heightened nodal point in the supra-urban scenario on which I spoke in my talk in Beijing.

Vitamin have been developing art projects there with the developer, though not necessarily for the developer, for a couple of years. Zhang Wei has not been entirely satisfied with how these have worked and asked us to go out last year to have a look at the village to see what we might think or do. A clear case in point was the playground made by French artist Mathieu Briand with the children in the village a. A classic case of context art, it provided a number of images of and dialogues on social engagement, but is actually never used by the children anymore. They live in a forest for goodness sake.

So our challenge is to somehow make art work in this situation. To be of use, to be of benefit to the village and not just the artists’ careers. It may be that art, at least in its popular incarnation is not the answer, but this is why we got on so well with Vitamin; because, like us, they actually asked the question if art was the right answer and had the balls to say that what they had tried had not been necessarily successful.

Incidentally, our relationship with Vitamin came about partly through my first curator-crocodile trip to China in November 2005, so they must work to some extent I guess, but it needs willingness on both parts. And for this to work we need to be doing things that we are all interested in.

Links:
www.vitamincreativespace.com
www.eco-nanling.com/eternalgarden/

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 09/05/07 at 12:31 : 0 Comments

So far on this blog we are just collecting thoughts and observations that follow our residency at Grizedale. Tagging each entry with a number of subjects/adjectives.
Assuming that different issues and ideas will shape one proposal for a project with Grizedale.

We’re thinking of using the Grizedale TV station that will take place later this summer at the A Foundation as a format to articulate and present the proposal.

A small event to push some ideas will be on Wed 23 May at the Serpentine Gallery, between 2.00 and 4.00 pm with Wapke, myself and Andreas from public works, Jaime Stapelton, Michael Hitchcock and Louise Coysh/Sally Tallant. Talking about objects/products/produce in regards to representing and extending social networks.

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 08/05/07 at 14:41 : 1 Comment

Grizedale Arts is a cultural producer.
Lawson Park is currently being set up to become a producing small holding again, by establishing a vegetable and fruit garden and keeping some farm animals.

How is the one linked to another, and how can modes of production be refined rather than re-established?
To marry cultural production from a contemporary art context with the traditional agricultural forms of production could be a great playful experiment. And hopefully not the continuation of established modes of production in both areas, art and agriculture. Paintings and sausages.

What is Lawson Park going to produce?
A well connected international art network with week long periods of intensity?
Who is the production for?
Is the production meant to be the proof of labour or a format for exchange?

I ve just been to Folkestone on the weekend, which still has a small local fishing harbour, but it’s also having a new “Creative Quarter”. Guess what the Sunday market was called? Fishermen and Arts Market. No joke.

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 08/05/07 at 14:39 : 3 Comments

One of the things I like best about Grizedale is the fact that it isn’t a building, and how it spreads across spaces. It might change with the redevelopment of Lawson Park into a live/work research place, but I hope it will keep its character, which for me is a space for quite accidental but very particular encounters, which then spread again, and might site and manifest themselves very clearly somewhere else.

Grizedale is going to places, which keeps it open and fragmented – and with very different access points, which is a huge advantage that most buildings are lacking.

Just to list some of the local Grizedale spaces:
Grizedale has storage space in Coniston, fund-raising dinners on the terrace of the Lake Café, Japanese cooking at the Library, Boat Dressing on the lake, radio stations in the forest, etc just to mention very few.
And it has the dinners at Lawson Park – very impressive and extremely memorable, not just because of the amazing food and the stories that come with it, but also because of the reasons why you are there and who else might be around accidentally. As if accidentally was the right term to describe the fact that one is sitting in a dining room some 6 miles from the next village and a few hours away from other art hubs associated with networking.

A spatial and relational analysis of Grizedale would be interesting.
What’s happening where and why, and how and why do those links come together and how to they move on?

During our time in Grizedale we went to see the Lantern House from Welfare State International (www.welfare-state.org) in Ulverston, now called Lanternhouse International (www.lanternhouse.org).
It’s public money for a public building which feels to have no general public.
Local gossip knows that it’s all a clique.
Wapke and I are still puzzled by the building and what it is for. It was kind of public but not, kind of welcoming but nothing to do. Kind of friendly but we didn’t want to stay. I strongly felt that it was an example for how an organisation gets trapped in a building, not just physically but also programmatically. Who is filling all those spaces and who is coming to them? The clearest memory are small arty/crafty interventions (such as the tiled edges of the staircase) in the building which were somewhere else claimed as artist/architect collaborations. That’s “functional” art at its worst, and has nothing to do with creating an innovative and functioned ground for shared cultural practice.

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 08/05/07 at 14:38 : 0 Comments

Wapke and I collect each other’s best quotes. Normally Wapke wins with sentences like:
“ People think that if you’re from a big place you have big ideas, and if you’re coming from a small place, that your ideas can’t be big. That’s of course wrong.”

The thing I said during our week in Grizedale which scored for our list was:
“ The ambition ends once the story is finished.”

I had some of ours and other's projects in mind when saying this. Thinking of how many projects are prototypes and could be extended, but often finish their production once they're delivered.
They extend and survive as narratives and linked into networks, but are rarely continued as such. The term ambition refers to innovation in terms of "post-production".

I was thinking about how Grizedale initiates, produces and documents projects. In terms of production they also seem to come to an end once the project is published/presented/performed. And I think it’s worth thinking about the outcomes and how they could remain an active tool within the Grizedale network, rather than becoming just documentation or illustration of something that has been.

I’m mainly thinking of the range of produce that came out of the Seven Samurai residency in Japan, and the Grizedale programme and stalls at the A Foundation in Liverpool. How does the project and what has been produced remain exchangeable and relational within the network? How could the produce allow for an cross networking exchange, like a market, without necessarily interpersonal links.

When we did the Park Products project (www.publicworksgroup.net/pages/Park_Products_01.html) we tried to base the principle of the project on the idea of an informal economy, and trade as social space, utilising products as a tool to represent but also to initiate new social and cultural contacts and space.

Grizedale generates social/cultural space and numerous outcomes, and I think that Grizedale’s production can also be speculated as growing cultural space based on the exchange of “goods”. These goods can be anything, but need to be seen and established as a means to extend the spaces of cultural production and the networks linked them.

In a recent presentation by Jaime Stapleton (at one of Gavin Wade’s and Celine Condorelli’s Support Structure events) he talked about products as collective property and public goods. And I think many of the Grizedale “products” come out of collective and public production and are much more than individual commodities once the production process is over.

I’m phantasising about a powerful global rural economy, which exists outside of monetary market forces, and where goods are exchanged in order to make links rather than gather profit.

The idea of post-production.
What are those items?
Autonomous, in the sense that they're active, not just documentation and representation.
They "speak for themselves” and can be traded.
Have the qualities of a product which communicates itself.

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 08/05/07 at 14:34 : 2 Comments

Lawrence assiting Wapke with her super functional soil drilling tool, doing something rather less functional

I think “functional” isn’t a term that opens up options but that defines and limits them.
Things become too much either – or, functional or non-functional.

To me functional is a dysfunctional term because it’s either highly subjective and relies on individual reading and interpretation, or it’s easily ideological and becomes exclusive. To introduce “functional” as a criteria doesn’t make things clearer, but shifts the attention towards a polarising goal that’s seemingly clear, but actually isn’t.
The recent Grizedale programme suggests artists to be functional, which I understand as an intents to start fresh and reflective debate about the role and responsibility of art within the very particular context of Grizedale. But might cause an urge to define things rather than opening them up. To be “ functional”, relates to practical, is almost a cliché in a rural setting, and opposes the time-wasting and decadent culture of the city. And especially within a tourism orientated context like the Lake District, the definition and appreciation of the “functional” becomes predictable, as in profitable.

In many of our (that’s myvillages and public works) projects we try to establish an open process, in terms of logistics and outcome, and putting a polarising term at the start doesn’t help. The work and process shouldn’t be about definitions, but about experiences that allow the personal reading of those terms to be changed and altered (or limited). It’s the process of being involved, and the option to find and redefine things/experiences/objects that make art worthwhile for me. It’s the transformation of meanings in everyday live, on whichever personal and collective scale, rather than the risking the danger to get stuck in rhetoric estranged from experience. I personally try to avoid it as a criteria, because it’s as unfruitful as terms like beautiful, useful or tasteful. They have no meaning, and I’d rather not confirm existing meanings and assumptions, but put my energy into allowing things to be read and experiences outside of those categories.

An example:
When we started to develop new product ideas in my village, everyone was adamant that they had to be useful and practical. As if everything meaningful in their lives carried this adjective, and even if it did, everyone had their very own interpretation of the term. Wanting something to be “functional” wouldn’t be questioned in the village, even though it urquently requires some fundamental doubt. Often the bigger pleasure seems to come from the surprising encounter with the non-functional anyway.

At no point would I want to stop a debate about art’s role and possible role within society, for the sake of blindly defending its so called autonomy. I just don’t think that the introduction of the word “functional” helps the discussion on an everyday and practicing level.

Posted by Kathrin Böhm on 08/05/07 at 09:58 : 1 Comment

Olivia Plender in Kibbo Kift attire (1930's camping uniform)

Train horror as ever, who designed these trains? 4 empty 1st class carriages and 5 packed others stinking like a sewage pipe on wheels filled with impossible luggage that doesn’t fit in the store (clearly the designers didn’t imagine people would want to carry heavy suitcases onto a train and quite right they were too, I am sure they don’t, but they do), the toilet alarm being pressed every 5 minutes - still after 3 years of these ‘new’ trains that problem hasn’t been ironed out. And of course the staff who might as well wear a uniform emblazoned with slogans, like 'it’s got nothing to do with me, I didn’t design it, I don’t work for Virgin, I hate you, there’s nothing I can do about it, die passenger scum' and my favorite Cumbrian catchphrase ‘I ve got absolutely no idea’ and of course the perennial torturous, mean and vindictive ‘is everything alright?’ a question which one never answeres in anything but the affirmative - it's all part of the pain and the zen of acceptance.

Alistair Huson (deputy director Grizedale, Fiona Boundy (director of the A Foundation) and myself spend the 2 days explaining and rexplaining what the TV project we are planning is all about. By the end of it we have refined a much clearer idea of what we are doing and provoked several arguments amongst ourselves - so that’s useful. We also have a long chat with YES the graphics company that Fiona wants to work with. They are arch minimalists, concerned with paper weights (not that kind) and qualities and unusually for graphic designers very upfront about their own critical process with material they don’t personally like. I had suspected as much as they did a fantastic and clever job of destroying a series of 4 pages we did for the A Foundation newspaper in 2006 – I had wondered if it was accidental but clearly not, quite impressive, they made us look like idiots. It’s going to be a challenge working with them but they are nice, perverse and sharp people so whatever, it’ll be engaging.
Giles Deacon (designer for uniforms) is busy but we say hello and meet briefly also with Jeremy Deller (he is working with Alistair on replacing the Greasy Pole - a folk event that requires the climbing of the aforementioned). He - Jeremy - is his usual slightly abstract self, off to look at a colony of greater Horseshoe bats in Devon (they of the nose shaped like a horseshoe), he’s making a bat house! The man doesn’t knowingly go with the money projects.
The interviews for a project manager (TV project) are interesting of course. It's always interesting to hear what people are up to, one interviewee has a particularly remarkable job developing online discussion space for voluntary sector and local government groups, fora for cross fertilization – government funded! We all get really interested in this but sadly we can’t really employ her as she has little experience of working with artists and their ilk and the project has a long and difficult list. We end up in the usual horns of dilemma trying to decide between two people with very different but excellent experience and all that.

On this visit I am particularly shocked by the price of things in London and actually how bad they are. One bar we are in charges 32 pounds for a jug of margarita, a jug entirely filled with ice and charmingly served in a lightly worn/milky plastic jug. The poisonous hotel run by understandably suicidal Poles offers a motorway service station styled breakfast at 17.50, a coffee and a warm flannel of a croissant comes in at a very reasonable fiver. All this after paying 200 for a room in a cardboard warren with a broken TV. Maybe I just don’t get it and this is all an ultrastyle statement reclaiming the 70’s dog eared chic of my youth (Crossroads, The Brothers etc).
The way the UK economy seems to work is that everything is massively ramped up cost wise to provide everyone with huge surpluses of money to buy endless houses around the world. The cost to us being the lowest quality of life in the known world (if you include how vile we all are to each other).

The train return revisits the horror – 2 hours standing on a platform waiting for the delayed train and then having to sit opposite my least favorite thing, a couple who’ve just met (on the platform) and are trying to get to first base by talking incessantly about the minutia of their lives, portraying themselves as the worlds most reasonable, observant and caring people, Jesus 10 minutes into this and if I was them I would be considering a joint suicide pact. ‘The thing with me is I really like old people, call me weird but I just think they’ve got so much to offer, I mean you know they really have experience of life’ and this moments after they had refused to give up a seat to an elderly woman who seemed a little lost. It’s strange conversation, kind of intentionally super dumb so as not to threaten/scare off one another, mating morons.

Fiona tells me Virgin Trains are sponsoring the project.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 13/04/07 at 16:00 : 0 Comments