You need big hands

Café Artistique in Leeds aims to get conversations going about art and art making - see www.axisweb.org. Artists in discussion is becoming of a bit of an end in itself, practically ‘the work’. This one is in a pub and is aimed at being a conversation started off by me – my week had been fraught and my time strained so I hadn’t written anything (so ashamed) – although I think such strategies don’t really work to stimulate conversation - probably better, (which is what I ended up doing) to ramble incoherently about various of your current ‘ideas’. So a mini diatribe from me against freedom, dishonesty in art practice (especially language – please no more hyperbole for events in far flung corners of nowhere Ville – no more use of words like major, innovative, pioneering, ground breaking, international for events in backwaters attended by a local pebble artist and a bored council officer). Also touched on a new moral code and artists becoming embedded useful members of their home communities - no more roving art star ambitions. It all ended up a bit me, me, me, a kind of audience with Dame Adam Average, in an extended question and answer session – mainly courtesy of me holding the only mic and rumbling into it at every opportunity. Actually I would like to have know more about the people I was talking to and to have initiated more discussion with the crowd – it’s a hard one to make happen, we all easily revert to the norm, i.e. one person going on a bit.

During the discussion Laura Quarmby from Artist House suggested that Grizedale favoured the underdog and why was it we did’nt work with the over dogs, these in Leeds being the sublimely happy property developers and their friends, maybe these people are just the truly functional people of the world – it was a poin. I have to say I am drawn to/identify with the underdog, it is such an ingrained component of art culture, all in there with the romantic notions of being an artist that I so abhor, but on the other hand working for the powerful and happy is normally called the luxury goods sector and how would a publically funded organization rationalize that sort of behavior.
After the talk another of the questioners raised the point again with more reference to the notion of well being, to reinforce wellness/happiness. I admitted that at heart, the ambitions I am too embarrassed to express publically are pretty much those of a Miss World contestant - to make everyone happy, end war and world poverty, unfortunately I could not reasonably expect to achieve this by wearing a bathing suit (might start somthing though). It’s hard to find a comfortable way to be positive, to sustain that direct forward propulsion of wellness without the odd caustic aside. There seems so little complexity to happiness, so little opportunity for wit - Feed the greedy not the needy.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 13/04/07 at 15:40 : 0 Comments

Framed

It’s going up, the new site office for the building project at Lawson Park gets its ribs. Parkamoor is also under the builders, it’s all springy and exciting, seeds germinate and leaves open, the miracle is on us again like a slow rolling mist the transformation unfolds, or as Christopher Lloyd used to rather more rudely say ‘the snouts go shooting’.

My Villages (see blog) are staying in Coniston in a classic holiday home we rented for them, it’s a perfect mix of materials and styles, a kind of flotsam of stuff nobody would want in their own home, all there and all wrong in some way, too old, too bright, to knobbly, too woody, too low, high, fat or furry. There’s a certain consistency to it all which I‘m starting to read and find rather attractive.

Kathrin Bohem and Wapke Fenestra along with Kathrin’s son Lawrence are researching Grizedale the organization, with whom and where we work. It’s a lot of fun to have them around being funny and interested in all things village and rural. Their own work with the villages they come from and their descriptions of those communities is fascinating, very different from an English and especially lakes experience of a village community. It makes me think about how extraordinarily disjointed and complex Coniston is in terms of actually being a community. All factions pushing in differing directions and all dealing with this bizarre sycophantic body of people called visitors, all that ‘your so lucky’ etc it's bad for you.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 13/04/07 at 15:32 : 0 Comments

So shoot me

Out of the blue Manchester TV asked if I would do an interview about the criminally under shown world-class Bolton Municipal Art collection (their words). They didn’t know what was in the collection but thought it offered a vehicle to talk about public funding and a public ‘right to art’. Being a helpful sort of person I said ‘sure’ come by the office’ , despite being somewhat bemused as to why they should want to interview me. I suspected it had to do with a recent interaction I had had with a misguided programme called the Big Art Project or BAP - a misguided title to start with. I had spent a day with a director (who’s last job had been ‘Shipwrecked’ the reality show) chasing around Sheffield being asked ridiculous questions and being put in impossible situations – I think their idea was put an absurd toff in a thoroughly working class environment and see what happens.

Any way back to yesterday – so the camera/interviewer turns up and it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the Bolton collection thing is a mistake - wrong notes - but she cant quite bring herself to say this, so we kind of do this interview which was supposed (I think) to be about the new Oyster cards that ACE have just commissioned (Grizedale did one). So the whole thing is a bit Bridget Jones, the bit in the 1st film where she is doing regional TV. I had assumed it was an interview for regional TV, the questions where from that culture and I answered in regional TV mode, it was only as she left after a single take - 3 minute interview that she said oh it’ll go out at 12, I replied midnight and she said no, on the politics programme – yikes, I will look like an idiot, in fact I cannot imagine how the material can be edited to make any kind of sense.

It is interesting how this stuff happens and the disadvantage you are at in the provinces. TV is dependent on the local network and the local network is operating on a certain level, it therefore depicts everything at that level. The annoying aspect being that if the person interviewing me had been remotely interested in the subject (known what it was even) she could have got a good body of opinion from me that an editor could have done something with, as it was - as usual - it was just how to get away with the minimum.

It all adds to the reasons that Grizedale with the A Foundation is going into making and broadcasting TV. TV about art made by artists, the first incarnation will be at Rochelle in Shoreditch – where we will set up a TV studio for a week and record a whole bundle of stuff, a kinda day time TV show centred on audiences, arts and reality.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 17/03/07 at 10:43 : 0 Comments

Jesse stands forward to accommodate his neighbours salute

Glorious news about all the money in Britain going into the Olympics. I was a bit shocked by the Heritage Lottery officer when several months ago she declared with some delight that 50% of heritage funds were going into the Olympics. What I really don’t get is how the core precepts of sport, survival of the fittest, Nietzsche’s ‘over man’ concept so celebrated by the 3rd Reich -
fit with our apparent ambitions for a democratic, equality centred society.

The Berlin Olympics are treated (in the sports fraternity) as some sort of defeat of the Hitler’s ideals. That Jesse Owens - a man from a community of people that at the time were being unbelievably abused, lynched and generally butchered by white Southern America - with complete impunity - should single handedly become THE example of the wrongness of the National Socialist Party, is at best ironic at worst a spin too far.

In the arts, equality has long been a corner stone of public funding, the redressing of the balance between the strong and the weak THE agenda for the government and the arts one of the vehicles to promote that idea. Sport has always sat outside of that agenda with its celebration of the 'fittest' and its relative tolerance of abusive behavior.

When I was at school the theory behind sport was that it was a tool for children to learn about certain aspects of life, teamwork/pack mentality, aggression, competition, the dominance of the strong – all of these qualities have been discredited and sport for those reasons has been increasingly removed from the curriculum. Actually I think sport is ideal for children, these are it seems still the facts of life, and sport offers a very simplistic model from which to learn and question the basics. But sport is for children, it’s ‘games’, no self respecting adult should consider it as a career. To go from Sport as a means to understand life, to life as a means to understand sport is a upside down world - but then before I get too pompous you could make similar arguments about some areas of art, elitism and all that.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 17/03/07 at 10:34 : 1 Comment

I want to be a tiger

Your so different and milking the cash cow

Is Jonathan Griffin (editor) cross with me, I haven’t returned the proofs of the Grizedale book – a survey of what has been going on here over the past 5 years - it's a struggle to let go of it. I know the reality needs to be ‘translated’ but I fear the tidying up process of it all, it's a difficult balance. I have been drawing cartoons - as kind of footnotes - featuring a monkey – a reference to the animal, awkward, perverse nature of the programme. I am just not to sure if it’s a good idea, here’s one of the images – what do you think?

The first image relates to an incident years ago when Mark Wallinger was face painting at a event and made a bit of a mess of a request for a tiger, explaining to the child that it had come out more like a monkey, the child rather magnanimously declared that a monkey had been his second choice.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 14/03/07 at 21:37 : 0 Comments

Hofen - home village

Below is an edited version of an ongoing email discussion between Grizedale and www.myvillages.org - a collective of artists that will be 'in residence' at Grizedale at the end of March - check their website.

For the very keen the full transcript relatively unedited is attached.

................................................................................................
From myvillages.org

I am also interested in international networks associated both with grizedale but also other local organisations.
How far is abroad? I remember Mr Armstrong (local farner) who had been to China before he visited London.
So people don't go to the next farm for 10 years, but go and see the Great Wall of China.

Can we add more to our own way of working, how we interact with the village of art. The things we currently do and the methods we use are :
Gathering, talking, taking pictures, making stories, trying local products, coming back on certain stories, using our own networks, flipping over to the non-cool more extrovert approach to open up spaces that we value as 'our villages'.
Using the subjective perspective in connection to bigger issues like changing landscape, local/global economies, political agendas.

What do we miss in our methods of networking?

We would like to have an official and unofficial talk with Grizedale about how
they established thier network of people and actions. Why have they separated from their history - the sense of place, the sculpture park (or is there another history that meant more to them, seemed more important or real)

And of course there is the instant attraction of making a proposal to counteract the male
expressionism so prevalant at Grizedale. It would be great if we could use the 'network ideas' to make a impression and expression of this place in a female way. I think our
giving food to the audience is already very female but there has to be more of a 'star quality' an impact.

How to star when you are in a village, what does grizedale do at
openings? Do they dress up?? Is there champagne or just beer??

............................................................................................................
From Grizedale
I am interested in a discussion between Grizedale and myvillages, we have much in common and some definite differences, I think the differences and evolution of each of our idealogies is where I would like to start – single projects versus group activity, the art product versus no product or anti product, the art aesthetic and assumptions about art interested audience etc. There is perhaps a potential gender related discussion, your thoroughness versus the take it as it comes, wing it attitude. Certainly this year there is this clear male female axis, that reflects many issues in terms of how artists work and in what way they are of value to the wider society. It is not a straightforward issue, from the moral high ground we do not necessarily achieve a good communication or impact, and equally from the immoral high art ground we can see real benefit.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 06/03/07 at 20:43 : 1 Comment

photoshop the saviour

I've been doing a drawing for Beagles and Ramsay's medieval punk fanzine, seemed logical to promote Karen's new film 'Living with the Tudors' in a teenage fanzine style. On eof the charaters in the film wears braces - she has to tell the public that visit the renactment that she wears them to stop her biting people!

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/03/07 at 18:52 : 2 Comments

keith and karen in the best kept garden centre on earth

art bags

Made a brief visit to Keith Singleton nursuries to do an interview for Egremont Radio. Keith is a very do it yourself kind of guy, he's building his own resturant as he can't find a good place to eat locally. He's imported a Tuscan pizza oven to get the pizza right.
He also famously (amongst giant leak producers) produces his own composts and potting mixes with his own designed bags - now thes ebelong in the folk archive.
http://www.cumbriagardensandpetsdirect.co.uk/

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/03/07 at 18:38 : 0 Comments

Scatter art

Farm works.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 03/03/07 at 10:37

massed farmers considering the merits of a roll of barbed wire

One of the rag rugs

Attended a farm auction at the weekend, a spectacular gathering of farmers, there were pick-ups and land rovers for miles parked up along the lanes. The massed body of people dressed in wellies and overalls was a phenomenal sight, very uniform, a specialised group that you rarely see on mass. The auction covered everything from the most dilapadated sheds and piles of timber to quad bikes and tractors. We bought some odds and ends, rag rugs and pottery (very tasteful).

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 28/02/07 at 14:46