Thursday 30 August '07

Rochelle School A Foundation Honesty Box

The A Foundation honesty stall was set up at Rochelle this week, designed and made by Martino Gamper it is mainly stocking goods from Grizedale and Toge at the moment but is intended to be of a more general use. The stall will also act as an information point for the Agrifashionista project.

I like the Hoxton look of it in contrast to Lawson Park's farmer's aesthetics and the Toge minimal version - I think we've got a franchise going here.

The idea of the stalls is that they act as an exchange point for ideas, marrying art projects with useful basic product. As the stalls develop there will be a more complex interaction between each of them and between product and ideas.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 30/08/07 at 12:40 0 Comments

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Wednesday 15 August '07

Somewhere for the weekend

I went to Germany to see Robert Eikmeyer a curator Grizedale is working with. His interest is centred at the moment on totalitarian use of art, so he has been working on Hitler, Stalin, Marx, and is currently developing an exhibition around Disney and his totalitarian vision. The show will be happening in 09 at ZKM. We are planning to run a TV production studio within the exhibition – the upcoming studio at Rochelle in London is the prototype. After the - as always hellish trip through northern Britain and Manchester airport with the wild animals that constitute the Shitish public it was a blessed relief to join German culture on the TUIfly.com budget airline which was really good, very basic but nice and quiet with pleasant happy blond gay stewards – I would recommend this airline! Then to land in Stugartt and a civilized country - although the airport was rather full of German men in plastic stetsons returning from Ibiza - another gay thing I guess. During the trip I also visited Christoph Kellor the former the owner of Revolver publishing who has published several of Robert’s books. Christoph sold Revolver recently and bought a farm near Lake Constance. The farm has a licence to distill alcohol which is a rare thing and is lost if you do not distil for 3 years, so Christoph took to distilling Schnapps like a duck takes to water and now is making amazing high quality Schnapps as well as keeping going with his book production - now with JRP Ringier. Yes, and also renovating and developing the house, barns, gardens and land. I was amazed and awed, this is some energy way beyond my own. So we talked about the farms and Grizedale and maybe doing some projects together with farming. I thought about doing an open air conference with the energetic people like Christoph doing kind of Sermon on the Mount style talks, surrounded by animals and people, maybe 6 at once or maybe open air lectures to people working on the farm. Like during the haymaking weekend, like in Cuban factories, lectures on culture and Schnapps, bees and relational aesthetics - mmm. The Hay Lectures, the Potato Lectures, The Irrigation Lectures, could be a nice series?

Then I went by comfortable and quiet train to Berlin. I travelled the full distance without headphones (my usual block to bedlam) (5 hours) and was only annoyed once by a man on a mobile in the resturant car who kept shouting ‘choose’ – which for me is always a tough one - choosing. In Berlin I was met by Dan Sieple from Sculpturen Park and an aquaintance from New York – he was a member of The E Team before going solo. So I am in Berlin to help with the selection of the upcoming programme for the Scupturen Park run by Dan and his friends. The name is a kind of joke it’s not really meant to be a sculpture park - it’s maybe new kind of joke a little difficult to get at first. The park is in reality a series of empty lots, wasteland awaiting development, the artist/curators want to retain that quality, so the park has this limited life span and is only viable through negociation with various ever changing landlords. But as they say in the art world ‘it’s a great space’ it is also situated on the former militairzed zone between east and west. The selection panel makes for an entertaining couple of days, each curator or artist has selected 2 artists to present, so the standard is high. I make the most terrible fist of a presentation, still everyone feels sorry for the artists I present so they both get pretty well recieved. I find it impossible to get over the idiosyncratic proposal of Emily Wardil, it contains multiple references including a marriage of German prog rock and the complexities of Lovejoy and jokes about how short Ian McShane is – it is hard to explain the delicate nature of this cultural position vis a ve his cross pollinating Anglo-Germanic hair arrangements, the post reformation position of 70/80’s culture and the general grooviness of the proposal. Garrett Phelan’s proposal is a little easier on the international ear and fewer questions are asked. There seems to be amongst the German artist proposals an odd replication of everyday activity, like the proposal to clear a dead persons apartment and sell the contents in a Flea market, interesting enough but easily accessed as part of normal life. Where does it end, ‘I would propose ziz verk - vone zelected person each day valks from a specific apartment, the exact same route each day to another building, at the end of the day he retraces his steps, to the exact original position, every veekday he repeats zis action but at ze veekend he by his own vill changes ze zystem - he leaves later, goes to a different place or series of places chosen specifically by the person themselves – actually this is starting to sound rather good.
Taking the piss out of people's English is outrageous, the entire German speaking panel spoke in English just for me because I am such a moron that I cant even speak German. I was ashamed of myself.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 15/08/07 at 15:00 1 Comment

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Wednesday 15 August '07

Creative Egremont progress......

Two of the the projects that GA staff Alistair Hudson and Karen Guthrie have been working on in the West Cumbrian town of Egremont, are on the up:
One is a RIBA competition to design a celebration / performance structure to fit inside the Norman keep of Egremont Castle. The castle is one of the town's hidden gems, used as a backdrop for local wedding photos and as a place to drink in for the local kids, so this is an opportunity to site something useful but also experimental and fun - in a unique historic spot.

The second is the Folk Float, a kind of live museum on wheels designed by public works - a customised milk float which tours about picking up new exhibits from local people. The Float fabrication is nearly finished, and we are planning to show up at numerous country shows in Cumbria throughout September.....

Posted by Karen Guthrie on 15/08/07 at 11:28 0 Comments

Topics: 'Egremont' 'public works'

Tuesday 31 July '07

Il Tempo del Postino – the time of the postman or as we might say The Post

In combination with doing a talk/discussion on Parkamoor at Castlefield gallery Alistair and I attended the Hans Ulrich and Parreno innovative, groundbreaking, pioneering, vision of the future of art. In their own slightly euro words, ‘What if an exhibition was not about occupying space but about occupying time? Can contemporary art be interpreted outside of a traditional gallery environment?’ If you can be bothered to even consider such a weird - has this thought ever occurred to anyone before – question, the answer could be yes but don’t let Hans and Phillipe loose on it. I love those euro questions ‘ I like to propose zis kwestion ‘cun V zee vohat ish nut zere? And then hang a publication, seminar, trans euro tour on it. There is that seriousness/absurdity in Europe that just doesn’t exist in the UK, the curator is expected to be a petulant prima donna, obsessed with these daft questions apparently investigating the world around us. But back to ‘Postie Time’, can we answer this vital question? - from my experience of the audience after the show - yes we can and the answer is no. My own feelings during the performance ranged from this is very disappointing, to this really is very very disappointing with a slight lift to, this is disappointing for the Mathew Barney piece at the end (which was a very long way from the beginning 3 hours (not making a theatre performance 3 hours long might I guess be a tenant of the theatre folk alongside not mentioning Macbeth)). The show was really depressing for anyone in the visual arts, if this line up is as good as it gets then really it is time to find a new job, this was just embarrassingly, stump gnawingly bad.

I often think of my mother in these situations and how she would have responded, ‘Oh is this the sort of thing you do, is this what you want to achieve?’. In fact my mother could have come up with better and more engaging concepts for playing with theatre constructs, but then she, I suspect unlike the artists taking part does go to and enjoy the theatre on occasion and has a pretty good and broad knowledge of a wide range of cultures. Just to wet your appetite for how bad this was and bearing in mind my absolute maxim that bad art sounds good when you describe it - Red stage curtains dancing to Daft Punk (going up and down and sideways), Madame Butterfly performed backwards by ‘theatre style Chinese costumed performers’ walking backwards, Beethoven’s pastoral symphony performed by the orchestra with one instrument walking out every minute (you see an orchestra is made up of parts, so it’s not like a cd, like it’s on or off), some people wearing upside down glasses, (not many people know this but we actually see everything upside down), a puppet show with curator puppets singing a madrigal based on Gaugin’s who are we, where are we going, omitting my burning question - how much did it cost to get me so bored? Look the list goes on and on and it doesn’t get any better, Tacita Dean, Liam Gillick and Douglas Gordon were the predictable UK contingent. Liam covered a popular Portuguese song from memory on the piano, Tacita filmed Merce Cunnigham watching a performance and shifting 4 times in his chair and Dougie baby did an operatic/folk version of Love will Tear us Apart (we were in Manchester you see), Liam and Tacita’s works were pre-recorded, with Gordon’s being performed, but not by him – at least some of the artists had the balls to do it themselves, now Douglas Gordon singing Love will .... would have been good however bad it was. I suspect anyone familiar with the theatre will have seen these ‘experiments’ before, or things like them, I am not so familiar with theatre on account of my perception that it is mainly bloody awful (with the occasional extraordinary (makes it all worthwhile type) exception) but surely not ever this bloody awful.

Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing and it was actually meant to envisage what my mother would have come up with if asked to make some conceptual art based on the possibilities afforded by a functioning theatre (in which case they underestimated her). I wondered what are the non art interested public are making of this, if I don’t get it or enjoy it with my 30 years of art training what do they think? Alex Poots the Manchester festival director seemed to be promoting the principle benefit being that 500 curators attend the performance (not on the night I was there seemed to be mostly dealers, but then maybe that’s splitting hairs, but the theatre was half empty/full). The more art I see the more worried I become by the isolationist position, the artists reference things that they think are pertinent eddies of culture, where does this end as the references become ever more mainstream as their practice becomes ever more specialist/esoteric. “Yeah well you know I ‘m very interested in this guy, who like back in the 40’s you know , kind of developed this amazing drug, which like has been hugely influential but not so known, yuh it was like a total accident, this agar plate….’

Just to be fair - and that is as you will know my middle name – Barney came up with a performance piece which was slightly better (although totally unrelated to the other work) but still pretty lame – it’s central character - a bull - was actually lame. If you’ve seen Carpenter’s Escape from New York or it’s Snake Pliskin starring close cousin Escape from Los Angeles you have a good idea of the flavour of the work. Barnie - with a live dog on his head - removes the vital organs (carburator etc) from a wrecked car, placing them in canopic jars (zo interesting ritual, not zo many people know about zis). Then the assembled cast attempt to get one of the oldest bulls on the planet to inseminate the rear of the vehicle, which it so doesn’t/could’nt do on any one of the nights the show - now a lively young bull would have made quiet a show, a bull’s ejaculation is quite impressive in both violence and quantity, would have given the urinating crab arched ladies a definite run for their money. But basically Barney did the - expose the seams of the performance type thing - so it looked terrible, on film it would of course have looked fabulous – the underbelly of the performance was doubly exposed by the use of local talent, none off whom displayed the NYC body fascism of Barney’s usual work, like they were really fat and the costumes hung or strained around them like bags on a bag lady.

Enjoyed the sponsors logo’s though, good range including the Henry Moore Foundation – they recently turned us down for a grant saying they were getting back to basics – now I am seeing what they meant with the emphasis on the basics.

Below is what Richard Dorment writing in the Telegraph thought of it, sounds like an essay for an English appreciation ‘O’ level and deeply anti Islamic to boot, he’s mental. I think my own interpretation that it was a homage/copy to John Carpenter’s vision of a multi ritual world is way better.

'Shocking as some of this is, nothing that goes on in Barney's dream-like, surrealistic performance is gratuitous. He is meditating on the psychic catastrophe that is Islamism, whereby men who possess power over women express their fear and disgust at the sight of the female body by forcing their daughters and wives to cover themselves completely. Drawing on Freud's writings, he shows that women who are made powerless express their rage in the only way they can - by using their own bodies to urinate and defecate.

The corpse we saw at the beginning is that of a Westernised Muslim woman, embalmed and replaced by women made faceless by men who deny their existence as real people. This breakdown of human interaction is completed when the men then cover their own faces in balaclavas, losing any sense of themselves as individuals and allowing them to be subsumed in their sick ideology. Barney seems to be saying that the horrors we see nightly on news bulletins from the Middle East have their origins in sexual dysfunction.

The cause of Islamists' hatred of the West has nothing to do with Israel or Iraq but with fear of the other. They hate everyone who isn't like them, beginning with their own mothers, sisters and wives. And orchestrating this perversion of human nature is the god of death.
At the end of Il Tempo Del Postino, I felt I'd been present at a historic occasion when the ambitions of the curators were perfectly matched by the quality of the art, and when we saw the première of one of Barney's most profound and powerful works'.
A Triumph of Shock and Awe - Richard Dorment Daily Telegraph 17/07/2007

Err yeah thanks for that Richard, I am sure Barney will be delighted to know that he is suggesting that all suicide bombers are only blowing themselves up because they can't do sex..

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 31/07/07 at 16:48 0 Comments

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Saturday 30 June '07

Park A More ready for use

Well almost. This week The Princes Drawing School are in residence at Park-a-More. They will be the first people to use the building in it's rennovated state.
The group will be documenting thier stay and endeavours in a blog and will be showing work from the residency in London in October - check the blog on (to be added shortly)

Bryan Davis and Dan Robinson represent the space in an exhibition 'To the Left of the Rising Sun' at the Castlefield Gallery in Manchester - where I notice I am doing a discussion on the 12th July at 6pm. http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/

If you are interested in using Park-a-More contact the Grizedale office - the building has no electricy, water is pumped from the well, the bath hangs on the door and the toilet is a composting loo in the garden - but it's very nice if you like a bit of 18th century living - oh forgot to mention there is no car access, you have to walk to it - 15 minutes for the hearty longer for the rest.

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 30/06/07 at 08:21 0 Comments

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Friday 29 June '07

Escape artists

My life shunt has included a considerable interaction with the world of the hospital, another nuts use of resources in an apparently unplanned manner. The hospital only operated 3 days a week, the rest of the time it was fully staffed but virtually empty of patients. However the hospital environment is amazing, akin to a multicultural soap opera, there are people from every corner of the world both in the staff and patients, hosts of translators all in all a wonderful diversity of people and cultures. Visiting hours brought great communities of people into the hospital, little encampments round each bed each involved in their own food and language, social culture/hireachy etc. My own visits took the form of .
‘How are you?’,
‘Oh absolutely fine, can’t imagine what the fuss was about’
‘The roses are doing marvellously well’
Although the hospital environment would make fantastic ground for an art project (see [url=http://www.swansong.tv/archive/npkgdsl.htm/ Pope and Guthrie’s Recommended Dose – the inspiration for Green Wing) the actual artwork commissioned for the hospital was beyond pitiful or rather the curation of it was insane. The most ludicrous example was the siting of a Cornelia ‘Flatliner’ Parker ‘piece’ in the waiting room of the breast cancer waiting room – the room itself had been converted into a Costa Coffee style coloured melamine temple and the ‘artwork’ hung from the ceiling. A series of silver plate Georgian teapots reflected by the same teapots in flatten form (even out of this context this is a chronic thing). Was the plan to prepare the users of this space for their own soon to be flattened form. It made me embarrassed to be involved in the arts, extra embarrassed to be involved in this jackass curation business.

As I recall there was much excitement in the 80/90’s following a survey that proved Bert Irwin paintings made people well or was that promoted wellness, i.e. you stayed well if already well after seeing a Bert Irvin painting – (now hang on minute there, any right minded person would surely contest that assertion). But I guess an interesting articulation of a slightly desperate desire that art should be useful to society, do good - sadly delivered in a package of lies and half truths, pretention and other commonly held artshit.
I particularly enjoyed the arrival and departure from the cancer hospital with the doorway crowed by smokers of both healthy and extremely unhealthy hue crowded around the doors in wheelchairs, pyjamas, blood stained operating smocks, hospital tunics of every cut and colour. I could’nt help feeling that smoking and cancer wards did nt perhaps go together so well and that smoking so publicly - a guard of honour through the raised cigarettes - was perhaps a little tactless (I waited till I got outside the gates).

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 29/06/07 at 17:37 0 Comments

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Thursday 28 June '07

‘I’ve been run over so much I should have been a road’

My life has recently taken a bit of a shunt and I have found myself in London on a more or less full time basis, yearning for home, to see the plants growing and the quick pull of the early summer trout on the line. I always felt like that when I lived in London – 15 years of tugging 15 years ago. London has changed little, but the culture of London has changed a lot. The use of the mobile, smoking, shouting and screaming, all those street life activities have amplified hugley. No other capital in the world suffers from the kind of mobile use that you get in London. I struggle to find a reason for it, obviously it’s massively rude, that could be a reason for it in itself, an outward expression of the ‘f*** you’ mentality so uniquely and warmly embraced in the UK. Maybe UK dwellers feel less inhibited in the apparent confines of phone world, a bit like cars, where it’s easy to think you are in your own private world so its alright to scream moustache curling abuse at the most minor of infractions - like a micro second pause before pulling of at the lights. Anyway there seems to be an idea that using a mobile in public is really a very private act. Outside my bedroom window in superficially charming Bloomsbury a woman engaged is an extremely long and creatively abusive phone call with her – presumably soon not to be - boyfriend, ‘Yo shitf***er, am letting yo f*** wit ma booty, sheeetman yo need to tink bout feelings of udder people’ after about 10 minutes of this unrelenting and rather unfocused Westwood style phyco babble abuse I was forced to open my window and ask her if she could possibly find an alternative venue to continue her martial workout? To which she replied in the sweetest middle class voice, ‘oh I am terribly sorry, I did’nt realise anyone still lived in Bloomsbury 'a classic ‘full English’ put down (‘oh you know well it’s just a pied a Terre, I am usually in Tuscany/Gloucestershire’).
The other street related activity I can enjoy in my 1st floor bedroom is smoking, the fairly continuous stream of office refugees smoking in the street does provide a wreath of smoke that fills the street, and the bedroom, and we are talking a quiet street here. How will it be once the ban kicks in, the streets will become one big smoke filled series of channels. The London smog of yore recreated using the human lung. There does seem to be this lack of thinking things through going on in London/UK. London’s public transport system seems insanely complicated, catching a bus an absolute picnic in a dog pound, buy a ticket at a stop if there is a machine, on the bus if not, get an oyster card, a carnet and all to be achieved with absolutely no information of any kind as to what where and how - just an angry driver jerking his thumb at something and mumbleing. While I am briefly on drivers - the notion of driving a public transport vehicle for comfort of the passenger seems to have completely been lost. The drivers throw their buses into sharp turns, abrupt stops, to lurch and lean with the sole intention of knocking the passengers to the ground, buses excecute boy racer tactics, switching lanes, bunny hopping at the lights and so on. Taxi’s are as bad (for any taxi drivers out there I never tip if it’s an uncomfortable ride – make what you must of that). Anyway enough of this abuse of the wonders of London after all I did walk past David Guest which was great and where else is this going to happen (at first I thought he was Tom Jones or someone wearing comedy Tom Jones head and chest wigs), such special hairs, blinged up to the 9’s, he looked every inch the legendary R&B producer with a rather strong sense that he could be some sort of teddy bear type child’s cuddly toy, maybe it was just the fact that he is pocket sized. All in all the most exciting celebrity moment since a friend of mine sold a 10ft length of hose pipe to Sidney Devine at a car boot sale in Galashields (Sidney Devine is a Scottish MOR superstar for y’all south of the border there).

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 28/06/07 at 08:42 0 Comments

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Thursday 28 June '07

Rumble in the Wural

There has been a lot of talk about the arts in the rural/regional of late. A recent Arts Council initiative called Art 07 brought together a body of arts people from the Northern region and included a debate on the rural/regional arts in relation to the urban/London scene. The debate was embarrassingly broadcast on Radio 3’s Nightwaves programme. The gist of it was that London is where it happens and everything outside of London is of little consequence and of low quality – of no particular interest to any but a local audience. This position was countered by local arts people suggesting that in fact there was a great deal of national and international level art going on in the rural it’s just that the urban audience doesn’t know about or have access to it. Just to quickly clear this one up, there is next to nothing of interest happening in the rural/regional and it is the fault of the artists and arts organizations. The insistence on apeing urban models, looking for endorsement, failing to creatively invent themselves,– that’s no way to make something useful, influential or significant.

But why is this? Historically much of British Art and many Art movements emanated from the rural, Nicholson and St Ives, Wordsworth and Romanticism, Pastoralists, Constable in Suffolk, Gill and Ditchling, Guild of Craftsmen in Gloucestershire, Architecture and music at Dartington Hall, not to mention the plethora of material coming out of the country house, Capability Brown, Adam, the Portraitists, etc as well as the one-offs like Moore, Spencer, Lowry, Schwitters. Maxwell-Davis even Damien Hirst now, the list is long, what’s come out of London - The Euston road School!
The rural has sporadically housed weird mavericks, working individually or in tight groups but in comparative isolation forging new vision, really taking risks (rather than saying they are risk taking), being ostracized. The current regional culture is so keen to be accepted they sell out before they have even started, begging for a special dispensation to be taken seriously.

The ambition of the debate was to ask if the UK was defined by rural or urban culture. Where do you start? the question seems irrelevant. Define UK, culture, urban, rural before the question can even arise and by the way the answer is - if you could ever define either as separate - derr, both. However there is a divide/fusion and it’s an interesting body of ideas/material that many people/artists explore. For the rural - as a subject - it is perhaps not an end in itself but rather a route to defining a more pertinent way to expand the rural value. The countryside is understood by the nation as a culturally backward zone - which is true. That is perhaps the rural’s natural/real position, rooted in day to day isolated activities, in tune with the basics of growth, life and death (or more realistically the season of the tourist, there’s nothing like a good fresh run tourist covered in lice (this is a reference spring salmon that when they first come up the river system are covered in sea lice – it used to be seen as a good thing, I think now it’s seen as a sign of the degenerating environment)).

The urban migrant probably has more impact on rural culture than anyone else, moving to the country in large numbers to enjoy that vision of opt out and simple life, to play real communities (largely with each other). Consequently the country is full of people who reinforce and perpetuate a very cliched vision of the rural, in fact insist it stays that way when it is they that could radically shift it. Times have changed the rural has changed but the cliché about it hasn’t in fact it has been massively reinforced to the point where it has become the only vision of the rural swamping the delicate reality of a complex and sophisticated environment. Importantly those people who guide and mediate culture in the rural perpetuate the cliche, investing in lame culture that plays along to a tourist centred agenda.

A recent Germaine Greer Christopher Frayling debate discussed funding levels in the regions, principally an argument about comparative funding levels – in fact the regional draws more than adequate funding, the problem arises in how these funds are actually spent. Currently in Cumbria £100 million is being allocated to develop a rural arts visitor centre, promoted as a rural Tate (despite the Tate’s denials). The project has employed London consultants to show the rural how it should be done – they are using an urban model, will it do anything interesting in relation to a rural culture? Unsurprisingly it would seem unlikely, there is no acknowledgement that the conditions are different. It would be hard - at a consultant’s glance - for anyone to see anything other than this model with virtually all the rural culture brokers (galleries, museums, artists, writers etc) desperately adopting urban models. For example a local Cumbrian gallery markets itself as being the same size Joplin’s White Cube - the old one!

The debate for Art 07 brought suggestions from the floor that the rural should be given a special dispensation, positive discrimination. The rural/regional needs to change its own clichéd view of itself, it needs to develop ways of contributing to national and international cultural evolution offering material that is relevant, being amongst the leaders rather than followers and to do this the arts community needs to rethink it’s mechanisms, urban models don’t and shouldn’t work in rural space – that is so obvious. The rural’s introspective and ludicrously self congratulatory attitude, the suggestion of discrimination are all unhelpful ‘head in the sand’ positions that suppress real engagement with the complex and relevant issues as ever present in both urban and rural communities. Cultural practioners need to get with the programme – an example of this ‘off the mark’ approach was demonstrated in the most exemplary way at the afore mentioned Art 07 event. Local artists staged an Arts Council funded ‘Art Strike’ – I am almost certain that neither the commissioner ACE North West or the organization being funded to deliver this ‘idea’ had any idea of the precedents – which are of course multiple and go back to the early part of the 20th century, a quick Google would have filled in the gaps. The other main event was a 21st century barn dance with paid dancers to guide people through a series of country dances, the event was titled Loc–Glo-Bal, the music provided by a ragtaggle bunch of world music musicians wearing black t shirts. The Arts Council put £200,000 into this ‘celebration’ of rural culture. There were no interesting ideas put forward, no critical analysis, nothing added to cultural development.

The rural is full of people escaping the perceived harshness of ‘real’ life which is fine but don’t then expect to be taken seriously and to be a part of national cultural discourse. I see this all around me amongst the local art community, angry artists making outdated work for their own pleasure hugely resenting the fact that they are not taken seriously by a critical audience (many of them make good livings which is more than your ‘cutting edge’ practitioner can claim).

The Bed and Breakfast scenario in the Lake District offers an interesting analogy/lesson. People move to the country to get away from other people and then open a B&B as the easiest way to generate an income. The basis of a good B&B is an open and friendly interest in people – do you see the problem?

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 28/06/07 at 08:00 0 Comments

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Sunday 17 June '07

Architecture Week where you didn't expect it

Not really a Grizedale project but relevant to the world of the rural and contemporary culture within it.

This weekend Karen and I took part in Architecture Week, opening the site of our ongoing attempt to build a contemporary house in the Lake District. The idea was to engage in a public debate on contemporary architecture in the rural, called ‘Building in the Rural’ strangely enough. Before I get onto the event/discussions themselves it is interesting to consider how the audience found out about the event.
Not a single person attended as a result of seeing it on the Architecture week website and few knew what architecture week was or had ever heard of it.
The biggest audience attractor was a small poster in the local supermarket (both branches of Booths).
Putting leaflets through peoples doors accounted for the second largest group and the mention in the local paper listings brought up the rear.
In total approximately 40 people attended – pretty remarkable for a non building (we are still after 4 years trying to get planning permission) in an area where there is apparently no interest in contemporary architecture.
The message re audiences is - as we have always found in Cumbria - that national advertising does not work at all, word of mouth and ‘folk’ marketing works by far the best (ie hand-made posters in unlikely spots). What this says about rural perspective and cultural isolation is interesting!

The audience was made up of architects, eco build enthusiasts and neighbours. There was a universally positive response to the proposed design and a great deal of discussion about the issues raised by our long battle with the planners and indeed the common experience shared by many of the attendees.
I wont go into the detail on our planning battles as it is too boring and petty for words, suffice to say the concensus of opinion at the event was that the planning authority were a dishonest and corrupt government department that worked through punative measures to achieve their personal objectives – principally to stop any contemporary design. Many people thought that the government at a strategic level was trying to move forward and that many people at ground level were keen to engage with contemporary ideas both architectural and environmental but that the government officers were incredibly and subjectively resistant to any change.
Generally it was felt that the planners chief weapon was money, if they could delay applications through fair means or foul the applicants would eventually give up – on average the planners seemed to be able to delay planning applications for 5 years (we are currently in our 4th year). This issue of money was further discussed in light of the contemporary obsession with property ownership and money making. People felt that no one wanted to take a risk with a contemporary build for fear of salability, that no one built houses that worked for themselves to live in but rather built with a priority to sell on.
The architects all complained that there was no opportunity for them to design as clients that wanted to build in a contemporary style in the Lake District did not exist.
There was also talk regarding historical precedent, if there had ever been a time when radical buildings had been built (there are a few examples of modernism, like 3 (see list of Lake District architectural highlights below)

In our gentle attempt to make an almost invisible contemporary building we have suffered a great deal of abuse from the locals, both neighbours and Parish Council, local tradesmen have refused to do work for us for fear of local opinion and outrageous stories have been circulated. Ironically the 2 biggest complainers in the village/hamlet are from holiday home owners concerned that we would live in the building! (80% of the village houses are holiday homes). We will hear the result of our current planning application in a couple of weeks time – watch this space for news!

Architecture in the Lakes – additions welcomed
Lodore Falls – John Gill 1968 The sole example of great design, now utterly ruined by the appalling conversion, however original plans exist if it ever finds a champion to restore it. Currently used as a lodge for the Lodore Hotel so you can stay in this tragedy of abused design – what a missed opportunity by the hotel – how special this could be on an international level if the original interiors had been maintained.
Motor Boat Club, Broadleas – CAF Voysey
Kendal House – Little Holme - CAF Voysey
Blackwell – Baille-Scott
Troutbeck Youth Hostel – an amateur enthusiasts home built stab at modernism circa 1920 and the first concrete shuttering build in the north of England complete with Arts and Crafts interior and battlements (A personal favorite fusion building).
Wordsworth Trust – Benson Forsyth – slate clad at the insistence of the planners who fought the scheme for 5 years and then attended the funeral of the man they had thwarted for so long (he died a year after the building opened)
Ambleside - Hutchinson Lymath Architects, a contemporary build in progress

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 17/06/07 at 12:13 1 Comment

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Monday 21 May '07

Roundabouts in Spain

I took these shots during a talk on art on roundabouts, see blog entry 'Sculptoric'

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 21/05/07 at 11:34 1 Comment