Friday 10 February '12
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

The Spiral of Success

Currently enjoying the light airport novel by Maxine Berg: The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815 - 1848. It includes this marvellous illustration by Burnett from 1826 to be hung in every Mechanics Institute in the land. It shows the King in the middle and spirals out through fifteen layers of revolution with the paupers in the workhouse at its tail: "the best informed and the most industrious will always, in their exertion to get forward, thrust out the more ignorant in the rear". Like an aspirational colon. Should be made into an app for for Art Facts. Nominations please for who's in the middle and who's left in a blue pastic doggy bag in a roadside hedge.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/02/12 at 17:04 0 Comments

Friday 10 February '12
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Der Uberkunstfarmfactory

Art factories in the snow

The print studio is the hangar on the left and the tower was used to imprison peasant farmers who didn't pay enough tax.

This week travels bring me to a wintery (-12C) Breugelish Hildersheim in the middle of Germany to meet up Charles Esche and his team from the Van Abbe Museum and Prof. Thomas Lange of the University to discuss 1848, the usage of art, agriculture, the Zombie of modernism, cluelessness and edutainment (that word has, worryingly no spell check alert), among other things we are plotting to crowbar into an exhibition to change the world, or at least change how we see it .

The art school here is like the Mercedes version of Lawson Park’s Vauxhall Chevette. The arts school is built around a gargantuan 13^th century mega farm-cum-fortress, surrounded by the most fertile soil in Germany. It’s very notable as you travel through this country by train that, in contrast to the UK, this is a land dedicated to productivity. Trackside in England reveals and a parade of retail hanger parks, malls, industrial wastelands, leisurelands and factories converted to go-kart tracks; a country given over to consumption. In Germany everyone seems to be at work, factory chimneys have smoke coming from them, the countryside is heavily farmed, not set aside and an engineering aesthetic pervades all, even at the Choco Leibniz factory.

Back at the art school we go to the student cafeteria which serves homemade café und kuchen. In fact it trumps pretty much any restaurant the Lake District has to offer and I gaze down at my 90 degree slice of subsidised patisserie and remember less fondly the Ginsters and scalding milky tea of the Goldsmiths’ refectory. But this is interrupted by a request from an art history student who is doing her thesis, startlingly, on Grizedale Arts and has heard that I am in town. “Are you sure?” I say. Apparently this website is read avidly in Europe, so we’d better get our act together. This is subsequently confirmed by Grizedale alumni and current Hildersheim artist professor Antje Schiffers who complains that we need to maintain the joke count on the site. Although, she says, we might be doing that but just not in a way she finds funny.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/02/12 at 14:16 1 Comment

Monday 23 January '12
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Coniston plus Tate

Last week we hosted the directors of the Plus Tate group  - a network of the UK’s 18 most dynamic art organisations that includes Tate, the Hepworth Wakefield, Turner Contemporary, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, Whitworth Art Gallery, Baltic and Grizedale Arts itself.

The annual seminar organised by Tate was hosted by Grizedale Arts throughout Coniston using the Coniston Institute, St Andrews Church, Brantwood, the Waterhead Hotel, Coniston launch and our headquarters at Lawson Park farm.

On the Wednesday evening the main hall of the Coniston Institute provided the backdrop for a grand dinner of 34 people comprising the directors of the Plus Tate group and the local “villager elders” who have been consistently volunteering over the last year towards the restoration of the historic Institute.

The dispersed nature of the seminar, was used to demonstrate the concept of the Village as Institution using what might be termed the Civic Framework, people and all, as the site for the conference. This is turn works to build a collective, social resource rather than a simple venue hire or site visit – using the village like one might use a work of art.

Throughout the three days the delegates ate menus that were made entirely from local produce and artists projects including local venison, Lawson Park pork, St James’ and Ruskin Blue cheese, wild grouse, Kathrin Bohm’s sauerkraut and Lawson Park grown vegetables and so on. Particularly popular were the dessert contributions of trifle, chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie created especially for the Tate by the village.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 23/01/12 at 16:34 9 Comments

Wednesday 9 November '11
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Rietdale. Gerrit?

On Monday we took delivery of this fine Rietdale Chair made by Harvey Wilkinson, former curator at Blackwell. The chair is a hybrid of the 1917 Red and Blue Chair by Gerrit Rietveld and the Eskdale school of woodcarving, produced by itinerant craftsmen in the valley of Eskdale in the English Lake District around the same time.  The Eskdale woodcarvers were never recognised as a movement or driving force in arts and crafts , yet their extraordinary designs in carved oak offer a proto-modernist version of design evolved in this remote valley, like some lost evolutionary offshoot.

Harvey has not created this piece as an art joke, but as a genuine improvement on what he sees as a slightly clunky attempt at a chair. The frame is built in beech, the arms in oak and the seat and back in ply. The edition of ball and ring turning to the legs is conceived to give the whole thing 'lift' in the traditional manner.  Further models with material variations are to be developed and it is surprisingly comfortable.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 09/11/11 at 21:29 0 Comments

Monday 19 September '11
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Greasy Pole Champion Reclaims Title

L-R: Josh Moorfoot, Adam Kane, Sarah Lehn

Josh Moorfoot on his first attempt

Kane on his descent to victory

2009 Greasy Pole Champion Adam Kane reclaimed his title this weekend at the 2011 Crab Fair and Sports, Egremont. In torrential conditions the Pole proved nigh on impossible, but with perseverance the competitors gradually dried the pole as they gained height with each effort.  An engrossing three way dual ensued between the pack leaders Lehn and Moorfoot, with Master Kane ultimately claiming the shortest ribbon and his prize of £5.00 cash and a leg of lamb sponsored by Wilsons Butchers of Egremont. That's Wilsons Butchers of Egremont.

The organisers would like assert that Adam Kane is no relation to Alan Kane (nor Jeremy Deller) the artists responsible for bringing the Greasy Pole back into operation as a seminal public sculpture of the Discursive Age and dangerous sporting apparatus.

Greasy Pole Results:

1^st Prize: Adam Kane

2^nd Prize: Sarah Lehn

3^rd Prize: Josh Moorfoot

A Hudson GA Sports Correspondent

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 19/09/11 at 12:12 0 Comments

Sunday 3 July '11
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Lawson Park Open House Day

Saturday 27 August

1100 - 1600 hrs

Admission Free

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 03/07/11 at 09:36 1 Comment

Monday 21 March '11
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Locked in a room to get some perspective

The problem with working in the country is that it’s so easy to lose perspective. There is less resistance and the world around you becomes the world. Before you know it you’re showing all the signs: shuffling around in a dirty fleece, complaining a lot about how busy everywhere is and thinking what you do is really important, international, high quality, significant, great and all those other words that provincial arts organisations love to use.

I’ve been on the road for the last week, but on a trip that entailed me being locked in rooms with artlike people for days on end. Tuesday through to Wednesday was spent in London with the Plus Tate group of directors and Thursday to Saturday locked in to the disused terminal at Cork International Airport to speak at Terminal Convention. I didn’t see any of these cities (in that ill-conceived sense of place way) but it was certainly more rewarding than standard travel usually is, in terms of clarifying what we do and don’t do when back home and, well, getting some perspective.

Both events entailed full days and evenings of sitting in a room talking about or listening to people talking about the value of art.

At Plus Tate I disagreed with a curator from the Whitworth Art Gallery about this, quite fundamentally. My point was that what art missed greatly, particularly in this time of economic tailspin, was getting the point, or having a point; that it should be useful. She couldn’t disagree more, based principally on an outdated Kantian position – arguing that art’s greatest asset was that it is useless and that was its use – the Kantian Paradox. (Interestingly our Ruskin show for the Whitworth was cancelled, we suspect, for this very reason; that the curators  refuted this post-Romantic,  post-market, post-subjective, post-historical approach to art and its history.) We agreed to differ.

At times like this you do have self doubt, that maybe you are just a deluded country bumpkin going mad. John Ruskin probably had this thought at least twice, surely. Most people outside the 604 people who are The Art World would, I suggest, have the view that art is useless. From a non-Kantian perspective.

So I was grateful for the excellent Terminal Convention (see what they’re doing there?) organised by the sharp and spikey Static Gallery in the disused airport terminal at Cork. It’s a weird thing to land at an airport and not leave it – although we did change buildings to sleep at the Cork International Airport which is the most incredible frou-frou of postmodernity and indeed worth flying there just for the hotel. They could do with a better strapline though, like We make Terry Farrell look like John Pawson.

I arrived with powerpoint in pocket, slightly unsure to be honest, concerned that the idea of the use value of art would be received with equal dismissal. But as the symposium unfolded it became clear that that it had been orchestrated to make this very point, with each speaker progressively re-enforcing this very idea as the next paradigm shift in the venerable history of what we understand as art. Which is reassuring.

Rather than regurgitate the proceedings (you can go to the website and I do have other things to do) I shall merely point you in the direction of the key interlocutors, as they say at art symposia:

Team Van Abbe Museum – Annie Fletcher, Steven ten Thije and Charles Esche

Look out. We are witnessing the end of history and modernity in all its forms and we better come up with an art solution that can handle this and give the economies of money and truth and run for their money. Charles says that we don’t particularly need artists any more and they’ve stopped doing temporary artist shows and maybe don’t need a museum (Steven looks worried). This also however opens up new possibilities for a performative idea of the archive. Oh and sooner or later we gonna have to kill the super-rich.

George Yudice, University of Miami

In order to operate beyond the entrapment of the market art must look at the established mechanisms of distribution. His book the Expediency of Culture looks a must read.

Stephen Wright, European School of Visual Arts, Paris

Not the DJ, comedian or ex-Derby County defender but a very interesting academic promoting the usership of art, art as double ontology, art as non-discipline, art without artworks, new coefficients of visibility - this guy should be run the Arts Council for a day just for the hell of it. Might make the world a better place too.  His web project Plausible Artworlds is an access point to projects that actually do something. Note: Would like to make cheese too.

Aislinn O’Donnel, GRADcam

Making philosophy useful in society. Good Job (read in a US accent).

These and all the other speakers confirmed all my doubts over the Whitworthian position and was a good excuse the show the funny but wrong David Shrigley campaigning film for the Save the Arts campaign as an introduction to my talk on what and why we do it. What the film says is that we should support the arts because of their economic and, effectively, spiritual value. What it misses is that if people could use the arts rather than look at them or buy them, they might just have a future.

Now back to the farm.....

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 21/03/11 at 13:18 0 Comments

Tuesday 26 October '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Local Vitamins

Paddy field discussion platform

This week we are hosting Michael Eddy and Emi Uemura from our good friends Vitamin Creative Space in China.

Michael, who runs the Vitamin operations in Beijing and artist Emi are here to develop ideas for a project between us.

During their stay they will be contributing to a number of events we are involved in. Please feel free to come along and take part.

Tuesday 26 October, 1.00 - 4.00pm

Kendal Food Fair

Market Place, Kendal

This afternoon, we will be contributing to the South Lakes Food Group stall at Kendal Food Fair in the Market Place. We will be presenting International Eating from Local Fields, or cuisine with normally high food miles made with local ingredients.

Tuesday 26 October

6.00 - 8.00pm

Mobile Radio

Coniston Institute, Yewdale Road Coniston

Mobile Radio will be making a programme at the Institute on Mosel Wines with a wine tasting thrown in. Michael, Emi and their friend Rob have made a range of cutting edge breads to soak up the booze.

Wednesday 27 October

10.00am - 12.30pm

Fair Trade Café

We will be helping out at the Fair Trade café at St Andrew's Church, Coniston Come along for some ethical catering and lecturing.

Emi is a Japanese artists who creates complex food related art works that address social and political issues surrounding food production and consumption. A recent project in Beijing saw the creation of a bespoke lunch delivery service for office workers.

Vitamin Creative Space are based in Guangzhou and Beijing and are one of the foremost Contemporary Art organisations in China working with many of the Chinese 'Art Stars' currently working internationally.

www.vitamincreativespace.com

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 26/10/10 at 12:27 0 Comments

Monday 25 October '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

New Chart Entry

The press frenzy continues with us now in the Independent's list of Britain's top 50 galleries and museums.

Click here for the link

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 25/10/10 at 16:06

Friday 22 October '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

PAPPED!

Note to self: must hang out with Ryan Gander more often.

Not content with an unflattering photogrpah of me in the art newspaper I now only gone and got myslef onto the hallowed turf of Artforum's Seen and Heard.

Next stop on the ladder, Grazia Style Hunter, surely.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 22/10/10 at 12:12 0 Comments

Friday 22 October '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Manifest-oh-no

You might be able to see Africa from here on a clear day

Simon Fujiwar and his unfeasably large testicles

Ryan's Puddle

I've just been to Spain on a package tour. I took a flight from Manchester to Murcia, surrounded by golf clubs and young families and the rest of my package group from the North by Northwest group of northwestern northwestern art organisations (ie those that aren't in Liverpool or Manchester).

Most people at Manchester Airport were in groups too. But they all had the same t-shirts with Malaga Muff Divers on the back. We all have the uniform of regional art administrators. As treasurer of the group I could not sanction Manifesta Muff Diver shirts, though it would make a nice change from the staple art cloth sacks favoured by the artnoscenti on these occasions. There's a Biennial project.

I'd never been to Spain before this. Being a white middle class art snob from Cheshire I always assumed the place would be full of British en mass, getting pissed and inflicting their culture on the locals. And so Manifesta proved.

Manifesta8, subtitled The European Biennial of Contemporary Art Region of Murcia (Spain) in Dialogue with Northern Africa, was constructed on a trinity of curatorial collectives who had spent too much time believing their own art theory. Manifesta in dialogue with northern Africa was therefore filled mostly with a European sensibility that manifests itself either as a) Lots of photocopied pieces of A4 paper that you don't want to read pinned to the wall or b) beautifully crafted HD projections of slow panning shots of nothing in particular happening.

If I counted right, there were only 8 artists based in Africa, out of about 100. One of the curator teams was the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum who laid on something close to the British Art Show in the old post office building. The consensus amongst the visiting audience, composed almost entirely from UK regional art tours like ours, was that this was the best bit. And there were good works here and there of course, but they could have been good works anywhere. Alexandre Singh brought some humour into the equation, as too Simon Fujiwara with his big cock. Ryan Gander made a puddle, which was nice. Pablo Bronstein and Common Culture were in a minority who actually addressed the context with any real sharpness. It was hard to find elsewhere with works that waded through and wore their academic credentials like a celice.

This comes across an aesthetic system built on extrinsic values, rather than any intrinsic will to have an effect on the world. Africa really didn't get a look in, not even in the catering.

You pay £3.5 million to get Manifesta. For that you get the art circus come to town and credibility branding and a few parties. I reckon that there were maybe 500 people at the opening party and this was the prime audience for the Biennial. That would work out at about £7,000 per head then.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 22/10/10 at 11:53 1 Comment

Wednesday 20 October '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Down the hatch

Papped

Prize

Just down the road from the Frieze Art Fair, Mrs Rebecca Gander-Limoncello has organised the Sunday Art Fair in a cavernous underground boiler room. A sort of art fair without walls, it feels like the old London art world used to feel, with fashionable kids and arrangements of artlike objects in an as-you-found-it warehousey place, in a venue you have to discover, rather than have shoved up you.

You access the fair through a metal gate on Marleybone Road, descend a metal staircase, follow a service road down and around, then go through a small door, into what you you'd expect to be a bunker, possibly housing a James Bond baddy.

Inside is the closest thing the art world has to a James Bond baddy, Ryan Gander (nobody understands what he does and he's taking over the world).

"Ah, Mr Hudson, I have been expecting you."

Ryan is running an eponymous bar serving tea, coffee, wines and beer at astonishingly reasonable prices and cocktails at astonishingly unreasonable prices. He has asked a number of artists to design and make their own cocktails, which are £50 each. Liam will be serving spilt vodka on a tray, Bob and Roberta Smith a glass of freshly poured concrete, but the mixologist on duty when I arrive is Fiona Banner. She has devised a drink in which the consumer has to down as many glasses of champagne as they can as she counts you down from 10. It's rather undignified, but actually not bad value considering champers is £10 a glass over at the Big Tent.

So, seeing as the art world is on the brink of financial collapse I buy one.*

Three glasses is all I can manage and feel quite glad about this as I don't want to be sick over Ryan. The prize though is a pair of boxing gloves and signed certificate. And I got a receipt for Julie in accounts. Look out for these items in a Christies sale near you soon.

Proof of the indignity is laid bare as I appear the next day in the Art Newspaper.

Cheers Ryan.

*NB If as a taxpayer you are questioning the ethics of this, be reassured that this was part of a complex marketing excercise/Ganderwerk to get punters to part with their cash for real. A bit like those gangs of scallies from Kent do, who sell perfume at Oxford Street. And it worked because someone did actually buy one, for real.

Now i understand art.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 20/10/10 at 13:17 0 Comments

Topics: 'Frieze'

Tuesday 5 October '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Mat Do Stronger than Ever

New resident artist and chipper Whitechapel geezer at large Mat Do currently has an exhibition at (AND/OR) at 171 Mare Street. The Ties That Bind Us are Stronger Than Ever features work based on his residency in Egremont. Mat is due back up in early November to develop a project with the goodly people of this vale.

'Go see' as they say in the print media listings these days.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 05/10/10 at 15:42 0 Comments

Topics: 'Mat Do Egremont'

Friday 24 September '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Mechanics Institute is christened

Even before the Instituto Mecanico programme gets underway, our Sao Paulo classroom hosts a talk by Ann Gallagher of Tate to a collection of art patrons and Outset folks. As the rest of the Bienal is a cocophony of video noise and vultures squawking, Ann is delighted to find a quiet room in the exhibition, at least while Adrian Street pumps on the other side of the wall.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 24/09/10 at 14:37 0 Comments

Topics: 'Sao Paulo Biennial'

Monday 20 September '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Sao Paulo Installation

Adrain Street film and mural by Raphael

Inside with drawings by Lambeth School children, 'Ruskin' and the Collingwoods

Cabinets of Coniston Curiosities

Jeremy bought some cacti to soften it up a bit, but looking for a cat calendar for that human touch

See how the Institute does that 'inside/outside' thing, see what we're doind there?

Nearly there, mural complete, film running, classroom set up. Just need to make a mess in it now. Meeting education team next to plan the education programme for the room.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 20/09/10 at 18:17 1 Comment

Topics: 'John Ruskin and reinvention' 'Sao Paulo Biennial'

Saturday 18 September '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

New Greasy Pole Champion for 2010

Congratulations to Ben Carhart winner fo this years Greasy Pole at the Crab Fair, Egremont. Ben got the leg of lamb and runner up with the shortest ribbon was Zac Turner, who claimed his £5 prize.

Artist Jeremy Deller, who instigated the return of the Pole along with Alan Kane is currently partaking in the Sao Paulo Bienal. Private view is this Tuesday at 7 if anyone can make it.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 18/09/10 at 14:12 0 Comments

Friday 17 September '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Installing at the Sao Paulo Bienal

The mural gets underway in the improvised spray booth

Jeremy Deller and I have been here for 5 days now installing our project for the Sao Paulo Bienal - a film by Jeremy about the wrestler Adrian Street, a mural of the same by local artists, a Mechanics Institute, an education programme, a school trip and a few other things rolled into one.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 17/09/10 at 23:41 0 Comments

Friday 3 September '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

It's not on

Yesterday a helpful soul graffiti'd our honesty stall: "IT'S NOT ON THAT YOU LEAVE SCRAP METAL AND CARPET IN THIS LOVELY PLACE! TAKE NOTE".

Thank you for that. We are very sorry for any offence that this may have caused. What were we thinking, leaving such unnatural materials in this haven of purity? (Though I think carpet is Royal Coniston brand, so quite local.) We shall henceforth endeavour keep this idyl free of clutter and signs of non-wilderness; but where to start? Tractors, cars, spades, straight bits of wood, disposable barbecues, tourists, fudge, brightly coloured clothing, spruce forests, quarrying, honesty stalls, graffitti.....actually better take the washing in just in case.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 03/09/10 at 16:31 2 Comments

Topics: 'unreasonable behaviour'

Thursday 24 June '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Late at Tate - You Tube can Double Dip

Yes for you folks who missed our spectacular at Tate Britain on June 4th, Jesse Rae has kindly youtubed his whole set with the Thistles and Skip Macdonald. Watch out for the Double Dip now.....

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 24/06/10 at 10:38 0 Comments

Topics: 'funk' 'Jesse Rae' 'Tate'

Thursday 24 June '10
(from Grizedale Arts Blog)

Hide and Horn Online

Long time Grizedale collaborator Peter Hodgson now has his own online shop. Do pay it a visit for finely crafted luxury goods in leather, horn, wood, ceramic and a variety of pet food supplies.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 24/06/10 at 10:31 0 Comments