Grizedale Arts: myvillages.org blog
Update on the Village Shop
Following our proposal to join forces in producing, promoting and distributing local produce with some culture clash aspect, the International Village Shop (also known as Honesty Box, Village Kiosk, Sufelje, etc.) keeps shaping up as a collective enterprise and real shop.
The rules so far have been simple. Everybody can open a shop - wherever they are and for however long they wish to, as long as the produce on offer has strong local links and reasons.
Shops during 2008 and 2009 include:
The ongoing Lawson Park Honesty Stall, Cumbria,UK.
A corner-vitrine shop in a veterinary's waiting room in Wjelsryp, Friesland, NL.
The Höfer Goods International Dorfladen in Höfen, Ger.
A two day village shop at the Royal Academy in London, UK.
A one hour shop at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Fransico, US.
An honesty apple box at Abbey Gardens, Stratford, London, UK.
An Internationaler Dorfladen in Boxberg, Ger.
A one day Village Kiosk at the NAi in Rotterdam, NL.
A one day International Village Shop at Loughborough, UK.
We have just received funding to develop the idea and its infrastructue further, with production workshops and a new website on its way (and to be launched in summer 2009).
We also started to make short Village Produce Films that show the makers and making behind some of the produce. To watch them online, click here.
Topics : cultural exchange local, produce, village shop,
The shop has opened
Honesty Stall at Rochelle School, London
Höfer Waren stall 2007, Höfen
Our proposed so called village shop has opened, a while ago, and been up and running at various locations with different product ranges at random prices, and together with Grizedale and public works and somewhere we have become happy and busy traders.
The shop appears under such different names as:
Honesty Box
Internationaler Dorfladen
Honesty Stall
Village Kiosk
Sufelje
Shop activities have shifted to other blogs:
the myvillages.org website
the myvillages/public works blog on the Agrifashionsita.tv website
and the still rudimentaryvillage kiosk blog.
Topics : Honesty Box Honesty Stall, Internationaler Dorfladen, Sufelje, Village Kiosk,
3 Comments
I think it is good that the honesty stall project has no owner but should perhaps mention that it was juneau/projects that kicked this project off (as an art thing) with the stall in Japan. Their project was called 'Like a Wayside Shrine' - and not forgetting that the concept is a common one around the UK.
From Grizedale point of view it has been nice to see it grow and transform organically. Every version of it has a different name and idea of how it should operate, we will never agree on a common policy in fact I think no stall will ever be able to have a policy - the nature of openness is constant change.
The relationships between all the stalls is also evolving, I think everyone is involved in the stall for Arnofini opening at the end of the week - even the juneaus. Grizedale will also be doing a stall as part of the Farmers market in Coniston 13th July - a new development for the Coniston Water Festival. We are just making some new products with local craftspeople - watch this space for Ruskin baseball caps, Ernest Race dog/cat book shelves, and Peter Hodgson 'animal wars' wall paper
hgKIp2 Thanks for good post
I want to see this movie pretty soon check out the trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ7W0GgkMH8
Expanding Honesty Box
From an e mail conversation between Kathrin and Adam:
E MAIL FROM KATHRIN
HONESTY BOX
I left quite a few Höfer Goods and Horsemilk products with Michael last Friday for the Rochelle School Honesty Box. Also left green myvillages.org frames with a brief introtext to go into the box together with the produce.
Michael wants to put things in today, and watch how fast which product sells.
We made some Shoreditch prices and let s see if it sells.
I like the multiplication of the HONESTY BOX, e.g. as Wapke suggests at the Witte de WIth in Rotterdam, and in her village.
I also would like to start one in our office at public works, and maybe one next spring in Höfen.
There could be some very simple guidelines for the extension of those boxes:
- they happen at places where we are active ( a similar rule that Wapke has for her soil drillings)
- they are made from recycled material on location
The growing number of boxes can also be seen as an extension of the "Village Kiosk" proposal.
E MAIL RESPONSE FROM ADAM
Karen and Nina are doing an Honesty Stall in their Northern art prize show in Leeds next month and are bringing/making a bunch more Japanese stuff.
Name and network would be good to formalise, maybe 'Pay what you think is right' is a term we have used.
I am making some japanese styled tea bowls centred around the idea of adding value to objects based on the Japanese concept of Meingei - very close to the idea of value in art. So the idea is the bowl is valueless until it is selected by a collector, it then becomes high value. The rules of mingei are all about how the object is produced in the first place, ie anonymous, part of mass production by hand, in normal use etc. I am interested in the idea that the purchaser basically pays what they think they are worth, ie how much value they bring to the object - sort of like therapy language, invest in yourself etc.
So maybe the honesty stall could be called 'pay what you are worth'
Also local to us there has opened an honesty cafe, pay what your wallet can afford or exchange work in the garden - seems to be working very well.
I had a chat with the design museum the other day I think they would be interested in having a stall too - maybe we need to put a cap on the number as it gets hard to service so many in an interesting way.
RE product: I would like to start to generate some cross over products, I am doing a schnapps bottle with Christoph Keller. Should we try to make this for Rochelle?
This thing of value starts to get complicated though even for example the rice has to be expensive, it is anyway and with shipping its unreasonable expensive so?
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first bits of filming for agrifashionista
Wapke started to film the handling of rural produce during the Hoefer Waren weekend, for the Grizedale tv project in January.
Ingrid Mueller made some fresh butter on the day to be sold together with the cream spoons.
And Paulina tried the sandals from Kobe which were part of this year's exhibition.
Topics : handling
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everyone with their whole families and international guest
Hoefer Waren was again a big success - very well visited, all sold out and, a rare thing in the village, no negative voices (yet). We had 2 tables with jam, juice, schnaps and dried herbs. And 2 tables with new produce, such as the lamps, bags and the horsemilk product range from Wapke's sister in Friesland.
Thanks again to Wapke for driving all the way from Rotterdam to Hoefen to make the event international!
Topics : village shop
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Please can we have a piglet update with pictures. Thanks.
Last preparations for Höfer Goods 2007
Just arrived in Höfen, the vilalge I m from, for the last preparations to do with the launch of the Höfer Goods 2007. We met this afternoon to compile all the home made goodies, label them and to discuss logistics for the weekend.
Prices were a huge issue - how much something should/could/shouldn't cost.
It's all rather cheap, a jar of jam for 90p, homemade juice for £1 ...... it's the products we designed and produced together which seems pricey in that context. The porcelain spooon for £7 and the jar lamp for £ 20. I promised to put some of the produce in the Grizedale honesty box at Rochelle School to test some London prices on them.
Topics : village shop
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The collective collection of aprons / village uniform
We just had the first workshop for the second round of Höfer Goods in my home village, Höfen, in Southern Germany (see http://www.myvillages.org/en/ourvillages.htm#waren) .
We, that's about 25 women from the village, product designer Angelika Seeschaaf and me.
Everybody brought some textile samples and things, and aprons were the most popular one.
Ranging from never worn practical, to worn out everyday to old and elegant. There must be hundreds of aprins in a village with 200 residents!
There was an interesting generation gap when it came to the appreciation of this item of fashion, and the new generation village aprons seem to be T shirts, wide and eays to wash and don't need ironing.
I was thinking of the new Lawson Park uniform and the notion of what is practical for whom.
The most popular apron in Höfen are the "Kittelschürzen" (second and fifth from the left): loose dress like aprons with a front zip and two pockets. Made from cotton and with strong patterns to hide the unevitable stains.
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Eerde
On this picture my father does a drilling on his farm, his name Eerde means soil, ground, earth. My name has a connection to watersources they have told me, our family name Feenstra means; coming of the peat. What does your name mean?
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Böhm means "from Böhmen", english Bohemia , amd to be more precise and not to confuse it with attitude, from the Bohemian Forest. Where my father's family is from.
As far as I know Böhm is the german word for Czech, which means that I'm a Katharina Czechova.
EVA
In Wjelsryp on the farm I did a cultureSOILdrilling, cousin Eva is curious what we will find in the ground.
On this picture Eva looks very much like my sister Maaike when she was a kid. We grew up more than 40 years ago at the same farm.
Topics : rural girl
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WHAT IS THE FUNCTION?
Alistair shows his green boots. The boots that I bought in Friesland are a bit darker and they were very cheep only 9,95 euro. Guess they are made in China, will have a look.
THE FUNCTION of the farm itself? Lawson Park is a hybrid monsters. So a monster we have spotted, but to less animals. For me it is strange to have a farm and have no cattle or horses or other big animals that you threat well because you earn money with them. This farm is not depended on what comes literally from the ground or out of the animals, from that point of view it really is artificially this farm. But because of its presents and its being there, it is not.
For ME at the moment it is not so interesting in seeing the “other location” or “the other way of working” in this farm. I know something about farming, I know something about art, I know something about villages and closed communities in art and in the rural. So lets start to differentiate and associate what we see here. What kind of tradition we step into? What is this FARM? What does the farm brings to art and visa versa. No answers, just a list.
First draft of a planned longlist set up to see different points of view on the FARM
THE FARM Seen as a ready made that needs attention.
Duchamp made a travelling suitcase with his oeuvre, I have to go into thinking about local art and portable art. Object rooting discussion is strange here, you cannot move the farm only the mental space. The farm needs attention on different levels. It is screaming for interaction, as the first readymades did. (To remind you the interaction keywords are piss, umbrella, bottle..).
THE FARM Seen as a catharsis place for stressed out art workers.
Farming as a going back to nature activity? Or the treatment for an art and sculpture crisis? – English gardening is a religion I am not familiar with. I grew up on a Dutch cattle farm, but catharsis HUM farming as catharsis is for art workers that have money from other grounds, maybe we have to invite some more European independent farmers over. To make us see what this farm is and does. Why not.
THE FARM Seen as an anti-action towards the roots of sculpture.
Mid nineties there was in my surrounding set up a polarisation in process art and object art. Ignore the object – Manifesta 1 advertised with NO sculptures no … I like the boots of Alistair. Also bought green boots in Friesland. We have to resee the object (and ignore the market in art (YES TRY!!) and see the ground of an object, which is just material that interacts with us. Mostly material we shaped and marked with a function or more functions. Are there objects without a function? I don't think so -
THE FARM Seen as a collection of goods, plants and people.
The body of the whole Grizedale Arts. Lets mingle a bit. What is collecting, collcting is a root and a ground of contemporary art. Mostly there is a subject in the collection, what is it here?
THE FARM seen as a loading time and space capsule of experiences.
Can you see this farm as an away from the rest of the world? No, but maybe physically when you are there in the winter. What kind of experiences this 'object' loads us with? The mix of experiences you can have here in one week is interesting. I had lunch with among others Zhang Wei - the only Chinese curator I know. Made the water running with Adam by using a Frisian trick. Did a drilling and asked for a drawing of Alistairs' boots. (GOT IT).
COMING soon
Does the periphery tell us something about the centre?
I think we can learn a lot by moving around these terms. What kind of objects are seen as centre in art?
Is this Farm periphery? And ask more. Whatever
First draft of spotting the connections of the Farm.
The Village
Residencies and contacts
The Network
Our network and their network
The Moods
Suicide and overkill
Lost – In the lake district the word MUSEUM has no vital meaning anymore / what about the object?
and so on.
7 Comments
There are plenty of farms around these here parts which are not dependent on something coming out of the ground or animals upon it. There's more of a shift for being dependent on the ground itself and making value out of the 'readymade' or at least tweaking it. So there's this new wave of farming which farms the farm - hedgelaying, barn restoration, aestheticised afternoon teas, boutique rurality, farm labour holidays and the like.
Lawson Park is not really a farm, it used to be, it became derelict 50 years ago because it was not viable as a farm in the tradition of farming here. For 300 years it farmed sheep, eventually the pest problem became so great they had to stop (ticks, fluke, maggotts etc). Even during this period there were moments of diversification, in the 20's it was a holiday home, in the 40's they were obligied to plough some fields and attempt to diversify ('dig for victory' a wartime campain).
But now it is not perhaps good to consider this a farm, it is a junction, farming is one of the represented cultures, and provides part of the practicle and theoretical framework. But there are many other components to this site of collisions. Gardening is another complex land based culture, almost the antithesis of farming, wrought be ideas of class, aesthetics, leisure and recreation, the value of work, the expression of status. Equally contemporary art is a component and all the complexities of what that is and should or could be, the list would go on, tourism, regeneration, rural and urban community, internationalism, enviromental issues, communication, etc. Grizedale as an organisation wants to encompass a broad range, bring this range into a fruitful relationship, it is the relationships between things that seems important rather than the things themselves. I don't want Grizedale or Lawson Park to be branded as a new media organisation or an eco farm or an international contemporary art player, etc. Despite the fact that any one of those brands would make life much easier re clarity and consequently funding.
Adam is using THE word when it comes to a current debate about agricultural production: DIVERSIFICATION.
I ve been to an agriculture and art conference at an agricultural school again, and diversification was the word of the day. And there were plenty of farmers who had diversivied into ice cream making, education, green energies etc.
It s probably more present in the UK, where farms have been run as leaseholds and businesses for a much longer time, than e.g. in my village in Frankonia, where farming is still very much based on the concept of smallholdings, and most farmers are doing it part time. The money is earned in the nearby factory.
Wapke's experience of a farm to me seems very personal, even though representing a friesian or central european established model of farming. When I look at my own village, the only farmers who run the farms like the image Wapke is describing, do it for personal reasons. Not for economic or functional ones. For them it would be easier to close down or diversivy. But two of them keep the cows, chicken, pigs, ducks etc because that's the kind of farm they personally want to have. So it s a chaoise and therefore a form of expression , rather than just the only option that farmers had for a long time.
I find this interesting in regards to Lawson Park. Where the farm isn t one persons/farmers expression, but can become a collective one, and therefore ecclectic.
I like Wapke's list of how Lawson Park can be read: as a ready made, a place of catharsis, a collection of goods.
Belonging For me farms are always about stories, and make you talk about your memories of farms. Farms have this sense of belonging, which doesn t have to be direct. I have a sense of belonging to the farm that my family had in what is now the Czech Republic, before they were expelled in 1946. I have never been to the farm, it doesn t exist anymore, it s been as removed as it can get, but I still have a sense of belonging to it through this family link and memory.
Farms as shared spaces I think farms allow you to get involved in a way that it becomes yours. I spent lots of time at the neighbours farm when I was a child, and going into their cow shed now, still doesn't feel like going into someone else's property but into a space that s partly mine. And the same with farmer s land. The fields I worked on and helped out as a child still are the pieces of land where I would walk across without thinking twice.
Just a quick annecdote about animals and their presence.
Andreas just told this story about travelling through India. Nad people kept asking him whether it was true that we didn't have cows and animals in the streets in Europe.
Good reverse question!
land owner ship is a complex one, the recent discussion Public works did at Serpentine brought up the value of land as a complex issue. The basic land itself is worth next to nothing you can buy many acres on ebay for a few dollars (albeit in Nevada). Land that has been worked, made productive has then a quantifiable value and as Kathrin says land you have worked on remains some how yours. Certainly with the Lawson Park farm as we bring previously fallow fields back into use and start improving the soil to sustain crops hitherto inconcievable the sense of the value of the land really increases, emotionally certainly, probably not in reality because on one would want to farm in such a difficult place and in such a difficult way (it doesnt compare well with the relatively easy money to be made running a B&B). (A local farmer did tell me recently that they gave up doing B&B because it was too difficult trying to achieve the standards people expected - en suite etc and they couldn't cope with the complaints)
I sometimes visit the farm I was brought up on. I dont feel any sort of ownership but I was a child and I only really played on the farm. The weird thing is I can't remember most of the buildings but clearly recall the sheep track shapes across fields, unchanged over the last 40 years.
I ve just recently come across the term LANDBANKING, which seems a more recent disgusting aspect of people speculating on property. You buy land as part of a huge association or lobby group, mostly agricultural, which is within a green belt area and doesn t have planning permission yet, and wait until it s being reclassified for residential developments. And then you make the money.
The Farm – Lawson Park
Lawson Park – is that the park that by law was given to the son? We have to find out what this name means? Focus on the farm and from there look on how it works.
You have an object, material and it is local, it is a farm, it has ground, soil, trees, plants.
What do you do???
Lets look at it if it was an art object: What do you do???
1 isolating
2 giving value to it
3 telling others about it and put it into a network of stories and contacts
4 collecting: because a farm is local you can add things to it, invite people to it, or collect stuff into it. To let it be a farm and not a museum all things have to be functional – that is an idea Adam brought up. I have to get what this means.
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FROM 2007; GRIZEDALE ARTS IS A FARM
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…
Topics : add things being different,
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Welcome friends! ,
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