Grizedale Arts: myvillages.org blog
Topics: add things being different farmer handling Honesty Box Honesty Stall Internationaler Dorfladen name overkill proposal rural girl something Sufelje Village Kiosk village shop
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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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.
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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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Animals from different angles
I came by plane:
During take off and landing a young man imitates a sheep. The English mates laugh loud and drink another beer.
Countryside also means living with animals and monsters.
We said before the rural is (can be) a cruel place. Going for details, difference and preciseness is what I needed when I left myvillage to study elsewhere. The Lake District is such a different place, don’t get it at all. This English people look quite familiar to me, but I have not idea where I am. This place is also cruel but in a touristy way: it is over marketed and over signed. Tourist places can make me very moody, we are lucky it is not the season. Where are we? Grizedale Arts, Lawson Park what is it?
After the first –one day- visit to Lawson Park (September 2006) I bought the book “the lamp of beauty’ by John Ruskin and was occupied with this book and especially with his opinion on Dutch Landscape. “Dutch Light” is read as a disinterest in the lower live. Ruskin: “I should attach greater importance to this rural feeling [in Dutch landscape] if there were any true humanity in it, or any feeling of beauty. But there is neither. No incidents of this lower life are painted for the sake of the incidents, but only for the effects of the light. You will find that the Dutch painters do not care about this people, but about the lustres on them. Paulus Potter, their best herd and cattle painter, does not care even for sheep, but only for wool; regards not cows, but cowhide. He attains great dexterity in drawing tufts and locks. Lingers in the little parallel ravines and furrows of fleece that open across sheep’s back as they turn; is unsurpassed in twisting a horn or pointing a nose; but he cannot paint eyes, nor perceive any conditions of an animals mind, except it’s desire of grazing. Cuyp can indeed paint sunlight, the best that Holland’s sun can show; he is a man of large natural gift, and sees broadly, nay, even seriously; finds out – a wonderful thing for men to find out in those days - that there are reflections in water, and that boats require often to be painted upside down. A brewer by trade, he feels the quite of a summer afternoon and his work will make you marvellously drowsy. It is good for nothing else that I know of; strong; but unhelpful and unthoughtful. Nothing happens in this picture, except some indifferent person asking the way of somebody else, who by this cast of countenance, seems not likely to know is. For further entertainment perhaps, a red cow and a white one; or puppies at play, not playfully; the mans heart not even with the puppies. Essentially he sees nothing than the shine on the flaps of their ears.”
I like to look at the Dutch light, I like the passion for the lower life in the critic of Ruskin, I like the signs and the postcards that sell the landscapes of the Lake District, and for the same price I can hate them. Moods and opinions are shifting by looking at these things. The good thing is that we still can see the paintings of Cuyp and Potter. They are material. Looking at material and dealing with things I like that in art. That you can walk away and the thing is still there and when you come back, you have to deal with the thing again.
Lets see what objects can do to us and how we can differentiate our views and acts by using them – rethink resee reuse reshape re re rethings
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