Grizedale Arts: myvillages.org blog
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Towards a Proposal
So far on this blog we are just collecting thoughts and observations that follow our residency at Grizedale. Tagging each entry with a number of subjects/adjectives.
Assuming that different issues and ideas will shape one proposal for a project with Grizedale.
We’re thinking of using the Grizedale TV station that will take place later this summer at the A Foundation as a format to articulate and present the proposal.
A small event to push some ideas will be on Wed 23 May at the Serpentine Gallery, between 2.00 and 4.00 pm with Wapke, myself and Andreas from public works, Jaime Stapelton, Michael Hitchcock and Louise Coysh/Sally Tallant. Talking about objects/products/produce in regards to representing and extending social networks.
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Lawson Park Production
Grizedale Arts is a cultural producer.
Lawson Park is currently being set up to become a producing small holding again, by establishing a vegetable and fruit garden and keeping some farm animals.
How is the one linked to another, and how can modes of production be refined rather than re-established?
To marry cultural production from a contemporary art context with the traditional agricultural forms of production could be a great playful experiment. And hopefully not the continuation of established modes of production in both areas, art and agriculture. Paintings and sausages.
What is Lawson Park going to produce?
A well connected international art network with week long periods of intensity?
Who is the production for?
Is the production meant to be the proof of labour or a format for exchange?
I ve just been to Folkestone on the weekend, which still has a small local fishing harbour, but it’s also having a new “Creative Quarter”. Guess what the Sunday market was called? Fishermen and Arts Market. No joke.
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No building. No trouble.
One of the things I like best about Grizedale is the fact that it isn’t a building, and how it spreads across spaces. It might change with the redevelopment of Lawson Park into a live/work research place, but I hope it will keep its character, which for me is a space for quite accidental but very particular encounters, which then spread again, and might site and manifest themselves very clearly somewhere else.
Grizedale is going to places, which keeps it open and fragmented – and with very different access points, which is a huge advantage that most buildings are lacking.
Just to list some of the local Grizedale spaces:
Grizedale has storage space in Coniston, fund-raising dinners on the terrace of the Lake Café, Japanese cooking at the Library, Boat Dressing on the lake, radio stations in the forest, etc just to mention very few.
And it has the dinners at Lawson Park – very impressive and extremely memorable, not just because of the amazing food and the stories that come with it, but also because of the reasons why you are there and who else might be around accidentally. As if accidentally was the right term to describe the fact that one is sitting in a dining room some 6 miles from the next village and a few hours away from other art hubs associated with networking.
A spatial and relational analysis of Grizedale would be interesting.
What’s happening where and why, and how and why do those links come together and how to they move on?
During our time in Grizedale we went to see the Lantern House from Welfare State International (www.welfare-state.org) in Ulverston, now called Lanternhouse International (www.lanternhouse.org).
It’s public money for a public building which feels to have no general public.
Local gossip knows that it’s all a clique.
Wapke and I are still puzzled by the building and what it is for. It was kind of public but not, kind of welcoming but nothing to do. Kind of friendly but we didn’t want to stay. I strongly felt that it was an example for how an organisation gets trapped in a building, not just physically but also programmatically. Who is filling all those spaces and who is coming to them? The clearest memory are small arty/crafty interventions (such as the tiled edges of the staircase) in the building which were somewhere else claimed as artist/architect collaborations. That’s “functional” art at its worst, and has nothing to do with creating an innovative and functioned ground for shared cultural practice.
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Produce as Extension
Wapke and I collect each other’s best quotes. Normally Wapke wins with sentences like:
“ People think that if you’re from a big place you have big ideas, and if you’re coming from a small place, that your ideas can’t be big. That’s of course wrong.”
The thing I said during our week in Grizedale which scored for our list was:
“ The ambition ends once the story is finished.”
I had some of ours and other's projects in mind when saying this. Thinking of how many projects are prototypes and could be extended, but often finish their production once they're delivered.
They extend and survive as narratives and linked into networks, but are rarely continued as such. The term ambition refers to innovation in terms of "post-production".
I was thinking about how Grizedale initiates, produces and documents projects. In terms of production they also seem to come to an end once the project is published/presented/performed. And I think it’s worth thinking about the outcomes and how they could remain an active tool within the Grizedale network, rather than becoming just documentation or illustration of something that has been.
I’m mainly thinking of the range of produce that came out of the Seven Samurai residency in Japan, and the Grizedale programme and stalls at the A Foundation in Liverpool. How does the project and what has been produced remain exchangeable and relational within the network? How could the produce allow for an cross networking exchange, like a market, without necessarily interpersonal links.
When we did the Park Products project (www.publicworksgroup.net/pages/Park_Products_01.html) we tried to base the principle of the project on the idea of an informal economy, and trade as social space, utilising products as a tool to represent but also to initiate new social and cultural contacts and space.
Grizedale generates social/cultural space and numerous outcomes, and I think that Grizedale’s production can also be speculated as growing cultural space based on the exchange of “goods”. These goods can be anything, but need to be seen and established as a means to extend the spaces of cultural production and the networks linked them.
In a recent presentation by Jaime Stapleton (at one of Gavin Wade’s and Celine Condorelli’s Support Structure events) he talked about products as collective property and public goods. And I think many of the Grizedale “products” come out of collective and public production and are much more than individual commodities once the production process is over.
I’m phantasising about a powerful global rural economy, which exists outside of monetary market forces, and where goods are exchanged in order to make links rather than gather profit.
The idea of post-production.
What are those items?
Autonomous, in the sense that they're active, not just documentation and representation.
They "speak for themselves” and can be traded.
Have the qualities of a product which communicates itself.
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The disfunctional functional
Lawrence assiting Wapke with her super functional soil drilling tool, doing something rather less functional
I think “functional” isn’t a term that opens up options but that defines and limits them.
Things become too much either – or, functional or non-functional.
To me functional is a dysfunctional term because it’s either highly subjective and relies on individual reading and interpretation, or it’s easily ideological and becomes exclusive. To introduce “functional” as a criteria doesn’t make things clearer, but shifts the attention towards a polarising goal that’s seemingly clear, but actually isn’t.
The recent Grizedale programme suggests artists to be functional, which I understand as an intents to start fresh and reflective debate about the role and responsibility of art within the very particular context of Grizedale. But might cause an urge to define things rather than opening them up. To be “ functional”, relates to practical, is almost a cliché in a rural setting, and opposes the time-wasting and decadent culture of the city. And especially within a tourism orientated context like the Lake District, the definition and appreciation of the “functional” becomes predictable, as in profitable.
In many of our (that’s myvillages and public works) projects we try to establish an open process, in terms of logistics and outcome, and putting a polarising term at the start doesn’t help. The work and process shouldn’t be about definitions, but about experiences that allow the personal reading of those terms to be changed and altered (or limited). It’s the process of being involved, and the option to find and redefine things/experiences/objects that make art worthwhile for me. It’s the transformation of meanings in everyday live, on whichever personal and collective scale, rather than the risking the danger to get stuck in rhetoric estranged from experience. I personally try to avoid it as a criteria, because it’s as unfruitful as terms like beautiful, useful or tasteful. They have no meaning, and I’d rather not confirm existing meanings and assumptions, but put my energy into allowing things to be read and experiences outside of those categories.
An example:
When we started to develop new product ideas in my village, everyone was adamant that they had to be useful and practical. As if everything meaningful in their lives carried this adjective, and even if it did, everyone had their very own interpretation of the term. Wanting something to be “functional” wouldn’t be questioned in the village, even though it urquently requires some fundamental doubt. Often the bigger pleasure seems to come from the surprising encounter with the non-functional anyway.
At no point would I want to stop a debate about art’s role and possible role within society, for the sake of blindly defending its so called autonomy. I just don’t think that the introduction of the word “functional” helps the discussion on an everyday and practicing level.
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