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
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?
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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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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