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
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.
alistair greenboots, May 14, 2007 14:52
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 Sutherland, May 15, 2007 09:53
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.
Kathrin Böhm, May 30, 2007 10:30
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.
Kathrin Böhm, May 30, 2007 10:40
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!
Kathrin Böhm, May 30, 2007 10:43
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.
Adam Sutherland, May 31, 2007 14:49
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.
Kathrin Böhm, June 1, 2007 12:26