Emma (Right) & Katherine (Left) volunteering at Lawson Park, January 2019
Photo: Karen Guthrie
Emma was one of 2019's first Lawson Park Volunteers, and we invited her to write about the experience:
Grizedale holds a special place in the trajectory of my arts career. I was fortunate to be invited to begin 2019 at Grizedale Arts Lawson Park residency as a volunteer, several years after I originally volunteered back in 2013. A week of toil on the land—coppicing trees for fences, painting functional sculptures, cooking mangelwurzel soup, and fixing poly-tunnels—took me back to my roots whilst re-establishing my faith in the unbounded possibilities of contemporary art.
I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know what triggered it, or if it was just my destiny (to frame it in a ridiculous construct), but I knew from a very early age that I wanted to pursue art. I don’t come from a family of artists, or visited galleries until my early teens, but I was around 7-years old when I declared to my parents that I was going to be an artist and around 8-years old when I opened my own private art gallery under the stairs in our family home. Art has remained an unshakable force in my life, it’s been engrained in everything I’ve done, it features in all my most vivid memories, and at times has disappointed me to the point of heartbreak, but my enthusiasm for it has only ever expanded.
I was raised in an agricultural family with the freedom to run the countryside, to be inventive and creative through play. My family were creative, as a child the clothes I wore had been lovingly crafted by my Mother who had also made most of our home furnishings from scratch, my Father had packed our home with alternative technologies, heating our rooms with a system run from a coal fire which always had the latest batch of laundry drying above it. Outside, we grew vegetables, composted and recycled all our household waste. My family life was overtly different to the rest of my peers, but I never considered it to be creative until much later.
Art remained a common force in my life, and I eventually enrolled in art school, a grown-up version of the creative space I had occupied as a care-free child, just here, in the adult world, it was called ‘experimenting’and cost money. I spent my precious vodka money on expensive art materials—paint, canvas, readymade textiles, haberdashery—to produce art that was of a market-standard, ready to sell. I churned out painting after painting, but it always felt a little pointless producing rt that had no useful function once completed. It went against everything I had learnt as a child; it felt wasteful.
After graduating I entered the art world and continued to paint whilst earning my rent (and vodka) money working in the institutions who decided what artists work was worthy of public attention. I never really understood the system, exhibitions would come and go, people would worry about signage, ticket prices and what themed goods the gift shop should stock. This all felt so far away from the exhibitions I had hosted in my under-stairs gallery and I was left wondering if there was another way: then I spent week volunteering at Lawson Park with Grizedale Arts.
Lawson Park is a space where my old life and new life merge together into a heady mixture of agriculture and contemporary art. After my first visit, I was inspired to leave my institutional role and widen my exploration of art, heading out to South Asia, where I have lived and worked for the past four years. In South Asia I learnt how the art world operates outside Western institutional models, engaging with projects that have found alternative routes for creativity to flourish, including the inimitable Somiya Kala Vidyawho provide design education to traditional artisans. I established projects with my peers, which put the power of art in the hands of those not usually given the freedom to explore their creative reflexes, such as Katab: Not Only Money, which recently brought the art work of female Katab (patchwork) artisans to UK audiences.
I returned to the UK in October, and after taking a few months to regroup, I knew I needed to start the next chapter of my arts adventure at Grizedale. It’s an organisation which makes absolute sense to me and reaffirms my faith that art can affect positive changes within society, whilst also having a useful and sustainable function within it. Where my next career steps will take me, only time will tell, but I remain inspired by Grizedale’s example and have the motivation to carve out an alternative trajectory for myself with others who share my passion: to make art useful and to celebrate the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.
It's very sad to hear that our neighbour Sally Beamish died a few days ago.
Sally was for many years Head Gardener at Ruskin's Brantwood, which adjoins our land here at Lawson Park. Whilst there she oversaw much sensitive restoration work and also new developments such as the ZigZaggy Garden, achievements for which she justly received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
Sally and her Brantwood colleagues in fact helped established the gardens here in a wet winter - 2011/12 I think - when she brought her beloved pony Sam up to plough what was then just rough fell around the farmhouse. Sam spent summers in our meadow here for many years, and was such a familiar presence that he appeared in several artists' works - we love this shot of him posing with a Bedwyr Williams' poster for his Satterthwaite Night Live comedy webcast. Sally possessed a vast knowledge of the local flora and fauna, and helped manage our meadow to maintain its species-rich habitat - one very hard winter she organised a resident pair of hardy fell ponies to graze it.
Sally was always encouraging of our gardening efforts: Like us, rain, deer damage and altitude did not dent her enthusiasm for the plants and landscapes of this corner of the world. She was always offering help and advice and keeping an eye on our polytunnels when we were away travelling.
During our National Garden Scheme open days she would be on our Plant Stall, offering advice to visitors. Here's a nice picture of her doing just that.
Our condolences go to her family, colleagues and friends.
In November Francesca Ulivi and Niamh Riordan were in New York
to represent Grizedale at the Alternative Art School Fair at
Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, as part of Grizedale’s ongoing interest in
formalising its education offer - the Valley School. It was an
opportunity to create a new set of manifestos and maps - local
cinema poster guru Brian Miller drew up ‘The New Super Heavy Heavy
Rules of Public Art’ and a map of Grizedale’s many local and
international resources, as they fed into the ’Lake Soup’ of
Coniston Water (this would prove to be an invaluable tool in the
effort to explain Grizedale’s structure, though some visitors were
disappointed to learn that “Lake Soup” wasn’t a real Cumbrian body
of water).
Francesca and Niamh headed across the Atlantic with very heavy
suitcases filled with articles from the Lawson Park collection: a
motely collection including an Ugly Mug, a spring loaded pickle
fork, a Christopher Dresser teapot and an oven glove that would
never fit man nor beast, alongside some of the honest shop’s finest
offerings. Having (to their surprise) successfully negotiated
customs, they set up the Grizedale stall like a kind of ‘show and
tell’, and spent the next two days using a knitted Angry Bird to
explain the complexities of the Grizedale programme to members of
the public and staff from other schools.
As it turned out, ours was an unconventional school even by
Alternative Art School standards. Francesca and Niamh spent their
time explaining the various levels on which Grizedale education
operates – the volunteer/intern system, youth club, village
activities and international projects.
They wore their own prototype of a Grizedale uniform (joining a
long line of prototypes) – potato printed workwear with horn
buttons made by Peter Hodgson and milk plastic buttons made by
Niamh to add some interest, but the uniforms couldn’t escape their
prison-wear vibe, and probably need some refinement.
On the final day of the fair it was Grizedale’s turn to lead a
panel discussion, on the theme of Reincorporating Art in Everyday
Life, alongside three other schools: Sunview Luncheonette, School
of the Apocalypse and NERTM (New Earth Resiliency Training Module).
Having spent each morning getting to know other schools through
slightly embarrassing team building exercises, it was time to lead
the audience in an exercise session of our own – and the audience
enthusiastically took up the challenge of Marcus Coates’ Creative
Fitness, standing on one leg with abandon. Discussion centred
around the professional separation of artists from everyday life,
self determination and self sufficiency and the responsibilities
involved in working within communities – all of this in the
hot-of-the-press context of Trump’s election, which had happened
only days before.
The Nuisance Of Landscape: Grizedale – The Sequel Jessica
Lack
“The ecstasy of drudgery” says Adam Sutherland, quoting Eric
Gill, with only a hint of the fanatic in his eyes. We are standing
in the hall of the Coniston Institute in the Lake District and
Sutherland, Director of Grizedale Arts, is telling me what artists
can expect when they come on residency here. Over the past 15
years, Grizedale has become the most radical arts organisation in
the country. “Which is odd,” says a bemused Sutherland surveying
the craftmaking workshop going on around him “because what we are
doing is actually very ordinary”. But then sometimes it takes an
extraordinary effort to be ordinary.
Grizedale Arts, as it is known today, began in 1999 when Adam
Sutherland was appointed the new director of a small arts
organisation based in the forest of Grizedale. It is now a research
and development agency for contemporary artists, running a
curatorial programme of community events and artist residencies.
Inspired by places like Dartington Hall in Totnes, which embraced
the philosopher Rabindranath Tagore’s ideals of progressive
education and rural reconstruction, and John Ruskin’s early
workers’ education movement, Grizedale promotes art that is useful
to society.
From the start Grizedale Arts caused controversy, splitting
locals into two camps, those who embraced its cultural democracy
and those who saw the organisation as cynically exploiting the
community. Sutherland, ever the belligerent optimist, devoured all
criticism, even going so far as to invite the inhabitants to decide
the fate of a much-hated public art work commissioned by Grizedale.
They did so with rueful pugnacity by burning it to the ground. Its
impact on the art world was also immediate. Grizedale offered an
alternative to the neo-liberalism dominating contemporary art at
the time and became a place of refuge for a group of young,
post-yBa artists who were at odds with the prevailing climate.
Artists like Olivia Plender, Nathaniel Mellors, David Blandy and
Bedwyr Williams.
By 2004, when Alistair Hudson joined as deputy director,
Grizedale had become something of a right-ofpassage for socially
engaged artists. A kind of Grizedale aesthetic began to emerge,
often involving animal costumes, craft and subversion. Marcus
Coates confronted rural romanticism, literally head on, by
attaching dead birds to his skull in an attempt to excite the
Sparrow Hawk population, Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane started their
Folk Archive, Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope won the Northern Art
Prize for work made as part of the Grizedale commission ‘The 7
Samurai’ in which seven artists traveled to work with a local
community in Japan. Then, five years ago, Grizedale stopped
encouraging artists to make art. They were still invited on
residencies, but were expected to dig in the garden, print 2 tea
towels for the honest shop or run activities in the local village.
What happened? Did Grizedale become anti-art? “Not at all”, says
Sutherland, “I think art can change people’s lives, but for me
creative success is the practical application of an idea that is
integrated into the everyday and then sustained by a community
inspiring involvement and development”.
Grizedale’s fifteen years are currently being celebrated with an
exhibition in multiple venues across the Lake District called ‘The
Nuisance of Landscape’- a suitably truculent title for an
organisation that’s impossible to get to without a car. The
exhibition starts with a blurred photograph of Marcus Coates
crawling across a field in one of his many attempts to commune with
nature. I’ve always enjoyed Coates’ art, he does no harm, although
he invariably puts himself in potentially hazardous situations,
politically, physically and emotionally, yet everyone comes out
with their honour in tact, and as Grizedale’s longest serving
artist resident it is fitting he starts the show. There is also a
video of Sutherland describing the public burning by the local
community of the contentious piece by Roddy Thomson and Colin Lowe.
A retrospective is a great way of testing the waters of
contemporary art, and what becomes apparent is how much of an
impact Grizedale has had on the British art world, not just for its
humour and DIY punk aesthetic, but its collective subversivism -
they even make a key cutting shack look political (we don’t do
Chubbs).
But mostly I like the fact that Grizedale is a respite home for
art’s superannuated Trojans, those who have fallen foul of
contemporary cultural Imperialism. There’s a great film of Olivia
Plender earnestly attempting to rehabilitate the late Ken Russell
as an auteur while he barks on about tits and ass and John Ruskin
is celebrated for his progressive ideals, rather than his
pathological fear of pubes. In many ways, Russell and Ruskin are
good mascots for Grizedale. Both were uncompromising bastards who
spent much of their lives in conflict with the prevailing
orthodoxy. As Sutherland says, “Why should the shit version win?
Lets reclaim a role in art; we will give back to people's lives
what is missing and it will act as a catalyst to get other
disconnected activities back into dialogue.” For those in the
public arts sector, crippled by cuts and directed by a deluded
government into approaching an utterly indifferent private sector
for money, Grizedale suggests there might just be another way.
“The ecstasy of drudgery” says Adam Sutherland, quoting Eric
Gill, with only a hint of the fanatic in his eyes. We are standing
in the hall of the Coniston Institutive in the Lake District and
Sutherland, Director of Grizedale Arts, is telling me what artists
can expect when they come on residency here. Over the past 15
years, Grizedale has become the most radical arts organisation in
the country. “Which is odd,” says a bemused Sutherland surveying
the craft-making workshop going on around him “because what we are
doing is actually very ordinary”. But then sometimes it takes an
extraordinary effort to be ordinary.
Grizedale Arts, as it is known today, began in 1999 when Adam
Sutherland was appointed the new director of a small arts
organisation based in the forest of Grizedale. It is now a research
and development agency for contemporary artists, running a
curatorial programme of community events and artist residencies.
Inspired by places like Dartington Hall in Totnes, which embraced
the philosopher Rabindranath Tagore’s ideals of progressive
education and rural reconstruction, and John Ruskin’s early
workers’ education movement, Grizedale promotes art that is useful
to society.
From the start Grizedale Arts caused controversy, splitting
locals into two camps, those who embraced its cultural democracy
and those who saw the organisation as cynically exploiting the
community. Sutherland, ever the belligerent optimist, devoured all
criticism, even going so far as to invite the inhabitants to decide
the fate of a much-hated public art work commissioned by Grizedale.
They did so with rueful pugnacity by burning it to the ground.
Its impact on the art world was also immediate. Grizedale
offered an alternative to the neo-liberalism dominating
contemporary art at the time and became a place of refuge for a
group of young, post-yBa artists who were at odds with the
prevailing climate. Artists like Olivia Plender, Nathaniel Mellors,
David Blandy and Bedwyr Williams. By 2004, when Alistair Hudson
joined as deputy director, Grizedale had become something of a
right-of-passage for socially engaged artists.
A kind of Grizedale aesthetic began to emerge, often involving
animal costumes, craft and subversion. Marcus Coates confronted
rural romanticism, literally head on, by attaching dead birds to
his skull in an attempt to excite the Sparrow Hawk population,
Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane started their Folk Archive*, Karen
Guthrie and Nina Pope won the Northern Art Prize for work made as
part of the Grizedale commission The 7 Samurai in which seven
artists traveled to work with a local community in Japan.
Then, five years ago, Grizedale stopped encouraging artists to
make art. They were still invited on residencies, but were expected
to dig in the garden, print tea towels for the honest shop or run
activities in the local village. What happened? Did Grizedale
become anti-art? “Not at all”, says Sutherland, “I think art can
change people’s lives, but for me creative success is the practical
application of an idea that is integrated into the everyday and
then sustained by a community inspiring involvement and
development”.
Grizedale’s fifteen years are currently being celebrated with an
exhibition in multiple venues across the Lake District called ‘The
Nuisance of Landscape’- a suitably truculent title for an
organisation that’s impossible to get to without a car. The
exhibition starts with a blurred photograph of Marcus Coates
crawling across a field in one of his many attempts to commune with
nature. I’ve always enjoyed Coates’ art, he does no harm, although
he invariably puts himself in potentially hazardous situations,
politically, physically and emotionally, yet everyone comes out
with their honour in tact, and as Grizedale’s longest serving
artist resident it is fitting he starts the show. There is also a
video of Sutherland describing the public burning by the local
community of the contentious piece by Roddy Thomson and Colin
Lowe.
A retrospective is a great way of testing the waters of
contemporary art, and what becomes apparent is how much of an
impact Grizedale has had on the British art world, not just for its
humour and DIY punk aesthetic, but its collective subversivism -
they even make a key cutting shack look political (we don’t do
Chubbs). But mostly I like the fact that Grizedale is a respite
home for art’s superannuated Trojans, those who have fallen foul of
contemporary cultural Imperialism. There’s a great film of Olivia
Plender earnestly attempting to rehabilitate the late Ken Russell
as an auteur while he barks on about tits and ass and John Ruskin
is celebrated for his progressive ideals, rather than his
pathological fear of pubes. In many ways, Russell and Ruskin are
good mascots for Grizedale. Both were uncompromising bastards who
spent much of their lives in conflict with the prevailing
orthodoxy.
As Sutherland says, “Why should the shit version win? Lets
reclaim a role in art; we will give back to people's lives what is
missing and it will act as a catalyst to get other disconnected
activities back into dialogue.” For those in the public arts
sector, crippled by cuts and directed by a deluded government into
approaching an utterly indifferent private sector for money,
Grizedale suggests there might just be another way.
* Jeremy and Alan's Folk Archive definitely didn't start at
Grizedale although they did come to stay during the collecting
phase and decided that any local folk art was tainted by the
proximity of so many artists so consequently inadmissible.
This was the first of several manifestations that the OUA has had over the next few years. As Alistair describes it, “The Office is part classroom part propaganda machine for the idea of Useful Art, recruiting for the Useful Art Association and working in parallel to the Museum of Arte Util at the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven where we will also be press ganging people into Useology from December 7th”.
The OUA at Tate Liverpool provided a complex, multi-purpose space in which ideas could be discussed and plans for futures could begin to be hatched and materialized. As well as providing an open drop-in space for visitors to the ‘Art Turning Left Show’, the OUA also provided a bookable space for anybody to hold discussions, talks, interventions or re-thinks about the show and/or the possible use of art.
The OUA at Tate Liverpool also provided a very successful model for integrating students within the infrastructure of a live show. Around 25 undergraduate BA (Hons) Fine Art students from Liverpool John Moores University signed up to work in the office and to recruit exhibition visitors to the Useful Art Association. Also, a group of my MA Fine Art students have become very interested in how the OUA attempts to work and rethink the conventional gallery/museum space as a site for information, intervention and exchange.
We also used the OUA as a location for a first meeting of the L’Internationale Mediation group who will be develop a series of seminars, interventions, discussions, publications and collaborations with us over the course of the ‘Uses of Art’ project (which will run for the next 5 years). The OUA itself, as an ongoing, developing, changing, mutating phenomena will also act as one of the key examples of how we can begin to rethink the role and relationship between art, education and use.
Although we are only beginning to look back at the impact, successes and pitfalls of the OUA’s first manifestation (as it will soon be travelling to different locations, in different guises, and working in different ways) it has already acted as a real means to think through complex and overlapping issues surrounding the production, distribution and reception of art. Rather than acting as a simple ‘information point’ – by which visitors to the exhibition could re-affirm their experience of the show by accessing the official ‘rationale’ or have the show ‘explained to them’ in ‘layman’s terms’ – the first iteration of the OUA has acted as a real space in which ideas of education and the production of meaning began to happen within a traditional galley space. As different people, from a wide variety of backgrounds, began to use and re-use the propositions found in Art Turning Left both the show, and the Office of Useful Art, began to act as a toolkit for producing new meanings. As Steven Wright argues in his recent book ‘Towards a Lexicon of Usership’ (which can be downloaded at the online Museum Of Arte Útil) we, passive spectatorship is currently being replaced by active usership. This, in turn, enables a more radical re-think of how institutions can begin to re-think or re-invent themselves as civic institutions for the production of knowledge.
The link between the OUA at Tate Liverpool and the simultaneous presence of Grizedale Arts at Van Abbemuseum’s ‘Museum of Useful Art’ show is crucial here. This has also begun to offer ways of thinking through different kinds of simultaneous usership, in different locations, and across different timescales – offering a way of beginning to think of alternative and overlapping temporalities (of uses and re-uses of histories and imagined futures, as well as contemporary materials that are ready to hand, which overlap and replay themselves as non-linear possibility). This also offers an opportunity for us to re-purpose and to revivify the role and function of the art institution (be it museum, gallery, education or production based) as a collaborative maker of histories and futures, one that relies on its users to help produce and reproduces an active civic role.
(I move from Korea to Japan to work with artists Fernando Garcia
Dory on his farming and food project in Maebashi – it is kind of
meant to be a holiday)
As with Seoul, Maebashi is a city of almost completely renewed
buildings, both flatten by war and the drive to modernity - looking
out over these places I feel a sense of tragedy, grief really, the
odd tear has fallen on several occasions (quite incomprehensible
really, always when I am on the 23rd floor or so) over
the ‘sublime’ in the extreme urbanscape, a kind of combination of
wonder and horror, a ‘what have we done’ feeling – the
extraordinary human endeavour, the sense of what is underneath –
not only the landscape but a former built environment, in effect
the place. The character the cities have is now more of a
geographical position than a visible history or culture – they
could almost be any place, any person’s home. The few ‘natural’
elements are hardly there, in Maebashi the river can perhaps offer
a little solace – not really sure why a river would do that but
somehow it does – all that flowing on and on stuff it’s always
getting up to.
I noticed that Seoul has been voted 3rd worst city in the world,
that does seem somewhat upside down – it is surely one of the best
cities in the world, very efficient, energising, interesting,
varied, law abiding, big. I guess the downsides are the
phenomenally built up quality, but even that is majestic,
awe-inspiring.
5 days in a window less, equipment free, ex pizza kitchen in a
mental health day centre is one experience of Japan that I might
not repeat in a hurry. The last day – a holiday - was however a
delight and flowed smoothly from dawn to dusk starting with a visit
to an exquisite house and garden in the Maebashi suburbs. The key
feature and centres piece to the stroll garden being the large open
expanse of dry stream bed acting as a stone garden in the dryer
months and a shallow pond in the wetter ones – really inspiring.
All the usual elements of the stroll and water, rock and inner
gardens including the usual buildings, tea house, viewing platform
– the no nails building design certainly inspired me again - Lawson
park get ready to get your freak on and this time it’s going to be
sharp.
This visit was quickly followed by a work-wear shopping trip in
the utterly vast agricultural store – a place where you can by a
bridge large enough to drive over. Picked up a set of working
clothes all pockets and padding to add to the LP work wear of the
world collection. We then headed out to Airko sacred mountain but
while stopping for petrol noticed an abundance of pots outside a
house – turned out to be an absolute treasure trove of amazing folk
art and other antiques run be a lovely old couple who made us
coffee and gave us rather good deals on our somewhat paltry buys. I
bought a tight collection of red lacquer wares Fernando somewhat
randomly bought a child’s kimono and a paper mache fox – I think
this may say something about our respective characters, and why the
previous 5 days had been such a struggle. He’s a freewheeling
charmer and I am an uptight delivery freak.
From there our artist friend and guide Hiro Masuda drove us to
the top of the sacred mountain and as we climbed the leaves of the
- incredibly diverse range of trees - changed – autumn was about
half way down the mountain and blow me if it wasn’t the E word
again and this time in spades, or rather maple, acer, sycamour,
birch and very many others.
Next stop was a pig farm and sausage producer followed by tea
with a teacher of the tea ceremony providing me with a close look
at her superb collection of tea bowls and their exquisite multiple
boxes, each more E than the last. The extraordinary attention to
detail involved in the ceremony is kind of nuts – like a really OCD
obsession, the angle of the light, the crawl of the raku glaze, the
bump in the foot of the bowl, the finger marks left by the potter –
all have names and are to be paid attention to. It was a
fascinating insight into a disturbing obsessive world – Fernando
was transfixed – so alien for him, for me, I would be there if I
took off the restrainers – so more like fear in my case.
Seoul’s Hermes store is a thing of extreme and slightly
sickening perfection, from the white leather upholstered stair rail
to the exquisite window mastic. The function of the building is
unfathomable – 5 floors of taste and quality, populated only by
staff, selling saddle soap, bridles, saddle blankets and of course
their incomprehensibly expensive scarves – but whatever these cost
it does not add up to this kind of operation.
Again this curious notion of authenticity – that is the nebulous
currency that compels people to buy directly from Hermes. I was
told many years ago about a retail experiment in a Tokyo department
store (I was told this in a pub so almost certainly fiction). 2
lots of exact same Vuitton bags were laid out in the store one lot
were priced at half the real cost – the full-price bags sold
quickly, not one half-priced bag sold.
This trip took in the hyper rich quarter of Seoul, the Samsung
art museum with its 3 – so famous you think they must be dead –
architects. The auction house where the ‘experts’ verify the
authenticity of objects and one of the most exquisite galleries,
the Horim Museum, the result of one man’s obsession with Korean
folk art. There is a curious schism in the galleries – the objects
are mostly simple functional items, components of normal life –
albeit a normality that is now hard to imagine in terms of
aesthetic quality – this is set against the most luxurious of
galleries, I suspect if I was an archivist I would be off the
ground in transcendent ecstasy at the ‘conditions’. Conditions very
far removed from ‘normal’ life – it seems an odd choice. However
the objects are inspiring, a kind of Korean version of the Mengei
museum and all the ideas behind that.
I arrived with an idea of what we could do with the project,
that has inevitably shifted a fair bit – partly due to the wonders,
partly the unexpected and not least the scale of Liam’s structure
and the nigh on impossibility of moving it.
Toya, Toya, Toya, (pottery, pottery, pottery) sing the chipmunk
choir – the soundtrack to your visit to the Incheon Ceramics
biennale, a place where everything is made of pottery – some might
say a dream come true but even as a devoted lover of clay it was
too much for me – too expanding the form, too much art, too many
people declaring pottery is art – mainly ‘here’s something that
looks like contemporary art that I made in clay’. In a way the joy
of pottery is it’s building block quality, it’s integration in the
ordinary – not it’s desire to fly. Of course clay is possibly the
most versatile of any medium, from high performance engine,
cladding for a space rocket and the always sharp knife, to the
coprophilic splogs and splats of self expression.
The pottery biennale along with many other things has made me
think again about the perception of authenticity – a long
historical and contemporary exchange between east and west, from
the pottery of the 16th century to the prints of the
19th century and the commerce of the contemporary.
Everywhere I see copies of contemporary design, in itself retro
design – copies of things that are themselves copies of other
things – but somewhere in this endless exchange someone claims
authorship and copy right (usually a photographer). Perhaps the
most perplexing copy is the copy of the up-cycled look, the faking
of recycled materials.
There is an interesting alternative in Korean pottery, there are
master potters that make pots in the traditional style,
15th century style, these pots sell for £40,000 as much
if not more than the ‘originals’. They are perfect versions, they
are made with the same materials the same technology and the same
craft skill and by people who are part of a living link - no
changes, no stepping outside of the form.
When the western potter then copies this style – slavishly
reproducing all the authentic details the result is of a high value
but nowhere near as high as the Korean potters, the western potter
adopts their own kind of other authenticity, when that is then
reproduced it again drops in value. I suppose the issue is when the
production techniques change and the same items become factory
produced of less individual resonance, but probably better
technical quality. Differences that the majority of people will not
notice, and arguably why should anyone care. The difference between
a good and great bottle of wine – largely symbolic for the majority
of people. The symbolic and votive significance become
paramount.
You can tie yourself quickly into a tight knot thinking about
this stuff.
When Bernard Leach was heavily forged by the pottery class
inmates of Wormwood Scrubs prison the bottom dropped out of the
Leach market – the prisoners work was terrible all they really
copied was the stamp.
In the north of Seoul is a small village area of winding streets
and exquisite crafts. I visited the Folk art museum guided by Jina
from APAP who translated and guided me through the complexities of
the travel and food and all the rest – amazing to be so well
hosted, so much more productive and you get the sense that you are
perhaps actually valued, that something worthwhile is actually
expected of you – so many residencies give the impression they just
wish you weren’t there even though you are only there because they
invited you. Anyway Jina (middle name Patience – no really)
answered my millions of disparate questions tirelessly including
the translation of 5 moral tales illustrated in a screen at the
museum – it seemed to be telling stories similar to ones my uncle
used to tell of his adventures - two brothers, one went to fight in
a war, he died, the other brother had a sandwich – the end – it was
quite hard to work out the moral messages.
The whole area is full of craft and making at all levels – it is
also full of large groups of Chinese tourists who do somewhat
destroy the bucolic calm of a solo visit to the chicken museum or
the knot making school – other than that - what a place to
live.
The evening we visit a retro music cellar, all 70’s design and
music – it is founded and run by an artist/dj and is becoming
increasingly popular for a mainstream audience. On a random note
Jin tells me that until quite recently all album releases were
legally obliged to have a health song on them, a positive
educational message – that could be a great compilation series –
from the west the plethora of positive songs in the James Brown
catalogue spring to mind – well they would would’nt they that’s the
sort of nonsense my mind is filled with. Trying to find out a bit
more on K-pop and the musical heritage - although American
influenced from the war period music seems to be largely Korean,
albeit fusion. Korean pysch soul is well known in the esoteric
circles of muso land but what did it mean? I found a film based on
a group called the Devils that seems to suggested the Korean
president blamed the loss of the Vietnam war on pych soul!! and the
group were imprisoned and tortured before making a post-military
comeback – the music seems largely to be pretty pedestrian soul
cover versions – a Korean Blues Brothers albeit the blues brothers
were sadly never tortured before after or during the film -
although Beluchi did do himself some damage by all accounts.
Next issue
Second hand Seoul (ok that will be the only soul pun) and
Pottery biennale - bet you cant wait
All the usual fun of the long flight – 10 hours + the children
exploring the rhythmic stylings of Stomp using the clack of the
seatbelt, the crash of the table and the sickening guillotine jolt
of the arm rest, while dad texts. My seat enemy seemed to have to
urgently leave her seat minutes after the meal has been laid out –
really extremely awkward to pick all that stuff up and move, and
the most unpleasant of all flight phenomena the toe massage – from
my rear seat enemy – a girl absolutely determined to explore the
full potential of her seat’s capacity for alternative function and
the back of my chair for some complex foot work.
The film selection was a bit of a struggle, I was delight to
note the Fast and Furious has reach 6 – actually might watch that
on the way back, heard it was so beyond reason it had started to
get good and Vim Diesel is always a jaw dropping watch – what’s
with the ‘I’ve got a blocked nose’ diction. Did watch ‘The Intern’
a rom-com with the Vaughn/Wilson jerk-a-thon formulae - those guys
really have got the portrait of unutterable tossers off to
perfection. The Wilson seduction scene always a must watch for
shear wincing agony.
Incheon airport is a groovy super breeze, and the relaxed coach
ride into Anyang a pleasant sojourn through the combination of high
rise, flyovers and spectacular landscape that is a familiar style
in Asia – made more comfortable by not having the burden of a
suitcase – erroneously left on some tarmac somewhere.
Met by Jin and Jina from APAP - and taken on a tour of the
art works of the public art programme – a series of YBa period
works in the new city, Gillick, Gary Webb et al. All looking a bit
down in the ears, and kind of irrelevant in what is a kind of
difficult context – the other part of the programme is closer to a
sculpture park in a rural setting, much like a contemporary version
of old Grizedale – mostly large scale sculptures in the
landscape.
Both programmes driven by slightly different visions coming from
the city government – the principle ambition being to do with
status and city brand – to raise the ‘cosmopolitan’ factor. Also to
attract tourists – despite that seemingly absurd notion.
The programme has to make decisions about various works in need
of conservation or re sighting, difficult things to agree to spend
money on and big money at that – big sculpture, big money.
It would seem a good idea to try to make some of these art
works, actually work, take on some kind of function other than
mildly pissing off the local population. Some are conceived as
‘social spaces’ particularly the architectural ones. However most
have some ‘reason’ they cannot be used, often something like power
or water supply, or impractical materials – which ends up meaning
that they are all in effect symbolic. We are looking at moving Liam
Gillick’s sculpture, ‘a scale model for a social sructure’ it seems
logical to make it function for a community in some form.
And that’s where the problems start - this is a big thing, built
to stay put, although looking structural it isn’t in many ways. So
using it as structure for a further components is a bit
problematic. The cost of moving it and re construction really means
that you are principally trying to preserve a Gillick art work -
that becomes the financially dominant aspect. It kind of becomes
some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario where once extremely
valuable things are used as components in mundane activities, kind
of like cutting up the tyres of a lorry to make cheap shoes or
using a Durer drawing as a men’s room pin up or some impressionist
paintings as a floor covering (all real examples). So Liam’s
million pound sculpture can be a sign-post and a support for an
honest shop.
Director Adam Sutherland is on a project development trip to
Anyang, South Korea and Maebashi, Japan.
Expect regular blogs throughout the next 2 weeks - focused on
public art, 2nd hand stuff, home and professional crafts,
agriculture, fear of flying and a hatred of travel.
I probably need to begin with an apology… maybe two? First of
all, this is the first JR memorial blog entry from me for well over
a year – I don’t know where the time has gone, other than saying
that the world has gone quite mad and, like everybody else, I’ve
been busy trying to stave off the forces of terminal
instrumentalization. Second, and far worse, this blog entry isn’t
about DeLorean cars, flying skate boards, sleeveless bubble jackets
or the consequences of calling McFly ‘chicken’ (though it has to be
said, big JR would have made a good stand in for mad professor type
person Dr. Emmett L. Brown). But this is about time machines – or,
more accurately, Mechanics Institutes as they were once called. Yes
folks, the good folk up at Grizedale have done it again. Just as we
thought we didn’t have an appropriate metaphor to think through the
process of ‘thinking ourselves otherwise’, up pop Adam, Alistair
and Co with a reminder to look in front of our own eyes. And in my
case into the history of the very institution I work in/for.
As you probably all know by now, Grizedale took the ‘Colosseum
of the Consumed’ to Frieze Art Fair last October. During this
multi-media, multi-project, multi-faith fandango, Alistair found
time to communicate to us (at The Autonomy School in Liverpool) via
the new fangled technology of Skype (something McFly and co could
only have dreamed of in their Back to the Future II world of 1989).
During this conversation, Alistair began to elaborate on various
developments in Grizedale Art’s ongoing project. Most importantly,
he invited us to imagine a bell curve of Social and Industrial
assent and decline – beginning with the late Enlightenment/First
Industrial Revolution and ending in our present economic chaos. If
we were to draw an imaginary line back across this bell curve, from
our present point in time, Hudson argued that we would find
ourselves somewhere around the beginning of the 19th
Century – a time in which Europe was beginning to re-define itself
along the lines of democracy, emancipation and extended social
inclusion. This period probably reached its ideological apogee in
the revolutionary year of 1848 and laid the foundations for the
ideas of citizenship and cultural value that we are currently
clinging on to (and re-defiling) today. Amongst this hubbub of this
activity was, of course, the growth of the Mechanics Institute –
those utopian expressions of social progressivism funded by
self-elected (and usually liberal minded) pillars of society.
Amongst this list of alumni was, of course, our own big JR who
kindly funded developments in the rural/industrial village of
Coniston.
What is important here for Hudson and the crew of the good ship
Grizedale was JR’s insistence on teaching art as part of an
extensive and integrated education – making it part of a syllabus
that would also include literature, the sciences and the
acquisition of everyday practical skills. Not only did this kind of
syllabus lead to the Mechanics Institutes becoming crucibles of
self-organisation and social change (centres of early union
activity as well as the foundations for many of our current UK
Universities), it also remind us of a time when art was also
ascribed a socially integrated use value. For Hudson, ‘the current
state of art galleries and museums is still determined by the
framework marked out by economic and truth values; where value is
ascribed to works of art based upon their operation within a market
system and their perceived ability to reveal or lead us to seeing
the world as it really is. In this scheme (from around 1848
onwards) the third value of art, based upon its utility or usage,
has been largely suppressed, or diverted into the arena of craft,
activism, politics and so on’. Re-inventing use value as the
crucial third term (against the accepted mode ‘dual mode of
advocacy of and advocacy’ – displaying works of art according to a
consensus of what constitutes a work of value [as commodities in
both monetary and aesthetic terms] and then advocating this value
to the museum or gallery’s constituency) then becomes crucial. It
becomes the cornerstone for beginning to re-imagine a more
permeable and open form of arts institution – one not bound by its
physical and geographical manifestation or legislation.
In its humble way, the time machine of big JR’s Mechanics
Institute at Coniston begins to open up this possibility, the
possibility for re-imagining a socially re-integrated art
production which forms part of our productive identity and
collaborative notions of citizenship, individual civil rights and
access to what we have left of community. Such a time machine also
gives us the opportunity to look back to the future, to re-assess
the roots of our culture, to sift through what was kept in and what
was thrown away in the processes of epistemological construct that
were (and still are) our inherited Modernity.
So! In our next issue of the Big JR Blog more on Time Machines -
and a big thank you here to discussions with Francesco Manacorda,
Director or Liverpool Tate, whose own (and far more elegant) use of
the ‘Time Machine’ as curatorial device put me in mind of McFly and
Co (and also, if I’m honest, made me begin to re-think the Machines
and Machinic illogics/counterlogics of Guattari’s ‘Chaosmosis’).
Maybe also something more on permeable institutions? Oh, and we
probably need to start a reconsideration of craft at some point I
would have thought? Until then may all of your Ruskin beards be
trim, may all of your bushy sideburns stay hearty (in a non-gender
specific metaphorical way of course), and may your Workers Soup
remain forever on low simmer.
Open Pamphlet Call for Radical Aesthetics event
organised by Loughborough University at The People's History
Museum:
Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer
A RadicalAesthetics/RadicalArt (RaRa) event
People’s History Museum,
Manchester,
FRIDAY June 14th 2013
Call for Participation
The RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt(RaRa) project invites artists and
scholars to prepare and submit a pamphlet for presentation at a
one-day event, Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer.
Instead of the traditional ‘paper’, submissions must essentially be
for or against something – in essence a protest.
The form that the protest takes is open to interpretation, for
example print, paper, images, video, performance, public
intervention. We invite you to address the idea and format of your
provocation/declaration as imaginatively and radically as you
wish.
How have artists used the trope of the radical pamphlet? How
might it be utilized as a format?
Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer will explore
the history and relevance of the pamphlet for contemporary art
practice through presentations by speakers and performers.
The one-day event will coincide with a small display of
selected pamphlets from the PHM collection (curated by the
RaRa organisers) together with a
selection from our ‘call for pamphlets’. See below for more
information.
Context: Radical Pamphlets, the People’s History Museum
and RaRa
Radical Pamphlets
It is written because there is something that one wants to say
now, and one believes there is no other way of getting a hearing.
Pamphlets may turn on points of ethics or theology but they always
have a clear political implication. A pamphlet may be written
either for or against somebody or something, but in essence it is
always a protest.
George Orwell (1948) in British Pamphleteers Volume 1, from
the sixteenth century to the French Revolution
For Orwell, the pamphlet is a polemical provocation. Through the
20thc and beyond, artists have worked and acted provocatively and
polemically with text, images and performance, publishing writings
and producing pamphlets and manifestoes, including the Futurists
(1909), Surrealists (1924), Fluxus (George Maciunas, 1963),
First Things First (Ken Garland 1964), Mierle Laderman
Ukeles (Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969) and Stewart
Home’s Neoist Manifestos (1987). More recently, in 2009,
Monica Ross and fifteen others co-recited the Universal
Declaration ofHuman Rights on the Anniversary
of The Peterloo Massacre at John Rylands Library Manchester and the
Freee Art Collective have performed their manifestoes in a
range of public settings. The edited book (2011) by Danchev 100
Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists
(Penguin Modern Classics) demonstrates it as subject of current
interest.
The last decade has seen art’s increasing engagement with
political and social issues, whereby in some instances artists’
activities have become indistinguishable from social activism (e.g.
Wochenklauser) or other disciplinary functions (e.g.
artist as ‘anthropologist’ as in Jeremy Deller’s Folk
Archive).The art community’s current preoccupation with
revolutionary movements and global politics is being addressed from
different perspectives. The format and traditions of the ‘radical
pamphlet’ may provide an alternative platform for artistic
intervention and provocation.
People’s History Museum (PHM)
The People’s History Museum is a national
research facility, archive and accredited public museum, which
contains unique collections of documents and artefacts. The
collection includes the British Labour Party and Communist Party of
Great Britain papers, extensive amateur and documentary film
holdings and the largest trade union and protest banner collection
in the world. The Museum suits our particular brief of radicality
in its focus on histories of radical collective action.
The project will extend invitation to a range of social groups
in Manchester, for example: Manchester Social Centre, All FM
Community Radio,Manchester Radical History Collective,
Radical Routes network of co-operatives, Working Class Movement
Library, Manchester, Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural
Change, University of Manchester.
RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt(RaRa)
The RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt(RaRa) project was initiated in
2009 at Loughborough University (LU) under the auspices of the
Politicized Practice Research Group (PPRG). The
RaRa project and its associated book series (with I.B.
Tauris) explores the meeting of contemporary art practice and
interpretations of radicality to promote debate, confront
convention and formulate alternative ways of thinking about art
practice. Previous RaRa events have included ‘DIY cultures’ and
Radical Footage: Film and Dissent at Nottingham
Contemporary.
We had a recent visit here from useful artist Tania Bruguera who is working on
a Museum of Useful Art for the Van Abbe Museum in October next
year, part of the project The Uses of Art: the Legacy of 1848
and 1989 we have been developing with the Internationale
group of European museums. We spent the weekend with Nick Aikens, a
ginger curator of the Van Abbe Museum, refining the criteria of
Useful Art or Art Util as she prefers to call it. Whilst here we
hooked her up with the Fernando Garcia Dory, awarded last month
with $25,000 and the gong for The
Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change at the
Creative Time Summit in New York. Fernando and Tania only ever
communicate via Skype, the preferred medium of purposeful artists.
Here you see them head to head in a feed back loop of social
engagement. Fernando is currently working in London on Now I Gotta Reason, go
use him.
To be arte útil it
should:
1- Propose new uses
for art within society
2- Challenge the
field within which it operates (civic, legislative, pedagogical,
scientific, economic etc)
3- Be ‘timing
specific’, responding to the urgencies of the moment
4- Be implemented
in the real and actually work!
5- Replace authors
with initiators and spectators with users
6- Have practical,
beneficial outcomes for its users
7- Pursue
sustainability whilst adapting to changing conditions
8- Re-establish
aesthetics as an ecosystem of transformative fields
The show at the Jerwood
Space opened for business yesterday. Co-curated with Marcus
Coates, the premise of the show is looking at ways in which art,
artists and culture can play a more useful role in society. The
main discussion so far seems to be about money and in particular
the artist and their unpaid or unvalued labour. As we will be
making the budget spend transparent and encouraging the artists to
think about generating income through their activity, money talk is
no surprise so we will see where these discussions take us in the
coming weeks.
Not really, he doesn't exist. However, we could really do with
some help bringing special seasonal art cheer to our local village.
From making Christmas decorations, serving mulled wine at the
Christmas Lights Switch On to offering a gift wrapping service at
the Farmer's Market and Art Fair, you can use your creative skills
in lots of useful ways. For more information, email Maria.
Art historian and media legend Tim Marlow consumes a cake
phallus from Bedwyr William's Curator Cadaver Cake at
Grizedale Arts' Colosseum of the Consumed
at Frieze Art Fair 2012.
The second text I would like to share with you is a draft
outline for how a UK manifestation of the 1848 project might be and
this is underpinned by a question relating to the issue of how we
might measure usefulness and how we might measure
aesthetics.
If we believe in the idea of usefulness and if we believe in
aesthetics (in its widest conception of the reception,
communication and processiing of the senses) as the how and why of
art and society - how do we measure these things, as Sam provokes,
without damaging the object of study?
The New Mechanics
The New Mechanics is a touring concept and a project to develop
youth citizenship that is delivered over multiple venues across the
England. It is being developed with three UK art institutions and
Grizedale Arts.
Project Overview
The New Mechanics is designed as the UK component of a
larger international project 1848: The Uses of Art, an
ambitious 5 year project, conceived by Grizedale Arts and
developing six major European Musuems and two Universities. This
pan-European Project aims to reintroduce the idea of Use Value as a
central function of art and to develop the civic future of museums
and galleries using the concept of the Mechanics Institute.
At the heart of this endeavor is an ambition to use art, artists
and art institutions more effectively in civic society and to build
a form of citizenship based on creativity and social
responsibility.
This process would involve a drive to reshape museums and art,
based on current socially oriented art practices and revisiting the
Mechanics Institute as a mechanism for social change – working with
a more comprehensive, expanded constituency, reaching and building
new audiences and developing a model of art that is valued more
widely, beyond the current conventions of economic and personal
impact.
The consensus of opinion that has grown around this project
(particularly the idea of the usage of art) has formed from a new
generation of work by artists and curators that aims to be
effective outside the performative frame of art – that is
understood for how it works, not how it is consumed.
This project was initially formed out a synthesis of recent work
by Grizedale Arts around a rethinking of John Ruskin, the
19th Century Mechanics Institutes and Liam Gillick’s
current work around European revolution in 1848 and grown with
interest from writers such as Barbara Steiner, Marie Jane Jacobs,
Jeremy Millar, Simon Critchley, Tom F McDonough and Stephen Wright.
It will consist of a long term programme of activity (a touring
concept rather than a touring exhibition) built around three key
themes:
1. Education: the use of art and creativity as an educational
and developmental tool
2. Land: The role of aesthetics in social and ecological
change
3. History: Rethinking the story of how art can be used in
society
The New Mechanics in the UK will primarily focus on
education and rethink how art is presented within an art
institution. This is envisaged not as a stand alone project, but
one that will emerge out of existing relationships forged through
the Plus Tate Learning project and create content for and inform
the larger European Touring programme over the next five years.
This project addresses some crucial questions around the role of
art, artists and art institutions:
What does the art institution of the future look like and how
can we shape it with the new generations who will use them?
In a era of de-development what forms of institution are best
suited suit help society adapt to change and how can the younger
generations direct this process to their advantage?
How do we more actively engage with our constituencies,
particularly young people as the future users of culture, who
cannot use the resources of museums and galleries?
Can we work with these groups to develop better ways to operate
more meaningful programmes that are clearly valued for how they can
be used by the public, rather than increasing cultural
capital?
Working with the project participants, what kind of new
institutional forms could be developed which would increase the
civic, social and cultural function of our organisations.
How do our institutions create programmes that are valued by a
broader population? And as a reference point look at the Mechanics
Institutes as a public resource that were valued enough to support
a subscription membership, over and above public subsidy.
With the participant groups, can we test the institutions to
fully synthesise the educational and curatorial programmes?
Existing work
The participating UK venues of Grizedale Arts, MIMA, Tate
Liverpool and Ikon Gallery are currently working together via the
Plus Tate network on a JP Morgan funded programme re-thinking young
peoples’ learning programmes. This project consists of each
Institution developing learning programmes though residential trips
to the Lake District with their respective youth programmes. This
experimental research stage culminates in a conference with all 18
Plus Tate partners in December 2012. Rather than seeing this as an
end, we would like to think of this as the start of a durational
set of evolving relationships that comes to fruition with active
projects in The New Mechanics, expanding on the work
already undertaken, drawing on education as a way of thinking about
institutions and how they engage with audiences and communities and
in particular young people.
Background
The Mechanic Institutes of the 19th Century are a
neglected model for how culture can work effectively in society
today. The Mechanic Institutes sprung up across Britain as places
of education, social reform and where the growing working class
could develop with the new skills of the age. Much like a cultural
centre for the working man, the Institutes provided educational
instruction in technical subjects - including the arts - and access
to literature and learning in a variety of different fields and
trades via a small subscription. The Institutes were built around a
holistic and altruistic programme of arts and sciences and social,
collective action.
Proposed Activity
This project proposes that the art gallery today should be
re-viewed, much like the Mechanics Institutes were used in the
19th and early 20th Centuries, as a place for
learning and public interaction. The principal is to develop a
programme, across all four venues, of artist commissions, events
and activity focussing on young people as an emerging generation of
civic participants, who will build the next generation of
institutions. The programme will be developed by all partners to
draw on their education and social programmes as the central
activity, to enhance their existing work but to find linkages and
cross programming to interact with the other sites. At the core
will be a range of young people focused art-based projects that
attempt to reinstate creativity to the centre of civic society.
Using the Mechanics Institutes as an inspirational starting point
the project will open up how an art gallery is used and perceived
by their visiting audiences and the wider constituency.
The programme, as with the methodology of the wider European
project, is not a touring exhibition but a touring concept,
creating an active network of discussion and development for young
people to reshape the institutions for the future.
The key to this will be to develop large scale projects for each
partner with their constituent youth groups, working with an artist
or artists whilst ensuring that the young people are genuinely
empowered to drive the project.
The project is conceived over a long timeline of 12 months to
ensure strong relationships and meaningful evolution. Each project
is initiated in April 2013 on the back of the research and findings
of the Plus Tate programme.
It is therefore not a one off project, but the nexus of a
continuum of thinking and activity that will work to re-establish
the fundamental role of the Institution within society and make it
fit for purpose.
Four venues will work together to develop an artist brief with
their locality in mind however there will be a relationship between
all partners to establish core principles and keep a coherency
across the project – as the aim of the project will later be
manifest in the European touring project as exemplars of effective
practice. It is hoped that the six key partners of the European
project will advise and contribute to artists selection.
Throughout this process opportunities will be created for
exchanges and collaborations between projects and people.
Where appropriate activities will be integrated into the
galleries ongoing curated programme, with the full participation of
the curatorial teams, who will see this project as part of core
programme, not that of the outreach nor education departments.
There will be encouragement for the young people to take over
gallery resources for the purposes of the project. We will be
commissioning artists to work with the gallery and young people to
develop projects that embed the activities of the gallery back into
the fabric of their everyday lives, pushing the idea of active
citizenship for both young people and the host institutions.
Beyond the 12 month period of the project in 2013 the 4 projects
will feed into the expanded European project with the potential to
develop the idea of a ‘touring audience’ to work in international
partner venues.
The project would be centred on a research question, which comes
from the groundwork undertaken in the current Plus Tate/JP Morgan
project between Grizedale, Ikon, MIMA and Tate Liverpool. In turn
this question should in effect come from the participant groups of
young people and look at changing the way the sector works.
The project is aimed at challenging the established ways of
touring programmes. It is a large scale and important body of
research, which aims to genuinely find strategies that work for
each partner and to genuinely fulfil the goals of public funding
and government agendas. In this process there should be an emphasis
in learning from each other, given the range of contexts,
experience and scale of operations.
As a consequence it has to be experimental and, to certain
extent, open ended in nature: although it is thought that a
reasonably prescriptive brief is drawn up for the artists’
projects.
Within the process there will be a series of conversations
around sociology, the role of culture and growing institutions in
relation to current thinking beyond the art sector for example,
economics, sociology, wellbeing, history and so on.
I would like to share with you two documents. These are two
draft project outlines for projects in development which show you
the trajectory of our thinking.
The first is the concept I have written out and currently
developing with six significant European Museums, who are all
looking at this as a way to rethink how their institutions can
develop in new and relevant ways for their constituencies,
particularly as public funding gets withdrawn, the established
value systems and modes of operation are increasingly prone to
criticism and cuts.
1848: The New Mechanics
A touring concept developed by Grizedale
Arts
1848/1984: The New Mechanics is a long term, multi-faceted project to promote a
movement, or growing consensus, to re-establish the idea of use
value as a central tenet of art.
On the one hand this project will highlight artists and
art strategies that share an ambition to have effect beyond the
confines of the world of art, whilst on the other looking to the
origins of our present era, signified by the years 1848 and 1984,
to offer a new reading of art history that supports the case for a
new approach to art, whilst rescuing the best of modernism’s
ambitions.
The endeavour will be a mix of historical exhibitions
and live projects, making clear links between the emerging arts
practice of activism, action and effectiveness with its antecedents
in the socio-cultural history of European Culture.
The historical aspect is seen as a rethinking and part
of a solution to unlock the current stasis that pervades at a
moment of declining Western influence, economic crisis, ecological
anxiety and an inability for the arts to make a case for their
value in society.
1848 proposes a range of approaches that attempt to
reinstate the function of art at the centre of civic
society.
The key principles of the project are:
1: To re-introduce the idea of the use value of art, or
the usage of art, for social, aesthetic and educational development
and as a means to resist the entrapment of art by the idea of the
Contemporary and its recognizable forms. In this there is an
ambition to open a discourse around the idea of a value system of
usage, that could be used to differentiate between the work of
artists operating in the social context, whilst reevaluating
historical works through the lens of a use-concept.
2. To foreground approaches to art that operate on the periphery
of the performative frame of art and present them as viable
alternatives to market orientated work.
3. To rethink the standard of the art historical survey and to
revisit the 19th century structures and concepts that
instigated the Modern era (Ruskin, Mechanics Institutes, European
revolution, social re-organisation) as a way to re-read of our
current situation of technological advancement, social and
political unrest, ecological crisis and to use new readings of time
to bear on how we re-think this past.
4: To promote education, in its broadest sense, as central to
the process of art, foregrounding and presenting it as a primary
function of the institution – to bring the respective educational
activities of each venue into centre stage.
Concept outline
The aim of the New Mechanics is to articulate a new, emerging
tendency in art; a movement built around the idea of the use value
of art and the value of art as tool to see, mediate and effect the
world around us.
It is conceived as an ambitious, landmark project and it will
look to advance the position of art beyond the conditions that have
dominated the last two centuries under the influence of modernism
and the Romantic paradigm. This will be achieved through a network
of exhibitions, discourse and activity, presenting new emerging
art, artists and art-like projects, alongside a re-thinking or a
re-reading of the last 200 years of European art as way to help
formulate new forms of art that can have a use in present
times.
The timing of this project is pertinent; against a background of
economic, ecological and cultural crisis as the world moves from an
era dominated by European thinking to an era of not just global
interdependency, but also planetary thinking – a broader ecology of
culture and nature. Furthermore it is being developed in response
to the continuing dominance of market orientated work as the ‘main
story’ whilst there emerge from the periphery a range of viable
other artworlds, or ways of making art, that none the less are part
of the continuing history of art. In many ways this is a claim for
the role of aesthetics as central to social change.
1848: The New Mechanics is proposed not as a fixed
touring body of material, rather a touring concept, an evolving
body of work (in the operative sense) and a productive discussion
between European partners that will advocate for art as an active
agent in society.
This concept has its roots in the early 19th century
and the beginnings of industrialisation; as society reorganized
itself through Mechanics Institutes, revolution, democracy,
environmentalism, social welfare, education, in a moment when art,
science and civic society were still fused together. It is
subsequently seen in alternate paths that weave through Carlyle,
Ruskin, Morris, the Bauhaus, the Utility movement, the Diggers and
even current strategies utilized by political activism.
Therefore this project is as much historical as it is current.
In order to assert the usage of art, it needs, as part of the
concept, to use history as vital and continuous part of our
present.
Structure
As the scale and scope of this endeavour is so large it is
proposed that the project evolves over a five year period and is
developed specifically in each location in partnership with the
staff of the host institution, with each context developing the
material and content using the resources (programme, community,
collections, learning programmes, etc) at its disposal.
The project is built around a core body of live and documentary
material that exemplifies the new work being made by artists and
art agencies that have or aim to have a useful function within a
socio-economic context.
Each host partner will elaborate this theme with use of its
collections, outreach/social programmes and partnerships with its
own constituencies, to bring to life the ideas and actions that are
pertinent to its own context.
In this there is an ambition to open a discourse around the idea
of a value system of usage, that could be used to differentiate
between the work of artists operating in the social context, whilst
reevaluating historical works through the lens of a
use-concept.
This lens would be considered as having three facets, with each
of the partners choosing to emphasize one of these three facets or
subject sub-themes that demonstrate the idea of the usage
HISTORY
Relating current issues to the 19th century
structures and concepts that instigated the Modern era (Ruskin,
Mechanics Institutes, European revolution, Thorbecke, social
re-organisation) as a way to re-read our situation of technological
advancement, social and political unrest, ecological crisis and
perceived ‘decline’ and to use new readings of time to bear on how
we re-think this past.
Also using historical and modern works to re-write the
history of art according to how it can be used, at a personal level
(how an individual subject uses a work of art) and at a political
level (how a society uses a work of art).
LAND
To foreground approaches to art that operate on the
periphery of the frame of art and present them as viable
alternatives to market orientated work. This ‘new territory’ would
include artists whose practice, or rather implementation, functions
as rural activism, ecology, social architecture, food supply,
political action, architecture, farming, urban planning and
sociology – making the case for art as an essential component in a
bio-physical and socio-cultural ecology.
EDUCATION
To promote education, in its broadest sense, as central
to the process of art, foregrounding and presenting it as a primary
function of the institution – to bring the respective educational
activities of each venue into centre stage, rather than supplement
or to the core program or even for the education programme to take
over the gallery.
Background
The New Mechanics is formed out of a synthesis of recent work by
Grizedale Arts (for the last few years proponents of the idea of
making artists useful) around a rethinking of John Ruskin (as an
artist, art critic, educator and social reformer), the
19th century Mechanics Institutes and recent work by
associate artists around European revolution in 1848.
These historical phenomena can now be read as extremely
pertinent moments in our present, offering new insights into
current art and particularly the urgency for sociality and ethics
in art.
In the case of John Ruskin, for example, this can be re-read as
complex body of work that prefigures the issues now surrounding
social reform, environment, ecology, capital, aesthetics and
politics, combined with the complex, difficult persona of the
artist. To date his writings have been subsumed by a formalist
story of modernism, which he was partly responsible for, yet he is
now emerging as a critical voice in the debates around the emerging
calls for art to be more effective in society.
At the heart of this, is the case for restating the use value of
art, an idea that has arguably been neglected (and refuted) since
1848, subsumed by the value systems of truth and money in the
evolution of the Romantic model, whilst there is an assumption that
usage is antithetical to art, or at least an uncultured view.
Four our purposes 1848 is cited as the symbolic date that frames
the current conditions, that marks the end of the key period or
industrial and social reorganization in the west, dominated by the
Machinery Question (1815 – 1848) that identified the effect of
technology on social, economic and political systems. In this
project we can identify this period as a parallel enquiry to our
own in the era of digitized information and biotechnology.
Equally there is at the forefront of this project an emphasis on
the new politicization of the rural, ecological or the peripheral.
This new ecology, far further evolved from the ecological debates
initiated by Ruskin in the 19th century, now includes
economics, activism, technology, shifts in global power, rapidly
increasing demands on agriculture and natural resources.
This is not a straight forward historical re-evaluation, but an
analysis of current art production through a restructured
historical context, citing the mid 19th century as a
vital and pertinent part of our own critical context with all its
human endeavour to adapt and survive. Perhaps this project can be
seen as an ahistorical survey for a post-chronological era, history
as subversion, a non linear re-evaluation of the social purpose and
complex function of art, presided over by artists such as John
Ruskin and Liam Gillick.
The principle is to tour, not an exhibition, but a concept and a
range of methodologies that in each location will elaborate on and
adapt the theme working closely with the host institution’s
curatorial and education teams. It will use some historical
material to make points, whilst showcase current artist, curatorial
and ‘art-like’ projects that operate actively within a social
context, to have, at least, an effect, or that seek, in the face of
multiple ethics and dynamics, to keep going, to try to make the
world a better place.
Alongside a profile of exemplar projects, the project would
bring the host’s education and social programmes into centre stage,
the activity to be the exhibit itself and return the gallery to its
origins as a public classroom in the Mechanics Institute model.
The different manifestations of the project will add to
the whole endeavor rather than repeat the programme. Therefore it
might be that in each location the ‘volume’ of the different
aspects of this programme are turned up or down accordingly. For
example in the UK the emphasis might be on education, in Spain
ecology and rural activism and in the Netherlands historical
re-evaluation.
In terms of content, the project is used to channel much of
Grizedale Arts’ and the collaborators’ ongoing programmes.
Particular attention will be focused on artists’ projects that can
be read through their use value or ‘double ontological status’
(Stephen Wright) – having applications that are valid and visible
outside of the frame of art.
In this respect, there is a case for highlighting projects in
which there is an element of co-creation by author and audience or
which enhance social activation processes around the direct
management of resources. This would inevitably reveal a range of
projects that are currently working outside the market orientated
art world in ‘peripheral’ zones outside the metropolitan context
and present them as strategically advanced ground.
The key issues of history, education, sociality, periphery and
ecology addressed by this project are designed to shed new light on
the wider political scenario of economic crisis, de-growth,
technology and the decline of Western influence. In one way or
another, many of the artists or projects that The New Mechanics
puts forward, are attempts to adapt to these circumstances and to
push for a change in art and the way it is used.
Suggested Exhibition Components
A Barricade
To create a barricade using works of art from an institution’s
collections for practical purposes, as was the case in 19c Paris, a
provocative method of display and action.
A new art history
Commissioning research and new writing to re-evaluate the
History of Art, 1848 – 2012 through the lens of use value. This is
intended to develop a more sophisticated language to describe and
evaluate current art practice; particularly those are now operating
in the social sphere and to differentiate between the multiple
strands of this work. Some ideas are being currently being
developed with the RCA Critical Writing course.
A core exhibition
A set of historical and contemporary works that can travel
between venues for the purposes of education and interpretation. To
be developed with the curatorial committee of the project and the
host venue.
Project Exhibitions
Developed by each partner in relation to the themes
Commissions
A number of artist commissions that are operative in the
respective venue contexts.
An education programme
To devise a model education programme that will take centre
stage at each venue, turning the gallery in to a classroom. Working
with project partner education teams, universities, night classes,
community projects and artists. This is in some ways intended as a
challenge to each participant institution, to present their own
social programmes as centre stage, rather than as complement to the
exhibition programme.
The Mechanics Institute
A series of projects that looks at the Mechanics Institute as a
model for the future development of the civic function of art
within society, including the profiling of the Coniston Institute
project by Grizedale Arts and associated artists. The Coniston
Mechanics Institute was originally conceived by John Ruskin and WG
Collingwood as the ideal education for the working man, but also
the originating framework for social organisation, democracy,
education and art centres in the UK.
The Secular Church Service
A reinvention of the service format created by artists,
curators, writers, musicians for a social dissemination of
philosophy, music, art, etc as a curated event.
Re-Coefficients Dining Club
Discussion and dinner performance event tested by Grizedale Arts
that combines lectures with the banquet format
Cream1848
Club night by the legendary Liverpool dance club for one night
only – Chartism meets Situationism meets Ibiza
The Touring Audience
Rather than touring an exhibition, the touring of a group of
people to experience the project in all its venues and
manifestations.
Coniston Mechanics Institute and Online
Library
The new Library for the Coniston Institute, designed by Liam
Gillick, will act as a fully functioning Cumbria County Council
Library (a meme for rural libraries) whilst doubling up as the
‘research centre’ for the 1848 project.
As part of this there will be an online library that will be an
accumulation of texts essays and ebooks that frame the project,
considering the use of art, education, social change, ecology,
history, politics.
Research
As a key part of the project there will be a network of academic
research that will develop the themes pursued with 3 European
Universities.
The Coniston Youth Club, which we started just over a month ago,
is arranging its first public event - a film night in Coniston
Institute on Tuesday 24th July. They decided to screen the 1960's
sci-fi film, Village of The Damned, a film about a group of
children in a village who have telepathic powers and are able to
force people to do things against their will! We will be joined by
a group of young people on a residential visit from Tate Liverpool.
Do read the Coniston Youth Club weekly blog here.
On June 28 resident artist Mat Do, he of the sharp atire
and sharp Essex attitude, brought together the Art in Irton Group
with the Coniston Art and Craft Society at the Coniston Institute.
This is all part of his long term project working with Egremont's
Florence Mine, a haemetite mine in West Cumbria which closed in
2008 and is being re-visioned with our help as a quasi Mechanics
Institute for this post industrial community.
For over two years or so Mat has been working on a number of
projects there includng a film with a group of amateur actors and
looking at ways in which the mine can be re-activated through new
projects that use the iron ore in new ways. One outcome has been a
process to get the iron ore made into paint and pigment products
that can be then used and disseminated to promote the town out and
create products for export out of Egremont.
This has led to an interested group of local artists (The Art in
Irton Group) setting up a co-operative to make products from the
very rich Florence haemetite; one of which is artists quality
paints. The group learnt the process themselves from books and a
workshop arranged by Mat and given by professional artist and paint
maker Pip Seymour.
In this last workshop the Irton group passed on their knowledge
of paint making to the Coniston Art and Craft Society. Ih this
workshop they demonstrated watercolour production from the Florence
iron ore and produced a very rich, deep grey from the slate dust
provided by Coniston
Slate - an unsued by product of their engraving and polishing
processes.
One ambition is that the paints can be made into household paint
products that can used as domestic paints. Lord Egremont owner of
Florence Mine and Petworth House,
Sussex (and relation to the 3rd Earl who patronised Turner so
profusely back in the day) is eager to work with Mat on a series of
projects at Petworth including the use of the iron as an estate
colour. See what he's doing there.
The new Honest Shop in the Coniston Institute has opened.
Designed by An Endless
Supply to provide homemade products without the inconvenience
of human contact and a chip and pin machine. In the video AES's
Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham talk us throough the retail
experience.