DIY Residency

Artists and non-artists opened up their living rooms, bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens and/or stairways over a weekend across Glasgow for Glasgow Open House (GoH) festival from April 28th - May 1st. Filling these domestic spaces were installations, performances, film screenings and art in all its manifestations. I took a leisurely walk around some of the venues in the West End.

The first thing I have to say is that the use of private space for the display of work is incredibly compelling. Working outside of the structures imposed by galleries and institutions, adopting a DIY approach to curation, viewing unused, domestic or unusual spaces… <3 <3

I was struck, particularly, by the warmth of the welcome I received at the venues. Entering someone else’s private space is initially quite daunting. The festival seems to foster an authenticity and genuine desire to share and create stronger community neighbourhood links. I was surprised at just how many exciting creatives there were living within a mile of my flat.

I find the festival’s selection process, or seeming lack of critical selection, an interesting approach or method. Participants included art students, established artists (Marvin Gaye-Chetwynd was back again this year), musicians and local organisations and groups (Glasgow Tool Library were on the programme, and I was excited to see this opening!). GoH’s strength lies in providing these participants with a platform that encourages an audience for their work, and a critical response (GoH, on their website, do, however, frame this as getting some ‘positive feedback’…).

While I understand this selection method allows for GoH’s use as an opportunity for experimentation and not, necessarily, fully honed artistic practice, I did find the standard of the work mixed, and, in a couple of cases, a wasted climb of the stairs. However, at each venue, I was continually surprised at the innovative ways in which space had been appropriated from its domestic functional purpose to become a setting for art. It re-enforced, for me, the irrelevance of using a white cube space.

[WK6]

I can’t believe we still have to protest this crap

I attended a symposium at CCA, Glasgow this week, titled ‘Assessing the legacy and impact of feminist photographer Franki Raffles’, operating alongside a retrospective of her work at Glasgow School of Art, ‘Observing Women At Work’. Raffles chose to predominantly photograph women at work, both in her native Scotland, and in places such as the Soviet Union, China & Tibet.

Some interesting papers were presented exploring her feminist politics, and how this influenced her practice. Raffles said of her work, ‘I hope that through my photographs people will see and learn about the reality of life for women and question and press for change and improvement.’

As per usual with events encircling women or feminist artists, the discussion, or argument, came back round to the same conclusion: progress is slow. The issues facing women artists today that were brought up at this symposium (labour, childcare, lack of representation in galleries/publications…) are the same issues that have been discussed for decades.

It reminded me of another discussion event I attended in 2015, ‘Women working collectively, what is your value?’. At the event, one of the panellists was Margaret Harrison, a radical artist who has been practicing since the 70s. She gave a short speech, which she titled: ‘Is the new old or is the old new?’. This event discussed many of the same issues, centring on collectivity as method and solution. Women working together is not a new idea. However, it is, I feel, integral to progress.

Raffles died in childbirth, before her final project could be finished, and the incomplete work has never been presented. I look forward to following this research project, and hopefully seeing more of her work celebrated and presented. Below is a selection of some of her works from that final project ‘Lot’s Wife’, copyright of the Estate of Franki Raffles. Her archive can be viewed online here.

I have been reading, looking at:

The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse

‘Assessing the legacy and impact of feminist photographer Franki Raffles’, symposium at CCA, Glasgow

I will be reading, looking at:

Glasgow Open House Festival 2017

[WK4/5]

Art in the infinite digital space

I have been remiss with my next entry, mainly due to writing a commissioned (!! ~money~) intro text for a publication on Scottish contemporary art. But, I have been finding lots of great ideas and art and projects online recently, and I have been thinking about art and artists’ use of the infinite digital space…

Despite having daily urges to throw my phone into various bodies of water, I understand the opportunity of the digital as both an accessible space to display art, and as the medium itself. Everything can be put online, in some form. Experiencing art no longer requires a pilgrimage to the gallery.

And yet, I do not feel looking at reproductions of artwork, nor online galleries, to be equal to visiting the space or artwork itself. If the National Gallery put all of the work they have on display online, I would not look at it. However, access to culture and information should be universally available, irrespective of age, sex, race, class, geographical location, interest/disinterest in art, if one wishes to access it. Art should not be purchased and then hidden away in underground climate controlled storage - collections should be digitised and easily viewable.

Recently, new experimental uses of digital space are emerging: providing artists neglected by the institutions a space to play, using it as a means for connection - creating dialogue and discussion internationally and without borders and, increasingly, making the digital the medium through which to produce.

I have been reading, looking at:

The White Pube’s latest exhibition review

Thirty works (online exhibition by 12ø collective) 

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles (now finished)

I will be reading, looking at:

‘Black people don’t go to galleries’, David Osa Amadasun (started, not finished)

The Vegetable Expert, Dr D.G. Hessayon

[WK3.5]

Follow up: The art is the venue

Yesterday, I read through ARTocracy, art, informal spaces and social consequences - a curatorial handbook in collaborative practice (Sacramento & Zeiske) in an alcove of the GSA library.

I find their curatorial methodology interestingly simple. In essence, they identify a topic or issue of relevance to the place (the town), they invite an artist to spend time in residence thinking and taking action around this issue, using the visual arts, working closely with interested community groups and individuals.

Where Deveron Arts has been successful, where many fail, is the involvement of non-art audiences in their work. The public has not only become a participant in the work, but an invested collaborator. This is, I feel, because the art seeks to directly improve their everyday lives. As they write, ‘A town with a variety of cultures, foods and habits makes a richer community’. Sacramento and Zeiske attribute this interest by the indigenous public to their use of ‘informal spaces’ - the ‘happenstance’ effect. I particularly enjoyed the distinction they made between ‘outputs’ (art objects etc.) and ‘outcomes’ (the social implications).

[WK3]

The art is the venue

I am hoping to source and read a copy of ARTocracy (Nuna Sacramento and Claudia Zeiske) this week. It might well be the sacred text I have been searching for. A bible on curatorial practice that aligns itself with: community-level action, ‘informal’ public space, collaboration, dematerialised work, land and process, ‘social consequences’.

ARTocracy outlines the working methodologies and processes that provided the framework for Deveron Arts in Huntly, a town in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. There, ‘the town is the venue’ - combining critical creative activity with town planning, rural community life and social wellbeing.

‘The same creative process used in making art can be employed to untangle and overcome real-life challenges… ARTocracy suggests that all people have art-power, and that this type of power reaches far beyond the walls of the gallery’ [from deveron-projects.com].

Looking at a ‘town’ as a unit is an interesting space for art to inhabit. Art that provides positive long-lasting change at a local level, a living model for the ‘useful arts’. In this approach (taking art away from the gallery) previously disinterested audiences come across art unwittingly.

I look forward to reading the so-described ‘curatorial handbook’. I am particularly interested in the ways in which this project uses the rural context, and the passages providing practical and logistical advice on areas such as funding and marketing (sharing of such knowledge is, strangely, a rarity! We must not always be in competition…).

And yet, Deveron Arts was set up in 1995. I am curious to see how it has evolved, and where curatorial practice will go next(?).

[TBC]

I have been reading, listening to:

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

Poems, Stories and Writings, Margaret Tait

The Weatherhouse, Nan Shepherd

I will be reading, listening to:

[WK2]

Art in the rural

‘Art is the means to an end, but not the end’ - Fernando Garcia-Dory

The site of the artwork in social practice is often the act of undertaking the process itself, the final ‘outcome’ being intangible and unfixed. The process, being either/both unending or fleeting, requires to be recorded, archived, or lost. Social practice, due to its durational element, acts similar to performance.

This week I attended a discussion event at CCA with Spanish artist Fernando Garcia-Dory, on ‘Inland Scotland’, a project that has created a confrontation between (social) art practice and the rural. It is a project that seeks to work at ground level, a bottom-up approach using collaborative agency and mobilising energies to tackle problems found in the rural setting, that have reverberations both globally, and for the individual. Art is the medium through which they think and act on land use, agriculture and territory.

From their website: ‘It builds on the premise that the rural offers a physical and cultural space for the generation of diverse ways of life that differ from the hegemonic model.’ Indicating, therefore, certain freedoms that are not possible in urban life.

Agnes Denes’ intervention ‘Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan’, situated the rural directly in the urban - a two acre wheat field planted and harvested on a landfill site in lower Manhattan, land soon to become a billion dollar luxury complex. Addressing misplaced priorities, mismanagement, world hunger, trade, economy, waste… As Denes is quoted, ‘It was an intrusion into the citadel, a confrontation of high civilisation. Then again, it was also Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures.’

These offer two contrasting approaches, equally acts of protest. One sited within everyday action, the other symbolic. Which is more useful? Does it matter?

I have been reading, listening to:

Confessions of a Mountain Climber, Agnes Denes

Fernando Garcia-Dory, Inland Scotland talk @ CCA (http://inland.org/)

Ariel, Sylvia Plath

A few more chapters of The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

I will read, listen to:

Going Public, Boris Groys

More of Agnes Denes’ writings

[WK1]

The artist as ritual-maker

‘The ideal sculpture is the road’ - Carl Andre

‘Carl Andre makes objects on which to walk, my art is made by walking’ - Richard Long

(wo)Man’s first disruption to space was a sculptural endeavour - to move a stone from horizontal to vertical: the menhir. Such a simple act was the first transformation of the landscape from a natural to an artificial state. The only architecture to pre-date this being the path - the tracks man took to roam, to map, to gather and to hunt.

Land artists return to these primal actions. The ritual of walking, pilgrimage and the act of transforming or witnessing the natural.

Where is the artwork? It seems pertinent to compare the work of Carl Andre with Richard Long. Whilst Long views the act itself as the artwork, Andre, seemingly, insists on a materiality - the object vs the absence of object.

Medium, therefore, can be anything?

Long documents his actions through measurements of space and time and using text. The photograph seen here, ‘A Thousand Stones Thrown into the River Yangtze’ (China, 2010), combines image with text to indicate action. If we do not document an action, is there a need to even undertake it, or is the idea itself enough?

I have read, listened to:

Land&scape series: Walkscapes, Francesco Careri

Herland, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman

I will be reading, listening to:

Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

Confessions of a Mountain Climber, Agnes Denes

Fernando Garcia-Dory, Inland Scotland talk @ CCA