Archive for Participation

PROJECT: State of the Arts Conference @ The Lowry 14th Feb 2012

January 29, 2012 Arts Funding, Participation, The Guardian No comments

State of the Arts blog

I’m psyched to be contributing to a ‘live blog‘ that will document (and hopefully critique) this year’s State of the Arts Conference. For anyone who doesn’t know, SOTA is Arts Council England’s annual suited and booted summit, intended to help shape the future of arts funding. I guess they have decided to hold it on St Valentine’s day to emphasize what a romantic prospect this is!

Our ‘live blog’ was given a nice mention in an article about theatre blogging by Matt Trueman in The Guardian this week. I’m happy that we’re being upheld as a positive example of a form of critique that can often be a little bit bland. Full kudos to Andy Field and Hannah Nicklin who have curated the whole enterprise.

I’ll be wading into the debate with a few posts this week… so do keep checking up on the site and leaving us your unrestrained approval…. or total contempt!

PROJECT: Level Five @ Abandon Normal Devices Festival 1st Oct 2011

January 29, 2012 Liverpool, Participation, Performance, Psychology, the Bluecoat, Video and film No comments

Over the summer I worked on the production of Level Five, a project by Brody Condon as part of Abandon Normal Devices 2011.

Here is a short video documenting the project. Its only two minutes long and well worth a look, if only for the kooky 1970′s clips pinched from Adam Curtis documentaries!

FEATURE: In the Big Society, not all art is equal 14 July 2011

January 29, 2012 Arts Funding, Participation, Performance, the Bluecoat, The Guardian No comments

Published in The Guardian

Dancers at an exhibition at the ICA – Sketches for Regency Living by artist Pablo Bronstein. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Dancers at an exhibition at the ICA – Sketches for Regency Living by artist Pablo Bronstein. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The arts have always been required to justify their access to government funding by performing a civic duty. Even while New Labour presided over a golden era in arts funding, its streams of cash flowed only in response to the party mandate that the arts should be “central to the task of recreating the sense of community, identity and civic pride that should define our country”.

In the age of austerity these sentiments have been recycled in accordance with the political rhetoric of the day. Arts Council England’s website waxes lyrical that “arts leaders and organisations occupy a major place in the Big Society”. Meanwhile the RSA’s pamphlet Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society suggests the arts should do more to renew instrumentalism, quantify social impact and provide better statistical justification for its access to the public purse.

Maybe this is a fair deal in times of economic crisis and certainly ACE appeared to consider artistic excellence a key litmus test while allocating its national portfolio. The new NPO status awarded to InBetweenTime and Fierce, two of Britain’s most exciting multi-art form festivals should serve as testimony to this. Yet surely government expectation that the arts can perform an enhanced civic duty while absorbing a 29.6% cut in funds amounts to a demand for greater quantitative return for significantly less investment? As match-funding schemes are announced to kick-start a new era of philanthropy, what criteria will be used to judge each art form worthy of financial investment?

The transition that is creeping through Britain’s best multi-art form venues is a telling example of how cuts to the arts are beginning to bite. In the new national portfolio venues such as Arnolfini and the Bluecoat (where I was recently acting performance programmer) have taken the equivalent of an 11% cut. The ICA took a hit of 42%, a decision that reports suggest was prompted by a spell of bad management. All three of these venues’ mission statements include programming an eclectic mix of talks, performances, literature and visual art. Now cuts need to be made and these diverse art forms are losing out to visual arts, based – it seems to me – on the instrumentalist perspective that galleries yield greater footfall and are more attractive to wealthy donors.

The Bluecoat in Liverpool, a combined arts centre with a heritage of hosting performance and literature artists, from Yoko Ono to Jeanette Winterson has recently made my former post of live programmer and the position of literature programmer redundant and placed programming on hold, while it reviews options for the future. Meanwhile the ICA has a number of staff that programme its multi-art form events under consultation for redundancy, while staff who curate visual art appear to be protected. A review of their combined arts offer is underway. In a telling precursor the Arnolfini have not employed a senior live producer since 2009, after they decided also to review their live activity.

Galleries that are open seven days a week can easily be pitched as civic and social spaces that offer free access. While these are positive assets, they are not the only criteria on which the comparative merits of the art form should be judged. Literature readings, talks and live performance can create uniquely life-enhancing engagement opportunities for the public even though they have limited capacities, happen at specific times and require the purchase of a ticket. Do we live in an era where the demand for accessible culture has become so pervasive, that these modest requirements are now insurmountable obstacles?

During a visit to the ICA last weekend, I took a peep at the ominous “Bronsteinification” of the theatre space that had set tongues wagging about the future of its live programme. On their website the ICA say that Pablo Bronstein’s Sketches for Regency Living is a “groundbreaking exhibition” that facilitates the artist “choreographing extraordinary art and ballet performances”. As an exercise in multi-art form programming it is scintillating, offering one artist the opportunity to exercise their oeuvre across a range of platforms. Yet as a practical exercise this exhibition appears to have facilitated the conversion of the ICA’s theatre into a space for visual arts.

In times of crisis it is vital that multi-art form programming remains agile and responsive to the need for change. Each art form must prove its worth, but analysis of value should be based on qualitative concerns rather than the need to generate footfall. Without arts centres to make a financial investment in a broad range of cross art form activity, the quality and diversity of our cultural output is at risk.

REVIEW: Two Degrees Festival @ Arts Admin 12-18 June 2011

January 29, 2012 Environment, Participation, Performance, Ramblings No comments

Published in this is tomorrow

The Family Cut Out The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home

The Family Cut Out The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home

In his short contribution to the closing discussion of the Two Degrees Festival, filmmaker John Jordan offers a neat analysis of the difference between art and activism. Art he says is a form of acupuncture, a way of making individual aesthetic pinpricks into pressure points in the public consciousness. Conversely activism is a prolific mass movement that seeks to reproduce its key messages virally and inclusively, without preciousness. For him this renders activism a superior tool for educating a wider audience about climate change and the negative impact of global capitalism.

Held only a week after government adviser Tim Oates made a public recommendation that climate change should be removed from the national curriculum and replaced with ‘real science’, the Two Degrees Festival offered a timely opportunity to reflect on a diverse range of tools for creating and maintaining a sense of relevance and urgency around radical politics and climate activism. Established in 2009 and held biannually, Two Degrees has expanded its remit after it’s first incarnation, to respond to world events such as the financial crisis alongside its perennial theme of climate change. Produced by Artsadmin, an organisation with a successful track record of supporting artwork that slips between conventional genre definitions of theatre and visual art, the festival is well positioned to galvanise perceived differences between art and activism and imagine new forms of public engagement.

In a conversation with Two Degrees programmers Mark Godber and Sam Trotman they define the festival as a site for the production of human collectives that instigate new forms of participation. Their primary example is The Haircut Before the Party an artwork situated in a local shop that will remain on site for six months and offers to restyle participants hair in exchange for a conversation about the impact of government cuts. In terms of its duration, the project makes a more long-term commitment to its audience than we might expect from a conventional relational artwork or from a flash mob style anti-cuts demonstration. As with most participatory projects, its success will depend upon its ability to create genuine engagement with users from its local community, rather than brief moments of novelty for art audiences on whistle stop visits to the city.

Often programmers and artists are guilty of affording the promise of collaborative experience or mutual exchange a little too liberally, as a result of their need to conform to the Arts Council’s instrumentalist agenda. Activist groups can also tend to idealise their organisational structures, which often contain hidden hierarchies or power imbalances. As an example of a human collective, The Institute for the Art & Practice of Dissent at Home is perhaps the most unique collaborative grouping in the Two Degrees festival programme. In their performance The Family Cut Out, father Gary reads out a summery of recent government cuts to benefits, education and other public services, while mother Lena and her three children hide under a white bed sheet that is gradually torn away by members of the audience as each new cut is announced. While the content of the work is not specifically radical, the extension of contemporary art making to an entire family is more rare. As an artist collective, each member donates ten percent of their earnings to the institute, including all three children who invest a portion of their earnings in child benefit. Borrowed from the historical tradition of the tithe where one tenth of income would have been gifted to the church, the institute invests this money back into the creation of contemporary art. Not specifically an instance of art or activism, but more of a way of life, this unique human collective is a fascinating means of experiential education for the family’s young children. Undoubtedly though, it also incorporates the inherent possibility that these children might undergo a teenage rebellion that ends in adulthood as a corporate banker! The outcome is subject to the project sustaining relationships out with the bounds of this seven-day festival.

At lunchtime on the final day of Two Degrees, a debate focusing on the legacy of the failed 2009 Copenhagen Summit on climate change takes place in the cafe at Toynbee Studios. For activists who attended the summit, its memory appears to trigger recollections of police brutality and the beginning of a slow fragmentation of key figures from climate activism into other political causes and issues of social justice.

At a time when individuals across social groups are preoccupied by the task of negotiating the economic squeeze and parliament appears too embroiled in it’s loyalty to big business to instigate change, it is more important than ever that reductive distinctions between art and activism are abandoned in favor of a collective commitment to new ways of working. As a festival, Two Degrees is uniquely positioned to be a useful part of this process.

REVIEW: Fierce Festival, Birmingham 22nd-27th March 2011

January 28, 2012 Participation, Performance, Video and film No comments

Published in this is tomorrow.

Burningham EXYZT at Fierce Festival 2011

Burningham EXYZT at Fierce Festival 2011

There was a pleasing audacity to the timing of this year’s Fierce Festival. Bursting to life during the build up to Arts Council England’s National Portfolio funding outcomes and coinciding with a weekend of mass anti-government protests, the festival offered the perfect opportunity to speculate about the future amid a moment of fragile uncertainty within in the arts ecology.

In their programme introduction, the festival’s new Artistic Directors Harun Morrison and Laura McDermott suggest that at this pivotal moment, “the kind of art that is made is shifting; perhaps a sharpening of politics, perhaps radicalised ways of relating to the audience are emerging.” Born as Queerfest in 1998 under the Directorship of Mark Ball, Fierce has existed since the time when culture first became wedded to regeneration via the mandates of a Labour Party, who declared that the arts should be “central to the task of recreating community, identity and civic pride that define our country.” Years later in a moment when Big Society rhetoric begins to force notions of participation and community into the territory of cynicism, how might a festival such as Fierce reflect new ideas in localism, urbanism and engagement with political activism?

I arrived in Birmingham on the first day of Fierce as a complete newcomer to the landscape of the city. Intrigued by use of the term ‘hyperlocal’ on the front of the festival brochure, I sought a selection of public realm artworks to help me stake out this new territory. My first encounter was with ‘Burningham,’ by French architecture collective EXYZT: a temporary structure built in collaboration with local community groups and designed to host talks, exhibitions and social gatherings. Positioned on abandoned Curzon Street, along the route of the proposed HS2 high-speed rail link, the work was intended by its placement to breathe life into a dead area of Birmingham’s industrial landscape. Having been offered food and warm conversation, I lingered on the site forming new acquaintances in a space where there would previously have only been an abandoned patch of grass.

Fierce’s Artistic Director Harun Morrison explains the term ‘hyperlocal’ as culture ‘made by the people of a site, for the people of that site.’ Differing from the more familiar term ‘site specific,’ hyperlocality is a direct reflection of a vernacular politic or agenda. On the second day of the festival I participated in Kayak Libre by Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, a work that invited the audience to take a water taxi service along part of Birmingham’s canal network, while engaging in a conversation with the ‘driver’ about how this archaic from of transport might play a role in the future of the local community. Utopian in its ambitions, the work had a strong political and environmental intent. But as a first time visitor to Birmingham, the real joy of this project was in the interactions it facilitated with the baffled joggers and dog walkers that I encountered, as I kayaked purposefully down one of the most derelict and dirty waterways in the city.

On the 26th March 2011 (the penultimate day of the festival) an artist acquaintance of mine participated in the mass anti cuts protest that took place on the streets of London, wielding a banner emblazoned with the slogan, “David Cameron, all artists hate you.” Although crude in its sentiments, this statement speaks volumes about the increasing schism between artists and cultural policy and about the candid language that art is ready to use to articulate its antipathy to power. While much of the work in this year’s Fierce Festival had no need for such directness, its playful concern for localism and political engagement speaks volumes about the important role festivals can play in animating a city. Art should not simply be a tool for encouraging tourism, regeneration or any other of the deeply instrumental terms that are often brandished by policy makers in order to validate its existence. It should act as a catalyst for offering changed perspectives on the world through interaction, dialogue and play. Its fantastic news that given its recently announced National Portfolio status, Fierce will be able to continue with this good work for may years to come!

REVIEW: Live Weekends: Last of the Red Wine @ ICA 9-13th Feb 2011

February 27, 2011 Participation, Performance, Video and film No comments

Published in www.thisistomorrow.info

Last of the Red Wine Production shot: Photo: Scott Schwager.

Last of the Red Wine Production shot: Photo: Scott Schwager.

There is a character in Last of the Red Wine, who embodies many of the popular clichés that you might associate with ‘Performance Art.’ Whisper (played by artist Hayley Newman) is constantly involved in the execution of ostentatious projects such as ventriloquising rubbish or touching everything that she sees. Earnest and deliberately obscure, Whisper plays on performance art’s apparent rejection of the notion of performer as entertainer and instead caricatures an individual grappling with more convoluted systems of artistic representation. The result is charming and hilarious, yet also surprising within the context of a project that was pitched as “the art world’s attempt to represent itself more accurately in mainstream entertainment.”

Last of the Red Wine was the sixth of the ICA’s highly successful Live Weekends and was conceived and produced by writer Sally O’Reilly in association with comedy coach Chris Head and a large group of artists, actors, comedians and writers. Evolved from scratch within the space of a week, the project carried a tantalising degree of risk in its alchemising of skills, experiences and no doubt egos, from across disciplines. The programme included five days of writing workshops and performances that were visible to the public, accompanied by a film programme, symposium and an omnibus performance that played host to a lively, sell-out crowd.

From the outset, the symposium set the context perhaps more forcefully than its producers may have intended. The portrayal of artists within mainstream media (including an hilarious show reel of characters from soap operas and sit-coms) stimulated heated debate, but did little to interrogate the rich territory of how meaning is created through representation, or why the language of the televisual is so enduringly pervasive within our culture. Historically, seminal artists such as Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys have attempted to override dominant cultural codes, by making their own interventionist broadcasts on television. A nod in this direction may have provided a riposte to the simplistic portrayal of the stereotypical artist, which so dominated the conversation.

By Sunday evening the buzz around the final performance was palpable and as a piece of entertainment it did not disappoint. Often though, it fell to the artists in the cast to instigate minor subversions of the otherwise conventional narrative. Artist and comedian Kim Noble abandoned dialogical convention and instead described his character’s stage directions, in an attempt to expose the inner workings of the script. “Shirley exits with a huge sense of foreboding, possible choral flourish to hammer this point home.” Visual artist and performer Bedwyr Williams digressed from the plot into a reverie of weird satire; “a really bad artist is like a warthog that smashes its way through your patio door and comes all over your scalextric…” With this he did more to poke fun at the grandiosity of art making than any of the more elaborate characters created by the rest of the cast.

At times these moments of deviation put me in mind of comedian Chris Morris’s show Blue Jam, which played in the early hours of the morning on Radio One during the late nineties. Blue Jam was an utterly compelling show, but there were reasons why it was relegated to the early morning time slot; its subversive unravelling of radio convention would have been just too unappealing for a prime time audience.

In a recent sketch, stand-up comedian Simon Munnery ridiculed the proposition that “comedy can never be modern art” by asserting that all artistic disciplines must ultimately overlap. While this may be true, a genuinely hybrid work can be very hard to achieve, particularly when dealing with such radically diverse contexts as art galleries and televisions. For this reason, Last of the Red Wine constituted one of the bravest, most bonkers and fascinating exercises in art-making that I have witnessed for a long time. I am already hoping that there will be a second series.

FEATURE: Leading or following? Social engagement and mass participation in the Cultural Olympiad

November 6, 2010 Arts Funding, Participation, Performance, Ramblings, Video and film No comments

A feature length article on visual arts bids competing for 2012 Cultural Olympiad funding. Published in artartart issue 7 December 2009. Download article here leadingorfollowingfinal2

Michael Pinchbeck. Sit with us for a Moment and Remember

REVIEW: Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth @ Edinburgh Festival 30 Jul–15 Aug 2010

August 25, 2010 Edinburgh Festival, Participation, Ramblings, The Skinny, Video and film No comments

Published in The Skinny

Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth, Press Shot for Staged at the City Observatory
Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth, Staged

The title of Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth’s new Edinburgh Festival commission might suggest a work that is rather spectacular. ‘Staged’ is a term often used to allude to all that is amplified, visually seductive and riddled with exaggerated fakery. Likewise press releases for the show describe a project that seeks to document the ‘human drama’ that invades the city every August.

Yet sitting quietly at the summit of Edinburgh’s Carlton Hill, ‘Staged’ uses a mixture of live feed CCTV and pre-recorded footage to chronicle the 2010 festival with a lightness of touch that is almost imperceptible. Projected floor to ceiling onto every wall of the small, sweltering box that is The City Observatory, many of the images depict Edinburgh in the abstract, focusing on the pattern of light on rooftops in a way that feels more referential of the visual history of painting than the rampant cavorting of theatrical display.

For centuries the human race has been compelled to recreate its environment via art and the production of imagery. What began with cave paintings and experiments in pinhole photography, now finds form in reality TV and the popularity of camera phones. What Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth have understood about the 21st century manifestation of this phenomena, is that as our access to digital image media increases, so does our tendency to record the painfully mundane. While trying to concentrate on out of focus CCTV images of an empty city bar at lunchtime, it’s impossible not to wonder if all of this voyeurism is really as entertaining as we think.

Back outside on Carlton Hill the air is fresh, some kids are running about playing football and an American tourist is bitching at his wife about the fact that their dog has just taken a shit in the grass. It’s a human drama all of its own and its only a matter of time before someone takes a photograph of it.

REVIEW: A Ritual for Elephant and Castle, Crome Hoof and Marcus Coates @ Cornet Theatre 5th June 2009

July 25, 2009 Participation, Performance No comments
Crome Hoof and Marcus Coates

Crome Hoof and Marcus Coates

I made a special trip to London for this because projects that put visual artists on stage always fascinate me. (See also II Tempo del Postino as part of Manchester International Festival for an even more esoteric helping of artists in the theatre).

Marcus Coates work is often presented in galleries and I wondered how it’s meaning might shift within the  context of a stage and a crowd of several hundred Friday night gig goers.

A performer by nature, Coates had no problem winning over the crowd, who after a period of initial confusion seemed willing to loose themselves in his ecstatic performance. Wearing a giant horse head and sliver suit, Coates manifested the animalistic behavior that is very familiar from earlier works, ramped up to fever pitch!

A project commissioned by Nomad the ritual was a response to the current redevelopment of Elephant and Castle and a bid to exorcise the area and provide a cultural platform for regeneration. In an interview for spoonfed.co.uk, Nomad’s Michael Smythe emphasizes their bid to interact with the community stating that ‘we also lived rough on the Heygate Estate, we slept rough in the derelict areas.’

In 2004 Coates made work in response to a similar issue when he filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual in the  living rooms of a Liverpool tower block that was scheduled for demolition. Yet as I examined the crowd of gig goers from my spot on the VIP balcony, I could not help but feel that this was a unique event for a crowd of art elite, rather than an attempt to create a lasting connection to Elephant and Caste and its inhabitants.

Taken at face value however, this was a brilliant event. The Cornet theatre provided a spectacular back drop to a brave piece of artistic programming and a mesmerizing performance. I can’t wait for Nomad’s next commission!