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!

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!

The Indirect Exchange of Uncertain Value

There’s a snippet of academic art speak that can still bring me out in hives five years after graduating from Glasgow School of Art. The context is half the work is the careworn mantra embedded into the psyche of the school by David Harding and his peers who founded the highly successful Sculpture and Environmental Art department in the mid 80s.

As alumni of GSA Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan know how to pitch a discourse around public art that will make academics associated with this prestigious history salivate. The indirect exchange of uncertain value is a project funded by The Scottish Arts Council’s Public Art Fund, but located on private land, setting up a contradiction around the use and abuse of public money to fund the gentrification of private space.

Fettes College, one of Scotland’s most prestigious fee paying schools, has opened its grounds (but not the building) to accommodate two new sculptures by Tatham and O’Sullivan and additional works by Chris Evans and Elizabeth Price. Visitors to the site participate in orchestrated tours, during which the guides report that Tatham and O’Sullivan’s enormous cat and boot structures have no specific artistic meaning. A sculpture by Chris Evans, installed behind the college’s locked doors cannot be looked at, but is communicated via a written description read aloud. These oblique strategies waver between cerebral genius and experiential wet lettuce.

That this commission facilitates public access to the grounds of a fascinating private building affirms it as an act of significant cultural value. Yet the soft criticality of these works perhaps forms the most telling statement about the true nature of public art. If the context really is half the work, then perhaps established discourses around public art should only be considered as half of the context?

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.

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.

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 26^th 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!

Live Artist Bryony Kimmings. Image by Christa Holka

In February 2011 I wrote a light hearted feature on Live Art and female sexuality for new performance magazine Bellyflop. The theme of the issue was Virginity, so I responded with an article titled: The Virgin’s Release: Women, Sex and Live Art. The piece was well received by many of my female peers and by the lady artists who featured in it.

I was pretty surprised (and oddly delighted) to see that the subsequent issue of Bellyflop featured a stinging critique of my arguments in a reader’s letter from Phoebe Collings-James, who was unsatisfied by my ‘vague’ arguments and my ‘liberal lefty’ opinions. The thrust of her argument seemed to be that my dislike of Sex and the City and other aspects of female popular culture defined me as a die hard elitist. An assumption that I countered fiercely in the following issue with my article More Women, Sex and Live Art that attempted to highlight the negative impact of Capitalism on feminist thought.

I’m still waiting to hear whether Phoebe Collings-James has more to say in reply. While I enjoyed the debate, the fact that our exchange became so heated made me think seriously about the implications of bitchy infighting among feminists. While a spirited argument is great fun, I wonder if serious cat fighting should be put aside for the sake of the collective aims of the sisterhood? (Whatever that might mean)

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.

Parfums Pourpres du Soleil des Poles Courtesy South London Gallery

If every human brain functioned perfectly, there would be no psychosis. Nor would there be genius, or other more gentle forms of psychological variation. Synesthesia; the automatic process of linking one sense to another is often considered to be a departure from conventional neurological functioning. Yet according to physician Oliver Sacks, it is in fact inducible in anyone with the correct dose of drugs or hypnosis. ‘Parfums Pourpres du Soleil des Pôles’ was a performance inspired by the synesthesic experience. It sold out South London Gallery for this one off event, with many audience members drawn by the involvement of German visual artist Ulla Von Brandenburg, who is well known in the city after recent exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery and Pilar Corrias. Its minimal staging featured three reed organs in triangular formation, adjacent to a table fitted with anglepoise lamps, a video camera and a collection of playing card size colour swatches in around thirty shades. Over the course of its hour duration a soundtrack of semi-improvised drone music was interpreted for the audience by synaesthesist Claude-Samuel Lévine, who choreographed a moving image that passed through various linear formations. Occasionally the glare from the lamplight merged with certain compositional elements, to infer works by reputed synaesthesists such as Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky. Yet the work’s formal simplicity distanced it from the more reactionary modernist embellishments that these abstract painters might imply.

As a solo artist, Von Brandenburg is best known for her deconstruction of theatre, reducing narrative stage sets to chorographical minimalism, as in her 2007 work ‘Singplay’ performed at Tate Modern (for which Laurent Montaron also wrote the music). Von Brandenburg refers to this work as a tableau vivant, French for living picture. It unpacks the theatrical relationship between song and gesture, in a way that might be said to precede the disconnect between visual and sonic elements in ‘Parfums Pourpres du Soleil des Pôles’.

However the correlation between sound and image in this performance was never totally apparent. At times the synaesthesist’s colour palette appeared to have its own independent vigour, responding to something beyond the sonic stimulus. While some audience members were frustrated by this disjuncture, I found it fascinating and was happy to passively observe the process, be it synaesthetic or otherwise. After all, the real beauty in ‘Parfums Pourpres du Soleil des Pôles,’ was not in its diagrammatic depiction of neurological functioning, but its reminder to us of the deep impossibility of replicating subjective human experience. If you want to understand synaesthesia, you might follow Oliver Sacks advise and get hypnotised. If you want to understand the unending complexity of retelling human sensuality, follow my advice and try to see this work.