Summer’s over, but festival season is just starting!

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Art, Culture, Festivals, Manchester

As the new academic year begins here at University of Salford the grinding of gears can almost be heard on campus as green areas and buildings are being smartened up in anticipation of new and returning student cohorts.

I’ve just come back to the grey and rainy North from a weekend spent camping at End of the Road festival, which has been one of the last reliably sunny outdoor music festivals of the season for the last ten English summers, but to balance the sadness at the thought of no more nights under canvas until next summer, the season for urban indoor-based events is picking up. In fact, autumn looks set to be the festival highlight of the year!

Right now there’s a national month-long festival of independent and repertory cinema underway, thanks to the organisers of Scalarama, now in its fifth year and still growing.

This year independent screening groups, film clubs and cinema enthusiasts in a number of cities formed festival sub-hubs to collectively co-ordinate their programme contributions.

This has been a brilliant and (in Leeds) unprecedented way to bring a disparate group of film exhibitors with very different aims and practices around a table regularly to meet each other, start a dialogue and share knowledge. New partnerships and future plans have emerged from this process and as we look forward to Leeds International Film Festival in November, there is a sense that this year, when the festival closes, there will still be plenty going on in the city to sustain a truly independent film culture year-round.

I’ve contributed two documentary films to the Scalarama programme this year. On Wednesday 16th September there’s another screening of the 2013 documantary Manakamana to raise money to send to a Nepal rebuilding project. The documentary, directed by Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, was made in the Manakamana temple area by a group of ethnographic filmmakers who are part of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. The work of this practice-as-research centre is characteristically immersive and this film is no exception: a 16mm camera was placed in a cable car that transports worshippers up and down a mountain to a remote temple. It is a journey that prior to the development of the cable car service took many days and the people caught in the intense gaze of the film reflect on this and other things during their journeys.

The film makers set up a crowd funding campaign earlier this year to send assistance to the village where they were based during filming after the terrible earthquakes and with the help of the film’s UK distributor Dogwoof, some colleagues and I have been able to screen this film several times this year to send the door money to the film’s participant community via that fund.

Then on Thursday 24^th September I’m joining in with a simultaneous screening across 6 UK venues with two films that look closely at protest, direct action and freedom of speech in the UK. One is a short documentary by Nick Broomfield about six Greenpeace protesters who in 2008 were tried and acquitted for shutting down Kingsnorth power station in the UK, the other is Franny Armstrong’s film McLibel which is rarely screened but is a remarkable story about two protestors who were charged with libel by McDonalds after leafletting outside one of their shops, with surprising consequences. 

This second film is also part of the #directedbywomen strand within Scalarama this year, drawing attention to the achievements of women in film, while women are still under-represented in most areas of film making practice.

The Radical Film Network have facilitated this second event and this group have been an important discovery during my PhD research that has helped me to put a critical frame of reference around a set cultural activities which I attempt to describe in my thesis as constitutive of a discursive public sphere. This is a lightweight, international network of film makers, exhibitors and academics which emerged from the Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF), it is the festival’s 4^th edition this year, with all screenings taking place at the Arnolfini in October.

The 2015 festival is formally very different to the last one.
Last year the BRFF festival organisers set up some of their political film screenings in community centres, taking their message to areas beyond city’s usual centre of cultural consumption. This year the festival celebrates the 40th anniversary of The First Festival of British Independent Cinema, a landmark event in the history of alternative film in Britain, which was organised by the filmmaker, writer, curator and dramatist, David Hopkins (1940-2004) at the Arnolfini. The 1975 festival screened overtly political film alongside avant-garde and experimental work on 35mm and super-8mm formats. In true radical film tradition, a speaker from the festival will be at the screening to lead the discussions afterwards.

Inspired by the work I have encountered in my research, I have been able to bring many events from the BRFF and other festivals to Leeds through my own events series and my connections with the Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF). This year there will be a programme exchange between LIFF and BRFF, they have suggested a rarely screened, collectively-made film from 1974 which puts into practice the tenets of feminist film theory, however the title can’t be revealed yet! The LIFF programme launch is on Light Night, Friday 9th October at Leeds Town Hall.

A film festival event in November that I can announce is a collaboration with Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall, a researcher at Leeds Beckett University. We have placed a film screening simultaneously in both LIFF and the national Being Human festival of the humanities, all Being Human events are between12 and 22 November 2015.

La Rue Cases-Nègres (Black Shack Alley) is the title of a book by well-known Martinican writer Joseph Zobel, the story was made into a film in 1983, directed by Euzhan Palcy. In the year of its release the film was awarded Silver Lion award at the 1983 Venice Film Festival and the director won a César Award for Best First Feature Film, making 25 year old Euzhan Palcy the first black female director of a Hollywood film.

The film transports viewers to 1930s Martinique, an island under French colonial rule, when poor rural black children can hope for little more than a life of back-breaking working in the sugar cane fields, working for the wealthy white béké, or boss. Young Jose escapes this fate and gains an education through the many sacrifices of his extraordinary Grandmother.

The film will be introduced by Joseph Zobel’s daughter, Jenny Zobel, and granddaughter, Emily Marshall, a researcher in literature and post-colonial studies who suggested the title to me.

The screening and its contextualisation through the introduction and discussion will hopefully start a conversation about colonialism, oppression, resistance and the importance of education. The Being Human festival is one of a number of festivals organised by universities which I’ve become aware of through my research that are committed to showing the strength of humanities research and teaching at a time when the study of humanities subjects is being politically undermined.

Manchester Metropolitan University’s Helen Malarky and Professor Berthold Schoene manage a ‘festival of the humanities’, held in Manchester, called Humanities in Public, which started in 2013 as a year-long public engagement initiative aiming to reach people with no experience of higher education but who may be interested in what higher education can offer. In this guest blog for the Being Human festival, they explain: “we didn’t want our public engagement efforts to be seen as a way of ‘saving’ the humanities. As far as we were concerned, the humanities did not need saving. They already had what it took.” They celebrate the work being done at MMU and want their staff to share it with the public.

The HiP festival is made up of themes, each of which involves a short series of events ranging from evening talks, exhibitions and interdisciplinary seminars to off-campus activities such as city walks or tours of buildings, pub quizzes and film screenings. The university has developed many new cultural partnerships through this festival and researchers at Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science have produced vast amounts of original work. The faculty recently took on the former Cornerhouse facilities nearby, where some of the events will be happening and it all kicks off next month.

So with such a range of events I’m going to have plenty to keep me busy in the evenings, my days are now filled with writing writing writing as the three years of PhD are nearly up! I hope this post has given a flavour of the sorts of cultural events I’ve been studying and why they matter, now to make sense of everything I’ve encountered along the way.

Co-operatives and the Cultural Industries

Tags

Art, Community, Creative economies, formal governance, jobs

Co-operatives and the Cultural Industries was a round-table discussion organised on 1st of April 2015 by Marisol Sandoval and Jo Littler at Creative Industries Department, City University, London. Four speakers had roughly 20 minutes each to talk about co-ops, followed by time for questions, comments and discussions.

To set the scene for this discussion, it is important to consider the following:

Around 50,000 design and creative arts graduates come onto the labour market each year. They face entering the workforce as part of the new precariat, what Guy Standing has labelled the ‘New Dangerous Class’, which means they are likely to be “relegated to a bits-and-pieces life, in and out of casual flexible jobs, without being able to build an occupational career or identity” (Standing 2011).

The four speakers had very different experiences of co-operation as a business practice, but their presentations addressed these problems:

1) Unpaid work and internships are endemic, even axiomatic, in creative and cultural sectors and permanent jobs are hard to come by.
2) Although ‘entrepreneurship’ and business skills are taught as part of creative arts degrees as a matter of course, the co-operative model of business organisation is often marginalised as an option.

This event was convened by two senior lecturers to encourage a discussion of the potentials and limits of worker co-operatives as a way of organizing cultural work, but I went because I have a personal interest in these issues too: when two friends and I started a small clubwear business after graduating in the late 1990s we had a number of problems, but being a worker’s co-operative wasn’t one of them. The solidarity, sense of common purpose or what one speaker here described as ‘sweat equity’ (working your equal share despite not getting paid) that united us in a brave attempt to create and manage our own experience of working for a living was readily cemented by a legal and ethical contract, the common ownership worker’s co-operative business model, that made sense of our shared ambitions and more importantly, shared risk. There are some ideas here that could also be applicable to the kinds of grassroots projects and community organisations currently involved in Connected Communities research.

Economist Robin Murray started by explaining the economic context in which co-ops assert their difference from other forms of production within organised capitalism. He has been Director of Industry at the Greater London Council in the 1980s, and a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies, so he knows a thing or two about the world of macro-business. He used a flipchart to explain how when production became more complex and specialised, the necessary socialisation of its workforce increased, which was how Marx understood the development of industrial capitalism. Robin then introduced the Dunbar model for the number of stable relationships that humans can comfortably maintain, which is no more than 150, making the point that labour organises itself more easily in non-complex activities. In Robin’s opinion, the Dunbar model limits a co-ops’ ability to manage really complex business operations and so capitalism became the default format as a system for organisation for mega-business, especially in our highly specialised late-modern economy in the UK. Capitalists have the ability to manage the co-ordination of complexity and combine it with hierarchical socialisation, making them able to operate effectively at economies of scale.

The first great wave of worker co-ops in the mid to late 19th century followed the Rochdale pioneers’ example, which was a model for how the proletariat could react to the development of national industrial capitalism and build resilience by organising purchasing and retail operations in small groups. He calls it “consumer co-operation of the industrial working class” (Murray 2012), they were, after all, the dispossessed workers of their age. It led to the formation of hundreds of retail co-ops, a wholesale society, factories, farms, shipping lines, insurance and banks that, if taken as a single network, was at the time the largest corporate organisation in the world. What Robin suggests that co-ops can do to take back ownership of complex economic processes or to form businesses that need to operate at a larger scale is to combine separate co-operative ‘Dunbar cells’, as the first UK Co-op movement did, to become a huge cell network.

Rhiannon Colvin founded co-operative advocacy organisation AltGen to support 18-29 year olds to set up workers co-operatives. Rhiannon says she founded AltGen after applying for endless graduate jobs and unpaid internships herself without success and decided that young people could create something better if they started working together. She decided to reverse the blame for her own struggle to find work and wanted to help other young people understand that that the problem is not them, it is the economy. They are inheriting an economic reality in which they have no control over their time, no economic security, are forced into accepting low-income, poor quality and temporary jobs and are unable to accumulate any kind of capital at all. AltGen aims to help them find ways into a sustainable working future and contribute to a more stable economy through co-operation. “We need to stop fighting each other for work, especially unpaid work” she said. Putting together minds and skills to empower young graduates to take control of their own employment, AltGen can help them to understand and solve the employment crisis they face. The organisation is now looking into setting up a freelancers’ co-operative. Being employed brings rights that self-employed people don’t have, like holiday and sick pay, protection against discrimination and unfair dismissal, redundancy pay and trade unions. This next action will try and find ways to ameliorate an isolating situation that makes self-employed people more vulnerable to being treated as a disposable workforce.

Printer and pro-co-op activist Siôn Whellens shared his own story, which in some ways was similar to Rhiannon’s. He trained as a printer but the recession in 1981 made finding a ‘proper’ job impossible. Living in London, he joined a community press organisation and started from there instead. He is now a member of Calverts, a communications design and printing co-operative, based in Bethnal Green. Founded in 1977, it is a worker co-operative with 12 members that can produce all manner of printed items from leaflets and menus to art books and multimedia products, it also creates websites and develops all kinds of interesting communication projects. Under ‘environmental initiatives’ their website mentions the company’s commitment to utilising the latest technology that reduces their impact on the environment in many ways, such as computer-to-plate technology which dispenses with film, as well as the obvious choices such as vegetable oil based inks. Siôn is also a business advisor at institutions including City University, where he advises on the nature and benefits of co-operative approaches to work and creative life. He has written about the precarious generation of creative workers on his blog suggesting that as the cultural sector has grown “workers have responded by developing agile, collaborative and creative approaches not just to work, but to the necessities of life including accommodation, leisure and social support”. He writes that despite “the primacy of individual genius and effort” that go with the territory of the creative industries and its rhetoric, collaborative practice is something that is “familiar and normal for many students and graduates”.

Tara Mulqueen is a PhD student in the Law Department at Birkbeck, University of London and her dissertation title is presently ‘Co-operation and Social economy in Critical perspective: History, Politics and Law’. Tara also has direct experience of being part of a co-operative as she worked at the community owned and volunteer run People’s Supermarket in central London, famously used by David Cameron to make a ‘Big Society’ speech in 2011.

She is interrogating the tensions or even conflicting aims of co-operative businesses to understand the difficulties of balancing social transformation with commercial sustainability, to consider whether becoming a market entity has a depoliticising effect on their practice and to locate them within the broader history of working class movements. Law is a “key terrain” (Mulqueen 2012) in which social groups and corporate bodies are defined. Co-operatives as corporate entities were brought within the state and its legal framework when they were formally recognised as a legitimate form of business in 1852. At this time joint-stock companies, trusts and friendly societies were already in use, now a number of different legal forms could also be co-operatives. It is a ‘protected category’ in law, which means that in theory, a capitalist business cannot use the word co-operative, but in practice it is the Government’s business secretary that has the final decision on this. One thing a co-op can never be is a charity, in fact it is the opposite of a charity. Trustees may not benefit from a charity. The market has therefore become the very terrain of a co-operative’s existence in which it is possibleto see them as a category of middle-class reformism, they are also limited by their recognition by the state, something that the trade unions resisted to preserve greater freedom of organisation. It is interesting that Tara’s own experiences of self-organised and ethical work included unintentionally becoming entangled with the state idea of a Big Society, a “dubious program” (Mulqueen 2012) to expand the voluntary sector as an alternative to state-funded services. Dilemmas over principles will continue to trouble the development of a social economy – one important question being is it acceptable to survive and prosper? Community groups and budding partnerships interested in producing and selling goods need to ask themselves this question. If they are considering adopting a co-operative model, would ‘business’ as the legal form of association actually obscure their political project and social goals? Or alternatively does the co-operative model limit their ability to operate within the mainstream economy?

In my experience, the common ownership worker’s co-operative model was, of the four options listed in the Princes Trust ‘starting a business’ guide, by far the most logical choice for us as a group of friends, yet being involved in conversations about the values of co-operative business did, over time, have the effect of making our business into an ethical and political concern. Becoming a co-op inadvertently developed and promoted a political project that I hadn’t understood would be an effect of running a business and started a chain of events which has ultimately brought me here – to the Cultural Intermediation project and the Centre for Sustainable and Regional Futures (SURF).

Refs:
Mulqueen, T. 2012. When a business isn’t a business: law and the political in the history of the United Kingdom’s co-operative movement
Murray, R. 2012. A different way of doing things.
Standing, G. 2011. Stirrings of the New Dangerous Class

Follow the speakers on Twitter:
@AltGen101
@Scumboni
@tara_mulqueen

One day workshop: Artists working within Higher Education

Tags

Art, cities, cultural; creative economy; community; art; Birmingham; Manchester, Engagement, Festivals

Artists Working within Higher Education was an event I attended on 21 January 2015, held in a space in Manchester currently being used by Castlefield Gallery.

There is already an excellent and comprehensive overview of the day here written by PhD researcher Rachel Marsden, who took the photo above, but for the benefit of the Cultural Intermediation project, I have written my own overview of the day’s speakers and discussions, concentrating on some of things I found most interesting. Ways that individuals negotiate issues of structure and agency while engaging in university-based cultural production forms a big part of my own research, and this day also highlighted examples of this.

The event was part of Co-producing legacy: What is the role of artists within Connected Communities projects?

The legacy project runs from Feb 2014 to June 2015 at University of Sheffield, with partners in Manchester and Leeds, and explores the legacy of the AHRC/ESRC funded Connected Communities programme. The research already carried out in the Connected Communities programme has been strongly community focussed and much of it has been co-produced with local communities and groups of non-academic practitioners. The methods or modes of enquiry developed and employed have included some innovative artistic practices combined with social science methodologies. This particular part of the legacy project, which has the title Artists Working within Higher Education, has looked at 60 of the Connected Communities projects (out of a total of around 250) in which academics and artists have worked together to realise ideas in imaginative and participatory ways, and today’s event here was organised to disseminate some of the findings so far. Out of these 60 projects, in which artists have done things like run workshops, contribute to journal articles and book chapters and facilitate parts of projects and produce work that draw on their unique strengths and skills, 9 cases have been researched ‘in depth’ with the aim of understanding how existing and emerging ways of working across disciplines and in collaboration with non-HEI partners may be changing the research terrain.

The choice of space for this event reflected this ambition too, as it was not a University-managed space but the ’empty’ top floor of an eight storey former office building with a screen and projector, a kettle and lots of folding chairs. Federation House is a large building close to the Victoria Station in Manchester, on the corner of Federation St and Balloon Street. I have always liked the name Balloon Street, its name refers to the first balloon ascent made in Manchester by James Sadler in 1784! The street is also home to the headquarters of the Co-operative Bank, in fact the Co-operative Group (formerly the Co-operative Wholesale Society) have been based in this part of Manchester since the late 19^th century and Federation House is one of their unoccupied buildings currently being used by Castlefield Gallery as a ‘pop-up’ project space.

More than just a gallery, Castlefield Gallery has also been working as an art space development agency since 2006, brokering low cost project and gallery spaces for artists and creative practitioners in shopping centres and empty buildings in the North West of England, an initiative that goes under the heading New Art Spaces.

Castlefield Gallery’s director Kwong Lee gave a quick welcome in which he mentioned this initiative, then legacy project co-investigators Kate Pahl and Steve Pool introduced the day, beginning with an outline of the Connected Communities programme which seems to get more complicated every time I see someone attempt it! Kate went on to say that some of the individuals who have been involved in this legacy project describe themselves as artist/academic ‘hybrids’ and they recognise that their outputs will face different audiences. A slide in the introductory power point mentioned that amongst emerging issues in this project was the notion that as co-investigators, artists felt they have to ‘lose something’ in the process of collaboration, which provoked an immediate intervention from an audience member, an artist, who asked should that be ‘gain’ also? And another asked if artists felt that they lost something in collaboration with higher education, then what did academics ‘lose’? In this way a discursive tone for the day was set, as Kate, encouraged by the intervention, explained that as the day’s sessions would be recorded and these discussions would contribute to the research project.

The first speaker on the programme was Jeanie Scott, representing A-N Artists Information Company, which is now a membership organisation for visual artists dedicated to research, advocacy and support for the sector. The company used to produce Artist’s Newsletter magazine, a valuable guide to issues and developments in the arts scene. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a copy, but this trusty journal used to be a must-have subscription for arts developers and practitioners while I was working in the cultural sector. Concerned with what the employment options currently are in the visual arts sector, particularly for the 4,500 new graduates entering a workforce where long periods of unpaid labour are now the norm, the organisation has recently been involved in the Warwick Commission’s Cultural Value project (whose report came out yesterday).

Jeanie talked us around this fascinating map of The Ecology of the Visual Arts produced by Emily Speed

This was commissioned by A-N in 2013, here the arts sector has been imagined as a city and its constituent groups are represented by buildings. Interesting how the word ecology seems to be replacing the word economy in documents dealing with cultural policy.

Next, Professor Vanessa Toulmin talked about University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind, a festival that fitted the criteria for my PhD research so well that I now wish I had been able to include it in my fieldwork last year. Taking notes during this personal summary was the next best thing, though, as Vanessa included a huge amount of self-reflexive commentary in her presentation, something I have been seeking in my interviews with festival organisers. She is an academic and a historian, specialising in early film, circuses and travelling and fairground entertainments. She is currently Director of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield and also worked for a number of years on heritage and regeneration projects with Blackpool Council. It was the idea of “city vibrancy” demonstrated by this work with Blackpool that she told us she had used as the argument to access £35,000 worth of free venue space from Sheffield’s local authority for the Festival of the Mind in 2014. Bus and train sponsorship followed, as the event took place in fresher’s week to offer newcomers to Sheffield “a curated way of knowing the city”.

She spoke at length about how further in kind contributions were leveraged and how she believes she gets things done by working strategically through all levels of the university and using the procedures already in place, but I’ll leave all that for my thesis and concentrate on the bits about the role of artists here. 30 new commissions were funded and through this, the festival’s public content was produced. Artworks and installations were made by artists working in collaboration with academics from the University of Sheffield, with many of the connections linking arts practices with scientific researchers. To start the ball rolling, a speed dating event took place on a specially hired bus, with tea and cake laid on for successful ‘matches’ to sit down and work out their ideas together. Vanessa modelled the way the commissions worked on her own experience of working with sculptor Anthony Bennett. With a background in entertainments rather than arts (an important distinction that is sometimes not clearly articulated, I think) she found that the artist’s ways of working were a “new world” to her, but it seems that she stayed at arm’s length and allowed the practices to evolve. She also believes these projects brought back “the joy of discovery” to scientists who it turned out were not at all reluctant to get involved and even built in funding for some of the projects into their own bids. Money for arts projects is “peanuts” compared to the sums they usually bid for, she explained, they were used to dealing in bigger amounts than the festival’s entire budget. As a result of this big drive for engagement in the run up to the 2014 festival (it’s third edition and it seems, was the biggest so far) it would appear that the entire science research programme now builds funding for engagement into all their bids and University of Sheffield is a Catalyst University for Public Engagement with Research. Sheffield doesn’t want to be “the university on the hill”, she said.

Next James Oliver from the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne, led a short, discursive session before lunch that took as its starting point something a previous speaker had said: ‘everything is related’. He wanted us to think about how relations are frequently unequal, reading a line from a letter to Marx from Engels sent during his time spent in Manchester about ‘dialectical ideas’. Binaries are unhelpful, James said, like the way cultural and creative work becomes labelled as practice-based or theoretical in hierarchical relations within academic discourse. Practice was a way to think-through problems and creativity should not be thought of as simply innovation or as a way to ‘translate’ social science, but a “mode of imagination and improvisation, which is open to other ways of being”. Durning the discussion which followed, a comment from a practicing artist was interesting, as she had been artist-in-residence in an archive project within a University department which is one I have encountered as part of my fieldwork.

As an artist working with, or alongside, different groups in a university setting – including staff who weren’t academics and students – “your status is unclear” she said. And while it is common for art to disrupt the brief it has been set, she wondered how the artist’s role is constructed prior to the residency and suggested that if the artists don’t conform to expectations, where does that leave the commissioner? I understand the problem and I agree that the production of art is a disruptive process and one that often takes critique as its central project, but as institutions are not keen on being made to feel uncomfortable, there are limits to autonomy which are often experienced in self-reflexive, internalised ways.

The discussion moved on to the subject of the project-based model in which most of the Connected Communities work has taken place, with many comments about low pay and precarious employment from artists and academics alike: “How are we affording the time to be here today?” and “We are talking to ourselves most of the time”. Vanessa made an interesting point, suggesting that “most academics don’t know how to pay artists”. She had been surprised by how much the artists in the Festival of the Mind project expected to get paid varied, which isn’t the case in the entertainment industry as it uses Equity pay levels as basis for a pay system.

The afternoon sessions seemed to take the works of art themselves as the focus for the talks, starting with artist and Professor in Creative Practice Steve Swindells’ talk, from the perspective of Huddersfield University, about what it means to be an ‘engaged artist’ working within an ‘engaged university’ in a town rather than a city. Creatively engaging individuals from the local community using dialogues that involve art practices and occupying spaces in the town is the idea behind the present ROTOЯ partnership which he has developed between Huddersfield Art Gallery and the University of Huddersfield. He describes it as a mutually beneficial relationship that showcases research by academic staff in the faculties of art, design and architecture. Steve mentioned a recommendation of the 2014 Farrell Review of Architecture and the Built Environment, which was “Every town and city should have an urban room where people can go to understand and debate the past, present and future of that place.” Urban rooms, already popular in Japan and China, would help to bridge the gap between architects and the general public and are places where the history of and future plans for the area are displayed and discussed. In the ROTOЯ project, work was exhibited in Huddersfiled that had been made in the town, but had previously only been shown in national and international venues. The project outputs include this published collection of critical essays and we heard that the ICA in London are also now partners in the project.

Finally Sheffield-based artist Paul Evans talked about being the recipient of a grant from the Leverhulme Residency Programme which allowed him to develop new work with an academic partner. Paul is interested in exploring the cultural significance of animals, with a particular interest in whales, so the grant enabled him to make a series of artworks based on 10 months spent in the Cardiff Osteological Research Group’s bone room at Cardiff University. While this was an experience he had clearly enjoyed, it was interesting that he mentioned in this presentation that the Leverhulme Trust was established by William Hesketh Lever, the founder of Lever Brothers (now UniLever). “It’s important to know who you’re in bed with” he said.

Paul’s work in Cardiff was mentioned in the Osteological Research Group’s 2014 REF impact case study in which he is quoted as saying “My collaboration with Dr Mulville and Guerilla Archaeology has had a substantial impact on my professional practice”, which is something that is also important to the legacy project.

The arts practice and co-production methodologies discussed here have illustrated a range of ways of working, but what I am interested in is how an artist’s autonomy fits with and complements an institution’s own objectives. All of us want to practice according to our values, which leads inevitably to conflicts of interest, so who is it that changes their approach or ‘loses something’ and what is losing something worth? Chantal Mouffe has this to say on strategies for hegemonic resistance in the domain of art and culture, which is where subjectivities are constructed:

‘Critical artistic practices do not contribute to the counter-hegemonic struggle by deserting the institutional terrain but by engaging with it, with the aim of fostering dissent and creating a multiplicity of agonistic spaces where the dominant consensus is challenged and where new modes of identification are made available.’ (Mouffe, 2013, Artistic Strategies in Politics and Political Strategies in Art)

(James Oliver also made reference to Chantal Mouffe and agonistic pluralism in his talk)

In contemporary, post-fordist conditions, where according to Mouffe “forms of exploitation characteristic of the times when manual labor was dominant have been replaced by new ones”, the objective of critical artistic practices should be the production of new subjectivities that contribute to the development of better social relations. Her comments aren’t specifically directed at the context of artists working with universities, but it’s the spirit of the argument that seems to fit.

While understanding the reasons why some prefer to advocate complete withdrawal from the existing powerful and hegemonic institutions and concentrate their efforts in constructing alternative social forms, Mouffe’s strategy is one of engagement with institutions as part of resistance to them. Believing, like some of today’s speakers, that the institution can be changed from within, she says “hegemonic confrontation” takes place in “the multiplicity of places where hegemony is constructed” implying that critical artistic practices will encourage agonistic spaces to occur inside the very institutions which secure the dominant hegemony, in the hope they can transform the way they function. It’s a pluralistic perspective that I think emerges repeatedly in Connected Communities projects, and while not all participants in the 250 projects (and counting) are obviously in pursuit of radical political change, the project is finding ways to hold onto individual differences, articulate them, value them and find equivalence among them.

Find out more:

Co-producing Legacy is led by Kate Pahl (School of Education, University of Sheffield), Helen Graham (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) Steve Pool (Artist) and Amanda Ravetz (Manchester School of Art)

Interview with Kwong Lee on New Art Spaces

ROTOЯ partnership

Artistic and Institutional Alliances

Tags

Art, Cultural Intermediation, Culture, Festivals

A gallery-based practice I always find fascinating is the public talk. A couple of weeks ago I went to a great talk given by Glyn Thompson at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery at University of Leeds called IN FOCUS: The Herbert Read Collection. It was right at the end of their recent exhibition ‘Sir Herbert Read’s Artistic Alliances‘ which ran from 1 September – 20 October 2014.

Contemplating the role of Universities as intermediaries in the cultural economy has become increasingly bound up, for me lately, with theories of institutional power and social influence. Exhibitions can be interpreted as a specific form of cultural production that Bennett (1998) understands as as sites of top-down flows of hegemonic power, something similar to Foucault’s strategies of micro power in his notion of governmentality. Institutions in the public cultural campus or ‘culture complex’ operate, in Bennett’s view, as ‘working surfaces on the social’ through which a kind of public organisation is sustained through the assemblage of objects and discourses within.

Many universities in the UK have a gallery space on their campus and in previous posts on this blog and my own I have mentioned other events at similar university spaces, for example at Lakeside Gallery at University of Nottingham and the Barber Institute at University of Birmingham. Although originally established in the 1970s, the S&AB gallery underwent major programmes of expansion in 1998 and again in 2008, funded first by HEFCE and then with private funds from long-standing friend and benefactor of the University, Mrs Audrey Burton, to become the welcoming and versatile art gallery and display space it is now.

Last year University of Leeds launched an art prize and special exhibition for recent graduates from its undergraduate Fine Art and Design programmes, supported by the Friends of University Art and Music-Leeds (FUAM) of which Mrs Burton had also been an Honorary President. This competition is one of the gallery’s current exhibitions. In the Education room at the other end of the long space is an exhibition of letters and greetings cards sent by Sir Herbert Read in the years after the Second World War, many of which belong to the University’s Special Collections, which houses Read’s archive. This IN FOCUS talk has been organised in conjunction with Special Collections, which are housed in Brotherton Library, the same building as the gallery.

The legacy of Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), art historian, critic, knight (“services to literature”), anarchist, is currently experiencing some favourable attention. A new film, an immersive study of his life and work has been made by Manchester-based film maker Huw Wahl, supported by the Arts Council. The film is called To Hell With Culture, its provocative title comes from an essay by Herbert Read, originally published in 1941. The son of a farmer in the North Riding of Yorkshire, as a young man Read served in the First World War, rising to the rank of captain and receiving the Military Cross. Later he became known as a poet, an influential art critic, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a committed anarchist. He wrote extensively on art history, theories of art and their importance to society. He co-founded the ICA in London in 1946 and also controversially accepted a knighthood in 1953. He was a modernist, championing the affective and symbolic qualities of art, from ‘primitive’ forms and cave paintings to abstraction and surrealism. The University of Leeds acquired Read’s library, including many rare and personal items, with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 1996.

In 1912 he had enrolled at University of Leeds to study Law and economics, but he went to the front and returned profoundly affected by his experiences. According to Glyn Thompson, for a time in the 1920s, Read was Britain’s best recognised war poet.

Of the items made available for handling or at least taking a closer look at during the IN FOCUS session are two that are of particular interest to the speaker Glyn, who completed his PhD at the University in 2008 on Marcel Duchamp’s ‘art’ practice, or perhaps it is rather more accurate to say his way of articulating meaning.

Read had in his collection a ‘Green Box’ (edition of 320 copies) from 1934 and an exhibition catalogue ‘Le Surréalisme en 1947′ that accompanied the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organised by Duchamp and André Breton at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, July–August 1947. The exhibition catalogue has a false breast on the front cover, mounted on a piece of velvet (we are told that the last one sold for $254,000).

The Green Box (pictured left, also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even) contains 94 individual items mostly supposed ‘facsimiles’.

Glyn talks about an outpost of surrealism that existed in London in the late 1930s, on Cork Street, particularly the Guggenheim gallery. This was where the elite of modernism from Britain and France exhibited and ‘hung out’. Herbert Read was part of this set, he was friends with Peggy Guggenheim and Roland Penrose. With the latter he co-founded the ICA in the centre of London, which opened in 1947, to showcase and champion contemporary culture across a wide range of art forms. Details of their first exhibitions can be found here.

Read used his influence to champion the work of Yorkshire artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Perhaps he was a cultural intermediary of his time, framing what was available through the use of cultural and social capital and leveraging credibility in networks that connected culture and society?

That would be a good topic for a future talk, but let me return to the one I was here for. Glyn’s talk aims to ‘disrupt the master narrative of Duchamp’, which he explains is commmonly held to be as the grandfather of modern art and the pioneer of art as ‘interruption of the normal’. This art was made exclusively for members of the elite, as work of allegory and rhetoric. “Articulating esoteric subject matter”.

Duchamp translates information into ‘things’. Glyn says Duchamp’s work is simply a form of embodied meaning. The meanings are encrypted, you have to “do archeology to it” to understand it from the point of view of its circumstances of production. Duchamp’s pieces are “pretexts of erudite discourse”. You have to know the content to appreciate the object, and decoding the elaborate symbolism of a work to receive its message requires interpretative reading.

In Glyn’s analysis of the exhibition catalogue, the square (on the back) and the circle (the false breast) stand for alchemy, while The Green Box is emblematic of The Emerald Tablet, a sacred text of alchemy and hermeticism.

An emblem comprises three forms of simultaneous representation: the visual (superscript) the motto (subscript) and translation (glossing text), so Duchamp’s work is that, rather than an artwork. Sans le saviours. The common herd is not supposed to understand.

Perhaps the multiple readings that are possible of the work of Duchamp and some other surrealists is something that McGuigan’s (2005) work on cognitive and affective communication could be productively applied to, because I although I can’t read their erudite discourse, I nonetheless enjoy the startling and disruptive appearance of readymades and surrealist objects when I encounter them in a gallery. Regardless of this, it is whether the influential circle of Read and his contemporaries gave this art its credibility in London and also in Leeds, via links with the University’s elite community, that is the real issue that I need to keep addressing when it comes to my own work on Universities at cultural intermediaries.

There are couple of opportunities to engage with some of these themes coming up in Leeds this month.

Next Monday, 10th November, the 28th Leeds International Film Festival screens the film To Hell With Culture at 8.30pm and I’m chairing a panel discussion following the screening which will reflect on how Read’s ideas can be applied to contemporary society today. That this takes place at The Hyde Park Picture House, which belongs to the same era as Read (it first opened in 1914), is a happy coincidence!

I have also co-ordinated two additional events taking place at University of Leeds on Wednesday 19th November in conjunction with this screening:

Tour of the Herbert Read Collection, The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Weds 19th November, 4-5pm

Richard High leads a guided tour of Herbert Read’s Library and Archive, now housed within the University of Leeds’ Special Collections in the Brotherton Library.

Herbert Read Poetry Reading, University of Leeds, Weds 19th November, 6-7pm

Fiona Becket, Hannah Copley, Jon Glover, Ragini Mohite, Emma Trott and John Whale read from the poems and other writings of Herbert Read, including materials held in the University of Leeds archive.

To book, email gallery@leeds.ac.uk or tel: 0113 3432778

Glyn Thompson has just curated an exhibition called Educating Damien at the Tetley in Leeds, drawing on lecture notes and slides he used when he was teaching History of Art to Damien Hirst on the Foundation Course at Jacob Kramer College in Leeds, during the academic year 1983-84.

These are being shown alongside a series of drawings made during that year by members of Hirst’s cohort and together they form a unique insight into the art education of a major figure of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation.

On Thursday 8th January Glyn Thompson also gives a public talk at the gallery.

___________________________________

Ref:

Bennett (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science

McGuigan (2005) The cultural public sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8:4, 427-443

Total war or total trivialisation? Cultural intermediation, translation and practice.

My PhD research for the Cultural Intermediation project looks at the role of universities as intermediaries in the creative cultural economy. Some of my early findings on the selected topic UK festivals that have a University as a strategic partner (eg. Open City Docs) will be shared at an event in Salford in September.

Right now I’m mainly dealing with two things. One is the internal evaluation process at University of Salford, for which I have to write a report on my progress, it is a process by which all the little things I haven’t thought hard enough about already are being revealed!

The other thing is that I’ve become a bit preoccupied with lately are the discourses circulating in a cultural context that deal with the legacy of the 1^st World War, which is something I want to share my thoughts on here.

Cultural programming has for some time been dominated by this subject; commemorative events, radio programmes, plays, exhibitions, horse performances and so on are encouraging us to reflect on the ‘Great War’ and the effect it had on national boundaries, individual’s lives, on modernity, on all of us as human beings, as we look back on the automated brutality, the suffering of millions of young men, of horses, of everybody, everywhere.

What is unconvincing about much of this activity is that some of the contexts of the war and its effects on society at the time are barely being represented in favour of personal stories, letters, mementos, medals and other familiar elements. At worst, I hear an echo of Guy Debord’s warning that all society can do now is consume ‘spectacles’, where the emphasis is always on novelty and consumption. These things have become part of popular war narratives and are as such irretrievable from popular myth.

These concerns were raised earlier this year amongst a group of historians, academics, members of the public and others from the fields of archives, museum and media studies at a conference at University of Salford, held over at the Media City campus, overlooking the Imperial War Museum North.

An opening remark set the tone for the day: “history is too important to leave it to the BBC and museum curators”.

The first presenter, a historian, talked about his experiences working with the BBC on newly commissioned war-related programmes. He explained that he welcomed this kind of work because it offered him the chance to have some influence on the outcomes of documentary programme making, but he also felt frustration with its processes. On a practical level, there was little advance warning of when these opportunities would present themselves, so he had problems balancing them with his own research and teaching commitments – his publishers were ‘very patient’. (I wanted to ask him if his department’s REF co-ordinator was pleased, but he pre-empted me by saying it ‘got him out of’ other REF-able activities!)

Journalists, he said, who tend to be the researchers on these programmes, didn’t head for the library or archives, instead they would talk to people, often local historians who had already spoken on these subjects. They wouldn’t have looked at any of his books before meeting him, and if they did there was a danger they would only use the bits that would justify what they wanted to say anyway.

He found that there were some concepts that these researchers were unfamiliar with or uncomfortable talking about – for example the war memorials themselves, and they frequently preferred to focus on the home front and regional connections to places in the UK instead of strategies and battles at the fighting front. Also as a result of excessive interest in the hyper-local and domestic stories, big national stories such as strikes were often missed out completely. There was also little attempt to show anybody disagreeing with each other, on the assumption that this ‘wouldn’t make good TV’. When advising on a series of programmes about Ireland’s role in the war, he had to explain to the people working on them that a ‘conscientious objectors’ angle wouldn’t work because Ireland had no enforced conscription. They also wanted to run a story on Belgian refugees but without making mention of why they were escaping the country! Then there is ‘access’ – the TV term for finding a family member, however distant, and putting them in control of the ‘personal’ narrative on the screen.

Drama, it seems, has taken over from history (as another speaker put it) and popular myths are being reinforced by this ‘psuedo-history’. This is an over-simplification of the war, but how can it be done differently? Deeper questions need to be asked.

Why there is such a ‘patriotic national myth’ when no evidence suggests that people thought the war would be over by Christmas?

What about the ideas of empire and nation, how are those values discussed? Most British subjects barely had the vote, so it can’t be accurately framed as a war for ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’.

How will the non-British volunteers be remembered?

Where is the room to speak of ongoing sacrifice?

As all those who were really there are now dead, so the shift from memory to history leads to the use of ‘objects and what they can communicate’ to aid popular interpretation. A museum director tells us that museums have the responsibility for “making material culture accessible to people” but admits that telling stories is sometimes ‘hampered by the politics’.

Context is everything.

In 1919 the city of Salford was presented with a tank, and two German guns (captured at Loos) by the National War Savings Committee, in recognition of the funds they had raised. Many UK cities received similar tributes.

Apparently the tank was exhibited as a public monument in Salford for a number of years.

A clipping from a Salford newspaper in 1927 reveals that it was dismantled and removed or possibly even scrapped by the Council. “The decision in favour of cleaning away the tank…will be welcomed especially by members of the Labour Party and other suporters of the anti-militarist movement”. The article goes on to say that “the Museum and Parks Committee will lay out a shrubbery” turning what was described as an ‘eyesore’ and reminder of the horrors of war, into a ‘pleasant spot’.

( source: salfordwarmemorials.proboards.com/thread/957 )

There is official reminiscence and unofficial reminiscence, war commemoration is political and the state is an intermediary in the context of interpretation.

The Imperial War Museum is spending £4.5million from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) on new First World War Galleries at IWM London, out of a total £35 million made available to the group for a major redevelopment project. The new galleries at IWM London will display “Original artefacts from soldiers’ personal items, letters and diaries through to weapons, tanks and artworks”. If a WW1 tank was displayed in Salford now, how would the contemporary political agenda deal with such ‘conflicting representations’ as those mentioned above?

A strong objection to the tone of these presentations came, during the break, from a museum representative, whose funding, she says, depends on attracting new visitors and on education. They couldn’t take these kinds of risks.

A sociologist, who carried out research in the Imperial War Museum North on ‘display and affect’ suggests that intellectual and emotional engagement are different responses to encountering artefacts. Her emphasis was on dialogue and conversation, she had used booths next to the objects to find out how museum audiences interpret them, followed up with walking interviews inside the museum and focus groups. She was very interested in how emotions and ethical dilemmas revealed a ‘reflexive self’ in the responses she collected.

The director of the museum group was more abrupt. Art has the power to hit you on the emotional level. Museums had to generate much of their own income, so engaging people was important.
For example, Russell Maliphant choreographed a special ballet that was performed at the IWM North as part of Museums at Night. Critics could still say that this is spectacle rather than engagement.

A German speaker later in the day just seemed baffled, his impression of the German population is that the majority thinks the 1st World War is just history, there is no wreath-laying or uniformed parades, this year Germany commemorates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 70th anniversary of the attempted assassination of Hitler.

The conference made my head spin, at first I felt that I learned a lot about the war just by going, but later, as I thought more deeply about those awkward questions that had still gone unanswered, I started to think more for myself. Soon afterwards, I went to a lecture in Leeds about Sir Michael Sadler, who had been the vice chancellor of University of Leeds during the 1st World War period.

In 1914 his son had translated Kandinsky’s important book on ‘The Spiritual in art’ which was a major contribution to theories about abstract art. Sadler was himself a collector of Kandinsky’s work and hung modern art in the University corridors.

Listening to the lecture, which was part of The Big Bookend festival, I realised that my dissatisfaction with the cultural programming around the 1st World War was that it was leaving out some of the other important narratives, for instance those circulating in art at the time.

I started to think about what else was happening in that period, from 1910 – 1920. For example, in the USA music was being pressed onto records and broadcast on radio stations for the first time and there were the silent cowboy films of Tom Mix in the movie theaters. In Europe, the beginnings of abstraction, Picasso collages, Kandinsky, Dada and early expressionism. Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka in Vienna, and the Cabaret Voltaire. Anthropological gazes, suffragettes, anarchist ideas and dangerous political theories – how were these things expressed in art?

Then the idea for doing a night of music, art and moving image came from reading about Hugo Ball and the Cabaret Voltaire, a kind of performance-meets-nightclub founded in Zurich in neutral Switzerland in 1916 by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. Zurich at that time attracted deserters from many parts of Europe, described as rebels with a shared hatred of the social order and a desire to challenge ‘outdated bourgeouis values’.

Hugo Ball is known as the originator of Dada. He drew on Russian anarchy theorist Mikhail Bakunin, who had also spent time in Zurich a few decades earlier in the 1870s. Dada itself was an invented aesthetic term and movement, with a manifesto (of course, they all had to have manifestos at that time) that declared it was purposely devoid of meaning. However, a basic spiritualism that writers like Herbert Read have found valuable in primitive art can be seen in many of the artforms that appeared around that time.

This combination of a rebellious rejection of reason and dominant political ideologies and a desire to bring people together to be moved by art and music has inspired me to act! Sadly I don’t have manifesto or movement, or any money from HLF, but I’ve decided that I’m going to remember Hugo Ball in a modest and hopefully enjoyable way next month.

Left Bank, established as a Parish church in 1911, plans to present an event with me on 6th September in Leeds. It will be a night of music and moving image with an atmosphere inspired by some of the art and aesthetics of 1910-1920. Details are below:

Original film mixes and live music from Tom Attah, Patrick Daff and Das Pain.

You can come along if you like, tickets are on sale and it starts at 7pm.

I hope it isn’t too much of a spectacle.

Arts & Science Festival – 1960s Art & Architecture Tour

Tags

Birmingham, Cultural Intermediation, Engagement, Festivals

The University of Birmingham Arts & Science festival, now in its second year, ran for a week from 16th – 23rd March 2014.

The festival was described as “a week-long celebration of ideas, research and collaboration across campus” and as my research looks at the cultural festival and how universities are engaging with it, I went along to a few of the events to see was happening.

The 1960s Art & Architecture walking tour of Edgbaston campus was part of the Arts & Science festival’s programme, presented in partnership with Ikon gallery’s Ikon 50 programme, a special series of events and exhibitions marking the gallery’s ‘milestone year’.

Last Saturday afternoon at 1pm, a group of around 25 people converged in the sunshine at Eduardo Paolozzi’s huge bronze Faraday sculpture at the edge of the campus. Claire Mullet, Deputy Curator of Research and Cultural Collections at University of Birmingham, and one of the collections’ other curators, Chloë Lund, met us there. Claire explained that the University’s Research and Cultural Collections contain around 1,500 objects and artworks, many of which have been commissioned by the University and many acclaimed artists have leant or donated important pieces. This collection is separate to the Barber Institute’s collection and much of it is exhibited in the departments and public spaces around campus.
So began a fun two hours or so of discovery within the campus boundaries!

Now, I am a veteran of many public walks and have a great enthusiasm for them, so it came as no surprise when within minutes the sunshine was replaced by a sudden hail storm – this seems to happen all the time. Claire was prepared and undeterred, and from under a frilly umbrella she described the circumstances in which the 1970 Barbara Hepworth sculpture Ancestor I (pictured right) was bequeathed to the University by the sculptor, following the award of her honorary degree in 1960.

Thankfully, we were then lead us inside Staff House and into the warm. It is worth mentioning that the University boasts a huge amount of astonishing and extraordinary spaces within its buildings and the top floor of Staff House is definitely one of them. At the top of this building, almost hidden away in a corridor with an elegant roof that floods the space with natural light, is one of the most notable works of the tour, a framed blue abstract painting by Robert Groves. He was one of the Ikon’s founding group of artists and the man who gave the gallery its name in 1964. We had to take turns to see it, there is only room in front of it for a few people to stand.

There are many other wall-based art works on display in this building, one particularly notable one is a huge John Walker canvas called Anguish at an intersection in the stairwell.
While we stopped to admire it, Claire mentioned the artist’s connection to Birmingham and Chloë offered a more personal observation of how the piece visually fits with the space where it is presently hung.

Next we headed across an open space to the Finance office and clustered around a really unusual piece of public art, situated in a less airy stairwell.

The legend attached to Anguished Skein by Patrick Maher, a ‘punk orange’ painted metal squiggle, it is incredibly significant to the tour, as it turns out the piece was commissioned for the University’s former Finance Officer, Angus Skene, a ‘character’ who was also instrumental in setting up Ikon gallery. Angus was a collector of contemporary art, he and his partner donated a large amount of money to start the Ikon gallery and he urged the University to make funds available for commissioning and collecting work from this period and investing in public art around campus. It is likely that his story is pretty fundamental to the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections and one member of University staff I spoke to was certainly interested to hear the story behind a piece of sculpture she sees frequently. But soon we’re off again, this time to the Law building, to see Moonstrips Empire News (1967), a collection of up to 100 screen prints installed in the entrance lobby to the Law building and the stairs leading up to the Harding Law Library.

The recent refurbishment of this space combined a £4000 grant from the School of Law and Claire’s own vision for the space, she explained that the bold colour scheme was designed specifically with the work in mind. The investment in the space created a serendipitous opportunity to have the work that had already been adopted by Research and Cultural Collections properly framed and mounted so that it could be displayed publicly.

The combination of colourful elements sets up an excellent and very pop-arty juxtaposition between what was probably a neat but stuffy institutional lobby and the riotous colours, kitsch and logos of the 1960s prints. It is a complete surprise, it works and I love it!

As we left the Law School it was nice to see that the sun had come out again. Claire explained that it is not only 1960s art that the University could offer to Ikon on this tour, but examples of architecture too.
The Grade 2 listed Muirhead Tower could be seen from here, somewhat dominating the campus, and this is one example of these. It was built in 1963, although it was modernised with a £27 million refurbishment in 2007. Chloë adds that in the early 60s the university experienced a big expansion in student numbers. This must be the 1963 Robbins committee report on higher education that I have already read about, in which it was suggested that universities should become more democratic, with places available to all who attained the relevant qualification for them. The expansion led to a new phase of building and consequently a new style of architecture appeared on campus.
There are other examples of 1960s building directly next to the Muirhead Tower, but just before we set off towards them, I notice a poster for The Handsworth Scroll on a pillar next to where we are standing.

The Handsworth Scroll is an item from the CCCS archive that was on display earlier in the festival, in fact the festival guide listed that event alongside today’s walk.

Claire tells the group that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) resided for many years at the Muirhead Tower. There is currently an AHRC funded project at the University to mark the 50th anniversary of that institution and the Arts & Science Festival presented John Akomfrah’s new film The Stuart Hall Project (read my review of the film here) this week too.

At this point, a member of the group mentions another 1960s related event taking place on the following Saturday at The Library of Birmingham which is also part of Ikon 50. Those Were The Decades is a day-long event with an Illustrated talk about the CCCS by Dr Kieran Connell, a panel discussion on Ikon in the 1960s with John Salt, the first artist to exhibit there, plus other events including film screenings of Motorcity Music Years: Second City Sinners (1992) and Medium Cool (1969) – this 2nd film is part of Flatpack Film Festival‘s programme.

This had become a truly fascinating walk, connecting so many of Birmingham’s cultural organisations and innovators to the times when these things were made and revealing some of the cultural developments that link them together. We still had a couple more places to see too, so we headed to the Arts building to look at one of the last major commissions by Cornish modern painter Peter Lanyon. His ‘Arts Faculty Mural‘ (1963) fills the whole of one wall inside the school’s lobby and extends up over the door. It was imagined as an abstract representation of elements of the campus that could be seen from either side of the lobby and it is reported to have cost £13.23 per foot. This expense had provoked some opposition at the time it was made, as quotes from Redbrick, the university’s own newspaper, confirmed. Claire had prepared many of these sorts of notes and had also printed out pictures to hand round, all of which added extra context to what we observed.

Next we were taken to see the prefab Modern Languages building, built using innovative methods for its time, with a surprising, elegant interior space and so much natural light!

We ended our walk at the Metals and Metallurgy Building situated at the North of the campus, looking at a set of reflective grid paintings with geometric shapes painted onto mirrors by David Prentice, another of Ikon’s founders. This work, Pleides, was commissioned and designed especially for the building, which is built as a grid itself (below is a picture of the ceiling at the Metals and Metallurgy Building).
This tour was completely fascinating (and free, as was much of the Arts & Science festival programme!) Claire and Chloë provided ongoing, valuable contextual information, helping us to understand some of the hidden meanings in the buildings and art that we saw. Writing about it has also made me wistful for something else that I’d really like to see, but never will to be able to: Ikon’s first home, the glass-sided kiosk in the Bullring shopping centre.

Created to be mobile and ephemeral, a so-called ‘Gallery without walls’ – would it be have been called a ‘pop-up’ gallery, today, I wonder?

 

 

Intermediaries, policy and place linked in new United Nations Creative Economy Report

Tags

communities, conference, Policy, Well-being

This week has seen the launch of a ‘Special Edition’ United Nations Creative Economy Report 2013, co-published by UNESCO and the United Nations Development Programme.

Principal investigator, writer and editor of the report, Yudhishthir Raj Isar was speaking on Wednesday 22nd January at the AHRC Community Filmmaking and Cultural Diversity conference at the BFI Southbank (more on the whole conference on this blog soon!). The report has chapter-long contributions from respected academics David Throsby and Andy Pratt and this special edition was produced with the UN Office for South South Co-operation and focuses on creative economy at the local level in developing countries in the global South.

It can be downloaded from here.

He told us that at its launch the previous evening, the response to the report from those who were there was that it was also relevant to developed countries. In a presentation that linked academic research with the policy world, he said the same issues affect the growing subsector of the economy labelled as ‘cultural’ as affect all cultural practitioners: intermediaries, policy and place. He added “It suits us to be included in the cultural economy because it is a sector that is moving ahead” but this is a tendency in economic development that continues to ignore the deep-seated and persistent inequalities between North and South.

However he went on to urge for caution in wrapping creative industries policy up in economic growth terminology, describing it as counter-productive. Success is contingent on many conditions, including geographical, structural and cultural, and any development must pay attention to local strengths. Outside influences may contribute to the generation of highly original hybrids (as is frequently seen happening in music), but they must not impose a model or an agenda for development. Raj mentioned Justin O’Connor’s response to the report on this blog in which he supports it for building on a 2005 UNESCO convention that supported a “diversity of cultural expressions” over what Raj referred to as ‘the reigning paradigm of the creative economy’ that reduces cultural value to the bottom line.

Commercialisation of cultural forms also loses sight of cultural forms that are a communities’ rights to communicate and pays no attention to disonnant voices, leading to disenfranchisement and decreased social capital of local communities. To quote Justin’s article again “purely market-oriented development erodes local cultures and undermines the ability of individuals and communities to access material forms of cultural expression”. Alternative futures for cultural economy development need to be imagined. Funding is one element to be considered in these, but others include ethical decision-making, trans-national connections, access to markets, leadership and education; intermediaries may emerge from many backgrounds. “It is an argument that suggests a new approach to cultural economy would not just ask what kind of culture we want to produce – but what kind of economy we want to help us do this.”

This also begs the question – what kinds of intermediaries are capable of providing meaningful support to the development of cultural economy sectors?

Exhibitions, texts & mediation – two cases, different objectives

As 2013 ends, I think it’s time to update the project blog with how my PhD at University of Salford is going, I’m now exactly one year into my research (proposal succesfully upgraded in November) and my ideas are developing as the reading and exploratory fieldwork progresses.

Just a quick reminder: the PhD was created to explore how universities interact with the creative cultural economy. I started off with an idea about how film festivals mediate ideas between communities on, off and around campus, animating cultural sector connections and making them visible. I’m becoming more interested now in how universities play a role as intermediaries in the curation, circulation and validation of cultural texts and artefacts (including films) and how the discourses that these texts and objects represent are mobilised through their exhibition or presentation. What are the objectives and orientations of the people involved in this practice? How are people engaged?

Examples of this idea in practice come from recent visits to very different exhibitions in Liverpool and Nottingham, both assembled with university involvement – it’s funny how research into cultural subjects can happen when you aren’t even planning it! I went to Leicestershire last week to visit my sister and because it was raining we scanned the ‘what’s on’ pages of Nottingham city centre venues looking for something to do. We picked Pop Art to Britart at the University of Nottingham’s Djanogly Art Gallery, a selection of around 50 pieces from a private collection of late twentieth century and contemporary art owned by David Ross, entrepreneur and trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

The gallery itself was founded through the philanthropism of Sir Harry Djanogly (a collector of LS Lowry paintings) and is part of Lakeside, the University of Nottingham’s public arts complex, which has occupied its present loction on the South edge of the University of Nottingham campus since 1992. Also on this site is the D.H. Lawrence Pavilion, built in 2001 and home to two more exhibition spaces as well as a 225 seat theatre. I’ve visited lots of times before and there is always something interesting on.

The current exhibition is free (on till Feb) and includes work by Bridget Riley, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Allan Jones, Gilbert and George, Mark Quinn, Damian Hirst and Peter Blake. There are some pictures from inside the gallery here and more information about the exhibition here:

I was interested to learn that David Ross, Nottingham alumnus and co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, is also co-Chair of a University fundraising campaign Impact: The Nottingham Campaign, the University’s largest ever philanthropic fundraising campaign, launched in October 2011. A press release states that the campaign has now reached £100m of its £150m target and the announcement was made at the launch of this exhibition last month.

While wandering around this impressive show of paintings and prints from Swinging Sixties to Cool Britannia, I’m thinking about what the artworks have been asked to stand for in this context, and whether that matches their original purpose. The double irony of Gavin Turk’s ‘Turkey Foil’ readymade drags pop art into a mildly funny pastiche of itself, Damian Hirst’s spot painting is predictably unsatifying – “insistently frontal” as Adrian Searle puts it. I find them a bit like a Cath Kidston design – basically inoffensive, will hold just enough credibility for now.

There are Pop Art reproductions of images from magazines and newspapers such as Yuri Gagarin in Joe Tilson’s toy-like piece, or Richard Hamilton’s picture of Mick jagger in ‘Swingeing London’. There’s a lot of Kate Moss, too.

‘Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool’ – an abstract looking David Hockney from 1971 is beautiful and mesmerising, but unsettling given the implied priviledge of the title. In the 2nd room there’s this little portraint of David, by (friend) Jonathan Yeo.

Despite enjoying seeing the works themeselves, there is a pervading sense of fait accompli about this show, it seems to be about acqusition and display, ownership, the images of celebrity culture reflect some sort of self-aggrandising triumph of marketability over substance. It’s as if its strategic function as celebration of philanthropic giving has eclipsed the meanings that the artists ascribed to the individual works on display. I also suspect (maybe unfairly, but hey) that these pieces have not been ‘collected’ for any political potential, rather for their aesthetic value as home decoration combined with ‘bankability’.

As a contrast to this ‘big name, big philanthropy’ message, I’d like to mention a new exhibition Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 at Tate Liverpool, put together with the support of Liverpool John Moores University, that takes a global view of how the production and reception of art has been influenced by left-wing values throughout the last two centuries. It has been curated by Francesco Manacorda, (Artistic Director, Tate Liverpool) Lynn Wray, (PhD Researcher at Liverpool John Moores University) and Eleanor Clayton, (Assistant Curator). Francesco is one of Lynn’s supervisors.

The top floor of the Tate is basically a riot of ‘stuff’ – hand-printed agitprop posters, piles of free newspapers, a reading corner arranged by Russian collective Chto Delat? (meaning: What is to be done?) piled with books donated by Radical & Community Bookshop News from Nowhere, a bolt of fabric and coloured threads for you to embroider your own message, Jeremy Deller’s videos of folk practices along the wall and this remarkable banner:

One star piece is one of Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Death of Marat’ paintings, a piece much copied to aid its swift disemmination across France and make Marat a martyr of the Revolution. William Morris wallpapers hang nearby, alongside pictures from the 1930s Mass-Observation project in Britain, we see art in a role as democratic representation, radical response, as subversive framework, an unauthored collective endeavour, challenging order, inviting discussion and negotiating possible utopias.

The Office of Useful Art inside the exhibition space is a project in association with Liverpool John Moores University and is running interventions and workshops throughout, while in January a selection of films will be presented in the gallery with talks by Film Studies scholars at University of Liverpool.

This exhibition suggests that art’s value lies is in its process, asking how to merge art and life. This reminds me of a lecture by Mark Banks, who looked at some of the realities of work in the cultural sector, and suggested these ways people could deal personally with issues of critique in their work:

Grounded aesthetics – Treat everyday life as a source of creativity and aesthetics, remain open to unorthodoxy, apprehend wider structures and create alternative cultural responses.

Social production – Recognise work as a socially embedded activity and find pleasure in everyday practices. Re-moralise economic imperatives by building in social rewards and ethical production. Despite its obvious difficulties, this practice is still persistent.

I want to know how universities are using these socio-cultural practices to connect with the public, to mobilise art as part in political discourses. These two examples aren’t meant to be comparitive, just recent observations and worth mentioning because they can still be seen in January. With this quote (from the Art Turning Left teacher’s info pack) Jeremy Deller perhaps offers a serendipitous link between the two exhibitions : ‘If Pop Art is about liking things, as Andy Warhol said, then folk art is about loving things’.

With my research I’m going to be asking questions about the purpose, rather than the content, of cultural events. By working with the discourses embodied in the texts and objects, do the curatorial collaborators hope to provoke a reaction? What reaction, with what effect? What can the mechanism of art exhibition (in this case) do and how would that benefit the institutions involved?

Kickstarting a model for participation – communities within the crowd

Tags

communities, Culture, Festivals, Participatory

I first started to think about the democratic potential of Kickstarter’s funding model in February 2013 at FutureEverything, Manchester’s annual festival of ideas.

The crowdfunding website was established in 2009 to connect people looking for project funding to people looking to invest, launching in the UK in November 2012 (using £ not $). It is not the only one, but I’ll use it as a generic model just for now. The rewards for investing are negotiated into a number of different options (from a free poster to advance access to products to exclusive one off experiences) and the model appears to work well for the creative industries: films are currently the 2nd most popular category of project funding after music.

(Source: stats – open ‘categories’ under ‘successfully funded projects’)

Stephanie Pereira represented Kickstarter at the Manchester conference, speaking in the ‘Platforms’ session which you can see on Vimeo here (her talk starts at 16.00). She suggests that the company provides a “creative ecosystem” for creators and that the 60 or so Kickstarter staff are themselves a community of “artists, designers… philosophers”. However, it was her suggestion that when creatives like games designers use Kickstarter, they are effectively working directly for their fans, that got me thinking about how ‘pay it ahead’ models have a role in connecting communities in the creative cultural economy. This was something to be explored further – and what better way than to have a go? (This is my usual response to most things!)

I’ve been following campaigns around factory farming issues for some time, so when news of a low budget UK film about an organic dairy farmer in Sussex started appearing in tweets by Compassion in World Farming and WSPA I backed it on Kickstarter to help the film maker fund a professional UK cinema launch.

The distribution system for new and specialist films in the UK is currently one of the sub-themes in my PhD. The US movie industry has had a terrific monopoly for many years over what UK audiences get to see in cinemas, historically this has been a problem almost all European countries and affects the circulation of non-American films and their domestic film industries (for some jaw-dropping history on the US cultural mission in the 20th Century, check out this book). Independent film distribution in the UK is supported through film policy in a number of ways, but cinemas still need people to buy tickets if the screenings are to be viable. If a UK film gets distribution, even if it has done well at festivals – as this one had – being able to provide posters, a press campaign and extras such as special guests to support a booking makes a cinema manager happy. The Moo Man film was trying to raise £5000 for such things, including the travel costs of the guests. When the campaign ended, I was pleased to see that they had exceeded their target!

This is where for me, the sense of community can be found in crowd-funding. It comes from knowing that my small pledge and those of hundreds of anonymous, like-minded people had made something tangible happen. Very tangible, actually, as the film was then booked by my local independent cinema and I was able to host the Q&A with film maker Andy Heathcote and farmer Stephen Hook (sadly no cows were available for the date).

This offered another perspective on the community outcomes of the campaign as on a sunny Bank Holiday afternoon in Leeds, about 50 people came to the cinema to see the single screening of this very specialist film and we had a milk tasting and chat afterwards. Puts a new spin on ‘taste communities’, too, doesn’t it?

I’ll be blogging about these sorts of events and screenings regularly on my own blog now and will be hosting more Q&As at Leeds International Film Festival in November.

Theory, practice and dilemmas

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Birmingham, conference, Creative economies, Culture, Festivals, Salford

The other day I was at a symposium at Leeds Metropolitan University called ‘Protests as events/Events as protests’, listening to the dilemmas of some academics who are or have been activists and how they consolidate these different identities in their jobs and research.

The opening address was a conversation between Dr Ian Lamond of Leeds Met and Dave Webb, Chair of UK CND and they discussed how they first became politicised, how this had affected their careers, up to the point of where they were today. Dave offered a useful insight from his many years of experience at CND: “Sometimes there’s a mis-match between what the public perceive you’re doing and what you think you’re doing” he said, “and you don’t know how much your organisation has achieved because you’re too close to it”.

Over the last few weeks I have also discovered that reading for my PhD is actually more productive when I’m on a train. I’m putting this down to the possibility that when I’m among strangers and in strange places, perhaps I feel more in the world so that I can think about it from the point of view of others. All of this, I hope, will be helpful!

I also recently presented at my first ever conference. I made a Pecha Kucha entitled ‘The Role of the University in the Cultural Economy’ and presented it in Salford at the SPARC post-graduate conference on the subject of Theory, Practice, Impact. I found that the ’20 slides, 20 seconds each’ format was a great way to condense academic waffle into a fast paced and fun performance (I even won a prize for it!)

Starting off with my current sticking point – ‘what is the cultural economy?’ and presenting to a non-specialist audience, I crammed in some basic ideas about whether culture means high art and civilisation or popular culture and commercial products, how the value of cultural goods can change over time and happens within an economy or eco-sytem that combines a mix of cultural and social exchanges with the production and consumption of goods, some of which have intangible and non-market values.

I went on to talk about how an economic system combining state-funded activities with commercial production and international business attracts plenty of debate around value for money and justifying public investment. Then I connected that subject of enquiry up with my other big topic – the role of universities in the cultural sector (and the coming of the REF), before suggesting film screenings as ways to acheive public engagement. 

There was just enough time to mention bringing together different groups of people from on and off campus to exchange knowledge, ideas, culture and experience, and how presenting a series of film screenings could work to generate impact in my own research before my slides ran out!

So with public screenings in mind, I’m still looking around at what’s new in the world of film and I was really chuffed to finally get along to one of the leading documentary festivals Sheffield Doc Fest this year – a festival that has such close links with the Sheffield Hallam University that they run an MA programme together. Two standout films for me were the new documentary about Stuart Hall by John Akomfrah (2013) and From The Land to the Sea Beyond (2012 – a repeat of one of last year’s favourite events). This surprisingly moving film was made mainly from BFI archive clips of the British seaside and coastal industries, directed by Penny Woolcock, produced by Sheffield Doc/Fest and Crossover Labs and screened with a live score by British Sea Power.

The Staurt Hall Project film is brand new, was backed by BFI Film Fund (which is also run in conjunction with Sheff Doc Fest) and is meant to be coming out on general release in September, which will be especially significant for those at Birmingham University I expect. 

Before that, however, for those of you in Birmingham there’s a great opportunity coming up this month to see the classic Murnau silent black and white film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) presented by Flatpack Film Festival outdoors at mac arts!

In this film you can really feel the tension in American and European society at the time, perfectly summed up by a single tram ride that crashes two fairy tale worlds into each other – the luxurious, shiny depravity of urban modernity and a sweet, gentle agrarian home. It also had the best action sequences Hollywood could produce at that time, winning an award at the first ever Oscars for unique and artistic production, and I am assured that the screening will go ahead whatever the weather!