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

Tags

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

What happened to the community art?

Tags

Art, Balsall Heath, Birmingham, cities, Creativity, Cultural Intermediation, Engagement, Participatory, Salford

Warwick University will be hosting an International Symposium on 17-18 September 2015 entitled ‘Amateur Creativity: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives’.

I’m presenting a paper at this event that emerges from the work with communities in Birmingham and Salford entitled:

‘A gallery of the gutter? What becomes of amateur art and artists?’

Here’s the abstract:

Over the last two decades, UK cultural policy has authorized an army of cultural intermediaries to work with ‘communities’. Amongst their many aims, they have sought to engage the ‘hard to reach’ as participants in the cultural ecology, both as consumers and potential producers. Thus, professionals have engaged communities to share in the production of creative projects and to develop their own voices and aesthetic responses to the world. As as a result of the nurturing of amateur skills and aesthetic ideas, community spaces boast exhibitions of the work of local people or their ideas and efforts adorn public places, evidence for instance of consultation processes as part of regeneration projects.

This presentation seeks to consider amateur production as part of cultural intermediation derived from research conducted as part of the AHRC-funded work in the inner cities of Birmingham and Salford. ‘Cultural intermediation & the creative economy’ has itself involved community members in co-production of research and, at the time of writing, in the commissioning of cultural work. In this latter process, community members are enlisted to form commissioning panels that produced organic cultural policy that might engage artists to develop work based on a remit formulated at grassroots level.

This paper reflects on these processes of intermediation, by both artist and social scientists. I ask: what are the dynamics of the relations of amateur and professional are articulated in such encounters? What ideas of culture, aesthetics, value and indeed engagement emerge? Above all, what happens to the work and indeed to the participants – the amateurs – engaged by such projects once they are completed?

The gestation of this particular paper and approach came in a tour of Salford I took a while ago in the company of Beth Perry of SURF. We came across a redevelopment site surrounded and partly concealed by the large white chipboards that are now de rigeur in such instances. This shield was also extensively decorated with reproductions of artworks produced by members of the local community. I think they conveyed ideas and desires for community improvements.

This site got us talking about such initiatives which are now quite familiar means of decorating urban disruptions which might represent, variously: a means of genuine engagement, distraction or concealment perhaps. My concern was, and is, with the question of what happens to the work solicited from and produced by community members and displayed in such public galleries? While galleries such as the one we encountered in Salford are made up of reproductions, the question applies to these examples as well as any originals.

Here are some images of a project I went to see today in Birmingham. In this instance, the work of school children has been commissioned by the construction company BAM and used to decorate one of its building sites.

My title here is not a judgment of the work itself but a result of suspicion is that it is often (although not always) discarded, so affirming the distinction of the amateur and professional. After all, the work of the professional gets preserved in the portfolio, exhibited in the official gallery or purchased by the collector.

In developing the paper, I thought I’d try to survey and capture as many instances of such public galleries as possible. In order to do this I could do with a little help in identifying examples and in getting hold of images and information about their dimensions. Readers of this blog might be able to help therefore by posting responses here or by emailing me materials directly at paul.long@bcu.ac.uk.

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

Cultivating Culture Symposium: Birmingham

Tags

Art, Balsall Heath, Birmingham, cities, communities, conference, cultural; creative economy; community; art; Birmingham; Manchester, Intermediation, library of birmingham, Participatory, thsh

‘Cultivating Culture’ was the title of a symposium organised under the auspices of Birmingham City Council, which took place on Tuesday 18th March 2014 at the new Library of Birmingham.

The day was a chance to reflect on the provision of arts in Birmingham and in particular on Local Arts Forum (LAF) development in the city and its Arts Champion Scheme, both of which have relevance for our project and activities in Balsall Heath in particular. In addition, Phil Jones had been asked to make a presentation on our work on cultural intermediaries.

Birmingham’s LAFs were set up in each city district by BCC’s Culture Commissioning service between April 2011 and March 2012. The aim of the scheme is to bring together individual artists and local arts organisation, education providers and community groups with an initial brief to organise public meetings, audit cultural infrastructure and to build a contact database for cultural workers. The brief has developed over the last year in tandem with the Arts Champion Scheme.

Indicative of the straightened times, funding for these activities has been miniscule yet the very existence of such initiatives testifies to a continuing faith in cultural provision as well as a desire or need to support the well established cultural infrastructure of the city (see illustration in link below). Indeed Ginnie Wollaston, Culture Officer of BCC’s Culture Commissioning Service described many in the audience as ‘fed-up’ yet ‘brave’ for their perseverance in the face of current pressures and their dedication to the value of culture.

Arts Champion Scheme

Faith and the missionary zeal for the value of cultural projects and participation (as well as issues of ‘nourishment’ and well being), particularly amongst the economically disadvantaged were familiar refrains heard across the day. Indeed, it was a rich day for those of us from the project who were present (Jones, Saskia Warren, Dave O’Brien) for the occasional discussion of notions of ‘hard to reach’ communities. That such discussions took place between a sizable assembly of arts administrators, artists, community leaders and local policy makers allows for a sense of ethnographic observation regarding the dispositions of the very intermediaries whose work is the object of our study.

Derry: City of Culture 2013

The day was organised into a series of presentations for the first half followed by ‘break-out’ sessions later in the afternoon. The first keynote speaker of the day was Claire McDermott, Cultural Programmer for Derry’s UK City of Culture tenure of 2013.

Something of the potentially high stakes game of culture was conveyed in McDermott’s presentation – illuminating the economic hopes for such initiatives as well as the potential impact of policy on the lived culture of communities like Derry. Of course, what is at stakes is underlined by the fact that in instance a representative of the ‘winners’ was addressing those of a losing bid in the City of Culture round and points of comparison and practical instruction were a focal point.

As is often the case in such instances, we heard a lot about the many interesting things that had taken place – from running competitions to a massed choir of Orphan Annie – and the quantitative evaluation of Derry’s year of events. However, direct comparisons and lessons are hard to draw. For instance, Derry spent around £20m on its programmes compared with Brum’s positing of a headline £121m budget for culture and development (of which £100k is actually for for Culture & Commissioning, £45k for community arts for instance). Derry’s population of around 100k souls is barely that of one of Birmingham’s wards. Furthermore, cultural differences in Derry based on historical/religious traditions meant that the very use of UK in the project title of Capital of Culture was tendentious (Londonderry is of course the city’s official name, Derry the preference of nationalists ): in previous bids in his category Birmingham’s champions have advertised its cultural variety as a basis for its added value and attractions.

McDermott was candid and insightful regarding some of the challenges of Derry’s year, whether in the form of local cynicism to how some initial promises had failed to materialise – largely in terms of financial support for arts organisations. Of particular attention here was a digital history project that she identified as one initiative that had not been fully realised and which fed broader questions about the legacy of the kinds of cultural intermediation represented on the large-scale of the City of Culture. Likewise, and balancing the emphasis on ‘leadership’ manifest in so much of the discourse of intermediaries and policy makers evidenced early in the day, McDermott framed some important ideas about the democratic entitlement of communities. Positioned as consumers or co-creators of cultural work, a priority for Derry’s activity aimed to develop autonomy and empowerment amongst communities in terms of their participation in City of Culture developments. Such ideas were clearly manifest in some of BCC’s current small-scale endeavours and resulting projects and of course resonate with our research as it aims in the next work package of enabling arts commissioning in Balsall Heath and Ordsall by community members.

Soap Box

The morning also featured several ‘Soap Box’ presentations including one from Sheila Arthurs of Active Arts of Birmingham’s Castle Vale area. Castle Vale is an interesting reference point for how cultural activity has played a part in local regeneration initiatives – in this case where the declining quality and reputation of a post-war estate have been overturned by community engagement. Arthurs offered an impassioned testimony of her own tenacity in engaging her fellow residents to get involved and to produce the kinds of cultural work that were on show across the event. Here, I think that Arthurs’ authenticity and connectivity to place and its lived culture carried a different weight to those who come from without of such geographies. Such presentations are heartfelt and whatever ways in which we approach questions of value and meaning in cultural intermediation, they are tangibly affective evidence of the passions such work capitalises on and is felt to evince in participants.

Cultural Pilots

The next session surveyed the pilot programmes of the LAF’s across the Birmingham areas of Castle Vale, Shard End and Balsall Heath. Our research team pinpointed the first two areas as the possible sites for case studies in the current work package investigating community responses to cultural intermediation. Of course, we have decided upon Balsall Heath for our investigations and it was both stimulating and challenging to consider the evidence before us. LAF work is well known to us, as is a wider variety of activity which underpins the manner in which Balsall Heath represents a site where a lot of policy and practice has been enacted.

An apparent challenge was presented for us in consideration of the fact that local company Merida Associates are conducting an evaluation of the impact of the variety of pilots. As Karen Garry of Merida revealed, the research will be published in May and will add to our variety of materials to consider ‘in the round’ of activities, some of which are emerging (or not) in our pilot interviews in the area as points of discussion. It would have been valuable to explore how our research diverges from that of Merida and the servicing of BCC expectations. Likewise, we might have explored the politics of our approach that mean that we are not seeking to repeat impact research or track individual projects within the lineaments of policy discourse and its rationalisation.

Whatever opportunity might have been missed on this occasion, the nature and integrity of academic research was outlined by Phil Jones as a conclusion to this session. In these circumstances this proved to be a useful means of attracting local attention for our project and inviting comment on themes that emerged on the day such as the nature of the ‘hard to reach’ and cultural value.

Certainly, the interest in our work was also couched in some comment from the floor on communications across the local cultural scene, between organisations and policy makers about their work and with audiences too.

Further points about communication and a familiar aspect of conceptual confusion was brought home by an impassioned request from one participant for more activity in the city based on Bollywood dancing. As a representative from one organisation pointed out not only is there regular programming of such dance across venues, there was actually a wealth of specialised activity organised last year – the centenary of Bollywood film. To my mind, these exchanges raised questions about the degree to which any one individual – whether a full-time cultural worker, or an audience member – is able to keep track of what is in effect a vibrant scene of cultural programming of some variety, some of which takes place in spite of a lack of funding. The digital world is one means of advertising the fact that so much takes place in a city the size of Birmingham that it would be a full time job to keep up with it. Whatever the complaints about what appears to be lacking, from one perspective such individuals sound like malcontents who might be failing to appreciate what it means to live in a modest utopia.

Break out

The afternoon saw several break out groups concerned with ‘Empowering individuals and groups – creative leadership opportunities’ (concerning the development of local leadership in the arts; ‘Branding Local Arts – finding the local appeal’ (challenging perception of arts activities in city wards where projects already exist); ‘Building partnerships and collaborations – local to global’ (concerning how to overcome a local lack of infrastructure in order to connect Arts Champion offers with the ambitions of residents). Then there were the two in which I participated: ‘Capturing the local – making it resonate’ which explored how venues connect with areas in which they are not based and ‘Responding to diverse communities and inclusive agendas’ which explored how to overcome ‘cultural barriers of perception’ in order to develop intergenerational and family audiences.

Each explored session themes via presentations from four arts organisations or their representatives. Time prevents an overly detailed outline of the many interesting accounts and personalities present but I was particularly interested in how the Town Hall and Symphony Hall (THSH) had developed a virtual project to explore memories of the legendary rock venue Mothers.

This project resonates with this researcher as the heritage aspects of popular music are an area of specialisation and I was intrigued to discover how the project had created little wooden artefacts in which to house and display MP3 players with some of the accrued testimony (pictured). I was not surprised to find that one or two of these artefacts had disappeared: if there is one thing worth knowing about the canonisation of pop culture as heritage it is that original, and reproduction artefacts are totemic and highly treasured.

Elsewhere, an account from Erdington Arts Café revealed how, in this Northern ward of the city, there were few venues where cultural events could be programmed although there was a wealth of amateur and ‘off the radar’ activity taking place. As someone with a keen interest in the amateur and informal aspects of cultural work this insight proved tantalising and I am eager for more data about the extent of this activity.

Across other discussions I was taken with a reflection from a representative of the Birmingham Rep theatre concerning how so many people within walking distance of the venue rarely attended. Some of the issues impacting on this locality – around the edge of the glittering Broad Street entertainment strip – are explained in part by high levels of deprivation. The nature of relations between institution and locality was further underlined and explored for him by Rep activities at a local hospital in search of families to recruit as audiences. Underwhelmed by the lack of response to the cultural institution amidst the rather vibrant regular business of the hospital this representative gained some kind of enlightenment from his colleagues in health when he discovered that a significant proportion of hospital users were non-English speakers, a fact that impacted on wider average measures of literacy amongst the recruits they sought to enlist. When it comes to definitions of ‘hard to reach’ and assumptions about the need for cultural participation, such factors barely touched upon the kinds of challenges faced by such organisations – for their outreach projects and indeed for their very conceptual basis and faith in the transmission of Culture.

Across these two break-out sessions there was much discussion of the audience and a challenge to the idea of ‘hard to reach’, of who and what this term was meant to describe and in fact whose responsibility it was for being ‘hard to reach’ at all. In tandem there was discussion of the distance described in such terms between those who ‘have’ culture and those who may be without it, which, as we explored (and as Raymond Williams noted) reduces the category to a formulae. Nonetheless, others reflected on the difficulties of cultural work with the ‘hard to reach’, of the cynicism, rejection and sometimes outright hostility to the kinds of projects with which they have sought to engage communities.

In turn, these sessions gave way to some final performances that made use of the Library of Birmingham’s elegant ‘rotunda’ space. These involved the choirs Ex Cathedra and So Vocal as well as poetry from Amera Saleh and Joe Cook of Beatfreeks as well as the current Poet Laureate of Birmingham Jo Skelt. A fittingly cultural turn at the end of day of reflections on cultural work.

Finally

As a veteran of such events it was a pleasant surprise to find that it was both focussed and marshalled evidence from participants in order to direct discussion in meaningful and provocative ways. While there was much for us as researchers to connect with in terms of project themes, there was a wealth of insight that inevitably escaped: many threads might have resulted in further productive discussion. For instance, an issue that emerged for anyone with a perspective on the day overall concerned the intense localism of cultural work in each of Birmingham’s wards and how a missionary zeal for meaningful activity and structure was the object of so much activity. There are particular reasons for this approach given the nature of ‘barriers to participation’ for so many in a city of the size of Birmingham and the logistics of its geography. On the other hand, such devolution poses familiar questions about the quality and ambition of cultural provision for a city like Birmingham and the possibilities of trompe l’oeil projects that look outward as well as inward in bringing together communities rather than running a risk of confirming their separateness – even at the level of the post code.

Reflections on the ECE 6th Conference, University of Toronto, and Artscapes, University of Kent

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Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, conference, connected, Creative economies, geography, Intermediation, Policy, Richard Florida, Toronto

At the end of summer term the academic calendar segues into conference season. First was the ECE 6^th Conference at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), University of Toronto from 18-21^st June. A highly stimulating yet exhausting programme ran from 8.30am till we had finished up to 7 courses of our dinners (around 9.30pm, depending on stamina). The conference was designed as a way to bring early career academics together from around the world in a process of field-rebuilding on the creative economy.  Generosity of funding by MPI enabled early career academics with limited or non-existent research budgets to attend – although Canadian immigration prevented two of the speakers joining us in person (Ammar Palik, Pakistan, and Andrés Goméz-Liévano, Colombia).

Richard Florida gave his time to meet one-on-one with each of the participants as part of a game in academic speed-dating. He also led a discussion on revisiting the creative class where he rightfully noted that 100s of trillions is invested in urban spending and urban practice therefore focus needs to be concentrated on how spending is translated into pragmatic strategy. Casinos, stadiums and bike lanes are not, of course, the simple solution. Issues of inequality and disadvantaged communities in urban space were discussed in the session and throughout the conference, with common agreement that the pay and conditions for the service sector were unacceptable. A set of fascinating papers ensued. In particular I was impressed by the potential of Dr Xingiian Liu’s data visualisations which showed how creative cities are networked in terms of level of workers and interdependence.

The next week it was onto a very different but interesting conference Artscapes: Urban Art and the Public at the University of Kent, 27-28th June. As an example of where site-specificity falls down, Dr Rob Knifton discussed David Mach’s Polaris (1983) which was set on fire by a protester on Southbank who suffered fatal burns. The paper recalled the type of intense public participation, and ‘radical decommissioning’, that artist Simon Pope articulates in the burning of Raymond Mason’s Forward in Birmingham City Centre in 2003 (see my artist talk with Simon here). Of particular note was an excellent keynote talk by Dr Jonathan Vickery which read Jochen Gerz’s 2-3 Strassen in relation to creative cities literature.  Vickery’s consideration of how culture in public space has to map itself onto broad objectives of governance and government usefully brought together the strands of thinking from both conferences which feed into our governance work. Exploring culture as a function of policy is one of our lines of thinking, and, taking a multi-level approach, in the next academic year we will be working with communities to learn more about how they connect into cultural and creative practice. More on this soon.

The Big Tent Activate Summit, Delhi, India

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Art, cities, communities, Creative economies, Delhi, digital, google, guardian, India, Intermediation, internet

Organised by Google, The Guardian and MediaGuru. 21 March 2013.

In March 2013, I was invited by United Kingdom Trade & Investment to attend a summit on the future of digital and media in India as an expert on the creative economy. The Big Tent Activate Summit, held at the Taj Palace Hotel, Delhi, was financially underwritten by Google along with The Guardian and MediaGuru, an Indian media services company. A short statement from the organisers explained the agenda was to “discuss and debate the impact of the Internet on the Indian economy, politics, media and culture.” Marking the first Summit to be held in India, Eric Schimdt (CEO of Google) and Alan Rusbridger (Editor of The Guardian) talked alongside politicians, media specialists, economists, academics, digital entrepreneurs and, to a lesser extent, marginalised groups and individuals. Weaving a somewhat problematic path through commercial gains to be made by big business and digital as a force for challenging inequalities in India, the summit nevertheless raised some interesting issues.

There are 150 million internet users in India. However, despite appearing huge in comparison to UK metrics, this figure only represents 12% of the Indian population. Of this 12%, the majority are on narrowband with just 1% estimated to have broadband. By point of comparison, the US has 80% penetration and UK 73% penetration (in market-speak). The internet effects how we work, govern, bank, learn and entertain. Furthermore, it has the capabilities to transform how we communicate with each other. As Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communication and Information Technology, told delegates the internet ‘allows communities to talk to each other’. Yet Section 66 was widely discussed by panellists as a curtailment of the democratic freedom of expression with divergent opinions on whether this was justified to prevent violent protests and killings in the most extreme of cases. Despite low usage, Ministers Omar Abdullah and Shashi Tharoor did agree that social media, and Twitter especially, was increasingly taken seriously in politics due to their power to influence as well as amplify volatile subjects.

In regards to equality, Sibal and Schimdt urged the Indian state to ensure wireless networks and fibre optics were installed so that everyday people can reach information. Further, devices must also be affordable, in particular smart mobile phones. Interestingly, 3/4^th of the growth in internet usage has been through mobile and tablet therefore web publishers targeting Indian markets need to consider small screen experience with low text, in contrast to the big screen computer experience we were first introduced to in the UK.

Innovative battery-operated education labs used in rural villages were showcased, which took ZAYA, a mobile and digital learning experience, to areas that lack text books and sometimes electricity. A breakout session at lunch by Radar also showed how technology could support marginalised groups through the usage of simple text messaging as a means of citizen reporting in politically, socially and geographically isolated areas. Dalat women were amongst those who shared their stories with Rusbridger, eventually getting past hotel security only with help from the organisers, demonstrating the caste system still shapes everyday experiences in India.

During my 5 day visit I also had the chance to pay a visit to Sarai which is part of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies located in north Delhi. Sarai in an interdisciplinary research centre which runs the Media City Research project and Cybermoholla. These are digital labs located in neighbourhoods in Delhi aimed at connecting with diverse socio-economic groups and young people; echoing some of our community engagement priorities in Birmingham and Manchester on the Cultural Intermediation project. Also Sarai’s environment is itself a case study of a cultural intermediary, connecting creative practice, theory and political action from its position within a megacity in the global south. I was very impressed by my brief visit to Sarai and hope to start a conversation with the academics and practitioners based there on our shared interests going forward…

Big Story Interviews

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Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, Creative economies, Culture, Engagement, Intermediation

One of the things I’ve been working on alongside Natasha are films of Big Story interviews with key ‘movers and shakers’ from Birmingham’s creative and cultural economy. The aim of the interviews has been to develop a common understanding of the site-specific and broader contextual stories around the development of the creative and cultural economy in each place. These narratives bridge the historical research by Ian and Natasha and governance research by Beth, Karen and I. Filming in Birmingham has already been done with: Roger Shannon, Film Producer; Derek Bishton, creator of photography magazine Ten.8; Anita Bhalla, Chair of Creative Cities Partnership and Head of Public Space Broadcasting, BBC; and Lara Ratnarajah, digital and business expert.  Overlapping with the Manchester work, Natasha and I also travelled down to London to interview Ben Kelly, the designer of The Hacienda nightclub. The rest of the Manchester Big Story interviews will be conducted by Natasha, Beth and Karen using walking techniques and photographs in an aural and visual mapping of the stories.  We’re hoping to facilitate focus groups in both Manchester and Birmingham at the end to share and refine the stories, building a picture of the distinctiveness of each place. Using the concept of ‘stories’, the Big Story methodology we’ve developed will develop urban narratives about change, transformation and the reconfiguration of places in dialogue with existing creative cities discourse.

 I’ve attached a short 6 minute clip of the first interview which features Roger Shannon, shot by film-makers Aman Alimshand and Karishma Popat from Birmingham City University. Enjoy!

New beginnings

Tags

Art, Birmingham, cities, Creative economies, Hello Culture, Manchester

We travelled to SURF at Salford University on Friday 30^th November to meet with Beth and Karen on the Governance workpackage.  This part of the project will include looking at governance through the role of the state, the rise of cities (so multi-level governance), institutions and knowledge networks. We also discussed the importance of capturing the creative practices of those organisations which are not usually categorised as part of the creative economy, such as the NHS employing video-makers or creating exhibitions. Big Story explorative walking interviews with key creative intermediaries from Greater Manchester and Greater Birmingham will connect the work being done on the Historical workpackage by Natasha and Ian with the mapping of contemporaneous practice by the Manchester and Birmingham researchers (Karen and Saskia).

In other news, Paul Long chaired a workshop on Transforming Cross Innovations as part of the Hello Culture conference on digital technologies, with Steve Harding of Birmingham City University talking on Cross-Innovations and me talking about this project (Custard Factory, 23 November 2012). Beyond a fruitful discussion with delegates on their potential role in the research and the projected outputs of the two projects, I met some interesting practitioners, including Deirdre Figueiredo from Craftspace and Alex Corkindale from mac who I’m following up with.

Thank you to those who have given their time already to be interviewed. In the past fortnight I’ve spoken with:  Debbie Kermode (IKON); Josephine Reichert (Ort); Noel Dunne (Creative Alliance); Dorothy Wilson (mac); Mike Tweddle (BE Festival); Steve Ball (Birmingham REP); Henrietta Lockhart and Adam Jaffer (BMAG).