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.

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

Culture, Sport and Protest

Tags

attilio fiumarella, Balsall Heath, BBC, Cultural Intermediation, Leisure, Some Cities, Sport

Right next door to the Balsall Heath Library is the Moseley Road Swimming Baths building.

This much-loved and well-used site has been in disrepair for a while with a group dedicated to its preservation.

The latest move in support has been an arts project described in this BBC report:

More than 100 swimmers have posed as a “terracotta army” for an arts project at a historic pool.

Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham is one of the oldest swimming baths in Britain, but is scheduled to close as part of council cuts.

A photographic project to commemorate the Grade II* listed building culminated with 110 swimmers standing in the now unused Gala pool.

Attilio Fiumarella said it had been easy to persuade people to pose-up.

The Birmingham-based photographer said: “It was the first thing I imagined when I first entered this wonderful building.”

He said it marked the end of a five-month project that had revealed some “amazing stories” and people’s “emotional connection with the building”.

Kate Wilcox was one of those to get involved on Sunday.

“It was fantastic. It took a long time to set up, but people were so patient and encouraging,” she said.

“People were so up for being involved in this because of their affection for this pool. It’s great to be part of it.

“I’ve been using the baths for 20 months now and when I discovered they were planning to close it I was appalled because it’s a heritage building.

“The new library and the symphony hall are wonderful, but we should treasure our heritage. Moseley Road Baths should be a national treasure.”

Birmingham City Council previously said the closure of nine leisure centres, including Moseley Road, would help to save £6.8m from its leisure budget.

The local authority said it was too expensive to refurbish old sites, but that they would be replaced by new facilities.

Images from the shoot will be exhibited by photographer Attilio Fiumarella whose work has been commissioned by Some Cities.

Here’s his description of the project’s motivation which brings together heritage, sport and a a creative intervention:

“The Swimmers” is an ongoing project commissioned by Some City through a bursary.

One of the first public facilities built in Balsall Heath was the Moseley Road Baths. Constructed in two stages, being the first the construction of the Free Library, the baths were designed by William Hale and Son, and opened their doors on October 30, 1907. There were restrictions to access, as it was common at the time, and three different entrances attest to that: one for first class men, another for second class men, and a third one for women. Its unique architecture and gathering purpose made it the icon of the neighbourhood.
After several years of decline, one of the two swimming pools has been refurbished, restoring its old lustre. Sadly, the Gala pool is still left to degradation. The Birmingham City Council intends to close the Baths permanently in 2015, following the opening of a new sports facility.
This body of work aims to outline the loss of this valuable heritage and also to strengthen the relationship between the pool and its people.
“The swimmers” were immortalized in an atmosphere inspired by the butterfly and its cocoon. This temporary skin provides the butterfly with enough energy for a new life. In the same way, in this imaginary world, the users are gripping the swimming pool’s essence, keeping the heritage alive.

Notes on Balsall Heath Carnival

Tags

Balsall Heath, Cultural Intermediation, St Paul's Trust

Our research in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham has enlisted local residents as participants in walking interviews. Geographical explorations prompt reflections on which places and spaces feature in the cultural lives of interviewees, unearthing layers of historical, contemporary, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ activities.

Conducting this methodology over the course of a year, amongst other things, means paying attention to the rhythms of the day, of the working week, of the school calendar and of the seasons themselves – after all, few want to walk and talk when it is cold and wet. Then there are the fixtures of the yearly cycle such as religious festivals, holidays and the annual Balsall Heath Carnival, which took place on 5th July of this year.

Established in 1977, each carnival tracks a processional trail through the area before coming to rest in an extended event in Pickwick Park (see map). Thus, in this visit, it was possible to follow the crowd in order to observe and participate in an important cultural event in the community’s life.

The carnival is organised by St Paul’s Community Trust and this year, thanks to a suggestion from pupils at the nearby Clifton Primary School, its theme was ‘Balsall Heath Under the Sea’ reflected in pictures, costumes and activities.

The day was marked by glorious sunshine and a lively crowd although as noted at the Trust’s site: ‘The event was slightly smaller than last year with fewer stalls and attendance slightly down, due to the fact that Ramadan started a week ago.’ Mention of the careful observance of Ramadan suggests how the rhythms of community sometimes don’t always neatly coincide and might temper traditional associations of the carnivalesque (although the local streets are lively once the fast is broken after dusk). Certainly, the aromatic food, tearoom and popcorn stalls were hardly doing a roaring trade as many attendees were in the midst of observing their fast, yet ‘Never the less, the Carnival had a great atmosphere and the thousands of people who turned out had a great day.’

Pickwick Park is deep in the heart of the community, surrounded by the residencies of Balsall Heath, many of them the organised around those older and narrow terraced streets alongside a range of new builds yet to feel fully acculturated. As this was Saturday, the appearance and ambiance of the area was markedly different to the weekday: many were at home, on the street, heading carnival way at their leisure rather than rushing to school of focussed on daily business of business, of work (although many in the area were clearly still at work).

I should add too, that from the researcher’s perspective, seeking to participate as much as observe such activities puts one in a different position from having an appointment with a particular person, changing the power dynamic that is at work in such situations. In and around the carnival, I found myself browsing, buying and interacting as any other participant, announcing myself as a researcher when something, or someone prompted a further interrogative interest.

Central to the park space is an enclosed multipurpose sports pitch and a game of football was in full flow in front of a carnival stage while a bouncy castle did a roaring trade with young children. On stage, singers performed a variety of pop tunes one woman singing to her ukulele, another in soul styles with backing tapes. In around this central focus were the aforementioned food stalls and those that invited attendees to get involved in something creative. Much of this was aimed at engaging children in designing materials around the carnival theme (see images). These activities were managed by local institutions such as Balsall Heath Library and artists associated with the Ort Gallery and Print Works.

Arrayed along one slope of the park were a number of stalls selling clothing familiar from many of the Balsall Heath stores that import fashions from South Asia and indeed make their own styles. There was a stall for a councillor available for consultation on local issues that seemed pretty busy (I waited for a word but of course the needs of others queuing up were more pressing than my research). There was a stall for connecting together Algerians living in Birmingham, for charity’s collecting aid for refugees in Syria and other sites of conflict. Here was reflection of the plurality of the community and indeed the global connectedness of this resolutely local event.

The standard yellow high visibility jackets of the event stewards testify to the underlying organisation necessary and bely the essentially organic qualities of such occasions and the sheer good will required to make such things work on behalf of all involved. That this happens at all is a testimony to the enduring mission and commitment of those involved in the St Paul’s Community Trust: As related in its online history,

‘St. Paul’s Community Development Trust had its origins in the desire of people in Balsall Heath to make a better future for their children, getting together to start a nursery, adventure playground and small school. The three groups joined forces to establish the Trust in the late 1970s, and from these small beginnings in voluntary endeavour it has grown to be a thriving organisation.’

Particular ideas of culture and community are palpable in such instances, manifesting the banal and the profound, reminding one of Raymond Williams’ observation that ‘culture is ordinary’ and an everyday, quotidian thing. The qualities of community appear to be performed in such a moment of coming together. It is there in the woman singing to her backing tracks, the face painting, new conversations and general exchanges between those who realise they belong to this community of people who are rarely gathered together in its name on any one occasion.

I eventually moved on with much to ponder about the meaning of such occasions. One useful item that I came away with from one stall operated by members of a local charity was a free copy of the novel ‘I know what you did last Jum’ah: Confessions of an Englandee’ by Qaiser M. Talib (Emerald publishers). This fascinating fiction is set in ‘Balsall Spark’ (Sparkbrook is the neighbouring area to Balsall Heath) and is told from the perspective of the teenage

Suhaib Haider, conveying his life in the area and relationship with his Muslim identity as a native ‘Englandee’. As one write-up has it:

He has loving parents, attends a wonderful school and enjoys his life enormously. He has no complaints against his Lord…but one Jum’ah, he has a major complaint against himself. His usually cheery mood changes as he faces the greatest challenge of his young life so far. 

As he tries to establish prayer in his life, he becomes embroiled in a battle for the spiritual future of his school: a power struggle between a Muslim, a Christian and a staunch atheist. 

As Shaythaan continues his spiritual war against the people, will Suhaib manage to correct his own faults? 

Will he manage to come out on top in this power struggle? 

Will his uncle, Chacha Conspiracy – member of the notorious political group Al-Death to Al-Kafiroon – dissuade Suhaib from participating? And will the forces of godlessness bring Suhaib’s dreams crashing to the ground?

Fiction clearly, but such imaginative portraits are important artefacts – alongside photographs, poetry, online rap, physical space and so on- for understanding the variety of cultural activities in Balsall Heath. The book also offers an engaging portrait of its milieu – fictional yet clearly recognisable and dramatised around actual locations.

Heading home after the carnival visit (it looked as if it would last a while yet), I took a turn down the deserted Clifton Road. Just by the Clifton Mosque I came upon a signal sign of a different perspective on community.

A Police Notice (captured on my camera phone below) served to remind of the potentially troubling qualities of when people come together. On 2nd July a man was shot on a street in Sparkbrook, at the border with Balsall Heath with two others injured. Media reports suggested that this incident was the result of a clash between gangs who formed part of a 300 strong crowd that had gathered on the Stratford Road.

The full details of the incident are yet to be established and I’ve yet to investigate the background to this order and what it has to say about Balsall Heath. However, its does pose questions about perspectives on the nature of crowds and public life in communities, anticipating that – unlike the Pickwick Park assembly – gatherings are likely to be negative phenomenon. As I suggested at the outset in paying attention to research and the rhythms of the seasons, the particular publicness of community life, of the possibility of such gatherings is at its height at this time of year.

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?

 

 

Cultural Work/Cultural Value Symposium, Open University, 21 February 2014.

Tags

Artists, Cultural Intermediation, Cultural Value, Cultural Work, Labour, Open University

The eerily quiet campus of Open University was the locale for an invigorating symposium which set about teasing out the knotty tensions in how we understand value in cultural work. Mark Banks (Open) kicked off the day with an introductory paper on ‘What is Cultural Work Worth?’ Banks resisted the model of a totalising economy, instead pointing towards Justin O’Connor’s work to think of the two values of culture and economy as a genealogy entwined, though not collapsed, into one relation. Culture matters, Banks argued, because of the examination of life, the sharing of cultural and social needs, and the generating and distributing of resources (a doubling of value across the cultural and economic). Calvin Taylor (Leeds), who followed Banks, sought to develop these ideas through a tripartite, rather than ‘bipolar’ model, inserting the need for ethics into how we value the cultural. A tour de force of theory from eighteenth-century philosophy (Locke; Third Earl of Shaftesbury; Smith; Hume; Bentham) to contemporary feminist theory, Taylor questioned the foundations of creative value measured according to utility. In foregrounding social production, and not the marketplace, a space was offered for challenging the dominant paradigm that cultural labour is commodified labour, and that we live within a fundamentally economic set of relations.  Pointing towards the domestic as a scale of non-commodity or exchange forms for cultural work, the paper resonated with our recent research on localism in community-orientated activity. Alike the petty cultural producer, can non-commodity community cultural work be scaled up and spill over out of the localised context? If a new value regime could become the dominant one at a regional, national and global scale, then it remains to be elucidated how this would be worked through, and benefits distributed.

Excellent other papers included  David Hesmondhalgh (Leeds) on  ‘Cultural, Aesthetic and Economic Value: The Case of  Music’ (including a short Candi Staton interlude) and Kate Oakley (Leeds) on ‘Work, Justice and  Mobility: Policy for Cultural Labour’. In the latter Oakley pointed towards a lessening in mobility in recent years in the cultural creative sector (hardly surprising under the Con-Dem coalition) and a spatialised inequality to where cultural workers are clustered (London!). Still, while not exactly diverse, the average worker is 35, female, earns under £20,000, works two jobs and has a degree (and often postgraduate) qualification. Not exactly big returns in spite of – or perhaps because of – an affectual (cultural) economy of passion and sense of vocation.

Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory

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Balsall Heath, Birmingham, Community, Creativity, Cultural Intermediation, Culture, Surrealism

Good news. Just before Christmas, I found out we had successfully been awarded a bid, titled ‘The Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory’ (with Dr Stephen Forcer, Modern Languages, University of Birmingham). Funded by the Communities and Culture Network+, the project builds out of our ongoing Cultural Intermediation work. It represents the first stage of a feasibility study for a heritage space dedicated to the Birmingham Surrealist Movement (1930s-1950s). The seed-funded experimental project aims to investigate the ways in which new digital facilities can help unlock complex issues of cultural heritage and cultural sensitivity in a diverse city. It was inspired by a recent Surrealist House competition staged as part of an art programme for residents in the area of Balsall Heath, south Birmingham (Balsall Heath Biennale 2013; http://www.balsallheathbiennale.com/decorate-your-house-competition).Of particular interest to the project is that Balsall Heath was home to the Birmingham Surrealist Group (Levy 2003; Sidey 2000; Remy 2000), and, indeed, the locale for British Surrealism nationally over the 1940s and 1950s, given Conroy Maddox’s role as a champion of ‘orthodox’ Surrealism (Levy 2003). The Birmingham Group comprised Maddox, Desmond Morris, John Melville and Emmy Bridgwater, and was at the centre of a community of alternative cultural figures including jazz musician George Melly, writers Stuart Gilbert and Henry Green, and poet Henry Reed.

Today, Balsall Heath has been identified as falling within the lowest 5% of neighbourhoods – referred to nationally as ‘Super Output Areas’ – for multiple deprivations (Census 2011). A low take-up from the established, predominantly Pakistani Muslim population in the Surrealist House competition offers productive ground for working through how digital technologies can be used to investigate multiple barriers to mainstream, and more subversive, manifestations of culture and heritage in the city. The project comprises two digital workshops in the Digital Heritage Hub, University of Birmingham, and a roundtable with surrealist experts and community leaders. It also neatly dovetails with the Cultural Intermediation research which will be focusing on communities and the creative economy in Balsall Heath this calendar year.