I am an artist / curator who works with places and people.
A few years ago (2003-4) I was lucky enough to be instigating, organising, fundraising and then helping select and develop the vision for an exhibition from a national open submission of expressions of interest. The work took place in the derelict swimming "palace" Victoria Baths in Manchester. I continue to work on the arts programme there as well as collaborating on other projects.
Around the same time, I got involved with Community Network For Manchester (CN4M.NET) I sit on the culture pool which represents artists and arts organisations working at the grass roots level (it also includes larger organisation's education departments for example). The idea is that Culture Pool feeds back the needs and ideas of the 'community' of cultural practitioners and artists involved with artsnet (network of artists) at the city council's cultural partnership (council/galleries etc) in Manchester.The culture pool also discuss and responds to the council's cultural partnership meetings. Artsnet and culture pool works alongside the other 6 other networks and pools such as environment and health inequalities.
My initial response when I got involved was what on earth can we do? small, disparate organisations, often in competition for funding and with so many varied projects and artist agendas. How can a few individuals represent all that? And really, will anyone really listen? Also the whole process seemed like lots of meetings and how would freelance artists find time to really engage with the process? – you know how we all love long meetings…..perhaps we could exhibit the doodles everyone does…
Despite the success of Artsnet as a busy e.mail network keeping locally based artists in touch with opportunities,exhibitions, concerts, community projects etc, the culture pool itself is not particularly dynamic. I got the feeling that maybe people don't know much about it, despite the good efforts of the volunteers and the one part time worker who runs artsnet / culture pool.
My response was to suggest that we try to get artists to work within the networks and respond to the work of CN4M – its a like research project really and hopefully some innovative and interesting responses will come about.
The applications have started to pop into the inbox now and already people are raising questions about the concept – which is good, its making me think too; the start of the process.
