First of all, a declaration of interest: I am a very occasional member of the Cardiff Contemporary steering group so mine is a partial view. Even though I haven’t been too involved, I am strongly committed to seeing this festival take root and flourish.
When I moved to Cardiff in 2010 to be director of the fifth edition of the Artes Mundi Prize, I was immediately struck that something like Cardiff Contemporary would harness and focus the chaotic, inspiring, and sometimes faltering energy of the scene and transmute it into a critical mass from which other things could grow. When I went freelance in 2013 it was an easy decision to stay in the city because of a sense of momentum building in the visual arts here.
This is the third Cardiff Contemporary, a festival started in 2005 that lay dormant for seven years until its tentative revival in 2012. The last one coordinated existing projects into a legible programme with the aim of securing funding for another in 2014.
Ambitions for the current festival are of an entirely different order. It aspires to be a ‘world-class event’ that ‘makes use of the entire city as a space to experience art,’ with the aim to effect an ‘artistic occupation of the city and reclamation of the streets for the people.’ These are bold claims, especially as they come directly from Cardiff Council, which is producing it in-house.
The festival includes 30 commissions and three residencies alongside various initiatives that, over the years, have evolved organically to become important components of the city’s visual arts ecology. These include Chapter’s excellent performance festival Experimentica, the artists’ film strand Outcasting: Fourth Wall, and the ‘hyperlocal’ community festival madeinroath, which includes a grassroots mix of projects in people’s homes, parks and other spaces.
At the other end of the spectrum there is Artes Mundi, which has finally integrated into the local scene and provides an important (albeit still too rare) moment in Wales’ cultural life when audiences have access to top international artists.
Positive expansion
The city’s core organisations have been commissioned to realise projects throughout the city, but the majority of commissions and residencies are the result of open calls. I am excited to see work by established figures on the scene here alongside a lot of young, mostly local artists. Open calls can be a great way to find out about early-career artists hungry for a chance to show, and others with more developed careers who are not on the gallery circuit. However, for all its democratic and meritocratic rhetoric, the potential of the open call is limited to those who hear about it and are motivated to apply.
One thing an open call will not do is meet the festival’s stated ambition to be a world-class event that captures people’s imagination. Decision by committee rarely produces flare or an overarching narrative that makes a festival hang together, regardless of whether there is a stated theme. For this there needs to an artistic director whose programme is based on judgement calls supported by deep networks that can integrate local, national and international artists, funders, and commissioning partners. If the city decides to recruit one for 2016, this should be done as soon as possible.
Three of Cardiff’s main venues – the National Museum, Chapter and Ffotogallery – have this year given their gallery spaces over to Artes Mundi. This is a very positive expansion of the strategy to broaden Artes Mundi’s base beyond the National Museum and will give an excellent group of international artists more, and different kinds of, spaces to work with.
Furthermore, it has prompted Chapter and Ffotogallery to focus their energies on off-site projects. Chapter has commissioned Richard Woods to make a pavilion in the grounds of Cardiff Castle that flirts with, pays homage to, and satirises William Burges’ mock-gothic absurdity. It’s the kind of set-piece that any biennial (or festival that happens every two years) needs.
But there is more room for ambition here: to really make its mark the festival needs to commission projects of the ilk of Jeremy Deller’s inflatable Stonehenge from Glasgow International 2012 or Michael Sailstorfer’s gold buried under Folkestone beach for the current Triennial. The Artes Mundi shortlist includes artists who have produced such set-pieces in the past and I am hopeful they will do so here. But it is a missed opportunity that Artes Mundi doesn’t open until half-way through the festival. Consequently, the biggest name artists and three of the city’s four established venues are unavailable to visitors for much of the festival’s five weeks.
Regenerative energy
There is nothing new in seeing the council of a post-industrial city turn to the arts for regenerative energy, and where it has been done successfully, like Liverpool and Glasgow, they have progressively assimilated the visual arts into the city’s core identity. It is early days for Cardiff, which is emerging from a decade-long loss of confidence in the arts since losing out to Liverpool in the European Capital of Culture bid.
During that time organisations have closed, capital projects sidelined, and an ongoing reinvention of the city’s art school has made many question whether there will continue to be a steady flow of practising artists to renew the scene’s lifeblood.
Nonetheless, there have also been significant improvements in recent years, a few examples being Ffotogallery’s Diffusion photography festival and the new suite of modern and contemporary galleries at the National Museum. At the other end of the spectrum, the artist-run space g39 continues to flex and stretch into its vast warehouse space with an excellent programme.
As things stand, it is hard to imagine Cardiff enlisting an artist to create the visual identity for its next ‘world class event’, as Jim Lambie did for Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games cultural programme. Maybe what is needed is an interim step that helps instil belief at a political as well as artistic level – an underlying objective for Cardiff Contemporary could be to demonstrate to the political order the strength of Welsh visual arts, while latently articulating a complex and inclusive paradigm of Welsh identity.
Carwyn Evans’ first major show at g39 is an important moment showing the progress of an artist who, like Bedwyr Williams, Sean Edwards and others, has chosen to build a practice from within Wales. All have presented solo shows here in the last 12 months, which is a positive sign. But it should neither obscure the fact, nor be at the expense of, the impressive diaspora of Welsh artists whose careers are burgeoning or established internationally but have very little exposure in Wales.
The whole of society will benefit if the arts can model an identity that moves beyond the introspective idea that Welsh artists are those who have ‘stayed’. For the visual arts in Wales to flourish, they must include artists living elsewhere who may have any combination of being born in, who grew up in, were educated in, or have strong ongoing associations with Wales.
Something unexpected from Cerith Wyn Evans, Bethan Huws or Richard Deacon would be a reminder that Wales in Venice has been going for over a decade but many of those who have represented Wales haven’t had solo shows here since. Persuading Heather Phillipson, James Richards or Jessica Warboys to make their most ambitious projects to date would alert the international scene to what is happening here while sending a signal up the political chain that Cardiff Contemporary, and Wales, could benefit from the international acclaim that is being focused on a generation of extraordinary young artists.
Longevity and confidence
As Folkestone has demonstrated, a deep art infrastructure is not an absolute necessity. Taking artistic quality as a given, underpinning the many negotiations involved in trying to pull off something like a biennial are two essential ingredients: longevity and confidence.
This cuts both ways: for the arts to act as an alchemical vehicle that fuels Cardiff’s regeneration, the city will also need to demonstrate confidence and commitment to Cardiff Contemporary. This means pledging funding at the outset so the project is immediately viable instead of having to pull together a programme in just six months, as was the case this time around. So much more could be achieved with the same amount of money but three times as long to prepare.
For Cardiff Contemporary to manifest this confidence it needs to learn from the current festival as a work-in-progress. Get the simple stuff right – iron out clashes, push the marketing early, coordinate everything to open at the same time to ensure maximum impact – and build on the scope and ambitions of the artistic programme.
But the real key is to secure commitments early on: two years is hardly enough time to get big name artists with the vision and experience to deliver major pieces; strategic possibilities to leverage further funding drift by while decisions are pending; and even the willing are stymied in what can be achieved at short notice.
Come the end of Cardiff Contemporary, I am confident I will be able to look back on some gems that I will still be thinking about in 20 years time. But what I really hope is to hear an announcement that funding has been committed for the next festival, so the city can immediately start gearing up and realise the rich possibilities that slipped by this time around – and which, given enough time, will still be there for the taking in 2016.
Cardiff Contemporary continues until 9 November 2014. www.cardiffcontemporary.co.uk
Also on a-n.co.uk:
Cardiff Contemporary: new ways to experience the city – Rory Duckhouse reports on the opening weekend of the citywide art festival
