a-n Travel Bursary Blog

The start and end point of this research that has been enabled by the a-n travel bursary are in some respects very different but in the broader context of my practice, I very much see them as interrogating the same set of ideas. The Shadow Archive was operating from the assertion that artist-led and self-organized spaces within the art world were acting as micro utopias. I was calling them utopias in the sense that their ambitions were likely to be far loftier than their reality. When I was developing that project, I was working with an archivist, Anthony Day, to conceptualise an archival methodology that would capture this. We set upon the idea that the most important thing to preserve from the often fleeting instances of such spaces were the ambitions of the organizers, and the subjective ideas of what they were doing, as opposed to the objective reality. This is the idea that trickled into The Future is a Collective Project – the notion that aiming towards an idea, outlining it in art, poetry, or fiction, and actualizing it as a proposition is important enough to warrant study. Beyond the conceptual thread that runs between the two halves of my research, there is also the context. I continued to work within artist-led spaces, requiring the freedom of the spaces to be mutable and hold space in many different ways. My way of holding spaces was to draw from Italian feminist ideas of creating a comfortable domestic environment for non-hierarchical discussion. This involved tea, snacks, and comfortable seating, as well as the insistence on reading texts aloud together.

The other idea that links the two halves of my travel and research is the relationship between an archive and the future. In The Shadow Archive project, I was interested in Gregory Sholette’s notion of ‘dark matter’ – that which propped up the art world but when unnoticed beyond its own strata. The archive was a means by which to preserve largely unheard voices, ambitions, actions, and ideas. The Future is a Collective Project was operating from the position that we are persistently sold the idea that the future is already written but in actual fact it is an open space for reinterpretation. I was, and continue to be, interested in the voices that have not been included in even writing the present – those outside of the dominant hegemony of the white, patriarchal, and capitalist mold – and what they might be able to offer as tools for writing possible futures. In this sense, the projects are linked by an interest in the way the past can influence the future. The Shadow Archive sought to actively intervene in the way the present would be considered in the future. The Future is a Collective Project seeks to unearth subjugated pasts in the hope that disenfranchised voices can be given some agency to author the future.

The travel bursary from a-n has enabled me to test all of these ideas by meeting, talking to, and researching together with artists and non-artists alike in towns and cities outside of London where I live and work. It has confirmed a fervent commitment by artists in particular to a continued collective effort to create experiment, discuss and collaborate in order to create alternative presents, and futures.

Having used the first half of my a-n travel bursary to speak to artist run spaces outside of London about their intentions and organization, I decided to use the second half to take The Future is a Collective Project to some of the spaces that I had made contact with during this time. Accordingly, I have run sessions with artists in Wigan, at Cross Street Arts, and in Newcastle at Newbridge Projects. These were part of the overall research conducted collectively, session by session, for The Future is a Collective Project. So far, we have collectively studied the following:

– Lynn Hershmann Leeson’s video interview series, Curing The Vampire, 2008, and exploring Helene Von Oldenburg’s online project, The Arachnomantic Archive (this has since been taken offline)

– Isabelle Stenger’s 2008 essay, ‘Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism’.

– The 1980s film adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi novel, ‘The Lathe of Heaven’.

– The work, ‘Futures and Fortunes’, of artist collective, Fourthland.

– ‘Power-Over and Power-From-Within’, the first chapter of neo-pagan witch, Starhawk’s book ‘Dreaming in the Dark – Magic, Sex and Politics’.

– Written excerpts of Beowulf in Old English and in translation; clips from the TV show Vikings; excerpts from Marsden’s own book ‘On Sledge & Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers’; issues of Girl’s Own Paper; and excerpts from A Tale Of Two Offas (Vitae Duorum Offarum).

– Anna Homler and Steve Moshier’s LP, Breadwoman & Other Tales.

– A chapter of Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban 1980); Simon O’Sullivan’s essay, ‘Myth-Science as Residual Culture and Magical Thinking’; and prehistoric rock art in Northumberland.

– An essay on Greek Rebetiko by Yiannis Zaimakis called ‘Bawdy Songs and Virtuous Politics’ (2009).

– Audre Lorde’s essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’; ‘Material Memoirs’, a chapter from Stacy Alaimo’s book ‘Bodily Natures’ and the music and methodology of folk musician Shirley Collins.

– Sections of the texts, ‘Householding amid global crisis’ and ‘Queering the intimate’ by V Spike Peterson.

– “The waking dream in ethnographic perspective” by Douglass Price-Williams.

The notion behind The Future is a Collective Project is essentially what it says on the tin and to this end it has been invaluable to be able to take the discussions outside of London and to a varied audience. These conversations have also been continued beyond the art world and outside of standard notions of knowledge sharing. The session in at Newbridge Projects in Newcastle was extended with artist, Verity Birt, to include a local female community choir, SHE Choir, and a couple of workshops held at Neolithic sites in Northumberland using vocal improvisation to share thoughts and feelings about the history of the sites. In Wigan it was extended with artist, Anna Smith, to include a sharing of ideas with the attendees of a local karaoke night; talking about Ancient Greek wine cults in relationship to karaoke nights.

With the initial part of my travel bursary I made trips to Scotland and the North West and spoke to artist-led spaces including The Telfer Gallery , Queens Park Railway Club and The Pipe Factory (Glasgow); Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh); Cross Street Arts and The Old Courts (Wigan); and Islington Mill & The Penthouse NQ (Manchester). Overwhelmingly, all of these spaces identified with what I was asserting – that regardless of how their projects manifested, they were nonetheless driven by a utopian urge to provide space, community and conversation, further artistic practice, and exist despite the financial and organizational burdens of running a small project space. None of the above had any designs to become commercial entities, or to give up. Holding space was at the forefront of everyone’s intentions.

This became of key interest to me – the creation of community and holding of space. Concurrently, I had continued by long-term research interest in utopian thinking into feminist utopian science fiction. It struck me that there was a parallel between the use of fiction and art to propose an alternative, and the use of project spaces to offer one. Even if neither impacted the world on any apparently large scale, the act of holding space is still political act. I began to run a collaborative public research group in London – at my own short-term artist-run space, Green Ray, and later at Res. Gallery – to explore these ideas. The idea was to build on what I had observed through my work on The Shadow Archive in terms of the holding of space to collaboratively enact and explore ideas. I sought to extend the importance of conceptualizing another way of doing things by also utilizing the future as a tool, a kind of blank slate, upon which to project these desires. Through collective study of films, art works, music, literature, art practices and texts, we began to explore:

– Marginalised ideas and practices of the past being essential considerations in thinking about the future

– The future as a tool of fiction for asserting our desires and articulating what is missing or ignored in the present;

– The possibilities of future thinking from the position of ‘the other’.

During this time the following website had been created http://archivesoftheartistled.org/. I felt that it was performing the same function as I had intended with The Shadow Archive and so I sought to shift the focus of my research with the other half of my travel bursary. I felt that active, collective research was more useful and urgent than duplicating existing work.

I initially applied to the a-n Travel Bursary fund to undertake further work and research for a project called The Shadow Archive, which I had begun as an investigation into self-organised art spaces. However, during the year in which I had planned to undertake the research, I became aware of several similar initiatives popping up that were seeking to map the landscape of artist-led activity in the UK. I got half way through my planned research with this bursary before losing heart somewhat in terms of the usefulness of my work given the apparent renewed interest in the subject. I therefore took a step back and sought to revisit the genesis of the project, which was an ongoing interest and belief in sites of utopian thinking. Delving further into these ideas, the project changed direction and I developed a framework for research called The Future is Collective Project, which I used the second half of my bursary money to take to different artist-led venues in the UK. This initial post will elaborate on the ideas behind the Shadow Archive and further posts will include the research and encounters that the a-n Travel Bursary has enabled, as well as the change in focus of the work and the travelling meetings of The Future is a Collective Project.

The Shadow Archive

At the fore of the project was the notion that current forms of self organisation by artists are in many cases both collaborative art practices and strategies and tactics for survival. Practices that are self-organised around a physical space can be understood as using art as a means for exploration, connection and shelter in an increasingly alienating and precarious world. Equally, they can be seen as a move away from the dominant idea of art as something that is authored and performative and towards an art that is usable [see: Wright, Stephen 2014: Towards a Lexicon of Usership, Eindhoven, NL: Van Abbemuseum, p.8].

Occupying a physical space offers a place to experiment, collaborate, generate income, and share ideas. It also provides a legitimacy to the work of non-represented artists and independent curators through having a name, place and website via which to approach institutions. With access to institutional support, funding, studios, and each other becoming increasingly scarce resources, artists are driven by necessity to create these situations for themselves. These spaces provide the nourishing conditions from whence come the ‘emerging artists’ and ideas that then enter the art market or established gallery circuit. But aside from feeding into the dominant art world, these self-organised art worlds hold other potentials. It is dissatisfaction that drives necessity and necessity that drives innovation.

One of the lines of enquiry that underpinned The Shadow Archive was: Do the spaces and communities created by and for artists harbour new potentials for art and for living?

The project’s name references the concept of a shadow cabinet that supports the ruling government in opposition. It also pays homage to Greogry Sholette’s associated idea of ‘dark matter’ [see: Sholette, Gregory 2011: Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture,London, UK: Pluto Press] that includes the informally organised artistic production that props up the dominant art world. However, the majority of those artists will not achieve ‘art world success’ and, as Sholette suggests, the inability to be “usefully productive”, in terms of earning an income for work produced, causes new means and tactics of survival to emerge, which hold the potential to create new narratives. In Stephen Wright’s terms, in his Lexicon of Usership, these “art-sustaining environments” are where art is used, rather than consumed. As he suggests; “usership represents a radical challenge to at least three stalwart conceptual institutions in contemporary culture: spectatorship, expert culture, and ownership.”As these are also the tenets of the status quo in our neoliberal, proprietary, and profit driven society, the potential for a usable art is huge.

The Shadow Archive was seeking to create a method for the subjective representation of the multifarious outputs, ideas and practices that constitute the spaces in its collection. In order to do this, each space was invited to submit videos, images, sound files and/or documents that they feel represent them, or that represent them in a way in which they wish to be seen. The Shadow Archive sought to do justice to the spaces in its care and provide an engaging platform that will encourage exploration and research.

Due to the nature of self-organising and acquiring and keeping space, many endeavours into running spaces are short-lived and therefore go undocumented. As artists move on or rents rise, sustaining a space becomes difficult. However, this temporality is not to be regarded as a failure; nothing is permanent and valuable ideas and work can happen in short spaces of time. In the original sense of the word ‘curate’, The intentions of the Shadow Archive was to provide a means to care for and communicate the ideas and particulars behind these spaces. Its aims were to provide a platform through which self-organised art spaces can network and make their operations available to view for users of the website. If there is a shift in what constitutes art and how it is being used, and if that shift holds a potentiality for a better, and ultimately more supportive environment for artists, then connecting the dots can create a critical mass. And if necessity is creating innovations then sharing those will enable them to be used and built upon. As the archive is populated, it will also begin to be activated; the efficacy of these propositions will become apparent but they may also become self-fulfilling prophecies as The Shadow Archive becomes a platform through which to share and reveal.