Practice as research

This week I went to visit the exhibition ‘Finding The Value’, at York St Mary’s, a deconsecrated medieval church which opened as a contemporary art space in 2004 and operates alongside York Art Gallery to commission works by contemporary artists.

Finding The Value
The exhibition ‘Finding The Value’ is the the result of one such commission, which came about due to a bequest by Peter Madsen and his sister Karen, of a large collection of art, including paintings, books, prints, small sculptures and ethnographic objects. As the catalogue describes: “Finding The Value is an exhibition in which commissioned artists respond to items from the collection and open up questions of the inheritance of cultural values. Peter Madsen left all of his collection to York Art Gallery, giving the gallery the option to sell any pieces not accessioned into the collection. Of course some works immediately suggested themselves on a basis of historical importance and artistic quality as desirable additions to the permanent collection… Other works could be readily assigned a market value, sold at auction and so happily passed to the care of other collectors and a financial benefit gained”.

“What remained was a relatively large number of lesser value items. However, these may well have been objects of high value in terms of personal meaning or affection. How can the curator respond to these human values as opposed to straightforward calculations of financial worth?”

Commissioning the artists
It was decided that the gallery would commission five artists to respond the reduced collection of ‘lesser value’ items, in order to produce new work based on the individual items as well as the bequest as a whole. As there was no restriction placed on the use of the collection, the artists were invited to work directly on, or with the items. Seeing this in practice felt quite subversive and contributed to the overall questioning of how history is preserved and which items are deemed valuable for future generations.

The artists approached the work using a range of methods and techniques. Through formal and material research and historical background information, they produced creative responses to the collection, in an effort to “investigate and develop the values and cultural meaning of the original work.” However, as individual bodies of work, each interpretation was unique in form and concept, allowing the artists’ practices to be highlighted, and affording consideration to the different possibilities and methods of viewing a collection.

The gallery space
Positioned first in the space was Yvette Hawkins’ work ‘Casing In’. Utilising her skills as a paper artist, she chose the Japanese books and prints to work with. On noticing the perforations in the paper which had been made by insects, she decided to work directly with silkworms to introduce an element of non-human craft. The installation included three small floor-based vitrines with kneeler cushions supplied to view the work. The impact of viewing the work in this way created the additional effect of highlighting the theological surroundings as well as reflecting perceived reverence to art and museums. The poignancy of the silkworms being required to die before the results of their labour could be harvested was also a fitting metaphor for the surroundings.

From the quiet contemplation of the silkworm cocoons, the next exhibit, required more physical interaction. Created by Simon Venus, the three vitrines of kinetic sculpture entitled ‘Passed On’ were suggestive of a religious triptych, and included various small sculptures and images from the collection which had been mechanised to respond when the visitor pressed a button.
Next came Alison Erika Forde’s contribution, which reflected on how Madsen might have displayed his collection in his own home, whereas Andrew Bracey’s ‘Reconfigure Paintings’ attempted to create an equivalence between disparate prints and images by applying the artist’s own systematic approach to erasing the figures with colourfully painted geometric shapes.

The gift
The work that interested me the most in terms of this project however, was Susie Macmurray’s piece, ‘Legacy’. The selected objects wrapped in gold wire and stacked together in the suitcase seemed to reflect both the religious setting of the work, and the nature of the [art] gift, its value, and our perception of it. I have previously discussed concepts of the gift and would be interested to see more of Macmurray’s work in relation to this.

Macmurray stated: “After visiting the collection I began to think about gifts and the cultural rituals around them. My immediate response to the collection had been an intense sense of poignancy: these things, amassed through a lifetime, must have had a personal significance and had many stories and private memories attached to them, none of which are now available to us… It touches all sorts of areas, from trust and responsibility to subjective perceptions of value and worth.”

Further info:
http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/leisure/exhibitions/11352914.Collector___s_leftovers_find_new_life_in_new_exhibition/
http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/11320470.Bequeathed_estate_inspires_York_art_exhibition/?ref=rss

Since I’ve been researching art in museum practice, I’ve begun to notice more and more artists working with collections. In a way this feels somewhat reassuring as there is obviously an interest in the field in which I am working. However, it also means that I need to consider my approach to collections carefully in order to ensure originality in my work. With that in mind I decided to visit some current exhibitions to see how artists were responding to museum objects.

The Paper Museum
‘The Paper Museum’ at Graves Gallery in Sheffield is one such exhibition. Artist Paul Evans produced a series of drawings based on Museums Sheffield’s collections of animal drawings, paintings and sculptures in response to a Leverhulme Trust funded residency with Cardiff Osteological Research Group. The title of his exhibition refers to another paper museum, The Museo Cartaceo, which was created by 17th Century scholar Cassiano dal Pozzo. In compiling his museum, dal Pozzo collected over 7000 watercolours, drawings and prints to create a visual encyclopedia of the range of human knowledge.

Rather than attempting to create a didactic exhibition, Evans took up the challenge to produce something more mythological and poetic and instead created an alphabet of drawings, or ‘Bestiary of Bones’. As Evans stated in the introduction to the exhibition: “Drawing has brought us closer to an understanding of the world through map-making and illustration, [but] imaginative drawing has helped us to maintain and deepen our sense of wonder at the natural world that we inhabit.”

Collaborating with poets
Evans was introduced to the poet A B Jackson through previously working with poets in conjunction with his drawing practice and they decided to collaborate on the Paper Museum project. Jackson described his working process as follows: “When Paul and I discussed how best to approach the writing of poems to accompany his A-Z drawings we agreed that any attempt to provide a summary explanation of the creature’s mythological story or cultural meaning  would be difficult; instead we  decided that the poems should be suggestive rather than straightforwardly descriptive, and I settled on a very strict form of four lines, each with four beats, and a rhyme scheme of ABAB. In addition, lines 1 and 2 run on together, while lines 3 and 4 are standalone sentences.

Replicating the museum
The highly structured and formalised process of arranging the drawings according to an alphabetical narrative reflected the museum classification process perfectly, while the element of interpretation through text and image allowed space for the viewer’s imagination. The inclusion of additional drawings alongside the ‘bestiary’, such as that of a spade-toothed whale (which has never been seen alive) or the ‘Endling’ drawings of the last examples of a species, also explored ideas of the loss and conjuring that the collector enacts.

I was also interested in the use of the alphabet (another linguistic organising structure) to create a finite boundary of knowledge. Such structures were effective in the dawn of museums due to the possibility of collecting the world’s existing knowledge. However, increasingly, artists working in museums are exploring how the museum structure frames knowledge in order to create a consistent narrative. This naturally requires an editing process where many objects will not be included. Any critique of museum classification structures using those same processes should therefore attempt to show how these structures impact on which objects (or knowledge) is included.

Further information:
http://www.ourfaveplaces.co.uk/events/art/the-paper-museum
https://soundcloud.com/the-paper-museum/thepapermuseum

At the beginning of August I headed down to the Tate Britain in London to see the British Folk Art exhibition. Although my work is not particularly influenced by the folk art style, I was interested to see examples of British work which might otherwise be termed ‘ethnographic art’. In her foreword to the catalogue, Tate curator Penelope Curtis discussed the upsurge in interest in folk arts, referencing the recent Hayward Gallery show, ‘Alternative Guide to the Universe‘ and ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace‘ at the Venice Biennale, as well as artists working in the museum format, such as the ‘Museum of Everything’ and the ‘Museum of Innocence’. (Tate, 2014, p6)

British Folk Art
The British Folk Art exhibition and subsequent catalogue were borne of a collaboration between curators Martin Myrone and Ruth Kenny, and Jeff McMillian, an artist specialising in American folk and outsider art. As Curtis stated, the exhibition aimed to challenge perceptions of folk art as “the work of an unknown amateur artist”, by revealing the stories of its makers and the contexts in which the works were created.

Through categorising the works into genres, such as place and function, Curtis also suggested that the exhibition enabled the viewer “to think about folk art within categories that are usually reserved for fine art – notably figuration and abstraction” (Curtis, 2014, pp. 6-7). Although the bricolage nature of the exhibition layout somewhat belied these claims, I nevertheless enjoyed the installation effect of the grouped objects within the space.

The House that Jack Built
The exhibition catalogue also included essays by the three curators, the first of which was entitled ‘The House that Jack Built: Essay as Sampler’ by Jeff McMillan. Here he discussed attempts by the curators to define British folk art within the limitations of a single survey exhibition. Drawing on contemporary interests in the genre, such as Tracey Emin’s quilts, Grayson Perry’s pots, and Bob and Roberta Smith’s signs, McMillan described how they aimed to trace traditional approaches to art making between the 17th and mid-20th centuries. He also distinguished the tradition of folk art from its closest companion, outsider art, which he described as generally denoting “a self taught artist working in a particularly idiosyncratic, highly individual manner, often driven by compulsion, desire or religious fervour” (McMillan, 2014, p12).

However, without a concrete definition of folk art per se, they decided instead to “approach the exhibition as a preposition… select[ing] works that inherently reflected certain territories and themes, such as the town, the sea, and the countryside, or alternatively, formal considerations like the figurative vs the abstract or non-representational”. Additionally, film and photographic archival works were included, showing the works of art in context, as well as acting as replacements for ephemeral objects which were no longer available.

Wallflowers at the dance of western civilization
Ruth Kenny further interrogated the discrepancies between folk and outsider art in her catalogue essay, ‘Wallflowers at the Dance of Western Civilization: the Limits of Folk Art’, the title based on a quote from Jane Kallir. Speaking about how folk art has come to encapsulate all art forms outside the canon, she outlined how formal similarities between the works have led to folk art becoming such a broad category, often “shaped by the use of found materials, varying levels of technical skill and idiosyncratic construction” (Kenny, p126, 2014).

However, given that similarities of form can often be misleading, she decided instead to focus on the contexts of production, using the American sociologist, Gary Alan Fine’s concept of ‘identity art’ as a way of delineating the boundaries between folk and outsider art. Unlike folk or ‘mainstream’ art, outsider art is not classified according to movements or time periods. It is generally valued as the unique vision of its creators, and one that “defies the influence of pre-existing models, refusing to copy or be in any way derivative”. As Kenny stated: “Outsider art does not seek an audience… in fact, a degree of alienation appears to be essential to its production”. Conversely, folk art can be seen to operate as part of a social system, often being produced by or for a group. Rooted in tradition, “folk art is characterized by borrowing and the reiteration of forms that are passed down from generation to generation”. Despite this tradition, however, folk artists have often subverted these forms to their own signature styles. (Kenny, 127-131, 2014)

Re-instituting British Folk Art
Martin Myrone’s essay considered the legacy of the exhibition and if/how institutions such as the Tate could engage with the history of folk art, given that “folk art was among the categories traditionally considered beyond the remit of the Tate gallery that were brought into reconsideration in planning the new Tate gallery of British Art at the end of the 1990s”. Since that time, workshops and temporary exhibitions on folk art in the museum have been organised, which built on previous enterprises by artists and individuals dedicated to preserving the history of folk art. These included the Museum of ‘Bygones’, Kirkgate at York Castle Museum, and most recently the Folk Archive by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane.

Although displayed under the collective rubric ‘British Folk Art’, the curators were keen to avoid any interpretations which implied a ‘native’ culture or ‘ethnic’ identity. The ‘British’ in the title instead referred to the geographical boundaries from which the objects were collected and associated. Equally, they were less concerned with historically accurate representations of social practices, preferring instead to consider how these forms had been transformed and mutated through the process of classification and value exchange. (Myrone, 2014, p136-139)

The Exhibitionary Complex
The changes (and instabilities) in museum culture have allowed for more decentred and discursive exhibitions to come to the fore. Myrone quoted sociologist Tony Bennett and his discussions on the ‘exhibitionary complex’ where he noted that the recent occurrence in “the production of decentred displays in which objects and texts… are assembled so as to speak to one another, and to the spectator, in ways that allow a range of inferences to be drawn. [This] questions the virtue and validity of the traditional ethnographic practices of observation and description by denying the availability of a position of discursive neutrality on which such practices depended; it stresses flux, fluidity and indeterminacy.” (Myrone, 2014, p139)

Such interests, which include artists revisiting early collection apparatus including the Kunstkammer and Wunderkammer, are symptomatic of a less disciplinary way of thinking, and thus not only allow for a re-engagement with artworks outside the canon, but also, conversely, for art history to be considered as part of a social system, using these same methods.

Further information:
http://ikon-gallery.org/event/post-folk-archive
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jul/16/art
http://www.comptonverney.org.uk/modules/events/event.aspx?e=70&title=what_the_folk_say__contemporary_artist_interventions

The artist self defining as magician, particularly in the context of European Modernism, has been linked to the separation of production and consumption due to the industrialised processes of capitalism. As Thomas McEvilley describes in his essay, ‘Marginalia: Thomas McEvilley on the Global Issue’, “if we can say that during the progressive modernisation and concomitant fading of religious experience in Europe and North America the artist remained one of the few ‘sites’ or ‘castes’ in which a knowledge of both production and consumption was retained,  then we can begin to see why the west invested its art with transcendental meaning. Perhaps this is why [Magiciens] tended to privilege traditional material processes; the fetishising of these processes as they are practiced both in Western culture and elsewhere reflects the yearning for some lost pre-industrial integrity of cultural ‘authenticity’.” (Making Art Global, 2014, p252)

The modern interest in magic and art dates back to the early 20th century and was particularly prevalent in Surrealism, with references to alchemy, tarot and shamanism. In 1957, the Surrealist leader, Andre Breton also published ‘L’Art Magique’, which included responses to the nature of magic art by writers, artists and ethnographers. (Dawn Ades, ‘Paolozzi, Surrealism, Ethnography’ in Lost Magic Kingdoms, 1985, p61)

Who are the magicians of the earth?
The concept of the Magicien was adopted by the curators of ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ as a method of standardising the concept of the artist in a global context. As the publicity for the retrospective of Magiciens describes: “Uniting artists from all over the world, “Magicien” was used as an umbrella term for artists using extremely different practices in cultures far distant from each other, where some possessed a pronounced otherness with regard to European culture…

“One of the aims of the Magiciens de la terre was to show the Western public what Jean-Hubert Martin called “visual and static objects, whose essential quality is to be vessels of the spirit” – a collection of works embodying a spiritual aspect and objects from ritual practices, which their creators had imbued with traditional codes while giving them a personal dimension. In this respect, Voodoo rites are particularly present in the exhibition archives, and so the terms “cosmogony”, “rites” and “rituals” are omnipresent in the surviving documentation”.

The title Magiciens de la Terre attempted to circumvent the problematic nomenclature of artist in a global context by equating the artistic transformation of materials with a kind of spiritual or alchemical practice. However, this attempt to create an equivalence between the artists, produced the effect of flattening out any socio-economic and political differences, thereby removing opportunities to celebrate difference within the production of art, as well as denying the different experiences and values placed upon artists by the international art market.

Responses from the Magiciens themselves
The concern about the title of the exhibition was acutely expressed through several of the works in the exhibition, particularly in the case of Barbara Kruger’s ‘Qui sont les Magiciens de la Terre?’ a large billboard suggesting a variety of professions, which functioned as a way of questioning the valorisation of the artist. (Making Art Global, 2014, p252)

In Kruger’s ‘Statement on Magiciens de la Terre’, which was reproduced in ‘Making Art Global’, she states: “I had problems with the methodologies of the exhibition and certainly with the title – I thought it was fraught with the conventional romantic notion of what art is and what it does. I knew that the only way my work could function productively within the exhibition would be to address the title and try to work critically in regards to it… My questions and criticisms did not extend to the actual work included in the show… And while the inclusion of difference, especially in terms of race, was a welcome addition to an exhibition with ‘global’ ambitions, somehow it all seemed a bit like escorting otherness into the capital”. (Making Art Global, 2014, p286)

Another artist who was interested in interrogating the exhibition concept was Daniel Buren. His four films, shown on video monitors at the exit to the final room at the Centre Pompidou, included interviews with the artists about their involvement in the show, and excerpts from films about the making of the exhibition. (Making Art Global, 2014, p149)

Magic and labour
My initial thoughts about the difference between art and magic (apart from Alfred Gell’s essay ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’) relate to ideas about the magician being required to hide their labour to produce the trick, whereas the artist needs to show theirs to produce context and value. With this in mind, I have decided to reproduce each of the images from the retrospective exhibition, spending an hour on each one. The image rights had been negotiated for the reproduction of the images and I discussed the possibility of my project with the conference organisers.

The framework of my project will reflect the equalisation of the works in both the original and retrospective exhibitions, and the hour long making process described both a way of allocating equal value to each of the works and also a typical unit of labour used to determine pay. The variable factor in this project will be the title, which, alongside appropriate credits will include the average hourly wage from the country of the artist’s origin, based on the Purchasing Power Parity framework. This aims to highlight the correlations between geographical, social and economic factors that the original exhibition ignored.

Further info:
http://repository.asu.edu/attachments/114383/content/JSA_VOL7_NO1_Pages19-51_Greet.pdf
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal9/acrobat_files/Jill%20Fell%207.9.11.pdf
http://critiquedart.revues.org/8308?lang=en

The original exhibition ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ was staged in over two exhibition sites in Paris (the Centre Pompidou and the Great Hall of La Villette), and ran from 18th May to 14th August 1989. It was hailed as the first global exhibition of contemporary art. The exhibition presented contemporary works by living artists from around the world, aiming to expose the range of artistic practices in a global context.

History and context
As the promotional text from the retrospective exhibition explains, Magiciens de la Terre was produced in order to show “that objects seen in Western cultures as works of art, but embodying a functional, spiritual aspect for the civilisations they came from, had a legitimate place in the Museum environment… evoking the precepts developed by Joseph Beuys with his Peace Biennial and Robert Filliou with his “Poïpoïdrome”, whereby the practice of art should include otherness and exchange as fundamental components at the very heart of creativity”. However, due to Martin’s insistence on representing only living artists, neither Beuys or Filliou could be shown as they had both passed away during the making of the exhibition. (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, pp.26-27)

As discussed during my previous blog (from week 94), the Magiciens exhibition was contextualised by “colonial presentations within world exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries, the creation of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris in 1937 and MOMAs ethnographic projects throughout the first half of the 20th century” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p10). These early ‘global’ displays provoked various other large-scale initiatives, in an attempt to address cultural practices that had not originated in the West in relation to the Western art system. Such responses aimed to question the established art canon and introduce historiographic readings into contemporary art (Steeds et al. Making Art Global, p10). This expansion of the artistic canon, shaped by the end of the Cold War and the beginnings of globalisation, encouraged new ideas and approaches towards displaying ‘non-Western’ art. These projects included exhibitions which ran concurrent to Magiciens de la Terre, such as The Bienal de la Habana, and ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian artists in Post-war Britain‘, “with its formulation of an unrecognised modernism produced by cultural and racial minorities in the UK” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p10),

Methodology of Magiciens de la Terre
In an effort to present an evenly distributed number of artists, the curators of Magiciens selected 50 ‘Western’ and 50 ‘non-Western’ artists. It was also decided that each artist should be treated as an individual creator or group, rather than as representative of their country, as usually happened in a traditional biennale style of categorisation. Utilising an ethnographic methodology, the four curators set off on numerous missions across the globe, accompanied by around twenty project leaders. These studio visits were preceded by visual documentation and recommendations from curators from the different continents, which they then followed up by meeting each of the creators in their working context.

Rather than selecting existing work for exhibition, the curators were more interested in developing an understanding of artistic practice globally, and then inviting artists to produce new work specifically for the exhibition context. Curatorial work as a “two-stage process” had been developed since the late 1960s, beginning with exhibitions such as ‘When Attitudes Become Form‘, organised by Harold Szeemen at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p13).

The relationship between centre and periphery was also stated as a concern to the Magiciens exhibition design and layout. As Pablo Lafuente explains in his introduction to ‘Making Art Global (Part 2): ‘Magiciens de la Terre‘, “the figure of the artist was the structural unit that gave form to the exhibition… it assigned each artist a singular location in the world, a dot in a map pictured on each of the artists’ sections in the catalogue, always at its centre, so that everyone of them is presented as an inhabitant of a common space” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p13). However, despite this “universalist conception of the act of artistic creation… this equality was denounced as fictitious, as oblivious to the socio-cultural and historical context in which the different selected practices emerged, and therefore as exoticising;.. the embodiment of a neo colonialist attitude that allowed the contemporary art system to colonize, commercially and intellectually, new areas that were previously out of bounds” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p11).

The exhibition: selection, collection, and installation
The intention was for most of the artists to produce works onsite. However, the curators also attempted to respond to the contextual requirements and expectations of the artists involved. This necessitated different agreements with different groups. Therefore, some of the works were borrowed for the duration of the exhibition, some were required to be destroyed after the exhibition according to specific instructions, and some were purchased by La Villette.

The criteria for selecting artists were stated as an approach to “radicalism, a sense of adventure and excitement, their originality with respect to cultural tradition, [and] the relationship between the maker and his or her work”. However, the accusations in relation to Magiciens ‘neo-colonialism’, also led the curators to abandon key modernist tropes, while asserting others, leading to a confusion between the Contemporary and contemporaneity (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p11).

The exhibition form as decontextualised space
Lafuente continues by describing the decontextualising move within the exhibition space, and how this impacts on the work of art. He explains “The decontextualisation effected by the western museum […] begins with an initial step of abstraction. This abstraction from the everyday conditions constitute an essential moment in the (Western) definition of the aesthetic experience, as has been understood since the end of the 18th century” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p20). Such abstraction has been criticised as alienating factor, being an arguably more familiar strategy to some of the ‘Western’ artists who were used to working within the contemporary art context.

However, despite the problems of decontextualisation [of the object] within the exhibition space, Lafuente suggests that a wholly oppositional perspective can also neutralise the artist’s agency. In other words, a focus on only the circumstances of the production of the artwork, could leave the artist reduced to a series of “biographical, social, economic or historical determinations” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p17).

Lafuente concludes therefore that the questions raised by the possibilities of display enacted in the Magiciens exhibition could begin give rise to a new understanding of the exhibition space, one “in which mixed and shifting agencies are possible, [determining] perhaps what the exhibition form is: a place where nothing belongs, but where, because of this, objects and people (artists, curators and others) enter into relations, according to and against their will” (Steeds et al., Making Art Global, p22).