“The success of artist-led initiatives…demonstrates perhaps that our institutions could learn a great deal from the way that artists organise themselves. Their outlook is often different, non-linear, more democratic and less structured than traditional visual arts bureaucracies, They are frequently highly energetic, synergetic, inspirational and broadly based: qualities often ground out of large cultural institutions. Haven’t artists earned the right to be trusted, for once, with guiding their own destiny? Real risk taking in the arts is likely to involve removing the burden of accountability from artists and replacing it with a more sophisticated sense of responsibility, developing a working relationship with [other arts professionals] that is based more on trust.”
“Why are artists increasingly left out of the cultural advisory and discussion processes in the UK? …Surely the key players in any discussion about culture are artists and audience, working closely with and supported by mediators and funders? Everyone has a role, but we need to refocus the part played by artists and audiences in the decision-making and – crucially – to pay both for their involvement in the process.”
Mike Collier, VANE Journal 1997, republished in Portrait of the Artist, a-n Publications, 1999, a-n archive
“The modern artist exists in a society as an experimenter with the conventions of culture; licensed to define his/her practice, its criteria and aims, independently from the dynamics that drive the change in conventions that prevail in the same culture generally.
At the same time, the existence of the artist is also something of a social experiment itself, subject to the authority of conventional assumptions, beliefs and expectations. Thus on the one hand, each individual artistic practice is by definition unique and non-representative of the culture at large. While on the other, all artists and their practices share in the eyes of the public certain common characteristics and traits, and these collectively represent the place of the art in the make-up of the society’s self image, The image that the society has of itself as a culture is then less the product of artists’ experimental efforts – the singular ‘worlds’ they create through their art – than it is the outcome of society’s attitudes towards the vale of the artist’s ‘unique’ practice for the social experimentation of art.
The experiment also extends onto the attempts to modernise the ‘old’ job of the artist as one who records, reports and celebrates the actions and achievements of others from the observation and experience of their world. In this again the artist is generally expected to provide a contribution which is at once unique and representative of the culture’s concepts of art. The artist must show an insider understanding of the others’ world but also maintain the distance that the society needs to understand the artist’s practice as a model of art. The more ‘modern society’ becomes the ‘information society’ (or the more the two become interchangeable), the more remote the models of art become and the more society tends to learn about itself, not from the observations of the artist but from observing the artist.
The artist’s ‘old’ job is taken over by the intermediaries who ‘deliver’ the art to the public, who facilitate public access to art – curators, critics, arts administrators – and whose role it is to negotiate the practical and ideological terms and conditions of the ‘services’ provided by artists in society.”
Extract from Other people’s culture, Pavel Büchler published in Curious – artists’ research within expert culture, Visual Art Projects, Glasgow 1999
“The work of the hand is the first and last consideration in the expression of art in metal work of any kind. When such is adequately given, the result is always sufficient to justify its existence. There is no art in any piece of work which does not possess the qualities obtained by hand work. To demonstrate this it is only necessary to try to think of a machine producing a work of art. Such a thing is inconceivable, inasmuch as all art is the expression of man’s thoughts and feelings. The hand well trained alone can achieve that. One of the most lamentable things is to witness the painful effort of a worker to imitate the result obtained by the use of machinery….. That it is necessary then to make art objects with the hands implies also thay the design must be such as can be best expressed by hand work, Hence it follows that all designs should be made by one who not only knows the methods employed in the craft but has also practised it….”
Harmsworth Self Educator “A golden key to success in life”, Arthur Mee, Vol VII, 1907. Group 14 Metals 13 – Art work in metals – consideration of the art in the treatment of metals.
