MEASURING THE EXPERIENCE #17
Role of artist-led organisations
“Visual artists are the experimental branch of a larger cultural movement investigating the politics of representation.”[1]
In defining what artist-led organisations provide, contributors to the study characterised artist-led organisations as being clear-minded, ambitious and innovative. Because artistic vision is paramount and groups have to seek out and make the opportunities through which their ideas are manifested, they are recognised as providing an important part of the range of activities which constitute contemporary visual arts, and highly inventive in terms of creating the resources and partnerships which are necessary.
Artist-led ventures are identified as a way for the arts funding system to both deliver support to artists and at the same time to provide opportunities for participation in the arts for others. Although analysis of the case study material offers an articulation of the economic and other tangible benefits which this area of practice offers, it also raises some key issues as regards how this practice might otherwise be quantified, and its particular relevance within the planning of future arts strategies.
Definitions of artist-led practice and definitions of audience
“The artist appears to create real objects but actually provides mechanisms of exchange exercised by the imagination.”[2]
The case studies demonstrate that most funding bodies’ perceive the work of artist-led organisations to be valuable in some way. This may because they define it as being capable of fulfilling requirements for visual arts development, audience growth, community participation, access for disadvantaged groups and the improvement of provision in rural areas or outside the main urban conurbation, or because they see it as a way of supporting artists’ businesses and marketing enterprises because these contribute to an area’s economic well-being.
However, these are unlikely to be the reasons why groups have instigated the work in the first place, although they are likely to have recognised at some point where their artistic plans co-incide with the interests of funders and other cultural and economic strategists. Artists’ motives in generating work may be best described as being concerned with personal and artistic development and with realising a vision. Whether the vision manifests itself through setting up what others may describe as a small business or whether it is concerned with identifying new working processes, collaborations with other professionals and in generating different kinds of social relationships, the common factor is the length of time required to achieve any significant outcomes.
Whereas the organisational structures of arts funding bodies are constrained by government planning time-frames, and has been indicated previously, schemes and strategies may run for relatively short times before they are superseded by new ones, artists tend to work, knowingly or unknowingly, within much longer time-frames.
[1] Suzanne Lacy, speaking at the conference Littoral: new zones for critical art practice, September 1994.
[2] David Butler, writing in Taming Goliath, a report on a city-wide public art project in Aberdeen in 1996.
