A joint application for funding for the Thai residency and project at the Museum of Bath at Work has come through from a GfA grant from Arts Council England. This is going to enable me to be more ambitious and represents a significant shift towards a longer-term approach to some aspects of my practice.
I wrote this for a-n:
Hauser & Wirth Open New Arts Centre in Somerset
With Galleries in Zurich, London and New York and a stable of international artists, many will be familiar with art dealers Hauser & Wirth. The power couple’s decision to base their latest venture in Bruton, Somerset, however, might take some by surprise.
The third page in visual correspondence for Revolve:R.
Some of the works will be on show at Choisi Gallery, Lugano, Switzerland, from 6 July to 13 September. If you’re in the neighbourhood this summer I hope you can drop by.
A challenging first mentoring session with Dave Beech. I was able to ask for clarification on some of the concepts we encountered in the Art & Politics reading group around the notions of counter-hegemony and the Philistine. The philistine is the artists ‘other’ that carries the potential to create a counter-hegemonic art precisely because it is excluded from art and its discourses. For artists the challenge is to renegotiate what it means to be an artist – how can we shift what an artist is, or inhabit being an artist differently? By being a philistine artist – rejecting the mythology of art.
We talked about the use of scale in my work how this device could be played out in different registers. Scale, because of its conventional relationship to the body, could be viewed as politically conservative. Scale could relate to geography, masses of people or the universal.
To look at:
Raymond Williams
Lukacs – ‘slow revolution’
Ranciere
Zizek
Minimalism
Paul Wood
John Roberts
Terry Atkinson
I’m quoted in this article by David Trigg, about the current trend for arts organisations to replace paid invigilators with volunteers. What’s not mentioned in the article is that these jobs are not just important employment opportunities for people – mainly artists – in difficult times, but jobs with a sympathetic employer. Artists don’t need to have paid employment in the arts, but it is desirable because arts employers understand artists need to take time off for residencies, installing shows and the like.
Making the case for adopting these models is like advocating a race to the bottom. It may solve an immediate problem, but it creates much larger longer term problems for the arts ecology as a whole by establishing a culture that is difficult, if not impossible, to overturn.
In my experience, when faced with a problem like this there are two positions; the first position looks at a situation and the circumstances that have created it and asks, how can we best work within these circumstances to achieve our goals. The second position looks at the situation and the circumstances that produced it and asks, how we can we change these circumstances? The first group of people, tend to dismiss the second group of people as idealistic and congratulate themselves on their grounded real-world view. The thing is, political activism is necessarily idealistic – it’s about daring to imagine that a better world is possible in impossible circumstances and setting about campaigning and pressurising to change what those circumstances are.
Without the pressure of the second group, the first group – whether they agree in principle or not – will happily go along with the pleasurable flow of ideology, rather than set about the more difficult task of challenging it.
When I posted this article on facebook, several people private messaged me to support my views and thank me for speaking out. They did not want to comment publicly because they were afraid of the impact it could have on their careers. This and the anonymous comments in the article itself are indicative of a very unhealthy culture established within the arts. When the people who take and implement these decisions are also the people who provide opportunities artists feel disempowered to voice their opinions.
Artist
