- Venue
- Toynbee Hall
- Location
- London
(Continued from Part 1 of review)
Sinclair’s description of regeneration drew attention to the lack of discussion elsewhere in the conference about the mechanics of the process. While rapid and major urban change was the context for most of the projects discussed, as far as I was aware, it was only explicitly discussed during the second session on Thursday. Called ‘How do you beat the system?’ this session included a discussion – ‘Cliff Edges: Curating on the Edge of the Institution’ – between Marijke Steedman (Head of Education, Whitechapel Gallery) and Clare Cumberlidge (Co-Director, General Public Agency (GPA)).
GPA’s aim, Cumberlidge explained, is ‘to investigate and support the public realm’ and to ‘share platforms for knowledge.’ She stressed that while government policy is boring, it’s also powerful. The policy that affects a given area, in this case East London, is rarely issued in a single policy document. It is necessary to read a number of policies in order to see what developments will be encouraged by legislation. From the Tall Buildings Policy, the Exemption from Mixed Use Policy, as well as other documents, it became clear to her that the City of London is being allowed to roll out over East London. The challenge for GPA is to ensure that when running a project, participants have equal access to this kind of information so that ‘everyone can speak from the same understanding’.
Marijke Steedman talked about The Street, a three-year curatorial programme that proposes alternatives to orthodox outreach practices in gallery education. ‘We realised that often we’d designed an education project before the artists who would lead it were appointed.’ The Street was a step away from that, appointing the artists more in the way a group show would be curated, allowing them to work with communities in whatever way suited their practice. An important feature was that people who took part in the artists’ projects were encountering the artists and the project directly, rather than mediated by the space of the gallery. This levelling device is not always easy to maintain though, and when working with the market traders in Petticoat Lane, it was undercut when the artists and curators had information about imminent building plans which the traders did not.
Most of the projects discussed so far will have received their backing because of a written proposal or a description at interview. It is verbal persuasion that brought them into public view. How do they persist after the activity is over? Since they are sited in face-to-face human relationships of exchange, would we expect their legacy to inhabit this form? This is the Alys Paradox, in which a work of participative art, having involved people other than the artist, enters the wider world via representations chosen by the artist. When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) is a collaborative work by Francis Alys in which volunteers walked across a dune in Peru, shovelling sand as they went. Alys later wrote ‘This story is not validated by any physical trace or addition to the landscape. We shall now leave the care of our story to oral tradition, as Plato says in the Republic. Only in its repetition and transmission is the work actualised. In this respect the art can never free itself from myth’. (6) Yet the work does not come to us through the oral tradition, or through forms that allow it to change and take on other significance; it comes to our attention through the precise and unchanging documentary images that were selected by the artist.
The Street raised the question of legacy for Marijke Steedman. How could work that took place in the space created by relationships be brought back into the gallery? The question of legacy was present from the start of the conference when Clare Doherty said ‘legacy is not necessarily a physical thing; I’m also interested in collective memory.’ Yet she also suggested that there was a new orthodoxy against creating and leaving behind something physical was hampering participative projects. Malcolm Miles (Professor of Cultural Theory, University of Plymouth), in response to a question on legacy replied ‘If you want to know what will come out of a project, you could see what people put into it that they want to keep going.’ And if what you invest in a project is discussion, ideas, and time, that’s hopefully what it will yield: more discussion, more ideas, and maybe more time.
All quotes that are not referenced to a particular publication are taken from presentations or discussions during the Engage conference.
5. Kwon, ibid. p.47.
6. Doherty, C., (ed.) Situation, p40
