- Venue
- Various Locations
- Location
- South East England
Seaside, oysters, quaint streets and pints on the beach. While for me the Whitstable Biennale is a day trip from the city, I am accompanied by art teachers Scott Grimshaw and Cat Taylor for whom Whitstable is their home and place of work. How important is the perspective of locality in our visual judgement? While the Whitstable fringe festival takes the title Local to interrogate the importance of place, one ignores it at their own peril.
A local perspective on the work soon emerges when it turns out that Grimshaw and his students have worked with two of the artists exhibiting in the festival through the Creative Partnerships organisation. Creative Partnerships, now renamed Creative Futures is a countrywide initiative to recognise the importance of creativity in learning across the entire curriculum. The context in which Grimshaw worked with these artists was a festival called Cultureal in the town of Sandwich. The aim of the festival was to explore what culture meant to the people of the town.
The artists Grimshaw worked with were Serena Korda and Alex Schady. His descriptions of their work with his secondary school classes both illuminates the individuals’ contributions to the Biennale and opens up wider considerations about the social role of art in local communities.
For the Biennale Serena Korda has created a project called The Library of Secrets. The centrepiece is a mobile art deco library which opens its doors to reveal shelves of old hardbacks. The viewer is invited to contribute to the library by anonymously scribbling a secret on an antique postcard then depositing it amongst the pages of the books on the shelves.
During the build up to the Cultureal festival in Sandwich Korda worked with students to identify and then re-envisage the visual culture of the town. Grimshaw tells me that students did this by photographing or drawing existing symbols and patterns they could find in Sandwich. These fragments were then used to create a pack of tarot cards. On the festival day students dressed as fortune tellers and read the future of spectators by handing them cards with images from the history of the town.
Alex Schady’s contribution to the Cultureal festival was to claim the discovery of a fictitious tradition of ‘boulder rolling’ in the town of Sandwich. This Sisyphean task was re-created by the students who first made their own model boulders before working to create a giant star-shaped sculpture more reminiscent of science fiction b-movies than historical traditions. This huge object was trundled around the town on the day of the festival, a spectacle that had been suggested by video installations around the town centre in the days preceding the event.
Schady’s video work at the Biennale is visually related to his work with students in Sandwich. The short film shows some of Whitstable’s many alleyways visited by mysterious supernatural objects that are similar to his titanic boulder. Seen in this light the shoddy Melies type special effects manage to suggest both historical and supernatural.
The element which unites the practice of both of these artists is the use of historical materials as a source of their work. While Korda rescues history from destruction Schady sets to work on the complex foundation of a falsified tradition. The end point of the artists’ work with the schools in Sandwich was a festival where school children brought the community together. To a certain extent then the artworks were at the centre of an act of social cohesion. The problem is how the artist negotiates this potentially problematic position of providing an image of social co-hesion to a disparate society.
Looking at the Biennale programme it’s easy to find the same concerns weaved through the other performances and works: Tarot cards, Ice cream van orchestras and prophetic performances all contain elements where past traditions are re-envisaged in various ways. Therefore it is not just Korda and Schady but many of these artists who are working out positions in relation to the image of an ideal community. It seems useful to ask of these works if traditions are invoked simply to arouse nostalgia or do they encourage the viewer into critical reflection on the past?
