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| West Town Farm, 13 February 2011 |
It's led to spin-off projects such as Love Local Food, a mobile food shop, and the Community Environment Group which works with people with mental health issues. They have also revitalised a once-failing dairy farm, encouraging its development as a community and environment resource and helping to access money that has funded footpaths, orchards, volunteer workers, a beef herd, pigs and bees - amongst other things.
Founders Christine Duff and Jo Cotter are artists, and were bemoaning the fact they've had very little time to pursue their own practice and 'make' things. At the time I nodded sympathetically - it's often true that artists who are the most capable and outward-looking end up spending the least time on their own work. But, on reflection, I think they might be worrying unnecessarily. You only have to look at someone like Suzanne Lacy to realise that Christine and Jo have never stopped making things. They've been making huge, complex, creative, meaningful, amazing things for years. It's simply a matter of how you frame the work of an artist.
By contrast, lots of object-like things are made at and for organicARTS by artists, students, local schools and community groups. I made my own Observatory as a site-specific piece for the farm in 2009, and I loved working there. But I will also admit to feeling that there's something pointless about adding to the world's accumulation of stuff in a place where there's so much real work to be done. To my mind, West Town Farm calls for a little less artistic romanticism and a little more artistic activism.
As a PS to this post, I'm borrowing a reference from an article on Axis by artists Townley and Bradby.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.axisweb.org/dlForum.aspx?ESSAYID=18147
Alan Kaprow said: 'Unless the identity (and thus the meaning) of what the artist does oscillates between ordinary, recognizable activity and the “resonance” of that activity in the larger human context, the activity itself reduces to conventional behavior. ... But ordinary life performed as art/not art can charge the everyday with metaphoric power.'
'Art Which Can’t Be Art', in Alan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 1986, Edited by Jeff Kelley, http://readingbetween.org/artwhichcantbeart.pdf