The Recipe Exchange
Spacex, Exeter 14 May – 9 July 2011
1. This is an exhibition that raises far more questions than it answers – and that’s no bad thing. It documents the results of a project by artist and researcher Helen Pritchard that involved the residents of Farringdon, a village near Exeter.
2. The Recipe Exchange expands the idea of recipes to include shared instructional texts for a whole range of practical activities. Pritchard encouraged residents to take part in skill-sharing events and to establish an online archive of practical knowledge at www.therecipeexchange.org
3. What initially looks like a rather gentle excursion into the domestic knowledge of a quiet Devon village (how to clean a Thermos, how to make nettle pesto, how to say hello to a horse) becomes something else altogether – once you relinquish your position as spectator and join in.
4. From the inside, The Recipe Exchange resists description but, as I’m determined to try, I’ll call it a practical demonstration of how knowledge and meaning can be distributed, rather than located in just one place. By attending the gallery events and talking to each other about this puzzling exhibition and the issues it raises for art, we share in its ongoing creation. None of us, however, can grasp the whole picture.
5. Drawing on references from open source technology development, Helen Pritchard challenges the top-down development and dissemination of information by authoritative ‘experts’ and champions a model of collaborative, networked knowledge production.
6. These are big and exciting themes, but the tangible outcomes of this project – or at least those that appear in the gallery - are relatively insignificant: three videos, a board of photographs, a database of ‘recipes’ and some books and papers. With so little to see, the question has to be asked – why install it in a contemporary art space for eight weeks?
7. This problem wasn’t evident at the opening of the exhibition, as the gallery was a sociable space, full of people from the village and the Spacex art audience. The artist and Martha Crean of Spacex both spoke about the project, and participants had their first opportunity to see themselves on film. For artist, commissioning gallery and participants alike, it was clearly an opportunity to step back and reflect. A point - not of completion exactly - but of focus.
8. The exhibition has also worked well as a setting for sociable learning events, such as Graham Dean’s Arduino workshop, Magda Tyzlik-Carver’s discussion of ‘the commons’ and David Gauntlett’s talk on the social meaning of creativity. But for visitors who came when no events were taking place (and this was most of the time), the content must have seemed rather sparse, rather thin, even rather inward-looking. By its very nature, social art isn’t really a spectator sport.
9. The gallery show suggests there's a second phase of the project that extends the collaborative community to Spacex and Exeter. Because in other, non-art, non-research contexts, what happens in the community hall at Farringdon isn’t of much interest to me. And it’s probably none of my business, either.
10. The Spacex show is also necessary because research demands documentation, arts funding demands outcomes, and art needs an audience to examine, reflect and debate. Which is what I’m attempting now.
11. So, how do you judge the project’s success? One could look for social benefits: if you surveyed the people of Farringdon they might say they’re talking to each other more, less litter is dropped, they have a useful new footpath. But this isn’t the job of art, it’s a useful by-product. We head off down a bumpy road if we expect artists to stand in for community workers.
12. Perhaps it’s created new knowledge? Not always from the recipe contents, which reveal uncertainty as well as knowledge. But we do learn quite a lot about the preoccupations of the communities involved, and also that writing meaningful instructions isn’t as easy as it might first appear. Perhaps instead, exchange is the key word here. The ‘recipes’ that are swapped are, in many ways, tools for self-definition and social interaction.
13. Just as knowledge is dispersed across the community, so is the meaning and significance of this project, which sets out to reveal and reinforce connections, but not from an omniscient position. The artist herself is just one agent among many - a significant one, but not the aesthetically privileged individual of the popular imagination, shaping materials to represent her vision. Instead, Pritchard seems more interested in setting unpredictable processes in motion.
14. Similarly, I can’t adopt the traditional privileged position of a critic, surveying something complete and self-contained, like the arrangement of work in a gallery. At this stage, I can only get stuck in and take part in the event, have the conversations, debate the issues. As a result, this blog entry is only part of a compilation that will include other voices talking about the project and talking about social art. Read the bigger piece here soon.
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Re the recipes – as you imply, the format restricted the scope for a recipe and as a result most were skimpy at best and, more often, simply trivial. It strikes me that a more effective way to link the wired world with a community such as Farringdon would be to set up a “knowledge exchange directory” where people could list the particular skills, knowledge, or talents that they would be prepared to share freely and for free. “Sharing” could mean via a lecture, class, one-on-one, electronic or telephonic q-and-a, mentoring, or whatever. The point being that in this case the proximity of the person and the offer of human interaction is what is of value, whereas for written recipes the wider Internet is always going to be vastly more useful than a very limited locally generated set.
ReplyDeleteI agree - if the main purpose of the project was effective knowledge sharing, the recipe format probably wasn't the best thing to use. However, I believe Helen Pritchard was interested as an artist in the idea of recipes as a tool for knowledge sharing and saw this as an opportunity to experiment with them. For me, it was very interesting what people chose to put in the recipes and how much they revealed about their own preoccupations. I suspect a more objective statement of available expertise and experience wouldn't have revealed as much. I think this is the crux of the crossover between social art and socially useful activity; they can be the same thing, but they often won't be.
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