Cultivating collaboration

'A Gift for Somerset' - wall of gifts

Cultivate 2: A Gift For Somerset raised interesting issues about collaborative working practices and how to relate them to institutions and audiences. Essentially a process of gift receipt, response and exchange between artists, it was centred on the gallery space at Taunton Brewhouse, culminating in a public exhibition 28th April - 7 June 2012.

The project was led by Simon Lee Dicker (of OSR Projects) and Karen Macdonald (an independent curator) with support from Tim Martin (Taunton Brewhouse). I was involved for two days, working as part of a group of associate artists in the gallery to respond to gifts sent in by other artists from around the world.

This collection of gifts (some physical, some conceptual, some virtual) was the starting point for a group collaboration. With just four days to produce and install a public exhibition speed, spontaneity, improvisation and collaboration were key. Flexibility and openness were vital too as the artists involved in production were a constantly shifting group.

'A Gift for Somerset' - responses to gift from Open Place

'A Gift for Somerset' - response to In the fluid tense from Jethro Brice

I focused with several others on a set of instructions, In the fluid tense, gifted by Jethro Brice. He asked us to consider, from the standpoint of the future, objects that were "once ubiquitous and mundane...now obscure" and to design prototype technology for the post-industrial world. These were then placed in a 'future museum'.

Although the content of this glass cabinet evolved constantly, at the time of the opening it contained mysterious miscellaneous metal parts (from a deconstructed and remodelled icing set found in a local charity shop), along with a model of a windmill made from old drinks cans, and drawings and a prototype of a sunlight-powered 'bulb' used by poor families in the Philippines to illuminate their homes. It was finished off with two plastic buckets (one mounted with a wheel) and a pair of found miniature metal objects whose form defied any useful function (a bucket with no bottom and a watering can with no spout).

Other parts of the icing set found their way into a response to a gift from Open Place in Ukraine. Part of this Kiev-based group's submission involved a 'Louis Vuitton'  plastic carrier. Inserts from the icing set echoed symbols on the bag and were therefore repurposed as 'future logos', divorced from brand connotations. One was projected on the wall and others hung to make shifting shadows.

The need for a public outcome was a useful point of focus, but also a source of anxiety. Putting incomplete or unresolved work on public display can make artists feel very vulnerable. This was solved by taking collective responsibility for the responsive works, which gave individuals scope to be more adventurous. Collectively, however, we faced an even greater challenge: inviting a general audience into the gallery to view what was, in some ways, a project in progress.

Gallery layout was used to give clues to the gifts' connections: received gifts were arranged in one corner around a makeshift map of locations, and responses emanated from it across the space. Thorough annotation ensured the origin and meaning of each gift and its responses could be understood. And in one work, the audience was encouraged to continue the process of gift exchange by swapping small personal items for hand-made badges. Nonetheless, for an outsider, the exhibition may have appeared as a rather random, if  rich, selection of objects and ideas. 

I still have a lot of questions about the best way to invite the public into such a process, but I take away from the project a renewed sense of optimism about the possibilities for artist collaboration. The loose, transitional production group (built around three or four core practitioners) created an informal yet purposeful atmosphere. Not reaching a wholly clear resolution means there's impetus to come back together (in some form) and move things on.

For me, the project embodies the gift economy that sustains much grassroots artistic activity - and may in the future sustain wider communites too. 

Cultivate 2: A Gift For Somerset was led by Simon Lee Dicker and Karen Macdonald . Associate artists that I worked with during my two days at Taunton Brewhouse included Tim Martin, Simon Ledson, Megan Calver, Jon England, Felicity Shillingford, Georgina Conroy,  Anna Newland Iacono, Gordon Field, Chantelle Henocq and Tasha Elena Stevens-Vallecillo.

More information at: http://osrprojects.wordpress.com/

Going back to my old school

Volkhardt Müller – Memory Lane (2012) Work in progress

In 2007, a year after I graduated, my old art college relocated from Exeter to become part of the University of Plymouth. Its former site at Earl Richards Road North (ERRN) was left to decay. Five years later, with demolition imminent, Revisions & Propositions (Sarah Bennett, Andy Klunder and Volkhardt Müller) were allowed to open the building to the public for just one weekend (31st March - 1st April 2012). They used the opportunity to show site-specific work to an invited audience, many of them former staff and students.

Derelict buildings - particularly those that are steeped in history or memory - often seem perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. When artists attempt to interpret or engage with such sites, there's always a risk they will be upstaged. The work at ERRN also had to compete with a whole array of personal memories triggered by the visit: most of us had taught or studied here and knew we were probably seeing inside the building for the last time.

The three artists wisely allowed the building to be part of the experience of the work rather than merely the setting for it. If they resented the attention given to former workspaces and other people's anecdotes, they didn't show it. Andy Klunder's work Opera Lignum was particularly generous in this respect. It allowed us time in the old wood workshop to pick our way across the damp-rippled floor, to inspect redundant safety signage and to ponder disconnected ducting and cables accompanied by his found and reclaimed recordings of active saws and lathes.

Meanwhile, Sarah Bennett’s Institutional Traits (Series 1) stepped beyond the inherent nostalgia of the event to ask some deeper questions about the organisation that was being celebrated. It featured 'mugshot' images enlarged from workplace swipe cards. These scratched and partly obliterated portraits, marked by repeated interaction with the workplace security system, become striking metaphors for the way we are changed by our complicity with institutions, sometimes to the point of self-erasure. I was left thinking of the mark the institution had left not only on myself, but also on the many people unknown to me who inhabited this building over the years

All of the work focused in one way or another on the notion of traces and residues and allowed the audience to imagine themselves as a cohort of ghosts moving through the building.

More than just an exhibition, it was an immensely social experience. Groups of people who had a connection to the institution met for the first time or were reunited after a long break. The exchange of memories - both spoken and unspoken - was incredibly powerful. 

Unfortunately, safety and security requirements meant that our tour was closely supervised, with artists talking about their work as we viewed it. With so little room for discovery and reflection, it became a rather closed experience. It was only when I broke ranks at the end of the tour and went to view the wreckage of my studio space that I began to feel a true sense of loss.

Revisions & Propositions: ERRN took place on 31st March and 1st April 2012 at the former Exeter College of Art & Design, Earl Richards Road North, Exeter.

Revisions & Propositions: http://revisionsandpropositions.newsandmediarepublic.org/artist-2/

Sarah Bennett: http://sarahbennett.org.uk/home.html

Andy Klunder: http://www.klundera.com/index.html

Volkhardt Muller: http://vm.newsandmediarepublic.org/

Lost and found

I'm delighted to have been selected to join The Library of Lost Books, a project that will culminate in an exhibition in the brand new Library of Birmingham when it opens in September 2013.

The project asks artists to engage imaginatively and technically with discarded books, catalogues, music scores and wooden archive boxes from the old library. Our task is to give them a new lease of life as art objects. 

http://thelibraryoflostbooks.blogspot.co.uk/

The Imperfect Nude

If you walked into the current exhibition at Exeter Phoenix without reading the blurb, you might think that you'd stumbled upon yet another show by a Devon art society.  The walls are stacked, floor to ceiling, with over 100 paintings centred on naked figures: some technically good but rather dull, some intriguing, some funny, some a bit tasteless, some downright bad.

However, a closer look tells you something's not quite right. There's a palpable sense of awkwardness, only half covered by a smirking sense of irony. Curators Dan Coombs and Phillip Allen assembled this collection by asking contemporary artists who more usually work in abstract or non-representational ways to respond to the subject of 'The Perfect Nude'.

The curators describe the 'the nude' as being neglected in contemporary art - and perhaps it is, in the sense of the study of a posed model (the late Lucian Freud aside). But, in fact, the naked body is ever-present in contemporary painting: in images appropriated from advertising, newspapers, art history, pornography and other reference sources. And that's largely what's on offer here.

For many contemporary UK artists the thought of standing in a studio, paint brush in hand, scrutinising another living, breathing person is beyond the pale; even though  20 or 30 years ago it was what many artists did, and the life class was still the foundation of any art training. The gallery blurb touches on the argument about the terms naked and nude, pitting art historian Kenneth Clark against art critic John Berger. In fact, many now see the study of the naked human form as an unfit subject for art - both because it implies objectification of the person and because it's been done to death.

Though there are some interesting paintings here, I'm most intrigued by the artists who seem to have cast back to old art school days and produced classically posed 'realistic' nudes, some of which have wobbly unconnected heads, tube-like limbs and poorly delineated hands and feet. Are these deliberately bad paintings? Are these artists presenting themselves to us naked and vulnerable? "I've done my best but see, it's true, many successful modern artists can't represent the human form in paint".

So, is it time to stop being so prudish, face up to our inadequacies and get back to the life room - or was it a lucky escape from an irrelevant, even suspect, genre?
 
The Perfect Nude runs 29 March - 12 May 2012 at Exeter Phoenix Galleries, Bradninch Place, Gandy Street, Exeter, EX4 3LS.http://theperfectnude.wordpress.com 

See also my blog entry about life class http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/naked-truth.html