¿AreWeNotDrawnOnwardToNewEra?

Last Saturday I popped in on g39 in Cardiff to say goodbye to their current venue. The three storey town house in Mill Lane has housed the gallery for the last 13 years, and in that time Cardiff has changed around it, it now sits slap-bang in a prime spot near the new shopping centre. The new venue has not yet been announced but, as the palindrome that creates the title for the last exhibition in the venue suggests ¿AreWeNotDrawnOnwardToNewEra?  it's not an ending, but a transition. Here are some images from the day.

On Collecting: Transactions in Contemporary Art

Sorcha Dallas Gallery - Alex Pollard - Collaborations - seen here

I went to a symposium at The National Gallery of Wales yesterday On Collecting: Transactions in Contemporary Art. The event was Chaired by Gordon Dalton from art agency Mermaid & Monster, facilitated by g39, and was part of the Contemporary Art Society's National Network programme for their centenary year. The purpose of the event was to '...investigate the market for contemporary art in Wales.'

Wales, like many regions and cities in Scotland and England has a lack of buyers and collectors. It also lacks the infrastructure to encourage such. There are remarkably few prestigious commercial galleries, Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff being a marked exception, although his approach is a very traditional one.

We heard from a number of engaged and inspirational speakers, Sorcha Dallas who has a contemporary gallery in Glasgow; Karsten Schmitz, German collector and founder of the Stifitung Federkiel, a foundation for contemporary art and culture; Ute Volz, Managing Director of HALLE 14, an arts centre in Leipzig, Germany which was founded and is supported by Karsten Schmitz; Ellen Mara De Wachter Exhibitions Curator of the Zabludowicz Collection in London. We also heard from Nicholas Thornton, Head of Modern & Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Wales about their collections policy.

I went along to hear some ideas about building and encouraging an art buying ecology in Wales. There is no lack of talent, we are particularly well  endowed with creative folk and have many exceptional initiatives and organisations working and innovating. We are beginning to build the critical culture we have been lacking through gallery publications, essays and arts press. Undoubtedly however, there are some missing links.

As Gordon Dalton mentioned in his introduction, a vibrant and well respected art school network is an important ingredient, and it was ironic that the previous day, CSAD in Cardiff had announced the closure of its well respected sculpture department. Last year it scaled back the Time Based Studies element. 

It has been an issue of debate for a very long while, that Wales is not traditionally a visual culture but a literary one. There is not the depth of cultural attachment to the visual image. This has been addressed through various surveys, including Peter Lord's definitive trilogy of books. I think that the newer generations of artists have embraced the issue wholeheartedly and transcended the stereotype, we have many top class artists here who can easily hold their own on the international stage.

This symposium has opened the debate, but I actually left feeling a little disheartened - the amazing projects we heard about seem a long way away from Wales. Sorcha Dallas asserted and reinforced the fact that there is not a collecting culture in Glasgow either, which I found surprising; the ingredients would appear to be in place in a historical city which has a highly respected art school and was the European City of Culture in 1990. 

As Chris Brown from g39 said in his closing statements, it is not wise to try to adopt any model wholesale, there have been a number of notable failures through that approach in Wales. The important thing is the collective will, enthusiasm, persistence, innovation and energy of those working in the arts in whatever capacity, we must all take our part in valuing and promoting our artists and bringing them to the attention of curators, collectors and buyers on the international scene as well as on our own doorsteps.

Buy One Get One Free

Exhibition poster - seen here

I went to a symposium today at West Wales School of the Arts about artist collaborations. Organised by Contextual Studies duo Helen Lindsay and Marilyn Allen (a dynamic duo in their own right!) the day featured presentations from Tracey Warr, Anthony Shapland from Cardiff's g39, Sean Edwards from WARP and Secondeditions

It was a good day, looking at the ways in which visual artists collaborate and some of the issues that are brought to light when they do. Tracey Warr gave an excellent introductory talk sweeping through art historical collaborations from Modernist groups and pairings to contemporary work. She talked about artists she has worked with, collaborating essentially as a curator/writer and the nature of equality in such scenarios. She highlighted the different dimensions of collaboration, the many varied ways in which people come together to make art and the peaks and pitfalls that can be encountered. Warr has published a series of conversations about collaboration - ‘On Collaboration: Interviews with Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey and Phelim McDermott’, Doubt Guardian. In press. 2008.

I have collaborated with other artists and technicians on various occasions and have run into many of the difficult territories discussed. Ideas of ownership, attribution, financial allocation, divergent ideals to name a few. I have also benefited tremendously from the generous and productive aspects of sharing with and learning from other practitioners. It's always a sensitive negotiation and requires a lot of grown up skills to bring the best out of the situation. I was personally a little relieved to find that other artists' collaborations are as individual, particular and potentially contentious as those I have engaged with - phew! I'm normal!

I like the idea Tracey Warr discussed of The Third Mind that can be created through the process of collaborating. A kind of reflexive entity that lets the work find a less ego-bound outcome; an autonomy outside the grasp of the individuals involved.

We heard from Anthony Shapland about the genesis of the hugely influential artists run gallery, g39, its unfolding story and current developments, including WARP, the resource service headed up by practising artist Sean Edwards. The network-style ethos of the project was celebrated at their 10 year celebration exhibition If You Build It They Will Come in 2008.

There were a few interesting suggestions as to why artists working currently have embraced this mode of practice. Perhaps a reaction to a current lack of any genuine political agency; or a compensation for the loss of communism and socialism; even an obfuscation to political action, a muddying of incisive action. My own feeling is that it mirrors the paradigm shifts in all other areas of our lives towards network orientated systems rather than hierarchies - the Internet being a primary expression of that idea. It is perhaps an inevitable outcome of Roland Barthes ideas in Death of the Author. The flip-side - the birth of the reader/viewer becomes a further collaboration, the participating audience. Marcel Duchamp in his 1957 lecture The Creative Act says: "All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

I am engaged in two collaborations at the moment - a forthcoming show with Jacob Whittaker, Absent But Not Forgotten opening in March at The Last Gallery in Llangadog. In May I will show a piece at Rhôd at New Mill, Drefelin on which I will have collaborated on construction and technical issues with Bristol based Marcus FitzGibbon. Two very different types of collaboration. Jacob and I have worked conceptually on the show together from the beginning bringing elements to the project as a whole, the result is conjoined. Marcus is helping me realise my own concept through his construction skills, we've worked together many many times and have an aesthetic shorthand which allows things to emerge quite fluently, he will help me bring my idea into reality and inevitably bring some of his own aesthetic to the project.

I like working with other people, I like the way it forces me to let go control of my entrenched ideas. When it works well the expansive sense of realisation is sublime.

Here's a video clip about the collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat in 1986 - collaboration or Oedipal face-off...? Fascinating.

December 11, Cardiff

tactileBOSCH - Building Up Not Tearing Down

I went to Cardiff yesterday with other west Wales friends to join in with December 11, a day of arts events and visits in Cardiff organised by WARP g39 and Chapter Arts. The day marked the end of an experimental collaboration of artists from Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff.

We started the day at tactileBOSCH to see Building Up Not Tearing Down, an exhibition of residency work from Rhys Coren and Fraser Cook (Bristol), Alistair Owen and Jason Pinder (Cardiff) and Sarah Farmer and Joanne Masding (Birmingham).

The work involved subtle interventions into the gallery space - so subtle indeed that we were required to actively search them out. It's the sort of thing that can be quite intimidating if you're not comfortable in 'Artworld' and not a tactileBOSCH regular, there's a lot of scope for staring at details, trying to work out if they are art or not. Once I'd decided to embrace my self-consciousness, I really enjoyed it; the slight tension and discomfort became part of the experience; all part of the ongoing debate about the nature and function of art. The beauty of the experience was to intimately engage with this amazing, semi-decayed space with its peeling paint, cobwebs, buckets for the leaky ceiling (the most prominent objects in the room - and the first focus of enquiry), odd bits of ironmongery etc. I found myself watching other visitors to see if I could hijack their finds. I watched someone discover a really discreet piece involving guitar strings tautly installed along a number of beams and tuned to different notes - and then enjoyed pinging them myself in his wake. Delicately beautiful, intimate and democratic - the show was a gentle, funny celebration of the space and its artful decay.

Next we went on to Chapter in Canton to see their new show (and the second in the newly refurbished space), Fragile Absolutes by Dubliner, Alan Phelan. The artist gave us all a brief talk about the show, but later we were lucky to get a wee personal tour of the works. A very charming introduction to the show! My favourite piece was Death Drive (interrupt the circular logic of re-establishing balance because he is the lowest outcast) making reference to street racing. I really liked the scent that had been specially commissioned in America for the show which was the orangey smell of the cleaning polish used to buff up the car interiors. This is the second venue of three for the show which alters as it shifts home - the first showing was at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art in Dublin.


Alan Phelan - Fragile Absolutes Death Drive (interrupt the circular logic of re-establishing balance because he is the lowest outcast)- seen here


Alan Phelan - Fragile Absolutes - Seen here

I liked the paper cabbages too - part of an artist workshop with Chapter installed in the gallery. The newspapers are reproductions of stories about industrial and political disputes; nice Art Povera overtones.

Next we trooped off (a weird little snake of artists) through the Cardiff back streets to visit two artist studio complexes, Kings Road Studios and Printhaus...on to The Hayes to watch a publicly screened showing of a Michael Cousins curated series of artists' films outside St. David's Hall...next stop CAI - a new bar and venue in Cathays, a welcome warm up - it was COLD out there!


Kings Road Studios, Cardiff

Last stop was a visit to g39 for a preview of Richard Bevan's show - the gallery is tiny and it was way too cosy to see the work properly - we headed back west.


g39, Cardiff