Grizedale Journeys

by Ruth Barker, 12 Oct 2009

Hello,

On Wednesday this week I went down to Grizedale Arts in Cumbria to attend the Public Art Needs Outsiders seminar event. This was the first in a series of planned events organised by IXIA and Places Matter! in collaboration with Situations, the research and commissioning programme at the University at the West of England.

There was a good bunch of speakers, I felt, and the focus – on an examination of residency models as ways for artists to engage with places that they didn’t call Home – was both broad enough to touch on wider contexts and focussed enough to keep conversation rigorous. I felt that there could have been a better gender balance at the event, as almost all the attendees were women while all the speakers bar one were men, which I did feel was slightly problematic. That said, I wouldn’t fault the approach or presentations of any of the individuals presenting, as they did touch on some interesting topics.

But who were they, and what did they talk about? I hear you ask. Well…

Alistair Hudson, the Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts was first up, and he gave an overview of some of the projects Grizedale has been involved in. He also deconstructed the seminar’s title slightly, to read it as ‘Public Art Needs Outsiders (from outside of art)’. This was an interesting slant, and Alistair expanded on it to state that art needs ‘outsiders’ (ie non-art specialists or contexts) because that is where works’ ‘bite’ or content comes from. Art cannot (he felt) talk about art forever.

Next Andreas Lang of publicworks talked about his experiences as the commissioned artist working on the Creative Egremont project, in which Grizedale worked within the town of Egremont as a cataylst for a range of artworks, events, and moments of change within this small rural community. This is far too big and interesting a project to do justice to here, so take a look over here to learn more.

After lunch (prepared wonderfully by Grizedale’s current artist in residence, who also washed a great many dirty dishes) we heard Paul Domela, Programme Director of the Liverpool Biennial in conversation with Kark-Heinz Klopf, the current artist in residence on Liverpool’s European Biennial Network Residency. Kark-Heinz talked very generously about his practice and the ways in which he has negotiated the city of Liverpool as a visitor as well as as an artist. He spoke very practically about his preference to have a ‘safe space’ away from the locations he was immersing himself in, and also spoke about the importance for him of the duration of the residency. Over the months, he explained, he has had time to review and evolve his first impressions, and his longer term accumulated experience of the city has offered him a very different footing than his initial response to that same place.

Jeanne van Heeswijk, the only female speaker, gave the day’s last presentation, as an artist member of the well known Dutch project The Blue House, which she discussed as an alternative residential model. Again, The Blue House Project does not deserve a swift paraphrase on my part. Just look at this information. Jeanne’s presentation was well balanced and passionate, though I do sense some frustration on the part of some British audiences when presented with seemingly idyllic Nordic/Dutch/Scandanavian projects that do not seem to face the same challanges that they might meet in this country (see N55 as an example of a Danish project which I have seen inspire fury in a Glasgow audience). In many ways I can understand the root of this ambivalence, though I do also think it’s worth seeing these projects for what they are: culturally context-specific engagements that come – undeniabley – from a particular set of circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. Jeanne made some good points, and made them well. She spoke particularly convincingly about the need for a shift in the language, and so the preconceptions, thay we may use to talk about residential projects. We should, she claimed, stop talking about artists ‘working with a community’. Instead she made the case for us to think about how artists can work with ’ a range of experts on location’; a neat shift in perspective that may just shed some light on our journeys through this complex landscape.

The day finished with smaller group discussions, and my group was set the question What are the challenges and pitfalls of negotiating an unfamiliar context as a visiting artist? We didn’t answer it so much as talk around it, and spoke mostly about the importance of commissioners taking risks with the structure and context of residencies, and accepting the possibility of failure and / or the unexpected. It felt like a good place to end up, and with plenty of tea and cake to prepare me for the journey home, I headed for the train, and home to Glasgow.

In other news? What else have I been doing… I went to a few openings, Bik van der Pol, It isn’t what it used to be and will never be again at the CCA in Glasgow (Check out the Loompanics book collection), and The October Show in Transmission; and on Friday I gave a talk to students at Glasgow School of Art, who are embarking on an intriguing collaborative public commission that i hope to tell you more about later… Intrigued? I hope so.

More later,
R