Written in response to Alias
annual gathering event - Moving Forward
and Staying the Same: Artist Led Evolutions
As AirSpace Gallery enters its ninth year of artist led
activity, we are in the midst of a regular phase of self-reflection and
organisational review. So it was timely then, ahead of an imminent ACE Grants
for the Arts bid for our next 3 years programme, to discover the Alias annual gathering event - Moving Forward and Staying the Same: Artist
Led Evolutions, held at OSR Project
Space in West Coker late last month. Ten invited artists and speakers and
an audience of over 50 artists and artist-led representatives from the South
West considered the future for the artist-led.
Artist-led initiatives are crucial to the overall success of
the country’s visual arts. They offer an alternative to the institutional. Well over 100 such organisations, some funded,
some not, are in operation in the UK today, offering distinctive and diverse, independent,
ambitious, experimental and challenging visual arts programming. At the same
time they create opportunities for each year’s hundreds of new visual arts
graduates, early and mid-career artists, to make, test and exhibit new works. Without
this artist-led activity, the country’s visual art landscape would be somewhat
one-dimensional.
Despite their importance, there are existential challenges,
something that felt visceral in the audience on the day. Former director of
A-N, Susan Jones has posited recently that despite the persistence and
consistency in their modus operandi and aspiration creating considerable
‘cultural capital’ within locations and communities of interest, artist-led
initiatives are often unrecognised and under-rewarded in the palaces of power.
High quality programmes are delivered critically and with enthusiasm, but often
for little or no financial remittance and regularly at the expense of personal
arts practices. And with the prospect of harsher economic times
to come for the arts, it was clear from the day’s talks that artists will have
to become ever more resourceful and self-sufficient in how they proceed.
The first panel discussion looked at mentoring
/ organisational review and its ability to help, to offer support and allow an
organisation to assess its strengths and weaknesses. Funding streams were
explored - such as A-N bursaries - which could facilitate the extended
dispassionate objectivity one gets from a professional independent outsider and
it was interesting too here that suggestion was made of the possibility to look
outside the arts for mentoring - and maybe towards the business sector, in an
attempt to “professionalise”, particularly in the area of funding and
organisational set-up. Tellingly, though,
there was an emphasis on the effectiveness of peer-to-peer mentoring,
cross-organisational support and a sense of artist-led union and co-advocacy,
which can be done with less expense, but can have added value when considering
the advantages of fraternal networking and peer and network strengthening.
Nick Davies’ and Sovay Berriman’s inventive, satirical,
retro-active artist-led runaround game - Blue Sky / Brown Mud, developed
in response to Davies’ commissioned print of the same name, nicely fed into the
afternoon’s panel discussion and an examination of the artist-led’s impact upon,
and responsibility within the wider visual arts sector and the wider cultural
context in which it works. A wide ranging discussion invoked healthy
contribution and debate from the floor, on issues such as gentrification,
access to disused space, public support and a lack of funding. However, for me,
the interest here lay in what is the job of artist-led activity? To whom is it
responsible? Does the presence of some public funding affect the independence
of an artist-led space or can it still be provocative and playful? How much
should the public be considered when devising a programme? And at what point
does the artist-led become institutionalised in its organisational processes.
Of course, there are no easy answers, and certainly none
were settled on the day. It is clearly a matter of individual context. For
instance, a space in London, or, say, Bristol which has a mature institutional
core funded arts sector, allows for that more playful artist-led-as-agitator
space. Here the responsibility can lie with the artist for the artist, and the
public can access the content on the artists’ terms. However, in a city less
culturally endowed or mature such as Stoke-on-Trent, the waters are muddied a
little. AirSpace Gallery, into its 9th year and still operating as
the only contemporary art gallery in a county of over a million people has to
consider its output and responsibilities a little more carefully. There is a
sense of implied institutionalism to that status which means that the balance
between audience and artist has to be a little more equal.
In truth, the whole day could have been given over to
discussing this area, though at its conclusion there was a palpable sense that
the audience were left with good food for thought.
