Flashpoint : Artists Taking the Initiative
by Fergus Murray
January 2000, Penzance
This seminar aimed at helping artists put creative ideas into practice. It looked at the need to balance inspiration and imagination with being well informed and organised, and considered how artists can track down the right advice and funding networks.
Common Themes
50 artists attended the seminar - 49 from Cornwall - and more than 20 others were turned away. The majority of participants were in the 30 - 50 age range, and 72% were women. All the speakers - Gillian Cooper from Bristol, Stuart Croft from UNIT in London and Helen Smith from the Waygood Gallery in Newcastle - had at one time or another found themselves in that frustrating place of working in a studio and waiting to be discovered or for something dramatic and decisive to happen. The very clear message that came out from all three speakers was both the importance of this place of frustration and disillusionment as a starting point and the need to take the initiative.
Many visual artists are still weighed down by the grand illusion of the modernist artist who bursts onto the scene and takes the world by storm. This image is incredibly powerful and for all but a handful of artists it proves to be a bitter and debilitating mirage.
First Steps
A first step for all speakers was to join some kind of artists’ group but all seemed to find these frustrating. There was too much hassle and argument, or the group became stolid and insular. In many ways, first steps reproduced the sense of frustration that the artists had experienced individually. The artists found they were showing their work largely to other artists in a limited circle of acquaintance and energy. This was an important phase in terms of beginning to establish networks and build knowledge resources but it didn’t appear to be doing the trick.
Breaking Out
A decisive step for all three speakers was breaking free of the illusion that someone or something was going to catapult them into a fairy tale of artistic splendour. There was also a need to gain some distance from colleagues and friends, to get a critical distance from the known and safe worlds they had created.
Helen simply decided to go it alone. She had been involved in three artists groups and had her fill of them. She went out into the world, found a warehouse in central Newcastle, put together some simple costings and set up an artist-led gallery supported by the rental income from studio space she let out in the warehouse. “People will stick and I’ll decide who I work with.”
Stuart was doing technician jobs, making work but not showing it. He got together with 7 other artists, and found a small and cheap space in East London. They decided to put on seven shows in seven months with each artist curating one of the shows.
‘We chose each other carefully and put together a wide range of skills. We weren’t great buddies but we were more or less working at the same level.’
Gilly had already had experience of setting up a studio group. She wanted to reach new audiences for her work and create a richer dialogue around the work and with an audience. From doing site specific work in abandoned shop units in Bristol she hatched an idea to put on a one day, 18 artist series of site specific pieces in public spaces in Bristol called Out of Place. With a Lottery A4E grant of £3,000 she set out on a new artistic course of action.
“The group had become inward looking. We didn’t seem to be connecting beyond a limited circle of artists looking at each others work. I wanted something different. But I didn’t really know what.”
But what about my work?
Some artists at the seminar reacted with shock to these stories, as if they had found a bunch of heretics in their midst. ‘But what about your work’, they asked, aghast that an artist could be anything other than an obsessive producer of work.
This was not a problem for the speakers. They did not see ‘the work’ as something separate from their organising and curating activities. Rather, they saw them as two mutually supportive and inter-locking processes with the one feeding the other. Putting on shows, selecting artists, seeking out funding were vital elements of the story. They built up networks, contacts and stores of knowledge and experience.
It was as if all three speakers had at one point decided to stop banging their heads against the block-built walls of a studio and find some other way to be an artist. This didn’t necessarily work first time. The initiatives they took and developed with others didn’t set out to change the world, and they didn’t expect to achieve much. But behind all three initiatives was the quiet determination to achieve something and to learn something in a world that often feels overfull of art, artists and artists groups.
If you like, taking that first step and breaking with an established orthodoxy is about putting a certain sense of identity as an artist at risk. It is about being open to change and contingency. Its about making a huge and determined investment in a new direction and not getting too hung up about whether you are being an artist in the ‘right way’ or not.
The lightness of being an artist-led project
It’s a well worn saying that altruism has a short shelf life. And the figure of the embittered artist turned administrator for an uncaring world is one most people will recognise. But the speakers didn’t see their efforts as altruistic. They all had kept a lightness of touch. In short, they’d taken on what they felt energised to do and they were not tied to projects that had become an albatross around their martyred necks.
Perhaps importantly, only one of the projects was linked to a building in a permanent way. But even here this became a base for putting on shows in other less permanent spaces and places. The first years of Arts Council Lottery led many artists into the labyrinthine world of major capital funding projects for workspace and permanent galleries. This is a hungry world of bureaucracy, scoring criteria, outputs and appraisals that devours the unwary for years of their lives. The speakers at the seminar had by and large avoided the temptations and pitfalls of large infrastructural projects.
This poses a dilemma for artists in that the infrastructure of workspace, networks, training and professional development, marketing and production resources are all crucial for a thriving arts practice. To a greater or lesser degree that speakers came from urban areas - Bristol, Newcastle and London - where that infrastructure already exists. This is not the case in much of the South West. If artists don’t initiate the development of this infrastructure there appears to be noone else who will. Government tends to be reactive and directs the majority of its arts funding to supporting the tried and tested big institutions. Regional arts boards often appear unable to initiate a needs-led process of infrastructural development in their areas but they are more and less aware of artists’ productive infrastructure needs.
So how do you do it?
These are a few of the tips that came from the different speakers:
• Be humble, be bold.
• Don’t expect to change the world with your first shot.
• Do whatever you do with commitment and the highest degree of professionalism you can muster.
• Challenge yourself and your idea of yourself as an artist.
• Set Deadlines - a commitment without a deadline is little more than a passing fancy.
• Be flexible and open to change.
• Don’t just work with your mates.
• Look for people you can work with and disagree with.
• Pool different and complimentary skills and experiences.
• You’ll have something in your locker that someone else has not got. Sometimes it just takes time to recognise it.
• Have fun.
• See your art practice as a process of engagement and dialogue with people, ideas and materials and not just (or even primarily) the production of ‘the work’.
• Develop a widening range of skills, experiences, contacts and knowledge.
• Keep track of and document your developing skills in a CV - you’ll be surprised how quickly you can develop.