Sluice magazine - Autumn 2017 (Sluice Biennial) by Sluice art

SPONS OR S

How is value defined?

This October the Sluice Biennial finds itself located in the middle of a designer-discount retail hub in Hackney Central. Until recently Hackney was known for having the highest concentration of artists in Europe, and as with any gentrifying area this was a transitory state. In many ways, a high-end discount retail development is the legacy that artists have gifted Hackney. Whether you read this as an indictment or not is likely tied to your views on how instrumentalisation plays out. Pallas Projects (p. 64) offer their view, informed by twentyone years of navigating the ebb and flow of socio-economic change in Dublin, Ireland. Often artists are viewed (and view themselves) as estranged from the working-class struggles of the communities they’re embedded in. By addressing sustainability head on, dkuk (p. 6) is actively confronting this dislocation from the existential realities of the community.

Julia Gat SARA

Art, like designer fashion, relies on exclusivity to achieve and maintain financial value. But Sluice is predicated on locating and quantifying value in places other than the price tag. For instance, Ian Hunter (p. 12) asks what value can be assigned to an artwork of historical and educational significance. The values we’re preoccupied with are tied to ideas of authenticity. Authenticity is tricky, for instance it’s easy to be authentically inauthentic. Authenticity is not synonymous with truth. In her review of Edward Said’s book, Representations of the Intellectual (p. 42), Rosanna van Mierlo posits the artist-asamateur as a defence against neoliberalism expressed as professionalism. Perhaps this idea of artists-as-innocents is a convenient prop to excuse us from being accountable for our complicity in neoliberal acts of artwashing, or perhaps our amateurish authenticity is a reflection of a survival strategy, against the vice-like grip we feel neoliberalism has over our existence. These questions are not all resolved in this magazine, or indeed at the Sluice Biennial, however, as the next wave of development washes through Hackney – they are all pertinent. 3

Do we believe in the art we’re making or just in the importance that we continue to do so?

6 Sluice interviews dkuk’s Daniel Kelly 12 Saving Kurt Schwitters’ Cumbrian Merz Barn project

Publishing Director Karl England Editor Natasha Kahn editor@sluice.info Associate Editors Ben Street Charlie Levine charlie@sluice.info Book Review Editor Rosanna van Mierlo rosie@sluice.info

Ian Hunter

Publisher Sluice www.sluice.info

18 Guston’s Pantheon

Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters info@chkdesign.com www.chkdesign.com

Ben Street

Lettering All fonts by Colophon www.colophon-foundry.org

23 The Supplement Ladies of the Press

Cover Stefan Riebel Distribution Central Books www.centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info www.sluice.info

29 Immersion Christopher Stout

32 SARA

A photo essay Julia Gat

40 Five types of art writer you should die before you see

Unsolicited material cannot be returned, though all correspondence will be passed on to the editor. The views expressed in Sluice are not necessarily those of the publishers ©2017 ISSN 2398-8398 EAN 9772398839005 Unauthorised copying, hiring or lending of this magazine is prohibited Subscriptions subscribe online at www.sluice.info

Alistair Gentry

Acknowledgements Guy Nicholson Andrew Sissons Jack Basrawy Richard Stanley Sarah England Sanjay Bremakumar Lucy Cobb Marie Kyriacou-Edwards Ted Haddon Kristian Müller

42 The artist as amateur Book review Rosanna van Mierlo

44 A distracted tour through Germany A photo essay Charlie Levine

52 Institut Für Alles Mögliche Stefan Riebel

64 Pallas Projects

Mark Cullen & Gavin Murphy

72 Artist-run Index: B 5

INTE R VI EW

Sluice interviews dkuk Daniel Kelly

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DK sluice

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Sluice: A few years ago you staged some talks called ‘Capitalist Artist Scum’ which were about looking at ways artists fund their practice… And how artists earn a living… Did you learn anything from the talks, did they inform dkuk as a project? Use a catchy title. It was a very hot topic, it’s the closest thing I’ve ever done that got close to going viral, it really caught the imagination, and what we wanted to do was start a debate. I was basically struggling to find other models that work in the same way as this works. Where trade rubs up against art practice. So we wanted to start a conversation about how artists support themselves, living in a really expensive city. It was a hot topic, but we found that there weren’t many other businesses that were doing what I’m doing here. So do you see this as a business rubbing up against an art practice, and not that the business is part of your expanded practice? Yeah, well, it’s very slippery, the honest answer is it depends on who I’m talking to. So sometimes you’re cutting hair and sometimes cutting hair is making art? I think all the time I’m just working. You know, it’s just different kinds of work. I mean, I still think of myself as an artist but I’m running a business and whether that’s an artistic practice or just a job, is kind of irrelevant. This has a lot in common with what I was interested in as an artist. Showing art in unusual places, showing art to new audiences and it’s got this political element about the funding of the arts. So it sort of satisfies the craving and urges in me to make art. If I’m talking to clients I don’t really describe it as an artwork, because we don’t want clients to feel like they’re participants in an artwork, and this is why it’s interesting, they’re coming and paying for a service, getting exactly what they want, whilst looking at art. 7

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Sluice is an expanded artwork essentially, but not everyone needs to know that, as for some it’s just a platform for galleries to exhibit and that’s okay. Do you think it’s possible to occupy both positions simultaneously? I always think of ‘Acid Brass’, the Jeremy Deller project that started as an artwork but ended up as just a great album. When it was released a lot of people didn’t know its origins, does that matter? I don’t think it does. I think if you can do something that crosses over in that way, that’s interesting. There’s an Eddie Izzard bit where he places the super-cool and the superuncool at either end of a circular continuum, so they’re at opposite ends of this line but they’re also right next to each other, dkuk occupies a similar area in relation to art in cafes, everyone knows not to exhibit their work in cafes, and yet dkuk is super-cool. How do artists approach this, is it something that’s acknowledged? I often reference the cafés, and I think the fundamental difference is [in cafes] the art is subservient to the business, it’s there to decorate it and not get in the way. Whereas here what I’m striving for is an equal balance between the work and the business. The space has changed a lot. Before, it was like a gallery where people came to get their hair cut, mainly artists and arty people. Now, this is the first show I’ve done where we’ve got the refit with the window with the shampoo in it, which helps make it look like a hairdressing salon, that was part of the Sam Jacob redesign. And for the first time we’re showing paintings, which look like art. 60% of our audience don’t usually go to galleries, which obviously no gallery can claim! That’s fucking great. That’s what motivates me. For the last show we had two hundred people come in for haircuts, they’re all participants. So that’s not just an audience, they are participating in the project. Some people come who aren’t interested in art, but just don’t like looking in the mirror. So yeah, there’s no great masterplan. I just trained as a hairdresser, got bored, moved to London, went to art college, didn’t really want to work in the commercial art world. It was just putting together my skills in life really. dkuk.biz

I just trained as a hairdresser, got bored, moved to London, went to art college

Ian Hunter

Saving Kurt Schwitters’ 12

Cumbrian Merz Barn project 13

The Merz Barn project is located in the Langdale valley in the Lake District National Park near Ambleside. It was Kurt Schwitters’ third and final Merzbau (after projects in Hannover and Norway) – in essence pioneering hybrid art and architectural experiments

A wide-ranging and eclectic artist, Kurt Schwitters maintained a prolific output of new artworks (painting, sculpture, drawings, collages, poetry, performances and music/audio art) throughout his entire life and career – works that today are regarded as being some of the major influences in the development of early Modernism. However, it is for the Merzbauten art and installation projects that Schwitters is mostly remembered and venerated by contemporary artists and architects. One of the best-known is his first Merzbau in Hannover, Germany, which he constructed inside his parents’ apartment building in Waldenhausstraße during the early 1920s and finished around 1936/1937. Schwitters left Germany for exile following the rise of Nazism in the mid 1930s. He travelled first to Norway and later, after the German invasion in May 1940, to Britain, where he was to remain as a refugee artist until his death in Kendal at the age of 60 in early 1948. After a period of internment on the Isle of Man, Schwitters moved to London where he lived during the war. There he associated with other leading British and émigré artists like Paul Nash, Naum Gabo and Moholy Nagy. At the end of the war he came up to live in Ambleside with his English partner Edith Thomas. His portrait commissions, as well as the sale of his flower and landscape paintings to locals and occasional tourists, earned him a meagre living, however, his dream was to begin work on a new Merzbau project. This opportunity came about partly by chance in early 1947 when Schwitters went to paint the portrait of Harry Pierce, a smallholder and landscape garden designer who lived on a farm near the village of Elterwater in the Langdale valley. Initially seeking a studio, Schwitters later asked Pierce if he could use a small stone shed on the property as the site for another Merzbau installation project. Pierce agreed and, fortuitously, Schwitters also received a Fellowship award for $1,000 from MoMA, New York. MoMA had expressed an interest in supporting Schwitters’ return to Hannover to try and recover and repair the original Merzbau that had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. In the summer of 1947, unaware that he was to die less than six months later, Schwitters started work on what he later called the Merz Barn. He began by covering the walls in a collage of found materials (glass, broken wheels, local slate and tins – all of which he bound together with plaster). Despite his increasing ill health, he managed to partly complete the end wall, which survived on after his death. Although only a small fragment of what would have been a fully-blown, interior architectural installation, the unfinished Merz Barn has attracted the interest of many artists over the years. In 1965 Richard Hamilton, then a lecturer at Newcastle University, arranged to have the Merz Barn wall artwork taken out and removed to the University, where it was later installed as a permanent part of the University’s Hatton Gallery. Some 60 years later, in November 2006, the Littoral Arts Trust raised the funding from the Northern Rock Foundation (and also via a major donation of £150,000 from Damien Hirst) to acquire the Merz Barn and begin to look after it. Although now only an empty shell, the Merz Barn building is considered to be an important piece of national heritage, and artists and architects including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley and the late Zaha Hadid have all made financial donations towards its ongoing upkeep and restoration. Initially the Littoral Arts Trust took the project on as an interim arrangement which, after tidying the place up (the site had been neglected for about 30 years), it had hoped could then

be handed over to some larger institution with the staffing and financial resources capable of managing and developing the project to its full potential. It was offered gratis to the Tate and MoMA, but both declined the offer. At this point the Trust had been an Arts Council rfo for a number of years, and it was on this basis, and with some encouragement1 from the Arts Council that the Trust agreed to continue to look after and maintain the site. In late 2010, ahead of the introduction of the new npo scheme, the Trust had a meeting at ace hq with Richard Russell (ace strategic partnerships Director) and Paul Glinkowski. Both actively encouraged the Trust to continue to care for and develop the Merz Barn site as a place for contemporary artists and the general public, and that the Trust should apply under their new npo scheme. However, the Trust’s npo bid was later rejected by ace, who stated that while the Trust’s professional record and the actual npo bid itself were good, the npo process itself was very competitive and the level of Arts Lottery funding was not available at that time to make an award to the Merz Barn project. In April 2012 Alan Davey, then ace ceo, and Vivienne Bennett (ace Head of Visual Arts) came up to visit the Merz Barn site. Having explained our disappointment about the npo decision, they assured us that they were fully supportive of our efforts to continue with development of the Merz Barn project as a site for contemporary artists and related public arts projects. They also agreed that the Merz Barn was a site of great national and international artistic and cultural importance and that a joint ace/Heritage Lottery funding bid would also be looked upon favourably by the Arts Council. Meanwhile the Trust had persuaded Sir Nicholas Serota and tb Director Penelope Curtis to stage a major Kurt Schwitters in Britain survey exhibition, which duly opened at Tate Britain in January 2013. However, an earlier proposal to the Arts Council for some Arts Lottery funding to commission a Merzbau architectural pavilion outside the gallery to coincide with the exhibition was declined – even though the Trust had managed to interest leading international architect Rem Koolhass to design it. Following this the Trust agreed with ace to undertake a major feasibility study and report setting out the future developmental options for the Merz Barn site, including some detailed proposals for both the heritage elements and the site’s use, mostly to support a range of future contemporary arts programmes. The Arts Council later awarded the Trust £38,000 for this work, all of which was paid out by the Trust directly to outside independent consultants, as well as three public consultation conferences in London, Cumbria and Manchester.

Although fully aware that the Trust’s Director and Chairperson were by then having to fund the Merz Barn project from their own personal savings and meagre pension incomes, ace repeatedly refused to allow the Trust any funding for the ongoing upkeep or management of the site during the 18-month period of the consultancy: July 2014 – December 2016. A decision that the Trust described in a letter of appeal to the ace North Director and its Chairman, Joe Docherty as ‘draconian’ and very unfair. However, they remained unmoved. The ‘Future of the Merz Barn’ report was presented to the Arts Council at the end of 2016, with as its lead, independent consultant Professor John Holden, who supported all the key recommendations tabled by the report’s other consultants (architecture, landscape, heritage, finance/governance, curatorial, public art etc), along with a detailed and exhaustive analysis of the project’s three main future developmental options. In February 2016, the Arts Council rejected the report’s recommendations as inadequate and in a covering letter stated that, as it was unlikely that the Merz Barn project would qualify in the future for Arts Lottery capital funding, the Trustees were at liberty to consider selling off the Merz Barn site on the open property market.2 Unfortunately, the Merz Barn was also badly damaged in the winter storms of 2015/16 and so the Trust launched an international appeal in February 2016. Amazingly, by June, it had managed to secure about £60,000 in donations and grant awards towards the cost of the capital work repairs, from Cumbrian, regional and international donors, including the late Zaha Hadid. However, our request to the Arts Council for access to some modest levels of Arts Lottery funding (in this instance approx £5,000) for the overall Merz Barn re-establishment fund was also rejected. At this point, and understandably after four ace rejections, the Trust felt that any further Arts Lottery funding bids to ace would be pointless. However, by the summer of 2016 the Arts Council seemed to have had a change of heart, and over the space of a month we received two (unsolicited) communications from ace3 suggesting that we could apply at any point for Arts Lottery funding under their Grants for the Arts. Despite earlier misgivings, the Trust submitted a Grants for the Arts bid in early 2017 for £75,000 . This was for a one year arts development programme, including some regional children’s arts projects, several artists residencies, a major public art commission4 and also some modest running and project support costs. This was mainly to support the 70th anniversary commemoration and public celebrations of Schwitters’ Merz Barn project in Cumbria and nationally. Again the Arts Council rejected the bid stating that, while the bid scored well on the Arts Lottery assessment, as competition for available Arts Lottery funding was such that no Arts Lottery funding was available to give the project. And again suggesting that the Trustees consider the ‘Z’ options, i.e. disposing of the Merz Barn on the open property market. Making it the fifth reject for Arts Lottery funding for the Merz Barn project in 6 years. This has put the Littoral Arts Trust in a very difficult position. And all this despite the considerable national and international historical and artistic importance of the project that has been acknowledged by the former Arts Minister Ed Vaizey, also leading cultural commentators such Lord Melvyn Bragg, who described it as “an outstanding contribution to the understanding of contemporary art” not only in the uk, but across the world. Artist Anish Kapoor has also recently

In February 2016, the Arts Council rejected the report’s recommendations as inadequate

All photographs by Natasha Kahn

expressed concern at the possibility that the barn could be sold to developers and its legacy destroyed. Artist Jann Haworth, who co-created the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover with Peter Blake, has also commented on the Arts Council’s latest negative decision, saying: “[The potential loss of the barn] was a terrible reflection of indifference and carelessness for a national treasure… Schwitters’ project in the Lake District can be set as a triumph of what is best about Great Britain: its historic tolerance and welcome, or as a sign of its degradation into small mindedness and bitterness.” Professor John Holden in the preface to the ‘Future of the Merz Barn’ report also summed up the situation very well stating that: “The UK has an international moral responsibility to safeguard the future survival of Kurt Schwitters’ last Merzbau, the Elterwater Merz Barn, which is an acclaimed pioneering and experimental site for modern art and architecture.” The above statement says it all as far as the Littoral Arts Trust is concerned. And we are hoping that the new Chairman of the Arts Council, Sir Nicholas Serota and ceo Darren Henley will now also be prepared to acknowledge this important national and international cultural responsibility, and help us to develop Kurt Schwitters wonderful Merz Barn site. Also that it is quite unfair and unreasonable of the Arts Council to expect two pension-age artists in their 70s and 80s to have to continue to fund the upkeep and development of a national art project by selling off their homes to pay for it, as we have had to do. And as to our future plans? We will aim to try and keep the project going as long as we can with whatever funding support and resources we can muster. We are also inviting any interested artists, curators, academics and students to come up and visit the Merz Barn site and see for themselves what we are doing here and also learn something about the project’s future development. We have some limited accommodation available on site and everybody who comes is assured a very warm Merz welcome. We are also looking for volunteers who might wish to come and help us on site. Please contact Ian or Celia for further information.

Notes 1. The Arts Council also awarded the Trust £150,000 Arts Lottery capital funding in 2009, to develop the site buildings to house a contemporary gallery, art workshops for artists and also some remedial work on the Merz Barn itself. These arts facilities continue to be used by the public and artists. 2. The ‘Z’ option was oulined by the Trust in a supporting letter to the Arts Council at the time. Explaining that if the project failed to secure Arts Lottery funding for the third time (2016), then it was likely that the Trust would have to sell the project, as the Trust had no other likely sources of funding to mainatin the project, other that with the limited personal savings and pension income of the project’s two directors, Celia Larner and Ian Hunter. 3. From Alison Clark Jenkins (ACE Director Combined arts) and Sir Peter Bazalgette, then ACE Chairman. 4. The Trust had then also been in discussions with Anish Kapoor about the possibility of his designing a future Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Museum. Anish was very interested in the idea, and this too was mentioned in our Arts Lottery bid to the arts council as evidence of the very high level of interest and support that the Merz Barn project was attracting, and in support of the 70th anniversary celebrations for the Merz Barn.

merzbarn.net

Ben Street

Guston’s Pantheon

I’m always fascinated when the present and the past of art touch. And an artist I’ve been interested in for a very long time is Philip Guston. And he’s an artist a lot of people are very familiar with, and the painting I’m going to talk about may be very familiar too 18

A transcript of a talk

Sound of audience members settling in their seats – creaks, etc. One cough. It’s something that’s become more important to me recently, but just let me tell you about the work. Sound of machinery being operated – clicks, etc. This is a painting called Pantheon from 1973. It’s in a private collection upstate in Woodstock, which is where Guston painted. Guston was a very well regarded Abstract Expressionist painter who famously had [inaudible] in the late 1960s and turned his back on abstraction, and moved back to what he’d started with, which was a kind of figuration. But when the figure returns in Guston’s paintings at the end of his life, it comes back as a kind of nightmarish cartoon. Sound of a chair being scraped back. Quiet whispers, two different voices. One cough. Coming partly out of Krazy Kat, and partly out of early Renaissance painting painters like Paulo Uccello. This is a painting he made just after the controversy of his last period of painting had really hit New York after his last gallery show there in 1970. He spent about 18 months in Rome. One cough. When he came back from Rome he made this painting, Pantheon. Pantheon is [inaudible] a pantheon is a group of heroes in a sense, the Greek or Roman Pantheon of gods. This is Guston’s Pantheon of gods. It’s a Pantheon of Italian artists, whose names are written or painted onto the surface of the canvas itself. They are artists that start with Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Tiepolo and finally De Chirico – Italian artists starting in the 14th and ending in the 20th century. [Inaudible] also on the canvas are two objects that are related to the practice of being a painter. Sneeze. Whisper, male voice. Two chairs scraping on floor. We have a cartoonish version of two objects that are associated for Guston with the practice of being in the studio. One is a lightbulb hanging down, and the other is an easel with a blank canvas on it. So it relates to the daily practice of being an artist. The painting itself is really [inaudible], because it’s not obviously indebted to any of those artists. When you read the names of the artists and you see the style of the painting, these seem to be slightly at odds with each other. Two coughs. Door opening and suddenly closing. What Guston found in the art of the early Renaissance with people like Piero or Giotto was a kind of awkwardness. A clumsiness, a heaviness about the way objects and people are represented. There’s a kind of strange modernism to someone like Giotto, he’s often presented – [inaudible] - when you look at 19

One Onecough. cough. Chair Chairscraped scrapedback. back. Distant Distantcar caralarm alarmbegins. begins. Guston and you look at Giotto, he doesn’t look like a starting point, he looks like a pinnacle. He looks like it can’t get any better than that. Loud ringtone – ‘Sorry’ by Justin Bieber. Sudden increase in volume, then stops. Two short laughs. Chair scraped back. One cough. And that’s the way an artist can change the way we see the art of the past. Now the reason why this has been important to me recently – this painting – and why Philip Guston has been a important figure to me for a very long time is – one of my favourite books about him, written by his daughter, is called [name removed]. It’s an amazing book to read, but it’s also been important to me because of David Bowie. So I wanted to talk about Guston, but I also wanted to talk about Bowie, who’s much more important as far as I’m concerned, a much more important artist than Guston [inaudible]. One cough. Whispered voice, male. There’s a great article, essay I was reading in Frieze Magazine, by Dan Fox. It’s an essay called [name removed] and it’s a brilliant essay. And it’s about how Bowie through his music, and through his sleeve notes, and through his interviews and through his presence became a conduit for lots of aspects of culture that perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise been accessed, by people listening to his music. So if you listen to [name removed] which came out a little before this painting was made, you’d have references to Nietzsche and to Brecht, and to all manner of cultural figures you might not have otherwise discovered. If you listen to his music you discover Chris Burden or any number of writers and figures of the past. Bowie was an enthusiast, an amateur in the true sense of the word. One cough. Chair scraped back. Distant car alarm begins. That’s why I mention him in relation to this painting, because Guston was in a way the same. Guston was a kind of one-man art school. And I’m interested in that, because I work in museum and gallery education, there is a body of knowledge which exists as text which is called art history, which is slightly separate from the practice of being an artist. It’s not usually done by artists. It’s usually done by people like me, who aren’t artists. One short laugh. People who are writers or scholars. But there is an art history that exists already, within artistic practice. I’ve often thought one of the best kind of responses to Las Meninas by Velázquez was by Picasso. That room of paintings in the [inaudible], which is in a way more eloquent about what Velázquez is about and what Picasso is about than any number of essays you could read about the subject. So going back to Guston, 1973, which Bowie fans will know as the year that 20

[name removed] came out, the album after [name removed], Guston is showing you this Pantheon – this list, this shopping list of great Italian artists – One cough. But because he’s doing it within this style – within this slightly wilfully hamfisted or wilfully awkward style – we are experiencing those artists’ works through Guston’s own language, which is the same way that we might experience the culture that Bowie talked about through his music. We experience Andy Warhol through the song [name removed] by David Bowie, which is how I came to be interested in Andy Warhol – that was my conduit. [Name removed] was how I got into Bob Dylan. So these are the roots by which culture happens. Whisper, female voice. Whisper, male voice. Sound of small object (pen?) falling on concrete floor. Short scuffle as object (pen?) is retrieved. One cough. I guess what I’m talking about is an alternative form of art history, that doesn’t exist outside of itself, but does exist within the practice of art itself. If you were to look at the work of the artists that are listed in the Guston painting, that’s what they did too. Masaccio in the 1420s looks back to classical art and brings it in, changes the way space is created and thought of within a painting. He’s interpreting the past for you, bringing it back into focus just the way Guston does. Some people may roll their eyes and think: Guston’s been done, Guston’s [inaudible]… Of course, when Guston’s late work was shown, the famous criticism of it was by Kramer – it always comes up in relation to the late work. When Kramer said that Guston’s late work was the work of a mandarin posing as a stumblebum. One cough. Sound of door opening. Which is a brilliant line – a mandarin, somebody whose brilliant kind of natural making of this shimmering delicate impressionistic abstract art posing as a stumblebum, pretending to be a fool, pretending to be a jester. What happens though is that history was not on Hilton Kramer’s side. Guston’s work not only has been immensely important for artistic practice since his death in 1980, but it’s also been, and this is where it comes into focus for me, really important to the way we understand the history of painting. When we think about what came before, the way the past [inaudible]. One cough. Distant car alarm ends. 21

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Get hooked on Belle ♥ The camera looks down and the girl looks up. The doe-eyed, duck-lipped model is seated next to a bookshelf with what appears as a couple of seemingly fake antique books in English and a vintage suitcase lined up next to what appears like a white IKEA bookshelf, which feels like a bit of a farce considering this is a half page advert for a Tokyo hairdresser. Her pose is known as the ‘PE squat’ in this part of the world: it usually comes with visual associations of teenagers in bloomers. The model, aptly, is wearing some form of casual shorts and socks donning a vacuous, innocent looking expression, as though she is ready and eager to be pounced on. The photo is exceptionally overexposed, leaving the girl’s skin looking bleached – one can barely discern what’s wall and what’s knee. The blurb next to the photo reads: “Foreigner style colour”, in reference to her bleached brunette hair. Read: let us help you look as caucasian as we can. The hairdressing salon is called ‘Belle’.

Become clever and cute with organic colouring ♥ Boasting a good location near a central station in the Japanese capital, this allegedly popular hairdresser once again promises foreigner-esque hair and the added benefit of ‘looking clever and cute’. Eager to discover the logic behind their hypothesis on the relationship between a female consumer’s intellect and the exact shape in which their hair is shaped and coloured, we have analysed the accompanying photo and concluded that opting for a burnt umber shade and a little bit of hair tong action in your shoulder area creates a fleeting sense of cleverness in the vein of the well behaved girl that sat next to you in class with good grades (who you secretly fancied). She is clever enough to keep a job, but crucially, not so clever that it would intimidate the viewer and break their sense of superiority.

SOURCE: HOT PEPPER JULY 2017, KICHIJOJI ISSUE (TOKYO)

Immersion (Piss Christ) is a notorious photograph shot by Andres Serrano in 1987. Its prominence transcended art world conversations and became an item of national and cultural debate, specifically as to what kind of art should be funded with our U.S. tax money. Andres Serrano also became notable as a member of the FEARSOME FOUR, which was the term given to the 4 artists whose work was called into question as an impetus for shutting down the National Endowment for the Arts. Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, David Wojnarowicz and Andres Serrano were the members of the FEARSOME FOUR, they are all visual artists; two of them are still making notable work, and two of them tragically died from AIDS. The image, ‘Piss Christ’, is an image of a mystical feeling, small plastic crucifix; which is photographed swathed in an amber glow. The Christ figure is bathed in light; however the title of the work brings the viewer with a realisation that the image has been achieved by floating the crucifix in the liquid of thick, rotten urine. The piece is named Immersion, but it’s colloquially just known as ‘Piss Christ’. This photograph was first shown by my gallerist hero Stefan Stux, at his then SoHo gallery on Spring Street in New York. In 1989, the work became known to people from outside the art world and then quickly escalated to became a conversation point by Conservative politician and House of Representatives member Jesse Helms and members of the Bush administration, in protesting that Federal grant money had been used to produce the work. Ultimately because of the scandal, NEA chairman John Frohnmayer resigned and the budget for the organisation was markedly reduced. These many years later, conservative politicians still call for the shutdown on the NEA and most recently President Trump proposed eliminating funds from the NEA. Instead of launching into a discussion about national politics, let me reframe our conversation on why this image is important to me. At the time of the controversy surrounding ‘Piss Christ’, I was a very young teenager. I didn’t live in New York City. In fact, I lived in small town America. Our school didn’t have a well-developed art programme; contemporary visual art was not part of our curriculum. I studied music and I took piano lessons – but just the concept of living in New York City and making work with my hands and of having the ambition to use my mind as a cultural vocation just wasn’t in the set of things that I could do. I specifically remember reading an article about the work in the summer of 1990 in Newsweek Magazine and being in wonder about the image on the cover, and how people were so upset at this crazy thing, at this thing that looked so beautiful. I noted how the artist in this work had changed our feelings about it by just one little thing. The addition of the word ‘piss’ in the title had the awesome power to shift everyone’s perception of what this beautiful work might actually be about. And here we are 30 years later, and in this country if you’re an individual artist you can’t get direct Federal grant funding because we’ve set all sorts of special laws to insure ‘Piss Christ’ does not happen again using taxpayers’ money in America.

If you’re an individual artist you can’t get direct Federal grant funding because we’ve set all sorts of special laws to insure ‘Piss Christ’ does not happen again by taxpayer money in America

It is imperative that the mindset of the avant-garde be included in the art of our future This image opened my mind and set me on a course, and these many years later, I’m here and I’m a part of this New York art world and this image is certainly a reason why. I have a studio in Bushwick where I make work, I show my art with a gallery in the Lower East Side, I curate, I write articles about art, I organise artist talks and panel discussions, and most recently I founded, and own a gallery that is now in its second year here in Bushwick. The work I show in my gallery is different from the work I make in my studio. Our programme is specifically about difficult and subversive art. In our brief history, we’ve shown some specific pieces at my space (e.g. The Donald Trump Tombstone) that have been reported about around the world. Some of our shows have perhaps started similar conversations outside of the art world and in popular culture about art and the definition of art. Our gallery (and the work that we have shown) has sometimes been mocked by the Conservative media around the country and we’ve received death threats and hired security for some of our shows because of it. These things certainly feel a little like the scenario I’ve described in the controversy surrounding ‘Piss Christ’; however, New York is a profoundly different city in 2016 than she was in 1990. When I decided to write the business plan for my gallery, there was a storm of conversation about the subject of gentrification, and this charged word certainly means different things to different demographics of people, including artists. While I was forming my gallery, I was reading op-ed articles decrying about how as New York City has become wealthier, the artist way of life has been dying and the cost of living has set the production of art in New York City in danger of extinction. Similarly, art-world people have started talking about the cost of an arts education. Like never before, artists are now consumed with a conviction that they NEED AN MFA to be valid, and so they are walking around in mountains of loan debt; and it is directly informing the kind of work they make… because they are now thinking, “I have to make this money back… I have to clear my debt… I have to make my rent”. And they are feeling a pressure to make work that fits a market niche instead of a philosophical one. They say if you can make it here you can make it anywhere; however, it’s also true that ARTISTS have often fought against DIFFERENT ISSUES at different points of history in New York City. In the 1980s/1990s, artists in New York City were fighting against extinction by AIDS, the crack epidemic and rampant crime. The big THING we as New Yorkers in the arts seem to be fighting TODAY is this financial thing which sometimes feels equally hard, to find the money to make it here and to still save the best of us to make our art; and to be able to make art that finds an audience in a city which increasingly holds the insular tastes that are sometimes the byproduct of the newly wealthy. For these reasons, I felt the calling to build a gallery that worked to buttress the market for that kind of work. It is imperative that the mindset of the avant-garde be included in the art of our future, and I am doing my part to champion that work within the New York art-gallery system.

Christopher Stout Gallery has been renamed as ADO Project (Art During the Occupation), New York (CSG/NY) it is a non-profit art space in Bushwick, showing subversive and difficult work by New York City artists. We delight in serving as a platform for discourse on work that is challenging to authority paradigms, feminist, queer, anti-establishment, hyper-aggressive, mystic, and/or joyously sexual. Our gallery celebrates a programme concentration of performance and video artists, with an additional specialties in contemporary sculpture and painting. ADO Project (Art During the Occupation) (formerly Christopher Stout Gallery, New York)

adoprojectbushwick.com

Julia Gat

Julia Gat, Director

CUPCAKE Gallery cupcake-photography.tumblr.com

juliagatphotography.com @juliagatphotography

01 T HE T ROL LU MNIS T

Alistair Gentry

It’s Jonathan Jones doing his weekly Lady Bracknell act, clutching his pearls and shrieking about performance art not being real art, that he’s sick and tired of public sculptures, or whatever. It’s Waldemar Januszczak deciding one week that three obscure and possibly even fake Caravaggios are the only works of art anyone should ever need even if you require private access to a particular bank vault in Tokyo to really appreciate them like he does, then the week afterwards castigating a living painter for being no Caravaggio, and the week after that angrily puffing his throat sacs out because artists nowadays are more interested in sensationalism than craft – SFX: Record scratch. Cut to Judith sawing off Holofernes’ head. They’re all in the same business. When they barnacled onto their jobs twenty years ago it was tomorrow’s chip paper so they didn’t give a shit, nowadays it’s clickbait for people who think they’re too clever to be clickbaited, so they still don’t give a shit. I once witnessed Adrian Searle and Louisa Buck ‘arguing’ during a panel discussion, and the clubby bonhomie between them made me want to puke myself inside out.

FIVE TYPES OF ART WRITER YOU SHOULD DIE BEFORE YOU SEE

ANYONE ON E-FLUX

These texts are usually a chimerical assemblage. If it were in fact a creature it would have the head of a yapping chihuahua with incredibly moist and kawaii anime eyes, squealing that it’s delighted to announce something that’s ‘special’, ‘unique’, ‘important’, it took nine years to research, there’s very critically adored artists in it and so on. The tediously elongated torso is misshapen from swallowing huge chunks of still undigested curator speak. It’s a provocation, it’s reactivating something. Nobody knows with what anomalous appendages this monstrous body terminates, because they never make it that far through an E-Flux email without deleting it. This has a certain resonance with the high likelihood that less than ten people will ever see any given one of the exhibitions announced through E-Flux.

THE ARTBOLLOCKS BINGO W INNER

Anyone who writes that an artist’s work is [verbing] between [abstract noun] and [abstract noun]. Usually the artists are oscillating, but sometimes they hover, making them sound like a particularly dull and predictable fairground ride. Normal thing is extraordinary just because an artist made a point of doing it. Related to this, there may be a strong suggestion that there’s some kind of inherent interestingness that comes not from anything they’ve done but merely as a result of the artist being a mother (The Andrea Leadsom Manoeuvre), or part of a sexual or ethnic minority. The artist may not be lucky enough to be part of a group that suffers from systemic inequality and injustice, i.e. they’re just a straight, middle or upper class white man, but they’re still so unique in their insights that obviously their work sprung forth fully formed and uninfluenced from the void to shatter accepted reality, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Actually what they’re saying is usually so obvious it’s more akin to it springing forth from the head office of Athena like that poster of the tennis player scratching her arse. Ink the rest of your grid with a steaming pile of International Art English obfuscation, some wilful misunderstandings of fashionable scientific concepts, splatter it with factoids or truisms, and Bob’s your uncle who writes for Art Monthly.

THE ARTIST-ACADEMIC WHO HAS TO PUBLISH SOMETHING (ANYTHING, ACTUALLY) TO KEEP THEIR JOB

Says they’re an artist, hasn’t made any significant work for twenty years because they’re too busy teaching, and before that doing their PhD. Goes to lots of conferences where there aren’t any practicing artists, just other arts-academics who spend their whole lives spinning their wheels over subjects of little or no interest to anyone other than whoever at the university is responsible for totting up valid research outputs to keep the place’s funding relatively safe. Worst of all, you’ll never see a more harrowing or sloppier form of verbal diarrhoea than what comes out of some people who teach art writing at postgraduate level to the next generation of art writers.

05 THE JAMIE OLIVER

Blokey bish-bosh-art-is-done explanation of a complicated subject like conceptual art or transgender issues, luckily it all got sorted out in under forty-five minutes on BBC4, oh hello Grayson Perry I didn’t see you there. They think a famous artist flirted with them during the interview, or was at the same parties when they were at art school during roughly the same period and would totally have flirted if they’d known that twenty years later there would be a section on them in a book with a punning title ‘explaining’ contemporary art published by Penguin. Thwack yer egotism and yer fauxletarian race, class and gender privilege into the chiminea on a baking stone, and the writing about art is sorted mate.

BOOK R EV IE W

Rosanna van Mierlo

The artist as amateur The artist as amateur “What I want to discuss are four pressures which I believe challenge the intellectual’s ingenuity and will. […] each of them can be countered by what I shall call amateurism, the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restriction of a profession.” E. W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, (76)

Part of the BBC’s famous Reith Lectures in 1993, Edward W. Said’s introduction to this assembly of his radio essays starts off by recalling how the station’s claim to journalistic truth, objectivity and therefore power was, and is, inherently complicated by its geographical history as ‘the voice of London’. Growing up in the Middle East, there was ‘the assumption that “London” tells the truth.’ Yet ‘how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?’ (88) Only a 121 pages long, Said’s book – although weighed down by that hefty title – has a light touch quality to it, as he skilfully navigates his way through the development of what we call ‘Intellectualism’ with a capital ‘I’ via historical, political, social and personal shifts in the last century. Said’s main claim, that in order to be a ‘real’ intellectual, one must remain an outsider and, as such, embrace a certain degree of amateurism, is not as much new as it is good to be reminded if its urgency. I read this book as part of my introductory reading list for my Master’s degree in the summer of 2013. At the time most of it failed to capture me as my interests lay with the more glitzy fields of gender studies, poetry and the works of feminist critics like Butler, Cixous and Irigaray. I had little time for the struggles of the Middle Eastern world or the rise of neoliberalism in the West, which is both depressing and exasperating in its inevitability. Yet reading Said’s work again, four years later and in the throws of developing a career in both the art world and academia, I suddenly realised that this urgency rings true not just for academia but also for the arts. Said’s description of the intellectual as caught in a suffocating net of neoliberalism expressed as professionalism calls to mind Michel Feher’s lectures The Age of Appreciation: Lectures on the Neoliberal Condition given at Goldmiths during 20132015 in which he described the increasing influence of the capital market-model on how we experience our own lives and form our identities. These days, everyone is the manager of his or her own destiny; we are all professionals, motivated by specialisation, expertise, power/authority and funding. Said describes the problem of the neoliberal condition as strikingly visible in the surge of what we call ‘professionalism’ and its jargon, when he describes a conversation he had with an air-force veteran, in charge of bombing during the Vietnam war. ‘As we chatted, he provided me with a fascinating eerie glimpse into the mentality of the professional […] I shall never forget the shock I received when in responding to my insistent question, “What did you actually do in the air force?” he replied, “Target acquisition”.’ (85)

The biggest threat to freedom of critical thinking, which I would argue is as important for the academic as it if for the artist, is the increasing validation of professionalism and expertise. These are inevitably connection to systems of power, which in turn are often accompanied by tools of validation and affirmation like funding. The danger in becoming nothing but an expert or a professional is that, in order to sustain that label, we neglect conducting ourselves and our practice freely, meaning solely motivated by our own genuine interests and critical opinion. As Said puts it: ‘The issue is whether [the] audience is there to be satisfied, and hence the client to be happy, or whether it is there to be challenged […]’ In neoliberalism, the ‘client’ relationship does not just exist in the literal sense of the word. It has grown to encompass your manager, the funding bodies that support your practice, the group of other professionals you hang out with. It has gone so far as to even mean you. The contemporary individual embodies both worker and client, constantly working on his or her own brand and targets. Which leaves us at a confusing impasse. How do we satisfy ourselves? How do we remain true to our own desires and interests when we want to be professionals? Amateurs, Said argues, hold the right to express interest and thus opinion on anything outside their own field, crossbreeding their interests but remaining free of authority of the obligation to speak ‘true’. It is our gateway to radical, lively and original discourse that exists outside of power. It is the origin of the grassroots movement that claims nothing yet discusses everything.

About the author: An internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, Edward W. Said is University Professor at Columbia University. He is the author of fourteen other books, including Orientalism, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Culture and Imperialism, The Politics of Dispossession, and, most recently, Peace and Its Discontents. Rosanna van Mierlo is a contemporary art critic specialising in feminist avant-garde, performance studies and (bio) politics. She is the Curator at Swiss Cottage Gallery and Editor at Sluice. www.rosannavanmierlo.com Twitter: @woosje Insta: rozeroosje

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE INTELLECTUAL by Edward W. Said First published in London: Vintage Books, 1994

A distracted tour through Germany Every ten years Münster is taken over by The Skulptur Projekte. Every five years Documenta descends on Kassel. Charlie Levine reports back with a visual diary of randomness after a recent visit to both.

If Documenta 14’s purported theme was immigration and the act of curation itself, it was perhaps better exemplified by chance encounters elsewhere – “meandering through the university and student accommodation quarter of Münster the quiet streets were lined with disposable student living items, piled on top of one another, creating momentary installations and accidental monuments to migration, capitalism and the transient mourning of youth culture. Old TVs became reflective black boxes reminiscent of the fish tank in Huyghe’s installation; burnt and crisp wooden furniture mimicked Oscar Tuazon’s Burn the Formwork (an external space/living room for barbeques and a place to exist with people); or a pile of black stones recalling any number of Richard Long pieces”. Navigation: literal and curatorial, emerged as defining themes. How the respective events were situated, encountered and mediated was the real story. “I completely missed The Das Fremdlinge und Flüchtlinge Monument by Olu Oguibe at Documenta in one of the main tram intersections as I was looking at burst balloons that hung withered from the square’s fountains. Likewise, a sudden rainstorm outside the old underground station overtook Zafos Xagoraris’ The Welcoming Gate.” “The few road names on the official Skulptur Projekte map were unhelpful at best, as was the fact most projects were time constrained, so there was a high likelihood (and in the advent realised) chance of missing several of the works. Navigating the cities and identifying what is and isn’t part of the respective events was problematic. But it was this frustration of missed experiences and unlocated artworks that served to activate both Kassel and Münster as tableau for potential artistic encounters.”

Pierre Huyghe After A Life Ahead Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017

Oscar Tuazon’s Burn the Formwork Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017

Zafos Xagoraris The Welcoming Gate Documenta 14 2017

All photographs: Charlie Levine

INSTITUT FÜR ALLES MÖGLICHE

Stefan Riebel 53

I am asked quite often if I still find the time for my artistic practice besides taking care of the Institut für Alles Mögliche – a project space I started in 2010 in Berlin. For some time I looked at the two as separate fields of work and had heavy doubts about me spending lots of time with things without knowing where this might lead to. After a while it appeared that running a project space and following an individual artistic practice might not be separate activities at all. When talking about running a project space two problems arise very quickly. One is the concept of the ‘project space’ itself and two is the ‘running’ of such a place.

PROJECT SPACES ALLOW OPEN EXPERIMENTS, UNPREDICTABLE RESULTS, FRAGILE CONCEPTS, INNOVATIVE PRESENTATIONS AND UNWIELDY SET-UPS 56

PROJECT SPACES/SPACE-PROJECTS At a first glance project spaces are simply: spaces for projects. They offer, according to the constitutional paper of the Network of Berlin Independent Project Spaces and Initiatives: “Room for artistic practice, which is rather process- than product-oriented. They follow a cooperative and/or participative purpose and apply dialogue- and discourse-related formats.”¹ Séverine Marguine adds: “Project spaces are therefore not only spaces, in which artpieces are exhibited, they are also spaces in which art is created, commented upon, presented in, re-thought of, experienced and co-produced.”² Project spaces today are a widespread model of artistic self-empowerment and a catalyst for multiple and experimental practices. They are intermediate spaces, in which new methods are tested, in which otherness relocates itself and in which innovative formats in combination with conventional practices blend into happenings and artistic events. They connect the remoteness of the studio with the disclosure of the exhibition and establish free space and fertile ground in which unconventional and innovative practices can arise and flourish. Project spaces constitute a retreat for new ways to experiment with, independently from economical effectiveness or the logics of exploitation. They allow open experiments, unpredictable results, fragile concepts, innovative presentations and unwieldy set-ups and, as a result, a maximum degree of productive disorganisation and freedom. 57

Project spaces thereby establish an integral part in many artistic developmental processes of cultural life and of the diversity of public life in general. Project spaces are adaptable, often created temporarily and mostly set up to be site-specific and/or thematically context related. Moreover, in interplay to their individual, geographic and social positioning, project spaces are defined by the sum of their parts such as artpieces, equipment, tools, participants and so on. Thus project spaces form complex organisms, made up of various compartments that continuously interact with one another. As an organism, project spaces are not only containers in which artistic practices are happening in but rather they are projects themselves that can and need to be continuously developed and worked on. Project spaces are networks of various people and offer as a collaborative continuum solid positions to potentially everything and everyone in its own organisational structure and logical order. They are model-like micro societies and describe, in every state, the relationship of their circumstances, component parts and players involved. They constitute a continuously growing system of relationships that, in its tentative and transitory nature, unfold a maximum of compatibility and effectiveness. RUNNING PROJECT SPACES Artists running a project space position themselves and their enterprise as cultural entrepreneurs with managerial responsibility. They orchestrate an economically integrated venue for which rent needs to be paid and for which overheads and insurance costs arise. Concurrently they unfold a cultural open space for self-determined, independent and mostly non-commercial projects and art practices. From this economicalcultural overlay, a highly antagonistic conflict arises that every project space coordinator has to cope with. The great challenge lies within compromising a non-commercial programme within an economically entrenched space. Only by managing the balancing act of these opposite demands a platform is set, a space of possibilities is established among artists, players and interested participants. The project space can have social and sculptural characteristics or show a specific atmosphere and thereby act as an object itself or recede into the background. Project space makers are often artistic directors, managers, architects, curators, designers, artists, assistants, manufacturers, janitors, guests and the cleaning service all at once. They balance and operate an unmanageable number of vague bits and pieces, demands, intentions and offers which, at any time, can turn into specific combinations and complex relationships of artistic interest and or economical applicability. Apparently without comprehensible regularity small talk for instance can turn into binding confirmations or loose contacts into significant collaborations. Latour and Woolgar describe this process as ‘Cycles of Credit’, in which the credibility of the (scientific) work is actively created in order to accumulate recognition. According to this theory, within a cycle, money, data, prestige, difficulties, arguments and publications are interlinked and translated as ‘credits’ into one another.³ 58

AS SELF-EMPLOYED INDIVIDUALS PARTICIPATING IN SOCIETY THEY SHOULDER THE FULL RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF THEIR PROJECTS

Project space makers administer their projects, their self-managed companies, the sum of their self-employed positions and as a result: themselves. As self-employed individuals participating in society they shoulder the full responsibility of the success or failure of their projects, their spaces and of their commercial survival in general and thereby become firmly established as an integral component of society. The artist on the edge between motivation, self-exploitation and the loss of identity, between burn out and existence, self-unfolding and total enslavement, is subjected to neoliberal constraints of the ‘entrepreneurial self’⁴. Under the imperative of contemporary multi-optionalism, a unitised “life in projects”⁵ and the setting of a project space appears to be an adequate strategy to legitimate and cope with the antagonistic conflict of arts and the daily struggle for survival. Running a project space, as optimised solution of self-employment, on one hand represents the coinciding of liberated and unfolded personality with the developed enterprise – the product. On the other hand it enables the largest possible degree of freedom the artistic-entrepreneurial selfemployment can bring forth: an artistic inefficiency. It holds the possibility of being able to produce something at any time, and simultaneously not having to produce anything at all. Running a project space can therefore be understood as one mode of operation.

Notes 1. Netzwerk freier Berliner Projekträume und initiativen/www.projektraeume-berlin.net/netzwerk/ statements/#12519310cb88e95806d1c0e8a93251c5 2. Séverine Marguin: “Projekträume: Vitales, aber fragiles Herz der Kunstszene”, 2012 /www.vonhundert.de/ index2bbc.html?id=409 3. Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar: “Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts”, 1979 4. Ulrich Bröckling: “Das unternehmerische Selbst: Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform”, 2007 5. Boris Groys: “Die Einsamkeit des Projekts”, 2003

PROJECT SPACE PRACTICE Considering the difficulties of localising and defining what a ‘project space’ is and what ‘running’ a project space exactly means I would like to suggest the term ‘project space practice’. The expression does not only imply that running a project space is an artistic practice - it also proposes a continuous operation in regard to the space which is taken care of, which is ongoingly shaped, maintained and as a result permanently (re-)created. Furthermore, the term also indicates the various roles and positions among which the project space artist is constantly switching or simultaneously working in. ‘Project Space Practice’ circles around a difficult gap between the vague idea of what this has already become and what it might possibly be in the future. 59

The Institut für Alles Mögliche (Self-Description) The Institut für Alles Mögliche is an artistic project that, by using experimental means, sets about questioning, scrutinising and probing the institutionalisation and presentation of contemporary art. To this end project spaces are opened, events developed and various artistic practices tried out. These, mostly playful experiments deal with interrogations of the ‘art space’, the operatings of the ‘project space’ and ‘exhibiting’ often in an ironic manner. The central concept is to develop spaces of possibility in which exchange and experiences can take place and space for artistic activity can come in to being. The project can be understood as an organism, as an artistic attempt to find niches and to implant a non-commercial program into the commercial structure of the municipal sphere. It is intended to formulate a notion, a proposal, an approach on how artistic collaborations, collective learning and cohabitation can be constructed. The project tries to create an alternative, which opposes the economic utilisation of art, the artistic pressure to produce and increasing standardisation. Projects that are realized within the institute are non–commercial and not market-orientated. We place great value on artistic practices and forms of expression that take place beyond art fairs and galleries. During our deliberately short events – the majority no longer than three days – experimental set-ups, unfinished concepts and playful approaches can be tried out and realised. The creations and projects that come in to being through these processes can work out uncannily but also fail spectacularly.

Text: Stefan Riebel / Februar 2015 Translation: Jessamine Davis

institut für alles mögliche www.i-a-m.tk

Abteilung für Alles Andere

Niederlassung Berlin

seit 2011

seit 2012

Büro für Bestimmte Dinge

Zuständige Behörde

seit 2012

seit 2013

Ministerium

Betriebsgelände

seit 2014

Zweigstelle Stockholm

Kunst-Werke

seit 07 2014

seit 2014

Pressestelle

Standort Madrid

seit 2015

Tagebau

Bezügestelle Hannover

seit 2016

Industriegebiet

Liegenschaft

seit 2015

Anlage

Vorort

seit 2016

seit 2017

Mark Cullen & Gavin Murphy

PERIODICAL REVIEW #5 L-R: Caroline Doolin, Gemma Fitzpatrick, Seán Grimes, Lucy McKenna, Brian Duggan

Conversations Across the Atlantic, panel discussion, August 2016 Pictured L-R: Miranda Driscoll, Maud Cotter, Lee Welch, Gavin Murphy, Mark Cullen, Angel Bellaran Presented as part of the exhibition Liz Nielsen & Max Warsh, curated by Jessamyn Fiore

Pallas, set up in 1996 by Mark Cullen and Brian Duggan, and joined by Gavin Murphy in 2006, began as an impulse to create a space for both working together and working within, in parallel or in a community with other artists, and it has survived to witness a wide intermeshing of an artistic community that is interconnected across Ireland. This is a cultural community that is under-represented and marginalised in Irish society to a point whereby its consideration is not given due regard, nor nourished through reasonable levels of state or private support. Pallas Projects/Studios provides a valuable platform for supporting the emerging grassroots, alternative and non-commercial practices of this widespread community of peers. The initial impulse to self-organise grew and extended to become an interest in what could be achieved outside of itself – projecting into the wider artistic and social milieu to stimulate activity and cultural meaning. Having a predilection towards collaboration as a strategic response to a lack of resources in a monied society brought benefits in community-building. We actively sought out partners beyond ourselves, working with most other artist-run organisations in Ireland, along with many others internationally.1 We ignored notions of hierarchy in developing collaborations and were as much willing to work with institutions as with independent practitioners. This proclivity for reaching out to other organisations has been a real strength that has helped Pallas enrich and revitalise its own project, with every partnership exchange entered into, providing possibilities for learning and creative expression. The name Pallas was taken from the previous occupier of the organisation’s first building, Pallas Knitwear. As the goddess of the muses, the intellect, (and war), it was an appropriate choice: famed for her ability to transform, Pallas Athena suited an organisation whose perseverance is defined by its capacity to adapt. Over the course of 20 years, Pallas has occupied 14 premises and many other exhibition locations, out of a necessity to stay one step ahead of the developers in a Celtic Tigerbubble economy. By 2012, the stagnant property market that followed the 2007/08 global banking meltdown ultimately allowed Pallas to obtain a relatively long-term lease – that which was almost a holy grail in that nomadic pre-crash period. And yet in writing these words there is still a marked sense of the precariousness of our position as the property developers begin heating up the market for another round of amnesiac development, to take up where they left off.2 We identified an old school building on the edge of the Liberties area of the city centre as an ideal location for a gallery and studios. The generously proportioned classrooms provided spacious studios, the old assembly room ideal as a gallery project space. Nestled off the street and down a lane, the building offers a certain peaceful atmosphere that is very conducive to making art and instigating situations where it can be experienced. Positioned in an area that is surrounded by schools and community groups, and armed with the longer-term lease than we have previously enjoyed, we are in a position to engage our neighbours though active programmes, occasional outreach, and we have been able to develop many ancillary aspects to the programme such as talks, workshops, performance events and gigs that open out the activities of Pallas to wider groups, audiences and participators. So far this has borne fruit through collaborative projects with the likes of: Common Ground, Open House, Irish Architecture Foundation, the National College of Art & Design, and ESP TV, New York. The temporal security has enabled Pallas the potential for thinking ahead and for initiating expanded international engagements such as the ongoing Artist-Run Europe project.

Periodical Review 20/16 L-R: Aquinas, FOUR, Patrick Jolley & Reynold Reynolds, Emer O'Boyle, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Willie Doherty, The Metropolitan Complex

The book investigates the disparate and heterogenous realities of artist-run spaces

Artist-Run Europe, Gavin Murphy & Mark Cullen, Eds. Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2016

Notes 1. Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Project 304, Bangkok; esp tv, New York; Suburban, Rotterdam; vto Gallery, London; Root, London; Auto Italia South East, London; The Black Mariah, Cork; Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford; 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Galway; The Model, Sligo; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; The LAB, Dublin; Common Ground, Dublin; Irish Architecture Foundation, Dublin; NCAD Gallery, Dublin. 2. John Mulligan, ‘Confidence returning to the boom time developers. Those builders who survived the crash are back, and they have big ideas’, published 15. 06. 2014. Accessible on: http://www.independent.ie/business/ irish/confidence-returning-to-theboomtime-developers-30354470.html

With the publication of Artist-Run Europe: Practice/Projects/Space a major long-term project came to fruition. Part how-to manual, part history and part socio-political critique, the 208-page, fullcolour book, designed by WorkGroup and published by Onomatopee (Eindhoven), was the culmination of four years of research. The book includes case studies of European spaces with different organisational models, including Triangle France, Transmission Gallery, Eastside Projects and Vienna Secession, alongside an expansive and detailed index of 600 artist-run spaces in Europe. It also features newly commissioned writing by Jason E. Bowman, A.A. Bronson, Noelle Collins, Valerie Connor, Céline Kopp and Alun Williams, Joanne Laws, Freek Lomme, Megs Morley, Gavin Wade and Katherine Waugh. In publishing a book, we wanted to encourage discourse, provide a resource for academics and students and offer a practical resource for those running or wishing to set up artist-run spaces. The book investigates the disparate and heterogenous realities of artist-run spaces and challenges the expectation that they must emulate other ‘defined’ institutions in order to ensure sustainability – a problem (though not necessarily of artists’ own making) that has yet to be adequately addressed. The artist-run model and ethos that PP/S espouses is based on alternative and non-hierarchical modes of organisation and collaboration. It proposes non-commercial approaches to producing art and generating cultural interaction that eschews the roles of producer and consumer. Artist-run spaces play a vital role in supporting artists’ practices at the early stages of their careers and often have a key stake in the revitalisation of derelict urban areas (though rarely see the benefit of subsequent regeneration). In Ireland today, however, the situation for artist-run spaces is more precarious than ever. In just the last two years, seven artist-run studio/gallery organisations have closed down in Dublin alone, and 50% of the studio stock in the city has been eradicated, not due to any lack of will or energy, but mainly because of unfavourable rent and funding conditions. In 2017 we find ourselves more than ever having to address how long-term creative space and studio stock can be maintained and supported in the city. We lobby collectively through the National Campaign for the Arts, which through essential research equips us with the arguments to bring to government (such as pointing out that Ireland is bottom of the eu average for spending on the arts – 6 times lower in fact). Once again our inclination to cooperate is called upon, as we join with a collective of studios and arts organisations presenting the case to Dublin City Council, the Arts Council, the Department of the Arts among others, for stimulating conditions through favourable zoning for the retention and development of arts organisations in the city and through capital investment. As we are all too well aware, this is a problem that is not going away while left to the unfettered mechanisms of the open market.

All images courtesy Pallas Projects

Sluice events are platforms purposefully eschewing definition: a self-denying art fair, a decentralised peripatetic exposition, at the first whiff of stasis Sluice slips the defining ties that bind. For the 2017 edition Sluice metastisises as a Biennial, a hybrid between our internationally-staged expo and our London-based fair. Sluice 2017 sees artist- and curator-run galleries and projects from the UK and abroad convene as a celebration and enquiry into the self-organised project-as-practice, project-as-enquiry, project-as-platform in and around Hackney Central in London’s East End.

SATURATION POINT

A RTIST -R UN I NDEX

Bahamas Nassau................ http://www.popopstudios.com Bahrain

Bangladesh Chittagong............ http://www.porapara.org Dhaka http://www.brittoartstrust.org http://backart.org Barbados Saint George.......... https://freshmilkbarbados.com Belarus

Belgium Antwerp ............... http://www.holeofthefox.be http://www.stilll.be http://www.parkantwerpen.be http://www.10-12.be http://raumtecollective.tumblr.com http://voorkamer.be http://themothershipart.be http://www.pinkiebowtie.com http://pulsar.website http://www.nicc.be http://secondroom-antwerpen. tumblr.com Brussels.............. http://rosabrux.org http://www.greylightprojects.org http://clovisxv.com http://www.theister.be http://www.islandisland.be http://www.deborahbowmann.com http://rectangle.be http://www.la-loge.be http://www.c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e.com http://www.sicsic.be http://okno.be http://www.enoughroomforspace.org http://constantvzw.org Ghent.................. http://croxhapox.org Leuven................ http://www.werktank.org Liege................. http://www.dieselprojectspace.be Belize Belize City.......... http://www.imagefactorybelize.com Benque Viejo Del Carmen http://www.five-o-one-artprojects. com

To be listed email info@sluice.info

Benin

Bhutan

Bolivia Santa Cruz....... http://www.kioskogaleria.com

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Botswana

Brazil Rio de Janeiro.......... http://agentilcarioca.com.br São Paulo.......... http://www.pontoaurora.com Poços de Caldas......... https://www.facebook.com/Studio-13Galeria-de-Arte-266812530033134 Brunei

Bulgaria Sofia................... https://www.facebook.com/ pg/0gmsgallery http://watertowerartfest.com http://tsarino.org Burkina Faso

Burma

Burundi

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SUSAK SUSAKexpo expo2018 2018 44toto1313may may There There willwill also also bebe a show a show of of photographs photographs documenting documenting thethe expo expo at at Palača Palača Fritzi Fritzi at at thethe Museum Museum of of Mali Mali Lošinj Lošinj (Lošinjski (Lošinjski muzej) muzej) opening opening onon Friday Friday 1111 May May (until (until Saturday Saturday 1919 May). May). If you If you would would likelike to to take take part part (as(as anan artist, artist, group group of of artist, artist, or or in in any any other other capacity) capacity) or or want want more more information, information, please please send send a message a message or or email email to to herzog@susakpress.com. herzog@susakpress.com.

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LOTTERY LOTTERY SHOW SHOW tickets ticketsare areon onsale sale(£10 (£10limited limitedtoto250) 250)for forour ourAnnual AnnualLOTTERY LOTTERYSHOW SHOW this thisyear’s year’sticket ticketisisaalimited limitededition editionprint printby byJEREMY JEREMYWILLETT WILLETTabove above the thewinner winner- -totobe beannounced announcedon on88October Octoberduring duringFrieze Friezeweekend weekendwill will be begiven givenaafour fourweek weeksolo soloshow showas aspart partofofthe thegallery’s gallery’stimetable timetableinin2018 2018 57a 57aRedchurch RedchurchStStE2 E27DJ 7DJ www.studio1-1.co.uk www.studio1-1.co.uk info@studio1-1.co.uk info@studio1-1.co.uk

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Alternative Publishing at Sluice Biennial 2017

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Alternative Publishing at Sluice Biennial 2017

Alternative Publishing at Sluice Biennial 2017 Alternative Publishing at Sluice Biennial 2017 Hackney Walk Morning Lane, London E9 6LH 30 September 3-9pm 1-3 October 12-6pm

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