Sluice magazine - Spring 2020 by Sluice art

ARTIST-LED CULTURE

IN THE SHADOW OF COVID SPRING / SUMMER 2020

CAMPAIGN FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP, AGAINST PRIVATISATION

From energy to water, the railways to our NHS, forty years of privatisation has left our public services in ruins. It’s seen shareholders pocket billions and the public lose out. We need a new settlement for our public services – where public good is prioritised over private profit. We Own It campaigns to end privatisation and to bring our services into democratic public ownership fit for the 21st century. All public services should belong to all of us. We use them, we pay for them, we should own them. weownit.org.uk

ARTISTS’ UNION ENGLAND

Artists’ Union England (AUE) is the trade union voice for visual and applied artists, and artists with a socially engaged practice working in England. We challenge the economic inequalities in the art world by working together to negotiate fair pay and better working conditions for artists. Alone as artists we have less power, together we are strong. Unions are needed more than ever in a world of gig economy workers and precarious employment. Membership (including PPL, training & legal help) costs £42 annually – equivalent to £3.50 per month. Join us! artistsunionengland.org.uk

Publishing Director Karl England Associate Editor Ben Street

Proof and sub-editor Tash Kahn Publisher sluice Art Direction + Design Christian Küsters Barbara Nassisi info@chkdesign.com chkdesign.com

The Common Good EDITORIAL Karl England

Lettering All fonts by Colophon colophon-foundry.org

The Emergency Commons and its narrative in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Giuseppe Marasco

Distribution Central Books centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info sluice.info Subscriptions subscribe online at sluice.info

Cover Pippa Healy 2m pippahealy.com Pippa Healy is an artist based in London. Her practice responds to her personal history, to events which have impacted on her life. Her handmade ‘Zines’, raw and diaristic in style are central to her practice. Themes encompassing loss, longing, violence and grief are frequently referenced. Her work is held in private collections and has been exhibited in group and solo shows in the UK, France, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Sardinia, Turkey and Italy.

Distance Drawing Grayson Perry Short Supply

Mollie Balshaw and Rebekah Beasley

Pippa’s work is published here as part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s project Acceptable Blockages.

Commoning Artist-led Housing Jonathan Orlek

Acceptable Blockages Photo essay Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

Clap for the MMT* Alistair Gentry

40 6

Nesting diagram Jonathon Orlek

44 Alone with Everybody Od Arts Festival Vickie Fear, Simon Lee Dicker and Rowan Lear

60 Art and Capital Andreas Backoefer

Acknowledgements Sarah England Nicole Sansone Ben Street Tash Kahn Keran James Kerry Harker Pamela Grombacher Indigo Richards Enrico Gomez Will Gresson Mollie Balshaw Rebekah Beasley Jon Orlek Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau Guiseppe Marasco Theresa Easton Chris Jarvis We’re very grateful to the Freelands Foundation Emergency Fund for supporting sluice magazine during these challenging times.

The biggest change will be the new understanding we all have of isolation and our closer familiarity with the ideas in many of the artists’ work

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 ©2020 ISSN 2398-8398 EAN 9772398839005

Vicky Fear Od Arts Festival

Unauthorised copying, hiring or lending of this magazine is prohibited but ask us nicely and we’ll see what we can do. Sluice magazine is at all times a companion publication to a Sluice initiated project, whether our biennial, expo or simply a programme of associated events, as such the magazine, is positioned as a crucial document of record of art as Praxis.

62 Profile swap editions Robin Tarbet

70 Profile skelf Claire Undy and Lizzie Munn

Sluice magazine is concerned with applied theory, we examine how the arts impact our societal and economic environment and vice versa. At Sluice we aim to publish writing that we perceive to have an unmistakable disruptive quality, which might open up traditional art discourse to unexpected ideas, approaches and methods. In this way, our contributor’s backgrounds are not important: we encourage contributions from any and all disciplines. At its best, Sluice magazine should be a site of artistic creation and theoretical reflection that creates confrontations, sparks, and unexpected alliances. Sluice is open to arguments from different (contextually merited) ideological quarters. Sluice magazine is a forum for debate not an echo chamber of assumed rectitude.

Artist-run Index: F

Detail from Island Skelf

Shouldn’t acting on common sense result in the common good? Can the common good also be in the interests of the individual? Are the commons a useful mechanism by which to navigate society. What makes up the commons, who owns the commons? At its best, artist-led culture is innately tied to the social, political and economic environment in which it exists. This edition of Sluice magazine focuses on the commons as both a place and a state of mind. Both of which are crucial for art to flourish. It seems there’s an enclosure of the imagination that allows for a material enclosure by the State and capital. If we don’t think of various commons as belonging to us it’s easier for the government to deploy the playbook of managed decay leading to privatisation. Publishing a magazine during the long shadow of a global lockdown there’s a feeling that our enforced isolation has heightened our awareness of the importance of connectivity and our relationship to the commons. Publishing a magazine in the midst of a mass lockdown there’s a feeling that our enforced isolation has heightened our awareness of the importance of connectivity and our relationship to the commons. The commons are prosaic things like public parks and libraries. Oceans are global commons, council housing and public spaces are social commons. The commons are also non-material, our rights of assembly and our freedom of expression are part of the civil commons. Libraries, museums, galleries, education, independent print and digital are all part of our cultural and knowledge commons. The pandemic is exposing the bones of what constitutes the commons. The commons are activated when they are used and recognised and stood up for. This edition of Sluice magazine looks at artists and projects that recognise and navigate the commons as social processes of production and organisation rather than merely resources awaiting enclosure.

GIUSEPPE

MARASCO

It’s clear this is the first time that the world has been united in the face of one enemy

When Covid-19 hit it stirred my focus in writing this piece. Catching a glimpse of the American science fiction film Prospect (2018), between the haze of news reports, the present situation transposed itself directly into it. The weird mismatched spacesuits at a campfire scene on a poisonous moon looked like a pathetic clumsy-tragic dating/marriage market, a vision of how the Covid-19 shutdowns and later waves could look like if they extended further into the future than we expect. It paralleled the desperate provisional hodge-podge of homemade PPE equipment of bin liners, 3D printed plastic visors and handmade cloth masks the government insisted would serve as substitutes in hospitals to keep the Coronavirus at bay. I had originally intended to look at Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 By Keith Wrightson to get a sense of the change of psychology that The Enclosures Acts brought and how we might return to the older spirit of England. I had wanted to also focus on the expansion and transformation of the commons into an influential role in 21st Century life. Envisaging constellations of new commons assisted by new digital platforms, and a further opening up of intellectual property in the sharing economy and the transformations of opportunity provided by 3D printing. The Covid-19 pandemic requires a visionary capacity, as government shortcomings point to necessary transformations in the institutions of democracy. Beyond the Coronavirus are the still-unresolved structural problems of the 2008 financial crash and the turn towards right-wing politics, along with an expected postCovid-19 crisis of acceleration of the market’s logic, A.I/machine learning, a social-media economy, big data, and the automation of jobs. As to the direction of the urgent emerging politics – the sheer complexity of unfolding events is distracting. Vigilance is needed regarding policies being implemented, the misuse and squandering of public volunteer efforts, civic organs and spontaneously banded private efforts. None of which have any of the political presence or authority that they should have. The new commons is characterised by an attitude and mobility. Politics now needs to evolve, the digital Commons of the Zoom Parliament is just one example. While it will be interesting to see how campaigning platforms such as 38 Degrees, the crowdfunded Good Law Project 1 and online people’s assemblies, meetings, reading groups, and lectures will evolve to serve the needs of a new commons, I’m curious about Labour’s policy of continuous education and of the gestures by public thinkers to make books free to access. As well as the possibilities of Time Banking as a way of skill-swapping. In all this I am reminded of John Berger’s The Shape of A Pocket – “The small pocket of resistance formed when two or more people come together in agreement” – and the nature of projects of shared work creating commonality and points of connection. Thinking about the image and the negotiations of power to come in the new economies emerging, the new commons and producing the goods of civic society, I’ve found it fruitful to draw on the words of Brian Eno, Yanis Varoufakis, Naomi Klein, Slavoj Žižek, political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, and economist Professor Richard D. Wolff. I’ve looked to the origins of democracy and the overlooked

We are used to the accelerationism of capitalist markets, as it places ever greater demands on work and personal lives. But what we see is in fact a slowness

spaces that exist within it. The multiple reinforcing commons. In doing so I will then look at how we can rebuild our civic duty and responsibilities. It’s clear that this is the first time the world has been united in the face of one enemy. But various challenges ahead are only just crystallising and many will not be obvious yet. There is the risk from far right populism if a new deal politics isn’t found. Economics Professor Richard D. Wolff on actdottv’s Youtube channel (How the COVID-19 Crisis Is Reshaping Our Economy, 1 April 2020), pointed out that America’s present economy is built on 90-year-old policies – saying it’s time to rethink and renegotiate the social contract. He gave the example of depression-era politics: “In the Great Depression millions joined unions, and hundreds of thousands joined the two socialist parties and the Communist party to exert pressure on the political establishment. In the early 1930s the government established the social security system.” I was stirred as I heard the neighbourhood light up with the Thursday evening Clap for the NHS. I was surprised by how alleviating the banging of metal pots was, a release from the intense focus of personal enclosure. As was the sudden appearance of a pleasant, previously unseen face of a neighbour across the road. Hearing the clapping sound of a young child’s small hands was moving because of their likely incomprehension of the link to the vast global events unfolding. Yet I was wary of the problem of using the NHS as a new rallying identity, with which to get everyone to forget the brutal austerity and underfunding of the NHS with vague Churchillian quotes in place of organisation. We are used to the accelerationism of capitalist markets, as it places ever greater demands on work and personal lives. But what we see is in fact a slowness and how markets have impeded science. People quickly shared their own quick calculations and disbelief around the policy of herd immunity and then shared the model by Prof Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial Collage. The University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in early April gave an upper estimate of 62,500 deaths by August. The Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer pointedly noted at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday 24 June 2020, that 65,000 deaths had been reached. Why might the state lose further authority? The British public are more capable and more expert than ever before and could have actioned their own plans sooner. The government has yet to manifest the horizontality of a wartime economy. Unable even in these modern times to decentralise or crowdsource the best minds. While the spontaneous commons of the pandemic economy has seen many that have forgone credit and intellectual rights, working across national borders to get science done in just a few weeks that would have otherwise taken years. It is likely that public professionals will have to step in and begin self-organising virus testing privately without a mandate from the government – as retired GPs in Sheffield, and others such as private lab owner Mark Fisher’s Covid-19 Volunteer Testing Network have done in Oxfordshire. The series of fumbling responses have been largely due to urgently sticking to servicing the accelerated

The pandemic did not happen in a vacuum, as organisational failures came out of a political culture

time of the markets rather than pausing to make time for Covid-19 preparations, as well as palming off to simple solutions of single providers like Public Health England who inexplicably resist decentralisation of testing. There’s an odd echo in the tendency against openness that came from a number of Art History MAs and PhDs who freaked out when threatened by the Open Art School project at the Tate Exchange. All this is a difficult picture to hold as it is a systemic cultural failure. The ubiquitous phrase ‘lessons must be learnt’, cannot be relied upon, if we know anything lessons are never learnt, such ‘lessons’ must be made into law, into procedure and practice and – memorialised into a ‘public image’. This is certainly a momentous shift in power that alters our public myths and images and laws, of the kind that Giambattista Vico as the originator of the philosophy of history so carefully analysed. Artists need to take up the responsibility and make the case to draw into the light the obscure politics happening now and communicate the realities and the new worlds that are possible. “This is the time that we are designing a new world.” As Brian Eno pointed out in conversation with Yanis Varoufakis (Reflecting on our Post-Virus World, DiEM25 TV). In January I gave a lecture on how artists were understanding and representing the new politics and systemic failures that had led to and were emerging from the aftermath of the post-crunch, post-Trump, post-Brexit landscape, and how politicians and the media were failing to address the fall-out. Thinking of a post-Corona world I think again of George Shaw’s desolate empty streets that chart demolished industrial estates as locals attempt to assert nation and identity, seem to eerily foretell our present fate. Huma Bhabha’s alien life forms standing in for the horror of the foreigner. Lives untethered from meaning and gravity in Dexter Dalwood’s painting Laid Out inspired by a cabin window view on the Gilets Jaunes surrounding the The Arc de Triomphe in Paris now has the tint of the billionaires escaping the pandemic to their private islands. Frank Bowling’s transforming the conceived boundaries and ordering of countries now seem in their shift and slippage to be prophetic and hopeful. Tim Shaw’s linking of abstract forces of economy, terror, oil on the human body – literally mocking humanity – these forces, as if looking for something real, provoking the human figure until a point of resistance is found. The pandemic did not happen in a vacuum, as organisational failures came out of a political culture. Holding to account the government and the market logic of corporations. For instance the government has taken to copying for-profit companies with their just-in-time supply chains rather than pay for stockpiles of PPE and warehouse storage. It was clear Cakeism (having your cake and eating it) was taking place, where the Prime Minister (Chief Spaffer) and cabinet were beholden to markets first and people a distant second. This has been no Dunkirk moment where the nation turned around to its small ships and trusted the professional offers from independent laboratories to carry out testing. This attitude of not trusting the small ship of civil society is pervasive. It comes from not knowing the commons, from having no practical experience of the range of talents on offer, from not knowing just how much things have moved on.

But it also comes from a want of clutching onto power as an instinct. This psychology is repeated in the newspapers – frozen in a preinternet, pre-credit crunch patrician world, and the public has shown its disinterest in being talked down to by turning away from them in droves. Underestimating the education, independence, this tired story no longer matches the needs and realities of people. The call for volunteers immediately produced 500,000. The reaction to the immediate response was a sense of disbelief at the immediate availability of manpower and good will. The huge organising shortcomings of the government in this crisis have become clear; namely delays in implementing social distancing, shutting down the high-street economy and provisioning for public health emergencies. The government has forgotten that its faith in corporations to solve everything actually depends on regular people, the workers. This is the moment that grassroots democracy movements have to be hyper vigilant. Naomi Klein talking to Mehdi Hasa on The Intercepts Youtube channel says: “The shock doctrine is the political tactic to use states of crisis, states of emergency. To push through a series of pro corporate policies that leave us less protected and we’re certainly seeing this in the midst of the pandemic... fossil-fuel companies are getting their wish list of policies, whatever fossil-fuel companies were after, before this crisis set in they have just been checking off the wish list right now. So ramming through the Keystone XL pipeline for instance… the Canadian government and the Alberta government has directly subsidised the pipeline in the midst of the pandemic... thousands of people were arrested (including me) trying to stop it… Now when people are in their homes several states have passed laws that make it a felony to disrupt what they call critical infrastructure including fossil-fuel projects, it’s just straight up opportunism. The EPA is suspending enforcement of all kinds of environmental regulation for the pandemic. ...the last time the global economy melted down. Expressed itself through brutal austerity all around the world. So what happens when the corporate bailouts at this moment, the bill sort of comes due and it expresses itself as a war on public education for their war on public healthcare... whatever the policy that’s lying around there they’re going for it.”2 The American political philosopher, Professor Michael J. Sandel has made the case for a moral and civic renewal in democratic politics. Arguing for a rebuilding of the civic infrastructure and a reframing of the political debate, bringing back a robust public discourse that engages moral and spiritual questions. In his Reith Lecture, A New Citizenship: 2009, A New Politics of the Common Good, he talks of a great hunger in contemporary politics and of the space that has to open up in contemporary democracy. While markets have grown and govern every sphere of life the “ ...public takings of decisions [must] be open to revision and re-argument which is why there [should] always be the opportunity to reopen contested public questions... arguing for a richer more morally-engaged public discourse that doesn’t shrink from contested conceptions of the good life... religion... other philosophical theories apriori”. He argues for “a more capacious, expansive conception than liberal political theories allow. [This] isn’t really about restricting, enlarging and making more demanding the

You cannot not have money without a community, it’s like language without a community

understanding [of] what freedom is... the freedom of citizens to debate the common good than the freedom as consumers pursue their interests unimpeded regardless of the effects on the wider social life... taking on an impoverished conception of freedom… the freedom of the citizen, civic freedom is a more demanding idea than the freedom of the consumer or market freedom… that undercuts civic freedoms”. Yanis Varoufakis the former Greek Minister of Finance, said in conversation to Brian Eno (Money, Power and a Call to Radical Change Intelligence Squared, 8 Feb 2020 London): “The individual is defined in economics as a bundle of preferences seeking satisfaction given constraints… other people who appear on the scene of economic theory as an economic obstacle. Community instead of being empowering is – as John Paul Sartre used to say – Hell… all these models are predicated on the assumption that the economy is founded on Robinson Crusoe and his clones, they have no relationship, except through the market mechanism, so buying and selling, there is no influence, there is no money and there is no debt. You cannot not have money without a community, it’s like language without a community – remember what Wittgenstein used to say there can be no such thing as a private language. Language is something we create together.” The book Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy by Professor Richard Seaford (Cambridge University Press) – suggests a fundamental rewrite of the origin of money particularly its lack of singularity, what emerges may assist a reconsideration of the shape of our societies. Seaford points out the tensions present from the earliest introduction of coin money. Philosophical, religious, moral and social tensions arose when the world started to be viewed as a singular system upon which values could be assigned and a world that seems to follow universal laws. You can see how fragile ancient people saw their lives, in this story of forgetting the power of natural forces and of the gods in the play The Bacchae as you see the fate of the tragic Tyrant provoking the forces of chaos. Democracy took hold to regulate the new individualism that money allowed for, and keeping in check a Tyrant’s ability to issue currency, money means the possibility of unlimited power over others. Coinage was first invented in Lydia in 7th B.C., the ancient Greek word for coin, Obol, originally referred to the iron cooking-spits on which the meat from the communal sacrifice was shared with citizens. (The first silver obols were minted in Aegina, after 600 BCE.) The first state-backed coins were essentially an I.O.U. for this communal meal. It is this function that has been written out of our democracies that needs to be written back in with the advent of new commons. Seaford makes the case for the importance of publicly shared religious/mystical rituals as a function of democracy. And theatre as a place where the creation and re-examination of values takes place in public. Where civic consciousness is continually re-born. It’s worth mediating on the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, (born c.412 Sinope – died 323 BCE Corinth), known for his radical, propounded actions and direct verbal interaction clearly rejected material comfort, was exiled for defacement of the city’s currency – it’s easy to imagine this as being his earliest philosophical act. Diogenes’ father minted coins for a living, so making coins was a likely future profession. I like the idea Diogenes used an expletive when questioning the metaphysics of coining and the authority on whose behalf the coin was minted.

But I draw attention to this instance as at its centre is the question of remaking the image of money. It’s inspiring to learn in Italy the mayor of Santa Marina, in the southern Campania region, printed €100,000 of local ‘currency’ to help residents in need. The markets are the Golem, like in the myth this creation that was made to assist man has continued to grow and risks collapsing on us. Cultures accustomed to ritual destruction of wealth… wasting wealth on people... are more resilient in times of extreme hardship. Slavoj Žižek warns in his especially rushed out book Pandemic!: “A careful observer could easily notice the tonal change in how those holding power address us: they are not just trying to project calm and confidence they also regularly utter dire predictions: the pandemic is likely to take about two years to run its course and the virus will eventually infect 60 to 70 percent of the global population, with millions dead. In short, their true message is that we will have to curtail the cornerstone of our social ethics.”

It warns against this generic expediency already put to pathetic use by Boris Johnson in PMQs: “Since we are all now in this crisis together, we should forget about politics and just work in unison to save ourselves.” To those saying now is not the time for politics Žižek announces: “This notion is false: true politics are needed now – decisions about solidarity are eminently political.” This pandemic is already leaving us with epochal images of change of the kind Giambattista Vico analysed. The historian David Olusoga wrote in the Guardian, “The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue is not an attack on history. It is history”. Reflecting on George Floyd’s death the novelist and poet Ben Okri spoke to BBC News and wrote in the Guardian, that it had become a “...crossover protest on a universal scale.” Because everyone had been doing their bit by staying at home, a sense of ownership developed. “The pandemic itself is about the very issue of breathing. I think that helped to strike a chord in people.”, “I can’t breathe” resonated with the constriction of social, political and economic life, the lack of room to breathe. The lack in our politics. Notes 1. The Good Law Project have mounted legal challenges seeking to bring the government to account on issues regarding PPE, the Environment, Migration, Poverty, Workers’ Rights, Tax, Brexit and democracy https://goodlawproject.org 2. To follow these developments recommends the investigative news site truthdig.com

Keith Haring But Emo

Van Goghs Bad Ear

Van Goghs Good Ear

The Mona Lisa

All Distance Drawings by Short Supply

Our McDonalds Order

Grayson Perry

shortsupply.org

Short Supply is an artist-led initiative and curatorial collective operating in Salford, directed by Mollie Balshaw and Rebekah Beasley. Short Supply was established for the purpose of generating creative opportunities, and facilitating and curating collaborative events specifically for artists in the U.K.’s North West. Particular emphasis is placed on ensuring emerging artists and recent graduates have the chance to put themselves out there, but Short Supply is a platform for all creatives, and aims to try and cultivate a supportive network. Short supply tries to ensure that emerging artists and graduates are presented with opportunities to expand their network, to connect with established artists and industry professionals and receive the relevant mentorship to continue their development. Short Supply’s long-term goal is to become a recognised and formalised system of support for the creative community in the North West. “We hope to continue trying to refine and redefine ways of connecting artists, and ensure the artists on our doorstep are provided with the proper practical tools to succeed outside of education and not just within it – to be the change we want to see.” 23

COMMONING

Jonathan Orlek

Layered drawing of Artist House 45 Credit Jonathan Orlek

ARTIST-LED HOUSING

A number of artist-led organisations and groups across the UK have recently launched housing projects. These organisations are providing housing for pragmatic reasons, as well as to develop collective and critical artistic practices in response to the housing sector and urban realm. Here Jonathan Orlek introduces ‘artistled housing’ and explores how artistic approaches to housing intersect with practices and institutions of commoning. Jonathan draws from collaborative work undertaken with the artist-led organisation East Street Arts. From 20I6–2019 he embedded himself within East Street Arts and undertook an ethnographic study of an artist-led housing project they have initiated called Artist House 45.

Artist-Led Housing Artist-led housing projects allows artists to be resident within neighbourhoods for extended periods of time. They create opportunities for occupants to act as engaged residents within local communities as well as practicing artists. Additionally, an integration of alternative/experimental forms of living into artistic work is often actively supported, for example through live/work spatial arrangements, sharing economies, the provision of a basic stipend irrespective of formal creative outputs, or the accommodation of atypical family units. Artist-led housing projects have hosted writers, performers, architects, artists, sociologists and researchers, amongst others. Whilst some residents within artist-led housing projects would explicitly articulate their practice as socially engaged art, as a way to emphasise the use of social relations and participatory processes in their work, others have engaged communities in debates, participatory practices and urban interventions more obliquely. A commonality which connects artist-led housing practices across artforms is the development of situated and site-responsive practices which would otherwise be precluded by the separation of space and contexts in which to live (longterm) and work. Collectives of artists have engaged with and occupied housing in a number of ways and the construction, occupation and management of housing has been integral to the development of artist-led practices from the 1970s. Different relationships between groups of artists, art institutions and housing have been adopted. The Western Front, Vancouver (1972–present), and Womanhouse, California (1972) are two very different projects involving the occupation of a house by a group of artists. Both projects were undertaken in opposition to limitations and exclusions within established art institutions and resulted in a merging of domestic experiences and art. In contrast, Martha Rosler’s exhibition If You Lived Here… (Dia Art Foundation, 1989) and Medical Care for Homeless People by WochenKlausur (Vienna Secession, 1992) both turned high profile institutional invitations into collective projects which sought to provide material support for homeless groups and respond to issues around vacant housing. More recently projects such as The Blue House, initiated by Jeanne van Heeswijk (2005-2009), and Casco Art Institute’s The Grand Domestic Revolution (2009-2012) explored the roles and hosted arrangements that an art institution could adopt by moving into, and becoming, a house. Through hosted encounters and by considering the domestic space beyond private concerns.

Artist House 45 living room during Lloyd-Wilson's residency Credit East Street Arts Daisy Robson Wright

Art, Housing and Commoning Institutions The commons offers a way of considering spaces, communities of users, and/or ownership models beyond notions of public (state control) and private (market driven). It is used to escape the dichotomy of public versus private altogether, thereby creating openings and criteria for new ways of beingin-common. In the UK the commons traditionally referred to uncultivated land surrounding villages or towns which was accessed by local communities and used to undertake life sustaining activities such as grazing animals, collecting wood and picking food. Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize winning work in economics brought ideas about the commons to prominence. Using game theory Ostrom showed that natural resources (such as forests) can be effectively managed by a community of users, through the creation of self-governing institutions. More recently, ideas about the commons have been used to consider how urban resources, including housing, can be developed, managed and shared in more just and ecological ways. To this end, the commons has been aligned with urban spatial theories and used to investigate the role that participatory and self-organised practices can play in the development of cities. In this context, and consistent with ‘right to the city’ arguments, the commons refers to the access and management of material spaces, such as housing, as well as more elusive, psychological spaces such as the space of imagination or play.1 Lauren Berlant summarises this double status of the commons as follows: “The common usually refers to an orientation toward life and value unbound by concepts and divisions of property, and points to the world both as a finite resource that is running out and an inexhaustible fund of human consciousness or creativity.”2 Artist-led housing contributes to discussions about housing and the commons by merging the provision and management of ‘real’ housing with more elusive, inexhaustible, practices like imagining domestic space differently and using hosted arrangements to play with public/private boundaries. In other words, artist-led housing practices are not limited to envisaged or prefigurative common spaces; they exist both as collectively produced artworks and material, architectural, houses.

Artist House 45 living room during Lloyd-Wilson's residency Credit East Street Arts Daisy Robson Wright

THE COMMON USUALLY REFERS TO AN ORIENTATION TOWARD LIFE AND VALUE UNBOUND BY CONCEPTS AND DIVISIONS OF PROPERTY, AND POINTS TO THE WORLD BOTH AS A FINITE RESOURCE THAT IS RUNNING OUT AND AN INEXHAUSTIBLE FUND OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS OR CREATIVITY. — LAUREN BERLANT

Existing studies of housing and the commons have identified the use of ‘nested enterprises’ as a way of scaling up selfgoverning practices.3 An example of this nesting can be seen within current Community Land Trust (CLT) networks in the UK. CLTs are nonprofit, community-led organisations that have been used to develop and maintain permanently affordable community assets, including housing. On a national level the National CLT Network supports member organisations in England and Wales. Regional organisations within this network, such as London CLT or Leeds Community Homes, support multiple projects within a particular geographic catchment. Within individual CLT projects nested principles continue to apply, with co-operative decision-making facilitated through working groups nested within steering groups. Nesting is used here to describe a series of democratically managed memberships operating inside of one another— as in a nest of tables or Matryoshka dolls. Artist-led organisations do not nest in this way. Nor do they coalesce into a coherent housing movement with shared characteristics, demands and goals.4 Artist-led organisations have more complex and indeterminate relationships of scale between individual and collective practices, often combining artistic programming, artist support and commissioning responsibilities as well as self-initiated project delivery. They use open-ended processes, chance encounters and improvisation; artistic strategies which do not align with predetermined community-based models of participation but instead aim for ‘a permanent process of instituting’.5 Closer, maybe, to a bird’s nest, or a site-responsive practice of social and material assemblage. (If this risks being too twee or lacking in collective action, for nest the dictionary also has ‘a place filled with undesirable people, activities, or things’ – to emphasise solidarities with activist practices and fugitive publics; and question collective desires.) In Common Space: The City as Commons, Stavros Stavrides emphasises the need for commoning practices to continually overspill the boundaries of a community.6 This is important to avoid commoning practices from enclosing themselves, forming collectively privatised spaces which exclude strangers and avoid frictions caused by difference. Stavrides draws attention to ‘institutions of expanding commoning’, which ‘necessarily presuppose an ever-expanding community of potential collaborators’.7 For institutions of expanding commoning to be continually open and malleable to newcomers, they must be always in-the-making: ‘Expanding commoning does not expand according to pre-existing patterns; it literally invents itself.’8 Artist-run projects, including housing, are formed through creative strategies which permanently escape easy alignment with neatly nested structures; an approach which, at least on the surface, seems to marry well with practices of expanding commoning.

LLOYD-WILSON SLOWLY SETTLED WITHIN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD AS ACTIVE AND ENGAGED CITIZENS, INTRODUCING THEMSELVES TO NEIGHBOURS FIRST AND FOREMOST AS RESIDENTS AND BLURRING DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN THEIR LIFE AND WORK.

Artist House 45 Artist House 45 is a back-to-back terrace house located in Beeston, South Leeds, which is owned by Leeds City Council.9 The first Artist House 45 residents were Toby Lloyd and Andrew Wilson (Lloyd-Wilson), an artist duo who lived in the house for almost three years (January 2015–September 2017). Following Lloyd-Wilson’s residency East Street Arts reflected on the project for six months (October 2017–April 2018). After this period of reflection East Street Arts developed a phase called ‘Portraits of the Street’ (May 2018–April 2019) in which multiple artists (including writers, painters, researchers and photographers) were invited to live in Artist House 45 for up to three months and develop a portrait of the house and neighbourhood in response. As part of this phase I moved into the house for a month as a Researcher in Residence (May 2018). More recently, Sophie Chapman and Kerri Jefferis (Sophie + Kerri), an artist duo, moved into the house (May– September 2019). Alongside this programming, I have been developing strategies to question, map and support Artist House 45 as a practice of expanding commoning. Without predetermined organisational and common structures, how can Artist House 45 be communicated within East Street Arts and translated across discrete residencies? Lloyd-Wilson slowly settled within the neighbourhood as active and engaged citizens, introducing themselves to neighbours first and foremost as residents and blurring distinctions between their life and work. I used collaborative mapping to explore how this led to the ‘carrying’ of participatory urban practices across different sites and situations. Together we drew connections between visible artistic events and objects and ‘under the radar’ exchanges. Cut up, fragile, and a bit scrappy these mappings prompted a discussion about the messy, sometimes ambiguous, connections between national events Lloyd-Wilson have hosted and civic actions in Beeston, including local greenspace campaigns. As well as making social processes within Lloyd-Wilsons work visible, these mappings also started to shape and change the perception of the project from within East Street Arts.

As Artist House 45 shifted to a programme of shorter residencies, I questioned how common spaces and knowledge could be passed on and kept alive when residents left. I introduced a ‘handover pack’ to allow research I had undertaken to be taken on and added to by Sophie + Kerri during their residency. This included written work and drawn observations, including situated experiences from my own time spent living in the house. Although only a modest initial intervention within East Street Arts’ wider programming activity, this evolving ‘handover pack’ begins to explore how commoning practices developed within discrete phases of Artist House 45 can be translated across residencies. It also starts to consider how information and situated experiences from discrete residencies can contribute to an ongoing and expanding resource facilitating organisationaland self-reflection. An open question: how can projects such as Artist House 45 be expanded beyond one-off pilot projects, whilst retaining their status as both collectively produced artworks and at the same time finite material houses? A starting point in answering this might be Teddy Cruz’s proposition, in the forward to Social Housing-Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice that: ‘We - artists/architects - need to be the developers of our own housing (the new site of intervention is the developer’s spreadsheet).’10 This could include exploring how artist-led organisations could leverage or expand into community development models such as co-operative housing and Community Land Trusts—and in the processes form new and hybrid nests of expanding commons.

Notes 1. Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal, ‘Introduction: The Social (Re)Production of Architecture in “Crisis-Riddled” Times’, in The Social (Re)Production of Architecture: Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, ed. Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal (London: Routledge, 2017), 3–4. 2. Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 396. 3. Aimee Felstead, Kevin Thwaites, and James Simpson, ‘A Conceptual Framework for Urban Commoning in Shared Residential Landscapes in the UK’, Sustainability 11, no. 21 (January 2019): 6119. 4. For a broader discussion on this, see: Emma Coffield, ‘Artist-Run Initiatives: A Study of Cultural Construction’ (Newcastle, Newcastle University, 2015), 41. 5. Gerald Raunig, ‘Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming’, eipcp, 2006, para. 3. 6. Stavros Stavrides, Common Space: The City as Commons (London: Zed Books, 2016), 31. 7. Stavrides, 39. 8. Stavrides, 43. 9. Prior to East Street Arts’ involvement, the house was vacant and in need of renovations for a number of years. East Street Arts have leased the property, initially for five years, at a peppercorn rent in exchange for undertaking renovation work required to return it to social housing. 10. Teddy Cruz, ‘Foreword: Rethinking Housing, Citizenship, and Property’, in Social Housing– Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice, ed. Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemci (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 7–14.

Bio Jonathan Orlek is a collaborative PhD researcher, investigating housing with East Street Arts and the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. He is also a director of Studio Polpo, a social enterprise architecture collective in Sheffield, and an Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University School of Architecture.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

PHOTO ESSAY

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau 1, (Tape on floor) Asda, Lewisham

We’re hard at work on a new symbolic language. It’s a visual dialect that draws on an existing vocabulary. It takes the form of public interventions made with spray paint, hazard tape, barriers, fencing and laminated signs

These constructions divide and block off parts of public space. They are physical barriers, but also readable signs. They tell us what they’re doing as they’re doing it. They are acceptable blockages. The creators of this new language use it to tell us where to be, how to stand, how close is too close and how far is far enough. We all take notice of these constructions, and while we decode what they are saying we appreciate their prosaic aesthetics and occasional wit or grace, just as we sometimes notice their clumsy awkwardness or their failure to function. A recurring motif in acceptable blockages is the triple layering of symbolic and actual barriers: written language, bright hazardous colours like red, yellow and black, and physical obstructions. Some acceptable blockages remind us of magical curses or circles of protection. Abandon hope, all who enter here. And although social-distancing measures are ultimately in place to save lives, the danger for the individual is more moral than mortal. There’s a new etiquette on our streets, in our parks and shops. We understand the rules and we submit to their authority. The coronavirus and the subsequent restrictions on economic activity and individuals’ movements have caused a worldwide drop in crime rates. In the uk though, there has been a rise in calls to the police about anti-social behaviour, the definition of which has now expanded to include being in a group of more than two people, or using a fenced-off piece of gym equipment in the park. Temporarily, we’re allowed to indulge our prejudices (they don’t look like a family group, they shouldn’t be sitting down, they’re too close to me) and assume the worst about the intentions of other people. I once spoke to a Senior Infrastructure Officer in the British Army [link: www. radioanti.co.uk/#/camp-bastion/]. He had overseen the building of Camp Bastion, the British Army air base in the Afghanistan war. He talked about the system of barriers they had at the edge of the camp. Some were forms of physical protection: ditches, barbed wire,

solid fences, but the first thing you saw at each entry point was what the colonel called a ‘flimsy finger barrier’ – the sort of thing you see at a multi-story carpark. It wouldn’t stop anyone who wanted to smash through but its function was symbolic. It determined the intention of people entering the camp, and driving through the barrier triggered an aggressive response from the guards. Friend or foe? According to the Behavioural Insights Team (the former government ‘nudge’ department now operating as a profit-making consultancy) young men are the most likely social group to break social distancing rules. Of course they are. Our politics and economics revolves around the figure of the youthful, radical man, a rule breaker, a decider, an outlier. Move fast and break things. Don’t follow the herd. Make your own way. In the end, anger felt towards those of us who do not obey the acceptable blockages is performative rather than punitive. Social distancing is a numbers game, one person doing pull ups, or standing too close doesn’t change the state of play. We turn our frustration into outrage on social media or in heated conversations with friends and family. In a way, we are reiterating the rules to ourselves as much as anyone else. Some of us wilfully ignore the blockages, most of us acquiesce to their stated desires, but all of us recognise that a language has formed up, and it can only enforce the rules through consent. The efficacy of acceptable blockages relies on the idea that we can exercise collective restraint in return for security. That assumption ignores 30 years of individualist ideology pumped into the cultural ether by capitalism, but in general our adherence to the rules shows that we have, for the most part ignored neoliberalism’s demand that there be no such thing as society. Some acceptable blockages are hastily assembled – flapping hazard tape on the swings, carelessly applied gaffa on the floor of the supermarket. But some are things of beauty. There’s satisfaction in seeing a bench rendered perfectly inoperative with

tight loops of yellow and black hazard tape, or casting your eyes across a field of fenced-off picnic benches. My collection of photos comes from a call out on Twitter and Instagram. I’m grateful for people’s contributions, and I get the sense that people are happy to share. It is gratifying to know that other people have seen what we’ve seen. These images document a distinct set of public sculptures, and a new dialect of acceptable blockages that speaks to our situation. Posting pictures of acceptable blockages online is part of the interpretation and dissemination of this symbolic language, but it’s also a moment of connection between individuals, distanced but not isolated. ‘Acceptable Blockages’ was a 2015 video by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau examining the symbolic power of blockages in public space [https://www.dekersaint.com/ acceptable-blockages]. If you want to add to the archive of acceptable blockages, post your picture on social media with the hashtag #acceptableblockage, or send them to Matt on Twitter (@mdkg) or Instagram (@mdkgiraudeau)

There’s satisfaction in seeing a bench rendered perfectly inoperative with tight loops of yellow and black hazard tape, or casting your eyes across a field of fenced off picnic benches

Ralph Pritchard, Park opposite St Mary of Eton Church, 28 Eastway, Hackney Wick, London

Rick Pushinsky, Park in Leytonstone, London

Karl England, Blackhorse Co-op, London

Ian Bruce, Baby Kingdom, Castle Hill, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Hamish MacPherson, Sainsburys, Hackney, London

Susie Henderson, ASDA superstore, Radford Rd, Hyson Green, Nottingham

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau (2m spraypaint), Hillyfields Park, Lewisham, London

Pippa Healy, Richmond Park, Richmond , Surrey, UK

Alistair Gentry

Confirmed that global pandemics are shit, in case anybody was in doubt about that. But in some ways it feels really fortuitous to be living ( / still alive) in a time when things that were widely deemed impossible and absurd have been so rapidly adopted as common sense. Mere months ago Jeremy Corbyn was ridiculed by the media for suggesting free high-speed internet nationally, now suddenly any schoolkid who needs it for their schooling will get it. Bang – that’s not just socialism, it’s Marxism, kids. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The Tories have spent every minute they’ve been in office methodically sawing a circular hole underneath the nhs like in a cartoon, with Richard Branson and a bunch of similar cruise ship magician-looking privateering motherfuckers lurking down there to snaffle up the smashed pieces that result from it crashing through into the cellar. The nhs still hasn’t got the £350million a week promised via a lie on the side of a bus, but now nhs workers are patriotic heroes of the people. Even the brown ones! Voluntary weekly outdoor applause session is mandatory, patriotic citizen. Oh by the way, have as many nurses, doctors and police officers as you like, we were just teasing with all that stuff about not being able to afford them. It also looks like the savings made by the Department of Work and Pensions knowingly bringing about the premature deaths of 150,000 elderly, ill and disabled people are going to be an utter waste of Iain Duncan Smith’s evil because there’s been a late discovery of the magic money tree that Theresa May couldn’t find before. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: all money is imaginary now. There can be any amount of it that we want there to be. Or at least for now, there can be as much of it as the people we elect direct their central banks to mouse click into existence. That’s what fiat currency means, currency not tied to a commodity and with no intrinsic value; only the value we collectively ascribe to it. Fiat means ‘let it be done’. So let’s let it. First step is to quit electing and empowering clowns whose main trait is fucking around – in every sense of that phrase – because when you do that you shouldn’t be surprised when you get a fucking circus, or a circus of fucking. Fortunately for us, even those clowns and their GOVERNMENTS AND gormless supporters are going to find it very hard to stuff the lessons being learned from near-universal THEIR ARM’S LENGTH daily experience right now back into their stupid INSTRUMENTS CAN little clown car. Lesson one: governments and their MYSTERIOUSLY FIND arm’s length instruments can mysteriously find the money for things they said they couldn’t, because THE MONEY FOR they’re doing it blatantly right in front of us every THINGS THEY SAID day now.

THEY COULDN’T, BECAUSE THEY’RE DOING IT BLATANTLY RIGHT IN FRONT OF US EVERY DAY NOW

SOME PRICKS PANIC BUY TOILET PAPER AND FLOCK TO THE PARK FOR TINNIES LIKE THEY’RE ON HOLIDAY WHEN EVERYBODY ELSE IS TRYING NOT TO MAKE THEIR FELLOW CITIZENS DIE

An example of this that might interest the artistic reader is Arts Council England’s quasi-communistic U-turn on what they previously referred to publicly and derisively as ‘salami-slicing’, i.e. dividing public funding up equally to everyone qualified rather than fostering a winner takes all and the devil take the hindmost approach to funding. Mind you, as is often the case with ostensible generosity in the arts, doing the maths on their ‘emergency support’ for individuals of up to £2500 (with an extra £500 if you need disabled access assistance so be a pal and don’t be too disabled, OK?) still only yields a heavily curated unaccountable payout for several thousand good boys, girls and genderfluid individuals who haven’t expired in screaming frustration from trying to use Grantium. This is in a country where, to highlight just two examples, the artist membership organisation a-n has about 18,000 due-paying members and the Equity union has in the region of 44,000 actors, singers, directors, choreographers, set designers and other performing or technical staff on its books. Yes doing something for some people is better than doing nothing for anybody, but we’re definitely going to need a bigger salami. The teachable here is that it can be done. If they want to, the Arts Council can fuck off every pending application for a £150,000 juggling and clowning festival in Totnes or whatever and decide to give ten local artists £1,500 instead, just ‘coz. They essentially have done this in response to coronavirus, at least to a tentative degree. Baby steps, preferably away from the parent and child bongo workshop. Other revelations that aren’t really revelations include realising that most of us don’t need to work as much, or even be at work at all to do most of our work, and we can still be paid the same or nearly the same, because the first prerequisite of having a career and a future again is that you’re still around to see it and there’s a magic money tree so have free money. That a great many people’s supposedly gainful employment is actually so useless that it doesn’t really matter, upset anybody or effect anything much when their workplaces shut down. And even if some pricks panic buy toilet paper and flock to the park for tinnies like they’re on holiday when everybody else is trying not to make their fellow citizens die even in the face of a government that seems hellbent on killing as many of us as it can without actually having to go to the trouble and expense of lining us all up to be shot... that socialism, solidarity and universally accessible resources are not the Lovecraftian alien horrors our mainstream media have convinced the great hateful British unnecessariat that they are, but actually the only things that can bring all of us safely to other side of the 4K Ultra hd slow motion flaming train wreck we’re in at the moment.

ALONE WITH EVERYBODY OD ARTS FESTIVAL

Vickie Fear Simon Lee Dicker Rowan Lear

Zoe Toolan_And a Vital Connection is Made Photo: Simon Lee Dicker

The theme of this year’s Od Arts Festival considers being ‘alone’ (from physical to psychological isolation) ‘with everybody’ (forms of community). Alone with Everybody finds the isolated individual adrift upon a teetering market economy and an underfunded and under attack commons. Sluice asked three of its organisers how the pandemic has affected the upcoming festival. 48

VICKIE FEAR

Zoe Toolan_And a Vital Connection is Made Photo: Simon Lee Dicker

We’re writing this in mid-April – a month ago we thought there was the real possibility that Od would be going ahead in May and we were starting to share our programme. Right now we can’t know whether putting on a festival in September is feasible or foolish. All of the artists in the programme will have been massively impacted and although we’re in conversation with them about changes to the festival, we also know they need support, time and space to respond to the unimaginable changes to their lives at home and loss of income. We won’t be asking them to make new work from scratch if we can’t offer them payment for it but if artists feel their work needs to change we hope we’ll have time to explore the options. The biggest change will be the new understanding we all have of isolation and our closer familiarity with the ideas in many of the artists’ work. We considered taking some of the work online but it actually feels even more essential to use the festival as a way to bring people back together and to see it as an opportunity to celebrate our communities.

SIMON LEE DICKER

The artists and creative team assembling the festival are the same, but the way we look at it will be different. The first Od explored artistic, romantic and neighbourly frictions, and this edition works with notions of solitude, loneliness and isolation, but we always have the intention to bring people together. But the way we come together will be different. We don’t yet know what the residual social effect of the pandemic will be, but I’m certain our relationship to others will have changed. Will we hug when we next meet?

ROWAN LEAR

Though it may be too soon to reconstruct Od differently, I can’t help but think the experience of lockdown will have given the art world a massive push towards understanding that we need multiple, different ways of accessing art. The minute the lockdown was announced, I felt an incredible release of anxiety – associated with the obligation to leave the house and partake in complex social situations everyday. It’s an underlying anxiety that I’d clearly acclimatised to and I hope, am fairly skilled at masking for short periods. However, now the world has altered to fit this new reality, I am joining more events, more screenings, more conversations, more reading groups, than ever before. My intellectual and social life feels enriched, and not at all diminished. I don’t want to suggest this is the same for everyone: we are not all so privileged to be able to stay home, to feel secure in our homes, to have basic subsistence and access to the internet or even, electricity. 49

The Walking Reading Group on Care, 2018 Commissioned by Whitstable Biennial with The Ash Project Photo: Rosie Lonsdale

But there are lots of people – neurodiverse, chronically-ill, disabled – who have long struggled to leave the house, for whom lockdown may even have offered new opportunities. As well as advocating for art in public space, as artists, organisers and curators, we need to seriously (and playfully) rethink how art can meet people where they are, in their homes, gardens and communal areas. SIMON LEE DICKER

Personal and collective understandings of solitude have gone through a global renaissance. I think the biggest change to our programme will be in the way that simple gestures take on meaning we could not have foreseen when we put the programme together in 2019.

VICKIE FEAR

Almost all of the works feel like they reference the recent experience of isolation! Zoe Toolan’s playlist for And A Vital Connection Is Made (a walk and rave) now feels like a collection of Coronavirus anthems.

ROWAN LEAR

The Walking Reading Group, while quietly radical in creating discussions on the move, seemed a pretty harmless activity. At the moment, the idea of walking closely beside someone you’ve just met, is pretty transgressive!

VICKIE FEAR

Similarly, A Long Night, our community feast with Fairland Collective couldn’t happen during the pandemic; and that title has a whole different resonance after weeks and weeks of quiet nights in.

ROWAN LEAR

Beforehand, I understood Sadie Hennessey’s performance artwork G.S.O.H rather ironically, in light of the research that emerged last year, proving that women who are alone without children, are happier, healthier and less lonely than their married and cohabiting counterparts. Despite all the rhetoric, marriage, family, and institutionalised partnerships are no assurance against loneliness and its associated health impacts (at least for women!). The extent to which our social structure so strongly rewards the ‘couple-form’ – financially and culturally – might well be what exacerbates our loneliness.

VICKIE FEAR

In contrast, G.S.O.H has really shifted for me during lock down: conducting boyfriend auditions is witty and playful but it feels completely different to me now as a single woman living alone and unable to meet potential partners in person. Loneliness is proven to cause high blood pressure, a weakened immune

The Walking Reading Group on Care, 2018 Commissioned by Whitstable Biennial with The Ash Project Photo: Rosie Lonsdale

TWRG On Commons_Summer2017 Courtesy of the artist and commissioned by SPACE Photo: Tim Bowditch

Art has been diminishing in our schools but thriving in home-ed timetables so I hope that more people will have rediscovered their love for culture and making and will be excited by an arts festival like Od

Sadie Hennessy G.S.O.H. Photo: Lee Carter

system, depression and Alzheimer’s disease so a lack of any physical contact with another human being has felt much more threatening than I had ever really considered before. I can identify much more closely with the air of desperation in that work but I also really appreciate the idea that heartache could be a driver for putting yourself out there. SIMON LEE DICKER

It feels to me like the choice to be alone can be empowering, when not house-bound, and at least the possibility for physical contact is just beyond the front door. Collective solitude is common in the house I share with my partner and two children. Slipping into a stereotype of screen addiction on our chosen platforms (instagram, youtube, GTA and Fortnite) the grass is greener – especially if you use the right filter. I think our ability to be alone while together may have saved our sanity in this time of social distancing: our choice to move to the countryside 15 years ago brought with it a disconnection and isolation from other artists that led to us setting up OSR Projects in the first place, and it’s why we continue to build projects that connect people through artistic practice. The solitude is welcome until loneliness creeps in.

VICKIE FEAR

I have been really struck by the way that people have embraced creativity in their homes during social isolation. Art has been diminishing in our schools but thriving in home-ed timetables so I hope that more people will have rediscovered their love for culture and making and will be excited by an arts festival like Od.

ROWAN LEAR

Maybe people will return to art for different reasons. Perhaps we’ll experience a renewed sense of the role of art – towards the sheer pleasure of materials and colour and texture and creativity and craftsmanship – and away from a kind of pseudo-intellectual celebrity worship. That’s not to say that mass-amateurism is necessarily or entirely positive, particularly when it comes to recognising the skill and rewarding the labour of professional artists. But it’s something we need to think seriously about, particularly in the wake of the release of Arts Council England’s new national strategy Let’s Create, from which the word ‘art’ has been banished.

SIMON LEE DICKER

The act of making brings us closer and it is no surprise to me that when we are left on our own we turn to art to express our hopes, fears, feelings and thoughts. I think in moments like these there is an opportunity to reconsider what is really important: re-think how we live our lives, find new rhythms and make changes. 53

Andreas Backoefer

In 2019, New York witnessed not only the installation of a highly innovative and impressive art space, The Shed, but also the presentation of a new exhibition concept at the venerable MoMA, reopened after extensive renovations. Just like the Public Library and Lincoln Center, both art institutions might be considered part of the cultural commons of New York City – yet equally, both are funded through the Anglo-Saxon philanthropic model.

The MoMA can look back since its founding to a long history of more architectonic than conceptual modifications. The 2019 reworking, however, emphasised two conceptual aspects: establishing a truly global perspective and remaining rooted in New York. Hence a central structural aim was to create galleries allowing for a synthetic display of the collection instead of ordering them according to discipline, as had been the case before. This was to extrapolate creative frictions on the one hand, and create links between different genres on the other. As MoMa director Glenn Lowry puts it: “The division of the galleries into discrete departmental spaces has gradually been balanced by a more synthetic and inclusive reading of the collection that complicates, rather than simplifies, relationships among works of art. That incremental process finds its culmination in the integrated hang of the collection galleries today – a presentation made possible by more than forty thousand square feet of new exhibition space. […] Each floor of the collection galleries now tells the stories of the art of an era through all the mediums represented in all of the curatorial departments, reprising the experiments of the Museum’s early years.”1 While the exhibition galleries do follow a chronological order, their multi-disciplinary presentation encourages detours, shortcuts, and repetitions – in short: the reorganisation refuses the teleological narrative of modern art. This form of curating might be understood in light of Achim Landwehr’s concept of chronoferences, according to which the present can relate to absent eras in multiple ways: (art) historiography can only be pluralist.2 To further multiply this multiplication, works will be replaced every six months in one third of the rooms. This strategy could foster far-reaching effects across the art world, as the MoMA is, in the words of Hal Foster, a ‘Modernism Central’3: new developments here affect art museums everywhere. It was Hal Foster, too, who looked more closely into the financing structure of the ‘new’ MoMA. Roughly half of the 450 million dollars needed for reconstruction was provided by David Rockefeller (long-term board member of the museum), with four individuals sharing the other half: hedge fund billionaire Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin, Steven Cohen, and media tycoon David Geffen (a new centre in the museum is named after Cohen and his wife, and an entire wing after Geffen). This form of funding creates some tension between the perception of the museum as part of the cultural commons, and the private interests of the financiers. Several architectural, organisational, and conceptual factors of the ‘new’ 58

MoMA underline its role as a public good: the open design of the entrance area, with some galleries accessible for free, the improved connectedness of different divisions, the diversity inherent in the new form of presentation, and the intended erasure of a hierarchy between high- and low-art media. Counter-balancing these tendencies toward democratisation, ‘plutocratic’ powers of capital are at play, endowing the art institution with a neoliberal entrepreneurial logic. While first fractures to this logic are becoming visible in the post-Occupy era, and the era of Trump – with the long-valid business credo of ‘expand or die’, for instance, undergoing some questioning – the philanthropists’ self-conception is still largely capitalist. Funding continues to be provided by donors who through their actions continue to propel inequality in terms of income distribution. In short, fewer and fewer people donate more and more. Correspondingly, Hal Foster has asked: “But why bow down to them for the tax break and the journalistic love that they receive in return?”4 This question becomes even more urgent if we look at the composition of the museum’s Board. Among its members we find, for instance, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, significantly involved in two large US prison companies. While the museum has done a lot in terms of the diversification of its employees, we have yet to see a ‘decolonisation’ of its board members and donors.

Hudson Yards The Shed, Ajay Suresh, 2019. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

As of 2019, the art space The Shed has also become part of New York’s cultural eco-system. It is integrated into the new giant building complex Hudson Yards in Chelsea. This complex consists primarily of a vertical shopping mall situated between two office towers, and an additional skyscraper, with a fourth one under construction. The project was planned by billionaire and developer Stephen Ross, who now lives in a Hudson Yards penthouse himself. Subway line 7 was extended to reach the new area, a new station built. The New York Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has called the Yards a “relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design,” arguing that “Hudson Yards glorifies a kind of surface spectacle — as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.”5 According to Kimmelman, the development has become a symbol for the social rift between the haves and have-nots of New York. Additionally, the New York Times has uncovered that for construction, funds were used from the cash-for-visas programme EB-5 – which had been put in place to support the poorest areas in the US.6 The Shed, having cost millions to erect, is situated right next to the Hudson Yards towers and hence forms part of the complex. It is a ‘flexible’ art space which, more or less built on wheels, can be pushed outwards and into itself almost like a telescope. Inside this architectural feat, again we find flexible exhibition rooms, a small theatre and a large performance space. Its founders and designers aimed to establish in New York a flexible room enabling artists to collaborate beyond the dividing lines of their respective disciplines.7 In the first season of 2019, artistic director Alex Poots presented a large number of commissions to display the full range of the new institution. The beginning of the 2020 season saw the impressive largescale retrospective Absolute and Intermediates of American artist

It is also a public service to provide a platform for art – as a cultural commons; and, furthermore, to formulate quality criteria in order to be able to provide public audiences with the best-possible selection of works 60

Agnes Denes, involving not least a large-scale new commission for The Shed.8 For October, choreographer William Forsythe (in collaboration with the Boston Ballet) has been commissioned with new work, and in November, conductor Teodor Currentzis will play in The Shed with his ensemble MusicaAeterna. Concurrently, the art space is in conversation with smaller New York-based institutions in order to negotiate possible collaborations in the educational sector. Nevertheless, many local artists are critical of the city’s cultural politics, arguing that it would be better to finance artists than establish yet another art space. This objection seems only partly valid, for it is also a public service to provide a platform for art – as a cultural commons; and, furthermore, to formulate quality criteria in order to be able to provide public audiences with the best-possible selection of works. Such a procedure of scouting, examining, and recognition has always formed part of the work conducted both by museums, such as the MoMA, and by presenters, such as The Shed. That said, it is just as much a public service to support a vital, non-regulated art scene – its studios, its artistrun galleries, and its grassroots events. These two strategic approaches should not be played off against each other. The institutional ‘sieving’ that precedes the presentation of works is necessarily tied to a certain hierarchisation; the support of individual, artist-driven projects is usually based on a more or less general understanding of democracy. Hierarchisation is always tied to a certain power dispositif – and capital, with its vectors of regulation and control, inscribes itself into this dispositif. In an environment dominated by the private sponsoring of art, these inscriptions constitute problematic ‘force fields’ that, in the very least, need to be rendered visible. Without the immense capitalization of the Hudson Yards, The Shed would probably never have been created. Both belong to a kind of economy that Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre have called an ‘economy of enrichment’9: the social actors of the world of commodities are connecting to one another various different arenas, such as the visual arts, culture, the creation of foundations and museums, the luxury goods industry, patrimonialisation, and tourism. This structural network has already been internalised by the creators of the new complex in Chelsea. The blending of lifestyle brands and contemporary art on a global scale is a development one can criticise with good reason; at the same time, it has been the prerequisite for being able to conceive of a forum as spatially experimental and as accessible to the public as The Shed.

Notes 1. Lowry, Glenn D., “Introduction”, in MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 8-17, here p. 14. 2. Cf. Landwehr, Achim, Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit: Essay zur Geschichtstheor ie (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 2016). 3. Foster, Hal: “Change at MoMA”, in LRB, 41:21, 7 November 2019 (https://www. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n21/hal-foster/ change-at-moma). 4. Ibid. 5. Quoted from: Paybarah, Azi, “Hudson Yards: The Making of a $25 Billion Neighborhood”, in The New York Times, 18/03/2019 (https://www. nytimes.com/2019/03/18/nyregion/ newyorktoday/nyc-news-hudson-yards. html?searchResult-Position=36). 6. Cf. Capps, Kriston, “Another Reason to Hate Hudson Yards: The billion-dollar luxury real estate project in Manhattan is exploiting a cash-for-visas program meant for the poor”, in The New York Times, 16/05/2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/ opinion/hudson-yards. html?searchResultPosition=32). 7. Cf. Paybarah, Azi, “The Shed Opens at Hudson Yards”, in The New York Times, 05/04/2020 (https://www. nytimes.com/2019/04/05/nyregion/ newyorktoday/nyc-news-shed-hudsonyards.html?searchResultPosition=31). 8. Cf. Cotter, Holland, “At 88, Agnes Denes Finally Gets the Retrospective She Deserves: She set out to change humanity. Now a superbly installed survey at the Shed charts this visionary artist’s 50- year journey”, in The New York Times, 07/11/2019 (https://www. nytimes.com/2019/11/07/arts/design/ agnes-denes-the-shed-review.html?searchResultPosition=4). 9. “We will call this form of economy an ‘economy of enrichment’. In doing so, we are playing with the ambiguity of the term ‘enrichissement’: which we are using, on the one hand, in the sense in which one speaks of metal enrichment, of feeling enriched by something in life, of a culture being enriched, of the refinement of a piece of clothing, and, finally, of the enrichment achieved if an object collection is expanded.” (Boltanski, Luc and Esquerre, Arnaud, Bereicherung: Eine Kritik der Ware (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), 16.)

PROFILE

swap editions began in 2016. Going through university, art schools, printmaking courses we would swap a lot of prints and works between each other. I’ve always been interested in multiples, editions, sequences. Robin Tarbet

swap editions is a sort of accessible artwork collection, I know the notion of what is accessible is loaded, but predominantly for artists swap editions is a way of swapping art between each other to not just build on networks but actually create interesting projects.

So that was how it started and I kind of bumbled around for ages trying to figure out what it was and whether it should be an ongoing project or just a few exhibitions. I’ve always wanted to curate and stage exhibitions but without having a space to do it in is difficult so something like this where I can run it out of my studio, it’s transportable, I can carry the project on the train, each edition is a little group set where actually I can pop it in the post if I wish and there can be an exhibition of an edition across the world. I also get to meet a lot of artists so it’s interesting for me as it informs my practice. I like interacting with artists but I don’t like interacting with galleries, or being a gallery or managing a space so it started as this idea that I’m an artist that makes multiples and I’m interested in other artists that make multiples. I worked out if I worked with roughly with 10-12 artists each contributing 18 artworks I’d have enough artists and artworks to create an interesting project without being logistically overwhelming. Each artist receives a completed set, that leaves 6–8 sets, one I archive, is kept pristine, one I take personally – and have the work in my home, one goes to the host gallery and whoever else has contributed. Then I try to get one into publicly owned collections. I’m not interested in the art market, and I’m not really seeing the types of projects in galleries that I’m interested in – so swap editions really started in a grass roots, low budget, no funding kind of way. With swap editions I was really clear from the start that I will never sell an edition, and there’s no money for artists to produce the work. I’m very open with artists when I do a call-out, or when I invite artists to apply to participate. There’s no funding for this, I’m going to give you no money but what you will get back is a whole set of of everyone’s works, so the actual value in it is you get an edition of 10 works, so if you’re an artist that’s interested in collecting artworks and you can see a value in swapping a set of your works with a whole set of other artist’s works, I think it’s quite hard to put a value on that.

Swap Edition 5: Island, 2020 Photo: Robin Tarbet

Edition 5: island is a virtual landscape inter-connecting 10 artists selected through an open-call, who were asked > Are You An Island? swap editions partnered with skelf, a virtual project space, to curate a digital exhibition as part of Edition 5: island. This was the first time swap editions included an online component to an edition and the project is live on skelf from 22. January to 20. April, accompanied by an exhibition at Creekside Projects in Deptford 12.–15. March (PV Friday 13. March 6–9pm). Edition 5: island brings together the work of Ruth Chambers / Daniel Clark / Philip Crewe / Jake Francis / Ed French / Helen Grove-White / Jack Holme / Tim Offredi & Mez Kerr Jones / Shir Raz / Sara Trillo https://www.swaparteditions.com/edition-5.html

Nipper, Philip Crewe Swap Edition 5: Island

Grey Matter, Ed French Swap Edition 5: Island

I’ll approach a gallery to host a swap editions exhibition for a few days between their gallery programme, in exchange they’ll receive one set of the edition. I like the idea of trying to work with the gallery system in between their commercial programme by injecting an exchange economy. I’ve always been quite interested in the idea of the exchange economy, and the value of the exchange economy from the perspective of artist-run spaces or projects. I think particularly in the art world where values are not always monetary but more communal. With swap editions there’s a material benefit (a set of artworks) but I also want the project to be recognised as an important way of working and creating culture. We live in a financially led, marketised world and it’s actually not always very good! I think institutions and museums should pick up more about the idea of collections and archiving, interrogating what should be archived. Organisationally what I’m trying to develop now is placing the work one into publicly owned collections. The ucl and rca collections currently have editions, with this edition I’m trying to get it into more regional institutions. I’m doing something I want other people to be able to see, and I want people to be able to find it and I think in the same way as things resurface as culturally valuable that maybe don’t make much impact at the time, that maybe there’s an importance in recognising the breadth of what happens in the art world. Thematically I started with adhoc because at the beginning the whole project was adhoc. The second edition was about trade, it was sort of anti-market, a bit grotesque, essentially a comment on Frieze. The third edition was about the artist as a machine, then Brexit happened so we made the Brexkit survival kit. This edition is intended to confront a post-brexit isolationist world. Which seems ironic talking about now Covid-19 is sweeping the world.

swap editions No.5 : island I really like the idea of sending out a container that the artists put their work in and they then sending it back to me, and it now has a history of where it’s been, and that ends up as the final case that all the work is archived in. This is a different approach to the previous editions we’ve done, where we’ve collected the work and then designed the archival case afterwards. The last edition, Brexkit was made by some young designers at Kingston university and they designed a survival satchel which was very tarpaulin like, this one I wanted to reference an art crate, I liked the idea of a lightweight art crate that could be delivered to the artist wherever they live. Drawing connections between their isolated locations. Playing on the fact most of the artists I work with are not based here in London, so there’s a good chance they won’t be able to come to see the exhibition, so to play on this idea of our isolation from each other we teamed up with skelf to host the project simultaneously online. We were thinking about what can connect us all. I sat down with Claire and Lizzie from skelf and we selected the artists based on their ideas of what isolation meant. Some were geographically isolated in places like islands, others envisaged their island to be contextually or conceptually situated be it due to health to financial considerations. So once they were selected they were all asked to expound on their version or understanding of being an island, which we then plotted onto a big webpage. I don’t know a word of coding – that was all done through skelf, I just figured out I wanted the biggest webpage we could get away with, I wanted a lot of space, and I wanted the artists dotted around that space. Like a big canvas that you can only see a small bit off at any one time. The idea being that the webpage is a deliberately annoying experience that takes a lot of scrolling, I sort of wanted to build a thing that isn’t like a functioning website, I wanted a challenging user interface, I like the idea that whilst scrolling you might stumble across one of the artists on this webpage – you’re not going to discover them in Anglesea or Shetland or wherever they live but online you might and I wanted to replicate that feeling of isolation or distancing.

P RO F I L E

VICKIE FEAR

The biggest change will be the new understanding we all have of isolation and our closer familiarity with the ideas in many of the artists’ work.

SKELF IS A VIRTUAL PROJECT SPACE, ACCESSIBLE TO ANYONE, EVERYWHERE 70

Detail from You’re in a computer game, Max! An exhibition curated by James Irwin on Skelf 22.4.— 21.7.2020

Claire Undy and Lizzie Munn

skelf is a virtual project space. The term ‘project space’ feels important rather than ‘gallery’, because it’s about giving artists the space to try different things rather than just making something and then putting a photograph of it online. skelf started in 2016 as a series of solo shows and then in 2018 we were given public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England for a quarterly programme, which gave us the budget to hire someone to do all the audience engagement and social media. It is quite important for an online project to get this right because we realised quite quickly that we’d made a thing that had loads of artists on it and some really interesting content but not as many people as we’d have liked were finding it. It felt like a responsibility to get it out to more people. Even before the current lockdown, there were many reasons that many people couldn’t visit art galleries in person, and social media is often how they see new art work and discover artists. While there is a shallow and narcissistic side to social media, it also provides a very accessible and utilitarian way of accessing things.

I began curating skelf by finding artists (often those who didn’t already work digitally) and working with them to make their work exist in a virtual space. It got to a point where I was just reaching artists that I was already aware of, and I wanted to broaden the reach of the project and have people on the site that I didn’t already know. When the quarterly programme began we invited external curators to do projects, and so now each one brings around ten new artists to the site – hugely expanding the number of artists we’re able to host on skelf, and allowing us to show work from all around the world. I wouldn’t necessarily expect people to just stumble across skelf online. If you did and were not looking for art, perhaps you might not know how to engage with it. I guess a benefit of social media is that it reaches out to the right people, to those that will find it interesting. I build the site using code. I’m interested in the idea of coding and the internet as a free platform that anybody can participate in. Anyone can teach themselves how to use code, so it feels very utilitarian, compared to a lot of the art world

Detail from Island – An exhibition curated by SWAP Editions on Skelf 22.1. – 21.4.2020

that can seem very elitist and inaccessible. The internet is unlimited in its scale, so we can work with lots of artists if we want and I can curate shows without the limitations of budget or physical space. If I want to work with somebody, physical distance is irrelevant. It is very easy these days to build websites from readymade templates, however I feel there’s a lot of possibilities in the gaps between these things. If you know how the systems work, you can pull them apart and forge something new. That’s how artists always operate, we take something and find new ways of working with it. I’m very interested in the idea of a mass distribution of art as opposed to making autonomous objects that only one person can have and own. This is why with skelf I’m interested in making a space that has no physical properties, because if you take away the physical limitations or the singularity of something then you can share it with a lot more people.

I think there’s a lot of value in something being shared. We’re brought up to value art by whether it’s sellable and conditioned to think it’s good because it sells for a lot of money. This acts to limit art to those that can afford to do it, can afford to fabricate it, can afford to collect it. It means the act of creativity and the possibility of possession is confined to the wealthy. If I wanted to sell an artwork at an auction house then I wouldn’t give it away on the internet first. But if I prized the value of experience higher than the financial value of my work, then I’d be serving my art best by making it as accessible as I could. I still believe in the Internet. l think it has a huge amount of possibilities, and the only thing that is holding most people back from doing whatever they want online is the knowledge of how to do it. There are resources and forums for anything you want to learn, so the Internet does still operate as an open and communal sharing economy. Any knowledge I’ve accumulated in building skelf is publicly accessible online.

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THE COMMONING

COMING SOON 82

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THE ACT OF MAKING BRINGS US CLOSER AND IT IS NO SURPRISE TO ME THAT WHEN WE ARE LEFT ON OUR OWN WE TURN TO ART TO EXPRESS OUR HOPES, FEARS, FEELINGS AND THOUGHTS