Sluice magazine - Spring 2021

A RT I ST-L E D C U LT U R E

SPR I NG/SU M M E R 2 02 1

W139 Fundraiser

W139 Fundraiser

W139 is unique.

Set in an historical building on Warmoesstraat – in one of the oldest parts of Amsterdam – since 1979, we invite artists to create new and experimental art with society at its centre.

W139 is always artist first.

We have built our space, organisation and exhibitions together – with and for them – and we still do. Over the past four decades, more than 2,000 artists have worked on their artistic practices and ambitions at W139.

W139 Fundraiser

W139 Fundraiser

But to secure the prosperity of W139 we need your support. To provide structural funding, so that growth can be achieved in commercial and social capital.

W139 is currently having a hard time and any support is welcome. We believe that art brings people together.

Therefore we are looking forward to welcoming you as a new friend of W139. w139.nl/en/supporting-2/

Karl England

E DI TOR I A L 6 Dr Susan Jones

SE E N BU T NOT H E A R D : T H E A R T I S T - L E D Q UA N DA RY

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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 Lettering All fonts by Colophon colophon-foundry.org Distribution Central Books centralbooks.com Contact editor@sluice.info sluice.info Subscriptions Subscribe online at sluice.info

Ad de Jong

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Cover CHK Design Acknowledgements Sarah England Claire Crawley 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.

©2021 ISSN 2398-8398 EAN 9772398839005

Charlie Hawksfield

W H E N D I D E V E RYO N E S TA R T H AT I N G A R T S CHO OL? 26 GABRIELA AKA 3 137 36

Unauthorised copying, hiring or lending of this magazine is prohibited but ask us nicely and we’ll see what we can do.

Sluice is an artist/curator-run initiative for similar. Our focus is transnationally local. Sluice is concerned with applied theory, both in regards of the impact of the societal and economic environment on the arts but also how the arts can in turn impact our societal and economic environment.

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 is 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.

Francesca Mollett

L O N D O N A R T S B OA R D 46 Daniel Pryde-Jarman

N E W I N S T I T U T IONA L CR I T IQU E 52 Alistair Gentry

AWA R D YO U R S E L F 60

Studio1.1

SOM E W H E R E OF F TO T H E SI DE .

H A NGI NG ON. 66 A R T I S T - RU N S PAC E S I N D E X : H 76

2021 sees Sluice in its tenth year. Which inevitably invites an element of introspection. Why haven’t we burnt out, incinerated by the intense heat of emergent churn? Have we achieved escape velocity, now comfortably cruising along with our future secure? Well, no. We’re still here because we bloody-mindedly believe that artist culture is worth championing. But is it possible to slide into our second decade without becoming ‘the institution’?

Sluice positions itself as organisationally non-institutional whilst opting to cosplay as such when it suits us. We feel that the strength of artistled culture is its ability to exist (and therefore act) independently of the institution, its resilience and authenticity is borne of independence.

As a project matures it inevitably seeks sustainability which often involves bringing on board different stakeholders who in turn have their own stakeholders, each with their own interests. The single vision of the artist-led project can succumb to paralysis-by-committee. Whilst it’s not inevitable that compliance-culture and bureaucratisation must overtake all institutions it’s easy to drift in that direction if you’re not alive to the possibility.

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On the other hand, it’s difficult to see a long term future for unfunded activities (pig-headed persistence aside), and the ability to increase one’s reach and ambition can be a compromise worth making. The argument for and against isn’t binary, geography plays a big role; the needs of an artist-run project in Hull may be different from one in London or Amsterdam or Athens.

Regionally and globally different regulatory and economic regimes produce different opportunities.

The artist-led and the institution have a symbiotic relationship – each seeking validation from the other. When the establishment co-opts the grassroots as seen in the 2021 Turner Prize nominations for instance, it raises the question of where and how should the artist-led position itself in response.

Certainly not all projects see a virtue in holding institutionalism at arm’s length – and by defining ourselves as artists we de facto position ourself within a certain institutional framework. But I think there’s something interesting about projects that have a certain institutional critique baked into their platform, or at least that are conscious of whether they’re outside the tent pissing in or inside the tent pissing on their own foot.

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Dr Susan Jones

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Action by groups of artists driven by collective artistic aspirations has punctuated the contemporary visual arts landscape over the last fifty years. Through joint - sometimes ‘alternative’ – ventures, artists’ practicedriven interests have provided dedicated means for testing and extending the scope for interaction with artistic collaborators and communities of interest, including with spectators for and buyers of contemporary art. Artists’ initiatives raise status and expand remit through such engagements, while also contributing to widening understanding of an artist’s role in society. Although outcomes differ in form and intention, the commonality between such artists’ groupings is persistent commitment to working through the processes of making art, forging productive relationships with others and desire to amplify engagements with their immediate constituency as well as with broader communities and society. Products of artist-led initiatives range from works by individual artists presented collectively in exhibition or site-specific format to collaborative art works and manifestations in which the artists’ social engagement with other people is core. As part of the financing of the latter, artist-led initiatives iteratively define suitable organisational and ‘business’ models for their particular circumstances. In these artist-led spheres of operation, social and economic benefits to artists accrue over time and contribute to sustaining their art practices and livelihoods over a life-cycle.

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initiated the ‘New Exposures’ festival in seventeen traditional and ad hoc spaces were however more successful in creating legacy. The aspiration to support and retain practitioners in the region beyond graduation was later realised through Redeye, the professional network and a membership body for photographers now in receipt of regular funding from Arts Council England. Such examples illustrate John Wright’s assertion that the connective tissue sustaining artists’ initiatives is the strong friendship born out of the camaraderie of student life. 5

In the ‘arts as regeneration’ era since the ‘80s, artist-led ventures have been key contributors to building the UK’s cultural identity and contemporary visual arts infrastructures.

London’s now renowned concentration of artists’ studios began in the ‘60s when a group of artists took over St Catherine’s Wharf. It continued steadily through the energies later of artists’ initiatives Acme and space, in effect gentrifying run-down areas of the capital and providing a model later emulated by other cities. These organically-grown ventures have suited arts funders who cherry-picked and talked-up the aspects of the artist-led which are more palatable to and measurable by economics-based arts development yardsticks, and are more easily cross-referenced to existing traditional institutional structures.

Arguably, informality and temporality are vital characteristics of collectively-realised initiatives where retaining artistic integrity and fluid modus operandi are prime drivers. tea – a collaboration between four new graduate artists in late ‘80s Manchester took the novel approach of establishing each process- and place-based investigation as a ‘temporary institution’ that encompassed the interests of all collaborators. The unifying ‘brand’ was a practice-led, collaborative research methodology with meticulous planning structures, individualised frames of reference and targetted production and distribution mechanisms. This strategy enabled tea to gain the equivalent of £123,000 nowadays in public funding while avoiding the dampening impacts of adopting a traditional, charitable organisational structure. The success of these artists-led temporary ventures led some of the (then) regional arts boards in England to solicit ideas from groups of artists for Regional Arts Lottery Programme (ralp) funding. As example, North West Arts Board’s Working with Artists Franchise Scheme from 2000 offered threeyear funding of up to £100,000 a year to artists’ initiatives, with decisions notably made on quality of work rather than instrumental value.6

Brighton, Parry and Pearson’s seminal 1985 exploration of artists’ economic status located their propositions for improvement firmly within the traditional gallery and artmarket systems. Greater support by funders for artist-led organisations including galleries and group studios to ‘mediate their own reputations directly with the public’ was justified because this contributed to preserving dominant art world and art-market patterns.1 The National Lottery’s massive new income streams for the arts from 1994, promising to transform the cultural landscape and provide greater levels of support for artists working in the public realm, including by putting more public funding to the artist-led. 2 The lottery’s Art for Everyone strand gave £100,000 (equivalent to £213,000 nowadays) to mart artists’ initiative for month-long, city-wide ‘festival of visual art made in Manchester’.

At the turn of the Millennium, post-industrial Manchester was likened to ‘60s New York, with ‘plenty of slack in the system’ including an abundance of cheap live and work space for emerging artists and artist-led initiatives to appropriate.3 The eight-strong organising group that brought together independent artists with others from the city’s studios including sigma , Manchester Artists Studio Association, Rogue and Bankley Studios argued the low profile of visual artists was a ‘cultural gap’ that needed filling in a city already renowned for performing and media arts, science and sports.

Unlike the 1995/96 multi-site exhibition ‘British Art Show 4’ that preceded it and that relied on incoming artists, mart ’s projects and exhibitions were explicitly home-grown. More specifically these intended to ‘… reveal the sheer strength and diversity of artistic practice… and make the work of Manchester’s visual artists visible and available to all’.4

These examples demonstrate how funding interventions capture and appropriate the artist-led as means of rationalising what artists can do for arts policy ends. Funders benefit from being part of the frisson an ‘alternative label’ brings, while they anchor and confine the scope and granularity of the artist-led back into the institutionalised practices they like best. An example is the argument for greater support of artist-led initiatives that emerged from Morris Hargreaves McIntyre’s 2004 study of the markets for art. In what was dubbed as a ‘golden age’ for the arts with massive expansion of the physical infrastructure for the arts, a Labour government increased grant-in-aid to the Arts Council by 70%. Expanding markets for art beyond London in cities with virtually no infrastructure for selling critically engaged, innovative, contemporary art became a holy grail for arts policymakers. On economic arts policy grounds, artist-led galleries, open studios, art fairs and festivals were valued as prime vehicles for accessing the £515m in retail sales of contemporary or ‘cutting edge’ art.

Widening access to this untapped income source would

Notably, mart ’s overarching ambition to create a temporary manifestation that would catalyse a sustainable network of practitioners and act as a departure point for collaboration on future city-wide festivals with the established art institutions such as Cornerhouse (now home) and Manchester City Art Gallery on equal terms remained unrealised. The cohort of newly-graduated photographers who in the same period

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While playing into the blunt instrumentality of an economic art model, these neat delineations of the scope, purpose and impacts of artist-led practices belie a heterogeneity of social benefits. My 1995 study of 300 artist-led groups demonstrated value created in various ways, whether divergent from or synergous with arts policy imperatives of the day. The majority provided groups of artists with the ‘means of production’ in the form of collective workshop and studio space and joint marketing initiatives as practical support to artists’ individual practices and livelihoods. In just under a third, however, artists’ individualised aspirations for art practices were superseded by forging collaborations premised on wider social activism and engagement. As example, London-based Platform’s interdisciplinary work was driven by ecological and social imperatives. This alliance of video and performance artists, musicians, engineers, social historians and green economists later became renowned for the Artwash campaign that successfully stopped BP sponsorship of the arts.10

THE ARTIST-LED-IN-THEARTS-POLICY DISJUNCTION FUNDING BODIES Artist-led valuable within short-term policy implementation; by fulfilling requirements for visual arts development, audience growth, community participation, access for disadvantaged groups, improvement of arts provision in [some way] supporting artists’ enterprises where these contribute to an area’s economic well-being.

ARTIST-LED INITIATIVES

Although these divergent types of artist-led venture bring nuanced values to artists’ pursuit of art practices over a lifecycle, the tendency of funders in the UK’s ultra neo-liberalist arts economy model is to give preference to public-facing ventures with readily measurable ‘outcomes’ such as earned or philanthropic income and audience volume. My reanalysis (left) of the original study data highlights the baseline disjunction between the intrinsic values that underpin and sustain artists and artist-led practices and arts policy’s instrumentalised measurements.

Personal and artistic development and realising a vision over longer time-frame.

Whether through setting up what others may describe as a small business or concerned with identifying new working processes and collaborations with other professionals, and generating different kinds of social relationships, a common factor is length of time for achieving any significant outcomes.

As Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard concluded, funders’ preference is to deal with organisations which look and act like they do, including speaking their language. Grant-givers ‘tend to be organisational technocrats... treating management structures and techniques as handy, value-neutral tools for making things happen... [judging the] board-led structure [as] the best tool for getting just about any job done’.11 The artist-led in arts policy disjunction is colour-illustrated by the funding decisions made by Arts Council England 2010 when faced with substantial cuts to government grant-in-aid. Dany Louise’s analysis revealed that by axing sixteen small-scale, artist-led organisations (ranging from production facilities and artist residency providers to membership groups) the art practices and livelihoods of almost 6,700 visual artists were affected.12 When push came to funding shove, these artist-centred ventures were judged of far lesser importance than the ‘frontline’ institutions who get face-to-face with, and derive economic benefit from the public.

have the effect of ‘bringing on’ emerging talent without upsetting the fine balance of the commercial art gallery subscription model eschewed by arts policy. The effect of this gatekeeper mechanism which arbitrates between ‘art’ and ‘decoration’ otherwise discourages artists from selling to unauthenticated buyers.7 Morris Hargreaves McIntyre’s Art Eco-System Model (illustrated on p14) demonstrates that selected artist-led galleries might be worthy candidates of public funding in recognition of their discrete role in this respect. Moves on contemporary visual arts courses to encourage undergraduate students to form groups and work collaboratively, as identified by Sarah Rowles’ study, could similarly be construed as an economics-led solution by demonstrating the ‘employability’ and career development arising from higher education courses. 8 In the same vein, Manchester School of Art actively supported students on graduation to form the DIY Art School as a peer network and ‘fourth year’ of their course.9

Many of the forty-seven organisations categorised and funded by ace as ‘artist-led’ since 2018 as National Portfolio Organisations (npos) are permanent, building-based charitable organisations. As a pragmatic move to keep artists’ divergent

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but his external communications belied it. In translation, the artists were instead ‘excited for what is next’, relishing the ‘opportunity to reflect on what we want to do and build something better’.15

artistic imperatives ‘in the game’, such artist-led groups are unwitting supporters of a biased and unfair art system for artists. Sarah Thelwall and Rebecca De Mynn both proposed how ‘insider’ small-scale and artist-led organisations might use their influence with funders as leverage to change an imperfect system for the better from within. They could collect evidence and advocate wherever they could for their ‘alternative’ organisational approaches, as mechanisms for capturing artists’ unseen ‘outputs’, as vital divergent contributions to society.13 However once in the ‘regularlyfunded’ arena, smaller and artist-led organisations can inadvertently become complicit in the ‘rules’ of contemporary visual arts that stifle dissent and keep most artists ‘in their place’, at the bottom of the arts food chain. They condone the inequalities of the mediating and gatekeeping protocols that characterise the workings of the contemporary visual arts, including accepting unfair treatment of artists through poor pay and conditions, lack of meritocracy and creeping levels of preference for the recommendation route over open submission. The price of reliable funding for these organisations is having their ideas pinned down and categorised, only accounted for when outcomes are easily measurable, all requirements that may distract from what supporting artists’ practices is really about. But in any case, funding to this aspect of contemporary visual arts is minor, as only 11% (or £4.8m over a 4-year period) of ace’s entire visual arts npo budget goes to regularly-funded artist-led organisations.

In terms of identifying a more substantial, influential position in the arts ecology in future, artist-led groups might take a leading advocacy role to policymakers by generating a stream of evidence about artists’ social conditions and the nuanced impacts of their practices on society. Despite being located in the lowest tier of the Arts Council’s npo hierarchy, funded artist-led organisations have opportunity through regular communication and reporting to ensure ace is aware arts policy’s positive and negative impacts on all artists’ ability to sustain practices over a life-cycle. Although it is commonplace in other countries and nations for artists’ representative bodies to take this strategic advocacy role, attempts to sustain a credible traditional artists’ membership body in England have consistently failed to gain popular support.16 As redress and as invitees to policy-making fora, npo artists’ organisations could take responsibility for bringing insights and experiences of the wider artists’ community into various fora where decisions that affect artists’ social status are made. However even if they did chose to pursue this ‘greater good’ remit, npo reporting arrangements restrict opportunity for collecting nuanced evidence and depth of advocacy. Rather than articulating values and outcomes arising from the distinctive role of the artist-led in enabling artists’ practices and livelihoods, npo terms of reference are mechanistic, focusing predominantly on measuring publicfacing impacts such as audience volumes and demographic.

In such contexts and as Gillian Nichol observed, the gap between artists’ and funders’ needs and intentions nibbles away at the rigor of artists’ practice-focused ethos. Being funded serves to endorse and encourage only certain aspects of artists’ activity. Unhealthy levels of exclusivity and preciousness are unintended consequences of being led in funding-focused directions. Encouraging practiceled organisations to adopt the bureaucratic structures of bigger organisations is restrictive of ad hoc and alternative, creative approaches to achieving artistic ends. Serving the different perspectives and expectations of funders and board members is a time-consuming distraction to maintaining core principles. In short, ‘Making a commodity of practiceled activity… impacts on artists by altering the nature of their activity or [sustaining poor] conditions’.14 Dan Goodman’s story encapsulates what artists can’t talk about, and how this condones unhealthy conditions and relationships in contemporary visual arts. Although feeling ‘fucking pissed off’ at losing the space the group had invested in over time at short notice, his emotional precarity was automatically reframed into the positive language characteristic of art world resilience. Adopting the ‘talking up’ that pervades arts communications, he fell into ‘performing the role’ the art world expected of him. In reality he felt ‘kicked in the teeth’

npo terms of reference

are mechanistic, focusing predominantly on measuring publicfacing impacts such as audience volumes and demographic

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Overtly social activist artist-led groups such as Platform were able to attract grant-aid in the past from a regional arts board for work that was inherently politically awkward.

In the ultra-conservative, risk-adverse environment for the arts today, micro and practice-led initiatives dedicated to progressing unambiguous critique of the status quo are far less likely to be ‘seen’ or to gain access to short or longer-term public funding. The situated practices and energies of artists’ initiatives at the turn of this century played a significant role in reimagining post-industrial Manchester as the creative and cultural hub it now is.

My definition for situated practices in this respect is those that are conceived, developed and modified by artists over time in relation to artistic ambitions which encompass their personalised circumstances including where they live and family contexts.17 With the notable exception of Castlefield Gallery, artist-led ventures in Manchester get scant support from the arts infrastructure to remain or set up there nowadays. The artists’ studios pivotal to mart ’s critical edge and cultural relevance have since been allowed to close or forced to migrate to the periphery. Rather than on strategically nurturing the indigenous artists’ community, the high status enjoyed by the city’s ‘top tier’, large-scale npo arts institutions rests nowadays on their success in importing internationally-accredited talent.

Art Eco-System by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre from Taste Buds: how to cultivate the art market, Arts Council England 2004.

In the ultra-conservative, risk-adverse environment for the arts today, micro and practice-led initiatives dedicated to progressing unambiguous critique of the status quo are far less likely to be ‘seen’ or to gain access to short or longerterm public funding 14

I’d argue that locating effective strategies for retaining the artist-led as a vital ingredient in social and arts well-being in future involves artists seeking out allies and synergies far beyond the restrictive, disempowering hierarchies for contemporary visual arts. Whether transient or sustained, frameworks and kindred spirits most welcoming and supportive of artists are more likely to be found close to where they reside. Hyper-local initiatives exemplify the richness and resilience of embedding socially-engaged and placebased artist-led interventions and collaborations into specific communities. Deveron Arts in Huntly, Scotland has used the town and 4,500 population as resource and venue over the last twenty-five years. Artists of all disciplines come from around the world to live and work there, using supermarkets, streets, churches, garages and bothies around and about as studios and sites. In a similar vein, artist-led In-Situ’s vision is to ‘allow art to be a part of the everyday life’. Ambitions are to foster resilience and innovation across their Pendle community, so all people ‘speak and act with confidence’ and are actively engaged in their cultural futures.18

Notes 1. See Brighton, A., Parry J. and Pearson N. M, Enquiry into the Economic Situation of the Visual Artist.

London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1985 2. Note that support to artists as a key aim for National Lottery funding is stated in Public Art in the North – a strategic approach to public art and lottery funding, Northern Arts Board paper, 1995 3. Williams, R. J, (2001) ‘Anything is Possible – The Annual Programme 1995-2000’ in Life is Good in Manchester: the Annual Programme 1995-2000, Ed S. Grennan, Trice Publications, 2001.

4. Mart 1999, The Mart Group Application March 1998 and MART Network: A festival of visual art made in Manchester. Project Evaluation, 1999 5. See Wright, J, The Ecology of Cultural Space: Towards an Understanding of the Contemporary Artist-led Collective, PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2019 6. Stanley, M. ‘The mid-life crisis and artist-led initiatives’, a-n Magazine, June 2000 7. Morris Hargreaves McIntyre identified mechanisms for, and barriers to, accessing an hitherto untapped £354.5m market from sales in the traditional gallerybased art world and £515.5m from work sold through ‘non- legitimised’ channels including art fairs, shops and studios. See Taste Buds: How to cultivate the art market. Executive Summary. London: Arts Council England, 2004 8. See Rowles, S. Lay of the land, a-n The Artists Information Company, 2013 https://static.a-n.co.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2013/03/3171032.pdf 9. See DIY in Manchester, a-n The Artists Information Company, 2013 https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/ diy-in-manchester- like-a-fourth-year-of-artschool/#:~:text=Although%20formed%20just%20 a%20few,social%20experiment%2Fart %20club’ 10. Reportage of this Platform campaign is at (https://platformlondon.org/p-publications/artwashbig-oil-arts/ 11. See Adams, D, and Goldbard, A, Organising Artists: a document and directory of the national association of artists’ organisations, National Association of Artists’ Organisations, USA, 1992 12. See Louise, D, Ladders for development: a-n Research paper. Newcastle: a-n The Artists Information Company, 2011 13. See Thelwall, S, Size Matters Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value, Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organisations. London: Common Practice, 2011 and De Mynn, R Artist Development at Castlefield Gallery: Policy Change through the Counterpublic?

Manchester: Castlefield Gallery Publications, 2016 14. See Gillian Nichol’s introduction in Mind the gap, a-n The Artists Information Company, July 2003 https://www.a- n.co.uk/resource/mind-the-gap-1/ 15. See Dan Goodman’s presentation What we don’t talk about when we talk about the artistled, January 2020 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qTtLzA2cQtI 16. See Glinkowski, P, Putting Artists in the Picture: Locating visual artists in English arts policy and in the evidence-base that informs it. PhD thesis, University of Surrey, 2010 and further analyses in Jones, S, Artists livelihoods: the artists in arts policy conundrum, PhD thesis Manchester Metropolitan University, 2019 http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/626357/ 17. Situated practices are constituent of my tripartite concept for conditions enabling motile artists, that also encompasses creative space and negotiated relationships – see my thesis (referenced above) 18. See Jones, S Art in everyday life, Arts Professional, 2015 https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/ magazine/285/case- study/art-everyday-life 19. See https://somethingsbrewing.org.uk/brewtime/ 20. See https://sameskiesthinktank.com/ 21. See my thesis, as above.

More laterally, clues about structural remedies to artists’ integration in social change, that enable artists as citizens to be both seen and heard, are emerging from artists’ direct interventions into localised policy-making. Preston’s Brewtime Collective is integral in developing the city’s 12-year cultural policy, within the artists’ overall ambition to create a sea-change that ‘embeds cultural experiences in the lives and expectations of all the people’.19 In the new Mayoral constituency of West Yorkshire artists are prominent, their voices heard loud and clear. There, the strategic processes and consultations emanating from Same Skies Think Tank are developing new, situated arts and cultural policy from the ‘bottom-up’. 20 These few topical examples are part of a burgeoning of progressive actions by and with artists.

They are indicators of the conditions enabling artists to be both seen and heard, and could – at long last – achieve Redcliffe-Maud’s 1976 aspiration for arts policy measures truly representative of the constituencies they serve, ‘foster[ing] individual creativity and … bring[ing] the results [of that] before the public’. 21 Dr Susan Jones is an independent arts researcher, commentator and writer with specialist evidence of and insight into artists’ livelihoods and arts policy matters. www.padwickjonesarts.co.uk

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Sluice Interview

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Sluice We encountered each other a few years ago when we were both presenting at a seminar. You started your talk with a photo of yourself taken in the late 1970s. From memory the black and white photo depicts you in the mid-ground, your back is to the camera, beyond you is a line of riot police, facing you, shields raised. It’s a really striking punk image reminiscent of any number of anti-establishment protests where the individual and the collective faces off against the State and capitalist interests.

In 1979, you along with Guus van der Werf, Marianne Kronenberg, Martha Crijns and Reinout Weydom, squatted a large derelict building in the centre of Amsterdam and launched W139, an artist-led art space which is still running today. For something born in those circumstances to survive for over 40 years there must have been some serious consideration about where you wanted W139 to sit in relation to the institution and by extension where you as an artist sit in relation to the institution.

AdJ In the beginning of W139 there was no relation to the art world in the sense that we wanted recognition. We were part of the art world because as soon as you show art you are somewhere part of this world if you want it or not. As squatters we wanted a place to live and work and as artists, we wanted a place to show our art. After the first 10 years without any structure, I became the first artistic director. The first years artists payed a small fee for cost of electricity etc. Because I was a working artist myself, I focused on – and was stimulated by – the artist programming (and not what was going on at biennales etc).

Because the W139 space is enormous you have to come up with a solid courageous plan to make a show.

From the beginning of my time as artistic director and later on the exhibitions had a museum-like quality although they looked different. So, the direction towards the art institutions and funding foundations were not existing, but we had such speed in exhibiting and transforming the space, that they came after us to see what was going on. After my artistic directorship period ended we decided we would change the artistic director every 2 or 4 years so that the place would not get stuck in the ideas of one person. And for a long time, they were also artists. After 2020 the funding

Billboards in the street for expo at W139, 1993

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Sluice Interview

institutions became more and more curatorially oriented. More and more they wanted a grip on the planning and they suggested that with a curator the shows will be better. They wanted to secure their artistic vision, whereas the vision of W139 is always up to date because they follow the ideas of the artists which in my eyes are always true to the moment/time.

W139 does not want to be successful as an institution but wants the artist to show their ideas in whatever way they want to do that. In much of the art world the idea is to want to be the best and collect the most money etc. W139 wants to give energy and new ideas from artists to the people. So, funding institutions want you to become more professional and international in a way that they can claim part of that success. The goal with my friends after the first years was to secure W139 as an artist-led space, for the city. Later the W139 foundation bought the building and now it will be forever an artist’s space. My position as an artist was and is, that I always create my own space in this art world. My dependence is on people to come and look at my sculptures, not institutions or galleries, in that way I stay independent as organiser and artist.

Sluice Your vibrant large-scale sculptures resemble monolithic superstructures of dubious structural integrity. Or scaled-up infrastructural model parts for an unrealised engine or piece of engineering.

Artists start projects and galleries for all sorts of reasons, but what I find most compelling is when the project grows out of the studio practice of the artist, one informing the other. Do you see a connection between the things that drove you to start W139 40 years ago with your current constructions?

AdJ After I finished the art academy I was mentally interested in the dark black space of anarchy where you can go in and bring from the dark unknown space new structures for our world. I started to disregard the usual materials like clay, plaster, wood etc., machines and factories to make my art. I started from scratch to make my own art world for people making sculptures with plastic bags, cardboard boxes from the street and fluid epoxy resin. Trying with these materials to give form to my ideas. And from there and then I still make every centimetre of my small and large sculptures with

After I finished the art academy I was mentally interested in the dark black space of anarchy where you can go in and bring from the dark unknown space new structures for our world 19

my own eyes and hands, to bring my spirit & energy directly in my sculptures.

My current sculptures: I make them in a way, although very colourful, that they are ‘a black dark space’. You don’t know what they are, I try to make them unrecognisable. When you start looking, you enter a new space, inside yourself. My sculpture becomes a reflection of your new space, and maybe expands your vision or consciousness.

The same idea was at the start of W139 and is true for W139. When we started (1979) nobody had money to buy such quantities of material to fill the big space with their art, so you relied on do-it-yourself with paint and simple construction materials – often stolen from construction sites – and container found materials.

The shows were totally made for and built on-site, which gave it a special true energy. We moved away from the usual gallery white walls and museum ideas, and started

How do I want to die, Ad de Jong, performce lecture, 2017

W139’s first groupshow in 1982

True new art and ideas come from a free space, the artists studio 20

Sluice Interview

from scratch to realise and build our own vision of how a space for our art should look like.

Because the building of W139 was situated in the run-down sex-worker area. The mental and physical background of the shows were people from all over the world, and junkies and dealers.

In that situation you cannot fake or pretend anything, you have to be true to yourself, because as an exhibiting artist you would host the show from noon through to midnight.

Sluice Do you think it’s possible (and desirable) for artists and artist-led organisations to remain antagonistic to the institution, to the establishment? Can independence really be maintained when funding comes with certain expectations?

AdJ Yes. Because true new art and ideas come from a free space, the artists studio. The artist (exhibition) space has to stay free too, to bring all this in a free and open way to all people, not a selected group. W139 has no entrance fee, the donation sign says pay what you will.

True, independence becomes more and more difficult because funding commissions want to steer more and more your programme on their ideas and not on the plans and directions artists are moving with their art.

Sluice Mark Fisher describes ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ Can art provide a real alternative to the institutional and capitalist status quo or are we just court jesters performing critique?

AdJ YES. But not an alternative, because that means from the base of capitalism (money rules art) towards an alternative. No, we have to build and start a new (art) world from the bottom up. It will be painful to leave everything behind. To start at the art academies. The problem is that people want to experience and feel less and less, (they become afraid of change) because of the digital screens, but to change the whole world and get away from the catastrophic ideas we embrace now we have to realign ourselves with everything around

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The New Reach at School Club, Ad de Jong, Amsterdam, 2017

us, nature, stars, all people on this earth, in a way that we are connected to everything and we have to live and work accordingly. Art is a great way to experience yourself in a different way and give people questions and answers for the future.

Sluice So if we’re talking about the physicality of the art work as situated in the world as a way of embracing our interconnectedness – do you feel the context of where your work is shown affects the mediation/reception of the work? For instance, I’ve always found it odd seeing Arte Povera artworks in commercial galleries. Surely that neutralises any countercultural power it once held?

Can art be neutered by where it’s shown?

AdJ It affects it, but not all the way, the essence stays. I have experienced that with my former Gallery in Antwerp, Annette De Keyser, the energy and the impact of my sculptures, for a sensitive person stayed the same.

Because the starting point from my sculptures is always an intention, which starts with the question what do I want to give? Some places you can give more.

Recently I exhibited my large sculptures in a famous nightclub De School in Amsterdam. People could see it all night long and touch all the sculptures and just be with them, I think, one of my best shows ever.

Sluice Your art is often monumental and invites interaction or at least doesn’t allow for non-engagement.

The reason I asked that previous question was because I get the impression that for you the artwork is just as much about the relationship between object and viewer as it is about the object and the environment it finds itself in. So, the object is not passive but a bit of a trojan horse – or a virus that aims to overwhelm the contextual baggage of the host venue. What are your feelings on this, can art exist in potentially hostile environments without being conceptually damaged?

AdJ Again, that depends upon what you want with your artwork. If you want it to shine and sell for as much as possible the only space for you is a white cube gallery.

If you want to contribute to your surroundings or the world at large a hostile environment is even better,

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Sluice Interview

People could see it all night long and touch all the sculptures and just be with them

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PLANT at Speak Memory, W139, 2017

Whilst making art is the sublime act of thinking, looking and making at the same time, and philosophy is the friend of art but not art itself Preparing for videoclip, Ad de Jong, 2020

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Sluice Interview

I think as long as you as the artist are in charge of the way it is installed, in every aspect. Pure conceptual art depends mostly on an intellectual text or story that makes it mostly impossible to exhibit in a non art friendly space. There is less or no time to go reading and look and think. I believe that everybody can resonate and connect viscerally with a physical artwork that is made to connect from the visual appearance and not only from the intellectual understanding.

Sluice The institution is often aligned to ideas of hierarchy and gatekeeping, how can an institutional space that prioritises free explorations of creativity and display ensure the space remains accessible to a broad distribution of artists?

AdJ To ensure that accessibility for all artists, till 2012 W139 had an artistic director, then from 2012 till 2021 a group of 20 artists were in charge each by initiating a large show with their own selected artists and would then appoint a new member after that show to the group of 20 artists. That was a meaningful experiment which W139 is now reviewing and three artists are now revaluating with the board and setting up a new programme.

Sluice From our perspective we can see a value in cosplaying as an institution, because a certain perceived authority can be helpful building relationships with official bodies, press and the public. However, this sets up a conflict between what you actually are and how you’re seen, is this something you experienced with W139 and as an artist? When you showed the protest photo you seemed to be alluding to the idea that what is presented to us (physically at the seminar) may not reflect what lies beneath.

more chances to get a positive result. It is a balancing act not to be more Catholic then the pope and still get funding. The problem lies in the conviction that commissioners believe that when artists make art they are not thinking but only making, and therefore text is valued above pictures of your artworks which are underscoring your new plans. Whilst making art is the sublime act of thinking, looking and making at the same time, and philosophy is the friend of art but not art itself.

Sluice Processes calcify over time, regulations bind, systems become standardised and quantifiable. How can an artist-led org with institutional processes allow for non-quantifiable results? How, after 40 years, does W139 maintain a lightness of touch organisationally and artistically?

AdJ By allowing artists with diverse ideas to exhibit next to each other and for their ideas to lead in the development of the programme rather than curatorial correctness or prioritising the institutions profile.

As Thomas Hirschhorn would say ‘Energy: Yes! Quality: No!’ Stay away from becoming professional and embrace energy.

addejongart.nl

AdJ In a way you can hardly avoid cosplaying nowadays because application for grants for me as an artist and funding for W139 are written not visual applications.

You have to translate your ideas and the ideas from artists into a structured and readable plan and that plan is competitive with other applications. In this way you mostly know exactly what boxes to tick to have

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Charlie Hawksfield

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Having regular conversations with practicing artists is one of the best things about running an art space. When we chat, I always ask: where did you go to art school? And: did you enjoy it?

Over the three years that we ran Wells Projects I was often shocked by the response; in fact I can’t remember one totally positive reaction to this question.

Between 2018 and 2021 I heard a raft of complaints including small studio spaces, dismissive management, unnurturing environments and a bullying culture. Everyone I talked to seemed tired or bitter. As I kept talking to graduates and students I got a growing sense that something was wrong, art school was something they wanted to ‘get through.’ They were making the most of it, after all they had paid all that money and if they hunkered down, they said, worked hard and took their opportunities, one day they would climb the ladder, make a name for themselves and have a fully fledged artistic career.

Then the pandemic came.

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Rewind back to the mid 2010s and my own experience with further education.

I loved it, although it must be said that I did not study a Fine Art Degree, nor did I have to deal with a massive global catastrophe like the one we are currently living through. I did, however, go to Goldsmiths, one of many London colleges facing fee strikes in the pandemic fallout. This is not to say I didn’t have anything to complain about. Goldsmiths was a chaotic, almost constant crisis of failed log-ins, missed deadlines, unfindable lecture theatres, terrible admin, alcoholic tutors and collapsing departments. However, when I was a student, this sometimes farcical disorganisation was part of a genuine system, and for every slip up there was an empathetic, relatable, struggling human who made up for it with expertise, generosity and large doses of badly needed encouragement. It should also be mentioned that I studied a fringe humanities degree and had zero career ambition after graduation (a sentiment that seems all but extinct in students today) and I missed the big price hike (up to 9k a year.)

Fast-forward to recent conversations with graduates, the human element of this system seems to have waned. In its place there are unreachable managers, complex complaint procedures and financial cost-saving justifications blocking initiatives and ideas. What used to be an open and complex system is now a closed and monitored operation. Where they used to be anecdotes of laughable, relatable calamities, there are now cold business assessments. Everything has been streamlined. All the while the reports coming from students seem to say: ‘I pay a lot for this service and this service is nowhere near up to standard.’

So when did it all go wrong? In this strained environment, with the colossal debt swinging over students’ heads, the air of free experimentation and curiosity has been replaced by a desperate need to succeed. This breeds an art-school system with bureaucratic and transactional values. Is it entirely down to the institutions, or are the students expecting something undeliverable? If so, what happens now in the light of covid?

The fallout of the pandemic on the whole university system has been ugly to say the least. There are food banks solely devoted to feeding foreign students who are trapped far from home with no way to pay rent or feed themselves. The promised ‘blended learning’ systems, hardship funds and remote lectures are proving woefully inadequate, A spokesperson from pressure group @dearual2020 gave some insight into the students’ current situation. “We are averaging 3 hours contact time per week with some students getting as little as 30 minutes, there is total neglect from senior management, no promise so far that the university will make up for all the lost time, no access to facilities, equipment and face-to-face practical learning, they have failed continuously to provide suitable contingency plans for their students and in spite of the statutory 10 working day reply, students have received replies after 6 months+ and every single response has negated the core reasons of the complaint, deeming it irrelevant.”

There is real anger brewing in these student bodies: “The pandemic has merely brought to the light many systematic issues across all campuses. There is a massive gap between students/staff and the senior management.” She tells me, “The learning quality was already insufficient before the pandemic began, but over the last year, it has become even more obvious that we are paying for a brand.”

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These problems are happening across universities outside art schools, with rent strikes and torrents of complaints becoming ubiquitous, but ual students are particularly galled by the property developments that keep pushing ahead despite all the troubles.

“ual keeps spending our fees on property (millions invested in a new lcf building and in taking over the Elephant and Castle shopping centre) which students consider utterly unnecessary, while they fail to provide us with the bare minimum. This should be recognised as what it is, theft, and punished accordingly.”

These financial links to larger, shadier areas of big business are alarming. ual are teaming up with Delancey to demolish the old Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre in favour of a new university building, luxury flats and rampant regeneration, to a backdrop of protests against social cleansing. rca have also spent £102m on a new flagship Herzog and De Meuron (of Tate modern fame) building (a monolithic steel box): while the rest of the studios have dodgy heating and crumbling facilities.

One rca technician told me: “They demolished the only building the students actually liked, for this...”

It’s true that universities are increasingly dabbling in deals outside their remit and every student is getting a raw deal with covid at the moment, but what makes art schools as institutions worth specific attention? Firstly, the facilities at art school are an integral part of the course and without them whole departments are struggling to justify their existence. Secondly, art schools have a tradition of radical thought and going against the grain, so their slide into commodification and entrepreneurialism is particularly stark.

To see how we got here we first have to go back to the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government. Most people know the story of Nick Clegg’s infamous U-turn on tuition fees, but what few people tell you is that £9,000 a term is a maximum value, in fact The £9,000 fee was intended to only be charged in ‘exceptional circumstances’.

Universities could choose to charge less, but to find any course in any university in the UK doing so is hard to do. This signposts another sea-change, one that was less obvious and more insidious. Universities are being privatised and deregulated by governmental and financial forces in order to make them part of a free market further education system. This involved cutting funding dramatically and encouraging competition between the universities. Financial rewards now come from large intake (the maximum cap on student numbers was removed by George Osborne) and rankings driven by qualitative data on employability and grades. This is how universities are now assessed. The coalition government’s education reform was where the system changed and the modern problems arose.

Rowan Moore wrote: “A university’s spirit of open inquiry cannot be subjected to the mechanisms of corporations.” This is an especially damning statement for art schools whose students are expecting, at the very least, to be able to openly enquire.

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“There is no background, no historical rigour, we are given equipment, told how to make films then pushed towards jobs”, a ucl film studies student tells me. There are also reports of grades being doctored to meet targets and managerial meddling in courses. One lecturer, after sending their syllabus to the university to be reviewed, was asked to add a paragraph at the bottom saying we should ‘decolonise the curriculum’ without any further information.

In these issues of managerial meddling within the curriculum itself, it’s important to ask where lecturers sit in the system. In short, they are increasingly on the students’ side. Lecturers are in a precarious position. There were numerous strikes across campuses when pensions were being slashed, this had an interesting effect, especially in hindsight: “I didn’t know what was happening, I just thought we were losing out on teaching time and I was angry”, one student, now protesting against the no-refund policy due to covid told me, “I know what they were talking about no”. Lecturers are equally frustrated by the complex management structures that have creeped onto campus. Academia was never billed as a well-paid job, but it used to be secure. Now, many lecturers are freelance, or on interim contracts that offer little security and even less pay. One artist friend of mine devised and ran an entire study abroad programme at St Martins only to be told in the corridor on the way to lunch by an executive , “Oh, by the way we won’t be running your course next year.”

How does this affect the mood at universities?

“Everyone is exhausted”, an rca grad tells me, “Technicians are being worked into the ground, lecturers don’t want to be there, students are unhappy. There is a feeling that everyone is being squeezed to get the last drop of value out of them”.

I can’t help but notice a certain hollow-eyed fatigue that pervades the ‘promising student’ contingent of art school. It reminds me of the story of an American car salesman who began to show up to work at 3am to get ahead of the other staff.

This seems to ring a worrying bell in the growing student ethos under the current system. Even before the pandemic, students were one of the most vulnerable groups for mental health problems, especially in London. There is a sense that universities are increasingly acting as a primer for the neoliberal world outside, getting students accustomed to overwork, precarity and stress. What used to be a period of reflection and ‘finding oneself’ has morphed into a facsimile of the fast paced, financialised, cosmopolitan sphere, a trial run for high-end galleries and art fairs. As this brand of success is encouraged, the space for enquiry shrinks.

There is the London influence on London art schools, however. Being located in a global art-hub is bound to have an effect and these universities cannot be blamed for that, so what about the smaller out-of-London art schools?

The Student Representative at West Dean College, a leafy Hogwarts-like institution on the south coast of Sussex, far from the incessant pressure of London, said that

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the picture there is better. However he warned that the same goblins of management, cost-saving and risk assessment are moving in. “All the things that make West Dean West Dean will be gone in a decade” he told me, blaming what he called the ‘Kafka beetles’ whose job it is to ‘rationalise’ and ‘slipstream’ an art school whose bread and butter lies in historic disciplines such as conservation and legacy. West Dean (the vision of an eccentric Victorian philanthropist and explorer Edward James) is a place of oak-panelled rooms, huge fireplaces, piano restoration, games in the woods and tutors with names like Malcolm and Norburt. It is described by its alumni as an oasis of weirdness and calm. Yet even here trouble is brewing. The problems may be on a more provincial scale, but they follow the same pattern. Courses must now be approved by the larger umbrella institution, University of Sussex, making it harder for the specialists and the experimental departments to survive.

One tutor from Falmouth told me that some students who would have been suited to the smaller universities are now being taken by the rca as their intake swells dramatically. “Those students are going to struggle, I’m not being unfair when I say they are not, as I see it, rca students.” The high competition and pay-by-the-student schemes means the schools with the reputation are taking over the market, but in doing so they suffer from larger classes, less one-on-one tuition, more students, less space, and a general feeling of alienation. Plus they starve the smaller universities around them. More artists may get into their first choice universities, but the cost seems to be the quality of education these universities can offer.

rca students have been among the most

vocal dissenters of the system, not just recently, but over a number of years.

I spoke to a representative of @rcaaction on what they are facing now: “There has been little to no real acknowledgement to the difficulty studio-based learners have faced during this time of no access to equipment or space. The rca has relied on the socio-economic background of its students to hire their own studio spaces and equipment, and those who cannot or do not are left with no alternative.

The rca does not have a ‘safety net’ or a ‘no detriment’ policy to support students passing their degree during these times. There are currently around 100 –200 students withholding fees within the rca Action group and the rca, and will refuse to pay until the rca makes changes to benefit the students this academic year. We are currently running internal complaints to support this. There are also currently 844 students in support of this fee strike.”

If this out-of-touch, and austerity-like treatment sounds political, it’s because it is. The devolution of risk to the lowest rung, the managerial stonewalling and the shifting of responsibility to faceless contractor firms are key features of neoliberalism. In fact the current governmental structure is the poster child of managerial control. Ministers for culture, health or transport just swap places without any expertise, or it seems, even interested in the fields they are taking over. They cast a ‘dispassionate’ eye over the system and coldly manage the way it will be run whilst the train drivers, theatre directors, doctors and now students look up from the ensuing mess to see only blank

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faces staring back, ones that not only don’t understand them, but who see that fact as a kind of level-headed benefit.

Arch-grump and Frankfurt School cultural theorist Theodor Adorno was circling this phenomenon when he wrote about the Cultural Industry back in 1963: “The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above... The customer is not king, as the culture industry would like to have us believe, not its subject but its object.”

Adorno saw the cultural industry as a method of mass media control, where the ideology of the time could pervade through the channels that used to question it: art, literature and theory. By turning the art schools themselves into commodities, the culture industry creeps into society’s most free-thinking institutions. Not only do students feel they are being farmed, but they are being indoctrinated into a marketised system, that objectifies their work and themselves as creatives, before they even attend the first lecture. What makes this worse is the fact that free market universities don’t even make economic sense for their consumers. Moore compares it to buying a can of beans. Under free market economics you have the choice to change to another brand of beans if the quality is unsatisfactory or there is a cheaper option. This exchange, however, does not extend to 3 years of a young person’s life that also incurs thousands of pounds of debt. The issue does not concern the lack of choice, it is the trap of choosing and the increasing standardisation of what is offered. Adorno again: “All its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap.”

The rca markets itself as ‘the best art school in the world.’ It is increasingly taking this pitch abroad, aiming it at wealthy foreign students who will pay even more in tuition fees. In my conversations with recent graduates, the rca came off the worst. Some students reported having to seek trauma therapy in direct response to the behaviour of members of the faculty. A technician told me he had been instructed not to open the facilities to certain foundation classes even though the students were paying the same. Laughable misuse of funds include the security gates which are ‘state of the art’ but broke almost immediately and absurd fines for getting paint on the walls of the studios. A host of other commonplace complaints makes it obvious that the reputation of the rca doesn’t match its current offerings. However some students are researching even deeper ideological flaws, ones that add weight to the argument of institutional ideological contamination.

The ‘hostile environment’ policy was introduced by Theresa May’s home office and was widely criticised for its aggressive attitude towards migrants. The initiative was designed to make the uk as unwelcoming towards migrants as possible in order to

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to curb immigration and illegal residency in the uk. Some students at the rca have noticed echoes of this attitude within further education, through their research, they are highlighting the unfairness of the current fee structure and outcome for foreign students. “Students pay far more and receive far less” a spokesperson tells me, “there is a sense that we are lucky to be there. Since Brexit, hostility is everywhere, but it is also part of the system”. Once students graduate the likelihood of securing employment or a Visa is extremely low. “The university doesn’t care”, the spokesperson continues “they have their money, there is no support, no advice on where to go next, many students are bundled out of the country once they graduate.” Foreign students are also ineligible for many benefits, this is why they have been some of the hardest hit during the pandemic. Within some universities foreign students are known simply as ‘cash cows’.

What does this all mean in the future? It’s safe to say that the students of 2020-2021 are not going to make for happy alumni. Some commentators are predicting this will be the death-knell for some art schools, but it feels like some (rca, ual, Goldsmiths) are too big to fail. Depressingly, the axe could land on the smaller schools, the ones who have actually had the least complaints from the students. It’s a familiar process of corporate monopoly, the largest and least popular companies survive while the smaller, friendlier competitors die off. Art schools are already some way through this process.

Academic and artist Matthew Cornford, in the article ‘The Art School in Ruins’ writes: “As recently as 1984, Simon Frith and Howard Horne could still write that in Britain ‘every small town has its art school’. This is no longer the case; while in 1959 there were 180 dedicated art and design institutions in the UK, now there are only a dozen left. The rest of the buildings have been quietly forgotten, renovated as luxury apartments and social housing, adapted as annexes of other, larger institutions, abandoned to the elements, or demolished.”

Could covid see a continuation of this process, offering only the big corporate universities, with terrible student care and massive financial side projects in property development?

The good news is: there is hope and it has been growing.

Artist-led initiatives are non-institutional and therefore beyond the reach of the macrosystems that blight the current art educational landscape. A few have been thriving in the past few years and they seem to have ridden the covid storm in a way the top ranking goliaths cannot. Turps Banana is run by artists Marcus Harvey, Helen Hayward, Scott McCracken, Phil King and Phillip Allen. It started as a painting magazine in 2003 and grew into an art school in 2011. It now has a building on the Aylesbury Estate and a peer-led structure with 50+ professional painters.

From their website: “Turps Editors had long held the view that an artist-led painting programme within a supported studio could flourish in a climate where there is growing disquiet about the quality of painting tuition, inadequate tutorial input and isolation in traditional studio set ups.”

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“In 2012 it was time to respond to this in much the same way that a painting magazine run by practising painters has fulfilled a need for many painters with a desire for intellectual stimulus and focus in this area.”

Other artist-led programmes include School of the Damned, The Other ma, Alt mfa, Open School East and Islington Mill. Each has their own structure and specialities, but across all of them, the human element which is being eliminated from institutional arts education, is present. In fact you could say that the people involved are the essential powers behind these initiatives, all of them are artists and all of them care deeply about what they are doing. For the experimental, curious and brave, these small operations offer something far beyond a slip of paper and a photo with a scroll and mortar board. “People drop in and out, but we have a core group”, an Alt mfa student tells me. “We know life gets in the way, if we keep going then people can join when they want.” These totally flexible courses fill the gaping holes left behind in the rigid art school to gallery to market trajectory, one that only works by shedding vast numbers of talented artists along the way, in order to support only the ‘cream of the crop’ (often artists who fit the market rather than the other way round).

It’s not just the specific alternative education scene where help is at hand. During the pandemic many rca students came to my own studios at Art Lacuna in Battersea to use the facilities. One of the rca technicians also has a studio there and he set up a dark room in the toilet. Art Lacuna is run by Chris Calkwell and Alexander Duncan, and they were happy to take a risk to provide students with what they need. These smaller operations aren’t just relatable and human, they are also mobile and flexible.

There is less red tape, no management and ample opportunity to make work among a community of artists. Wells Projects offered a space, but it also offered technical support, access to a network of other artists, advice on where to find studio space or facilities, basically anything we had to offer we offered. These places may be harder to find, but they are nimble, specialist and accommodating, all the things that students from large universities are crying out for.

Even more important in the current situation are the online resources, the groups that aren’t even tied to physical space and all the infuriating property problems that come with it, many of these have specific areas of interest or support vulnerable groups of people who may have less of a voice in the artworld.

Alternative art spaces have always been out there, but at a time when art school is growing increasingly corporate and so many students are looking for options, perhaps they have never been more important. charliehawksfield.com

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sphere. We claimed the job of the Director of the Museum to stay with issues that affect and are being affected by our working environment and conditions. Our application aimed to envision and think across a collective and nonhierarchical institutional/ management model.

The selection committee, consisted only of (white) males, with an age average of 69.8 years, subsequently announced that none of the submitted applications met the selection criteria.

We have to admit that we were surprised with such an announcement, even if we a priori assumed that our application would be considered inappropriate, as it does not meet the terms of the application. Surely, the recruitment of a collective for the role of a director would increase the expenses of a museum, therefore such a strategy is not attempted, even in an international scale.

When the national open call for the director’s position in the National Museum for Contemporary Art in Athens (emst) was announced, we got goosebumps immediately.

National, local but at least accessible. Both the goosebumps and the open call.

As art practitioners working with culture through personal and collective actions for more than a decade, we decided that applying to this open call would allow us to open up a discourse about some themes which, in a local context, are usually (and paradoxically) discussed within the private

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Our application draws on thoughts and consists of methodologies tracing a complicated administrative and managerial structure, with, for example, demanding and time consuming collective meetings involving museum staff, city residents as well as members of the international art community.

The aforementioned theses, desires and alternatives on how we look at and with the institutional format can be further explored, among others, while reading an abbreviated version of our application. The reason why we decided to make it publicly visible has nothing to do with a claim on the best rejected application. Our intention is to provoke and to open up a series of discussions about what every single cultural practitioner and player is allowed to do regarding institutionalised structures.

Such statements arise from our positions, both as

a collective and as individuals, and processes towards the current governmental model of a (long-awaited in this case) public institution. Our proposal aims to comment on the politics, aesthetics and ethics of a benefactor’s role as well as on the occasional sparsity of cooperation, solidarity and collective targeting in the contemporary (art) world; phenomena quite prominent in the global constructions of the often white and metacolonial operations of western institutions.

Today, we hope that the committee’s results have not been affected by the longterm problems of a museum often blocked by micro-political decisions and lack of local, sufficient, public cultural policy.

Therefore we are very much looking forward to the new international open call.

Warm and collegial greetings, 3 137 aka Gabriela

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PROPOSAL-MEMORANDUM Proposals: STRUCTURE - CHARTER CHANGES

Reconsideration of the association between the Museum’s direction, Board of Directors (administrative council) and Ministry of Culture.

- The Board of Directors must be consisting of at least two persons working independently in the field of the arts. These two members must have a significant role in the evolution of Greece’s contemporary art schemes and must not be administratively affiliated with any other public sector (Chamber of Fine Arts, Aica Hellas, ASFA).

- One of the members of the board, regardless of their position, must also meet the age restriction of being born after the year of 1988.

- It is being regarded as commandatory for the Board of Directors to be fully updated regarding the developments on the field of contemporary art.

Educational trips to significant museums across the globe are regarded as absolutely mandatory. The ideal scenario is that occasionally members of the workforce (such as desk clerks, cashiers, guards and invigilators among others) of the museum will also be joining those trips.

- The duration of the tenure of the Board of Directors, which is 3 years, can remain as such, according to the designated regulations. However, there is a necessity of reviewing the frequency of its replacement. A provision must be made for the members of the Board of Directors that will allow them to be replaced, one after another, and not concurrently. This regulation is aimed at preventing the formation of counter groups within the “body” of the Board.

Re-insertion is not welcome. Only in particular occasions, and after taking into consideration the specific reason and the unanimous agreement of all the members consisting the Board of Directors, a petition at the ministry can be submitted for the reelection of a prior member of the Board of Directors.

- Every six (6) months, after a day long assembly, the record of which comes together in a compendious synopsis, the staff anonymously submits a personal, digital report evaluating the function of the Museum and appraising the direction, the Board of Directors and the ministry. The collected material is shared with everyone (including the Board of Directors and the ministry). Once a year, the synopsis of this material will be made publicly visible through the EMST’s website, along with the museum’s annual evaluation report by the public (the priorly mentioned evaluation will be accomplished through a questionnaire distributed to the public).

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- Regarding the Museum’s intake in curatorial, researching, archiving and preservation positions, besides the official procedures affiliated with the recruitment by The Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection (ASEP), an interview process with the potential candidate is being suggested. The interview will be conducted by a committee consisting of the Director, a member of the Board of Directors and three members of already existing, appropriately trained specialists. The committee’s grade will be a collective one and it will operate under a specific coefficient. The interview process will be accomplished under the supervision of a member of ASEP’s staff. The member undertaking the role of the supervisor, will neither have the right to vote, nor will be an active participant concerning the conversations. However, their role will apply to the operations of keeping a record of the meetings and of composing a debriefing commenting on them. The report will be thereafter be published.

- Aiming on the development of a creative dialogue between the Director and the Board of Directors, the incorporation of an advisory board is being proposed.

The members of this board will undertake an advisory role, whilst operating as representatives of the Museum. The board will consist of professionals coming from the fields of art, of entrepreneurship and from civil society. The advisory, honorary committee of the Museum’s development will function as a vessel for discussion and it will aim to establish a dialogue, whilst concurrently contributing to the pursuit of the Museum’s resources and to the distribution and publicity of its activities. The advisory board will be generated and thought through proposals made by the Museum (both the Director and the appropriately trained specialists working for it will have a say) and the advisory board. The participants may also come from or living abroad. Moreover, the board will be open to participatory calls. The number of its members will not be a priori defined and the affiliations generated between the Museum and the Board of Directors aim on being carried out both in personal and collective terms. The aforementioned process will be undertook through a series of assemblies organised by the administrative office with participants both parts or by whole committee. None of the above, will have the right to vote. The names of the members will be publicly visible through the Museum’s webpage. The advisory board’s rhythm of development will come as a result from decisions made through specific subject oriented meetings, by the Director, the Board of Directors and the Museum’s stuff.

Reconsideration of the association between the Museum’s Direction and the appropriately trained specialists (curators, researchers, archivists, preservators).

- A job-sharing scheme, which will give prominence to the active enrollment of the Museum’s appropriately trained specialists is regarded as essential.

The gradation of each museum’s field activities is suggested, having as an axis the respect towards each other’s labour. The aforementioned suggestion can be accomplished either through a general plan concerning the team of the

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Museum, either through taking as a starting point of reference the needs of each individual project.

- The Director must assign projects of high operating budget to their colleagues.

RECONSIDERATION OF THE MUSEUM’S DEPARTMENTS - We suggest a segregation between the Curators working on the Museum’s collection and the Curators of temporary exhibitions, despite the divisions applying to the production mediums (painting, sculpture, etc). The Audiovisual sector may be the only excluded field regarding the priorly mentioned plan, as it aims on embedding pioneering film based practices.

- The formation of a department for genres such as performance, that haven’t yet been thoroughly demarcated is also suggested. Themes and questions arising from them, regarding the ways that the performative medium can be integrated in a collection as a work and not only through its documentation, are the ones that we are interested in. The same attention will be given to thinking across works that arise from and state community issues or even the intervention to communal structures.

- Expansion of the Public Program Department that applies to and takes into consideration all of the parallel activities of the Museum.

- Recruitment of a Head of Publications and further development of this department. For as long as the Museum is not financially strong, a part of the publications could be distributed through a digital format. (e-books).

- Development and recruiting for the department of Architecture and Industrial Design. The priorly mentioned department will devise a program originating from the history of the building and among its other operations, it will focus on ordering a series of works, studies, publications and will organise events related to the past of the building and to Takis Zenetos. This department will collaborate with the Museum’s team as regards the architecture design of the exhibitions.

BUDGET A. OPERATIONAL EXPENSES-BUDGET MANAGEMENT - The annual Museum management is divided in two sectors: the basic functional expenses and in the budget management related to research and artistic planning. The first applies to covering of the payroll, the preservation of the building of the Museum and of the artworks. The second refers to the purchase of works, to the commissioning of new works, to the exhibitional, educational, publishing and public programme. From the budget that will be annually requested, the basic functional expenses must be covered by the ministry of Culture to at least in 85%, whereas the planning to at least 60%.

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- For as long as the exhibition of the permanent collection of the Museum has not been completed, the buoyancy regarding the purchase of works will be prorogued. The Museum will only accept endowments as well as funds when aimed at the aforementioned purchases. On the contrary, at that phase, the stress will be placed on the accomplishment of the mission statement concerning the commissioning of new works, the collaborations and/or the co-production of projects with other institutions or organisations.

- Moreover, the constitution of a committee specialised in the planning and approval of purchases is suggested. The Director is eligible to travel along with one member of the Museum’s staff to established, commercial Art Fairs.

These trips will intend to a pre-emption of the desired works, which will be completed after the committee’s approval. Concurrently, the purchases can be premeditated by the committee’s assembly, meaning that a list of artists’ or other works towards which there is potential interest for purchase, will have been determined in advance.

The suggested constitution of the committee is the following: Committee of purchases = 2 alternating members of the Board of Directors + 2 alternating members of the advisory board (having no right to vote) + Direction + 3 alternating members of the appropriately trained specialists + one resident of Athens coming through a ballot + 1 young female artist under 28 years of age (the last positions will change after the members’ participation in two purchase processes).

B. FINDING OF NEW RESOURCES - Resources could potentially arise from both the municipality and the region of Athens. The organisation of the artistic departments of every structure of self-organisation, having as an aim their autonomy in local art councils will operate as a trade-off to the priorly mentioned funds. After the completion of the formation of the municipality and the regional structures, these will continue to financially support the Museum for an indefinite period with a reduced budget compared to the one provided before. As a trade-off, the Museum will offer a space for these assemblies to be hosted.

Along with that they’ll be given the opportunity to organise an event hosted by the Museum’s halls. This structure could be an exchange between already existing artistic committees but hopefully will motivate some new participants.

- Moreover, internal vacancies of restricted time can be covered by fundings coming from other institutions or organisations. These positions can cover ancillary vacancies in the fields of production, of archiving, of basic functional activities, etc. Along with this structure, researching positions can be formed anew, through the participation of the Museum in International Museum schemas.

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-Recruitment in the field of Financial Services and of Trade Management of a specialist working explicitly on finding resources and planning the trade strategy of the Museum. Private donations must be able to be acquired efficiently through prompt bureaucratic procedures and European funds coming through commensurate programmes must be embedded in the Museum’s policies along with the the development of a strategic coalition with the established private cultural foundations.

MUSEOLOGICAL RESEARCH - By looking at and with the Museum’ archives, encompassing work that has been done by the two previous directors and through a close collaboration with the in-house curators that have been a vivid part of the team since its establishment, our aim is the planning procedures of approval and application of the permanent collection to take place as soon as possible, taking as starting point of reference as the contribution of the priorly mentioned specialists will much appreciated as well as credited.

Concerning the opening date of the collection, a special edition of a publication will be launched, the content of which will present this process, as well as the theses of former studies and the scientific goals of the final research. Our intention concerning the final research is for it to demonstrate the local identity through the history of foundation and establishment of the institution, through the breaches and the delays, through the structural impediments, the deficiencies as well as the possibilities.

- Concurrently, the collection will be also be presented through a series of thematic hashtags showing an intentional-conceptual element. These hashtags, will be emerging from the ways that artistic production is being researched and recognised both in a local and in an international scale, the geographical position and the relation with its archaeological past, the means that contemporary art can reflect on the touristic and historical past of the city. More specifically, through the hashtags, what will be further investigated is how the local cultural production is in dialogue with a globalised version of a history of art. What are the relations between the Balkan States and the Mediterranean countries? What is our affiliation with the Middle East and the artistic centres in Istanbul, Cairo, Beirut, Palestine? What are the emerging terms that comment on the national construction? How are the works affiliated with high western-(ised) avant-garde movements? Which countries are the ones we are in dialogue with? What’s the relation with the ancient archetype of beauty? How do artists choose to build a narrative locally and internationally? Each work will apply to more than one of the questions/hashtags stated above. These categorisations will be prominent when it comes to the virtual display of the collection on the website.

SCIENTIFIC AND ARTISTIC PLANNING - The intensification of the organisation of the archive of the Museum and the finalisation of this process within the upcoming year is regarded as a priority.

A digital platform hosting in the same space all the national collections will follow after, as an initiative coming from the Museum.

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- Taking into consideration the mission statement of the Museum in terms of forming a special programme of professional establishment and specialisation of the curators of museums of contemporary art, the formation of a summer school for curators is being suggested. The invited speakers will come both from a cutting edge perspective related to the field of knowledge and after an open call invitation. The materialisation of this programme will take place after a collaboration with other museums across the globe and it will concurrently operate as a symposium/forum for significant curatorial practices.

- Every second year the exhibition will be curated by an external collaborator.

Our aim is to emphasise on curatorial collectives coming from both Greece and abroad and there will be no thematic restriction regarding this commissioning.

- Furthermore, the formation of short programmes for artistic residencies and for collaborations with the Museum is suggested. Every year, the Museum will host an established Greek or International artist, invited to work on and with the archive of the Museum. The product of their research will be presented through a special event. Correspondingly, another artist will be invited to produce a work or a project in collaboration with the educational department. This initiative, will also be led by the invited artist within the framework of the educational programme.

- Last but not least, a special programme hosting young, emerging artists up to 30 years old will be developed. The artists will be invited to work at the exhibition space of the museum, having as their aim to present work publicly by the end of the programme. The aforementioned open call will apply to an intersectional/ interdisciplinary scheme. The same spaces will also host the works of Artistic Collectives from Greece and abroad.

- We intend to generate a dialogue, running in parallel with the priorly mentioned enterprises, for the development of the residency programmes with other international foundations, concerning hosting greek artists in other countries.

- A series of works arising from the histories of the areas surrounding the Museum (Koukaki and Neos Kosmos). Within this context, a series of works can be formed inviting the residents in a collaboration with the Museum, as well as a thematic program including the creation of works placed in the surrounding buildings of the Museum, in the facades and rooftops. These artistic interventions will aim on the formation of a contemporary art “nexus”.

Regarding the materialisation of this program, a potential strategic coalition with established private foundations finding themselves in the same geographical axis with EMST, such as the Onassis Cultural Centre and SNF (Stavros Niarchos Foundation) can be formed, having as purpose the co-production and the common use of relevant spaces.

http://www.3137.gr/assets/gabriela_pdfs/gabriela_10_songs.pdf

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Sophie Birch Old Friends 1

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Lydia Hamblet We weren’t Prepared for this Weather

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Hellena Hueck Falling Garments

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Hannah Burton Life is Good and Good for You!

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Jahnavi Innis Air Pollution on Children

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Founded in 2012 by Liberty Rowley, currently directed by Francesca Mollett (formerly by Anna Minchell), The London Arts Board is a disused municipal noticeboard on the corner of Vestry Road and Peckham Road in Camberwell, South London. The London Arts Board gallery is dedicated to giving emerging artists the chance to have a solo exhibition in London.

londonartsboard.blogspot.com

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Daniel Pryde-Jarman

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The first wave of practitioners who gave birth to the term Institutional Critique, were concerned with investigating and exposing the operations at work within art’s institutions. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, and Daniel Buren cast a spotlight upon the inner workings of art institutions and their policies of inclusion or exclusion, which are by their very nature political. In the early 1990s a second generation of artists, including Fred Wilson, Louise Lawler, and Andrea Fraser, reinvigorated Institutional Critique by further interrogating processes of institutionalisation, of art practice and culture more widely, and the ways in which different modes of representation, and indeed non-representation, attribute status and constitute subjects.

By challenging the ways in which institutions strategise through the organisation of objects and subjects, Institutional Critique serves as a means of subjectivising (often excluded) social groups. New modes and modalities of subjectivity can be created through the rejection of institutions, and the ways in which their methods can effectively silence subjects. As the curator Professor Nina Möntmann (Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm) has argued, there is ‘a new freedom to be attained in that which is non-formalised and noninstitutional’1 in those art practices that cannot be easily contained by the prevailing categories of value.

The first and second waves of Institutional Critique have arguably been followed by a third wave; institutions that have recuperated and embedded their own critique. George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, as expressed in Art and the Aesthetic,2 defined artworks in accordance with the status and nature of appreciation they are afforded within the social institution of the art world, which serves to both define and limit their field of possibilities. Describing institutions in terms of their regulating discourses and apparatus, Dickie’s institutional theory drew together all mediators, forums, interlocutors, and organisations, which combine to constitute the field of knowledge and give

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flesh to the art world, including galleries, museums, biennales, criticism, and any other site established for the production, mediation, or consumption of art by its ‘public’. Any object announced as art, Dickie claimed, is always already ‘institutionalised by the system within which it functions’. Similarly, without institutions interior to art and internalised by artists, ‘there is no art’. Born from a deeply felt need to rethink institutionality, forms of Institutional Critique have served to both challenge and uphold institutional theories such as Dickie’s, uncovering the ideologies, discourses, and symbolical exchanges that shape the field, and making use of those same methods and mechanisms for the purposes of critique.

The partnership of Institutional Critique and curatorial practice is a contested field, giving birth to a practice that simultaneously works with and against institutional conventions. Institutional Critique is not simply the practice of intervening into the contexts of galleries and museums, it is also a response to the realisation of how these orthodoxies have been internalised. The curator, as a symbol of the institution, is a key target for criticism, and so a paradox is created when curators critique the same institutional frameworks of which they are very much a part. Institutions have long co-opted the practices of artist-led culture and experimental alternatives. Indeed, the process of co-option has come to be accepted as an inevitable outcome, and as Dave Beech put it, displays itself to be ‘instantaneous, ubiquitous and unexceptional.’3 However, rather than collectively mourning the loss of autonomy and avant-garde experimentation, Beech instead argued for a deeper understanding of institutions and methods for revisiting questions surrounding how institutions can be defined. Beech pointed out that radical artist-run spaces, such as Cabaret Voltaire and Copenhagen Free University (2001–2007), were themselves also institutions, as they instituted their own sets of values, which paradoxically, could be considered anti-institutional.

Rather than becoming overly fixated with the differences between institutions and non-institutions, Beech proposed that artist-run spaces should instead set about instituting their own values if they are to defend themselves against full absorption and dilution within the mainstream. If institutions are only referred to pejoratively and treated as a taboo by artist-run spaces, these practices are themselves in danger of indoctrinating their oppositionality, which in turn could lead to a form of anti-dogma dogmatism. Artist-run spaces that fully invest in a binary opposition between their practices and those of institutions, are in danger of caricaturing their practices as simply contrary, and nothing more than a ‘negative image of the institution’. Beech argued that such a binary is intrinsically flawed, as in his view ‘alternative spaces, artist-run galleries and artist-led art magazines’ are themselves also institutions. Their distinctiveness

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lies not in the fact that they are non-institutional, but in the ways in which they institute a distinct set of values in a different way. Beech has offered two distinct strategies for critically responding to the dilemma of art’s institutionalisation: firstly, to occupy these institutions in experimental ways that contest their habitualisation, and secondly, to create new institutions that offer alternatives to them in terms of both form and content.

Beech argued that ‘institutionalisation for the few’ needs to be replaced by ‘institutionalisation for all’. However, it is unclear as to whether Beech is proposing that all institutions become expansive enough to be able to provide space for all mainstream and alternative practices equally and simultaneously, or if he is advocating the development of new institutions representative of the more alternative experimental practices they nurture.

‘INSTITVTIONALISATION FOR THE FEW’ NEEDS TO BE REPLACED BY ‘INSTITVTIONALISATION FOR ALL’

Both of these proposals are problematic, as the former solution requires that more experimental practices have to wait patiently for their turn in the programme, and the latter suggests that they be partitioned off in experimental institutions, which instantly become less experimental by virtue of their categorisation and containment within these vessels. The relationship between the experimental and the non-experimental is also a matter of relativism, as the identity of experimental institutions is dependent upon the prevalence of normative conventions. As critics have frequently highlighted, a fundamental limitation of institutional critique is that it is itself institutional.

In From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, Andrea Fraser argued that the growth of critically engaged art practices, the widespread dissemination of its vernacular, and the popularisation of critical theory, have combined to form a new institution: the institution of critique. Ironically, a tool frequently deployed in forms of resistance has itself been inverted to become a tool of governance, the authority of which now precedes it. Fraser argued that no conceivable form of Institutional Critique is able to exist outside of this same field,

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and that practitioners can only hope to expand associated discourse or create internal niches. Fraser proposed that the self-enclosing nature of Institutional Critique is not reflective of a ‘totally administered society,’4 but rather a product of the internalisation of the institution: “It is inside of us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves.” When applied to artist-run spaces, Fraser’s argument can be interpreted as identifying artists as the institutional element. If either Beech or Fraser’s theses can be accepted, they inevitably then lead to the following question: what kind of an institution is an artist-run space? What types of values do they institutionalise, and which forms of practice do they encourage and reward? As a self-organised space begins to define itself, in terms of the practices and network it supports, those practices can quickly become normative and institutionalised by virtue of this process.

The plurality of spaces occupying the artist-run category is indicative of the fact that there are many different types of space run by different kinds of artists, each of whom are likely to be instituting different sets of values. This pluralism has resulted in a category that is notable for its cacophonous nature.

Similarly, some values may be affirmed with more certainty than others, and at different rates and intensities of institutionalisation. If an artist-run space can be considered to be an institution, what effect does this have upon the relation that exists between artist-run spaces and public or commercial institutions, and between forms of self-organised critical practice and institutional structures?

A process of co-option by the New Institutions of neoliberalism has resulted in the harnessing of the means of production of artist-run spaces to be applied within larger institutions, distilled to a stylistic gesture, and collected for the purposes of cultural cache. Although both artist-run spaces and New Institutions appear to be disempowered by this bind, their dialectical relationship can also be looked upon as mutually sustaining. As New Institutional discourse tends to fetishise such conditions and qualities as ambiguity, instability, fluidity, provisionality, and self-referentiality, it is difficult to distinguish these from the methods used by artist-run spaces. The antiinstitutional language frequently adopted by New Institutions and the autocannibalism of their own critique, ensures that there is no outside, and no safe ground upon which to settle.

Despite the blending that occurs between them, a degree of protectionism on both sides also ensures that their dialectical relationship has not been fully collapsed or homogenised, and the discourse between artist-led activity and their institutional or market-led counterparts continues to shape forms of resistance and conceptions of autonomy. The institutionalisation of

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Andre De Jong Vinyl art space Floor plan for an institution Meter Room

THE INSTITVTIONALISATION OF INSTITVTIONAL CRITIQUE LED TO ITS DISEMPOWERMENT 58

Institutional Critique led to its disempowerment as a critical tool, and in a similar vein, a third phase of critique that is self-performed by the curators of New Institutions, has failed to catalyse the reform of many of the prevailing power relations. Although Institutional Critique, as a genre and a practice led by an evolving engagement with both the act of critique and institutional structures, has itself become an institution, critique continues to be the principle means by which artist-run spaces are able to maintain a contested relationship with institutions and hegemonic power structures.

As Fraser argued, institutional practices have become internalised, and their trappings can be replicated through artist-run spaces, either on a small scale, or as part of more fundamental processes of institutionalisation.

A form of expectation shortfall is created when artist-run spaces attempt to replicate the activities and aesthetic of established and well-resourced institutions. However, even when institutional and non-institutional models share structural similarities, it does not necessarily follow that they will produce the same kinds of effects and relations, as these will be influenced by the contrasting intentions that bring these agents together. A state of criticality, similar to the one described by Irit Rogoff, is required if artist-run spaces are to strive towards independent positions and sustained critically engaged practice. At some stage in their respective lifecycles, artist-run spaces are required to measure the goal of sustainability against processes of institutionalisation, professionalisation, and instrumentalisation.

By virtue of these processes and their related pressures, what once started life as forms of self-organised acts of ‘refusal-and-creation,’5 can themselves transform into hegemonic structures, becoming comparable in form to the institutions they were originally designed to offer an alternative to.

Notes 1. Nina Möntmann (2008) ‘Spaces of Art’, Site Magazine, (22–23), p.8–10. 2008 2. George Dickie , Art and the Aesthetic, An Institutional Analysis. Cornell University Press, 1974 3. Dave Beech ‘Institutionalisation for All’, Art Monthly (294), p.7–10, 2006 4. Andrea Fraser ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, in Alberro, A. and Stimson, B., eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, MIT Press: Cambridge MA, p.408–417. 2011 5. John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, Pluto Press: London, 2010

(This piece is an extracted and edited chapter of Daniel Pryde-Jarman’s Phd thesis titled Curating the Artist-run Space: Exploring strategies for a critical curatorial practice. Submitted in 2013) Daniel founded the artist-led projects Grey Area (2006-12, Brighton) and Meter Room (2011 – present, Coventry) danielprydejarman.org

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AWA

YOV R 60

RD

SELF 61

In 2009 when I and a few enlightened colleagues started talking about the art world’s institutions, their relationship to money and the mysterious absence of said money in most artists’ lives, hardly anybody was interested. We were often asked why we bothered. Some people were obviously scared that we were poking a hornet’s nest; possibly a hornet’s nest they currently had their dick stuck into. There were already a few others kicking out pseudonymously, or discretely in public while fuming in private. I can’t blame them for that now, knowing that I got regular threats or warnings, even legal notices, that I shouldn’t look into who and where the money was flowing to and from, as well as concerted attempts to libel or discredit me. We took the opposite approach and deliberately put our names to everything, while also making ourselves into a kind of ad hoc institution to do it because we recognised that even fake institutions have more clout, credibility and safety than most individuals.

Especially if those individuals were us.

Nowadays nearly every agency and artist-facing organisation in the uk is talking about money and the role of the institution if they have any sense.

The next generation of kiddies are too, on their Twitter Toks and whatnot. Millennials also seem significantly less bothered at being smoothly co-opted and neutralised by the institutions they purport to critique. They even seem to kind of like it. It hits them and it feels like a kiss.

This may be because a decade or so on, even übermainstream institutions like Frieze have tentatively signalled virtue by proposing, for example, that artists don’t earn enough money to live in the places where their art is primarily consumed, and 62

this might… be… problematic…? Careful there, Che Guevara! The survival of many uk art institutions and funders depends to a pathetic degree on courting the rich, moisturised hand that feeds or fists at its own whim.

Although people still get hung up on aesthetics and ‘but is it art?’, the real story is not how bad, irrelevant and vapid the art establishment and most of its suppliers are. Don’t get me wrong, I agree, but the main issue is that the art world’s major institutions are inextricably and toxically tangled with tax evasion, money laundering, corporate greenwashing and artwashing, international subversion of the rule of law, offshore unaccountability, unchecked influence of oligarchs and murderous warmongering elites from antidemocratic autocracies like Russia and the uae (not to mention their parasites and money-funnelers in the uk and usa) who make and keep their millions from creating global chaos and division, all of which are impoverishing and holding back 99% of the world’s population.

The flaws of our arts funders, galleries and museums are profound and they have real, sometimes devastating effects on real people. But ultimately these art sector problems of underfunding and overwork, class and pay inequity, racism, sexism, ableism, business and policy conducted secretively by cartel and crony are just a cack-handed Muppet Babies microcosm of the pervasive systemic injustices in our societies that are perpetrated on a global scale daily by the people who run those societies and profit from those injustices. On both the micro and macro scale, within the art world and without, why would its beneficiaries ever want mild 63

reform let alone major change to a system that suits them so well? It’s much easier to let people vent a bit and just shoot down the odd wall-jumper.

Or you can tranquillise them and bring them in, usually for a laughably low price. One of the fundamental problems here is that artists currently, to a large extent, still need access to institutions and the rubber stamp of their gatekeepers if artists want to be anything other than hobbyists solely making themselves happy, diddling about on the margins to general indifference- not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s really your thing. But the genuine and usually quite pure desire and need to reach beyond people we know personally with our art, and the need to trust an institution to do it with us or for us, is also for many artists wrapped up in a perverse, self-harming impulse to impress even (sometimes especially) those gatekeepers who are least interested in them and have least use for them. It’s also striking how many artists will voluntarily throw themselves into the line of fire to protect in particular those gatekeepers who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire and a system that treats them like chunks of gristle clogging up the meat grinder.

And so we still get the hollow hype and promises of the vanity art fairs and the artist farmers who hoodwink the egotistic but unwary with so-called development schemes and bogus agencies, a couple of pages in a catalogue nobody will ever read, or a really basic holiday dragged up as artist residency.

Although in the art world it is again wrought painstakingly in miniature, who is really screwing who is a fundamental, age-old problem between the institution and the individual. Marcus Aurelius noted how foolish it was to seek the approval of people 64

or institutions whose values we reject… and he was an introspective stoic who’d gone to extraordinary lengths to become the Emperor of Rome.

Awkward. The inevitable corollary to Aurelius seeming to have a good point is that obviously everyone reading this – including me and you – has at some point tied ourselves in knots worrying about the approval of somebody, some gallery or funder or buyer, who doesn’t give a shit about us and never will. It’s an easy problem to point at, much harder to resolve. And I’m not even in charge of the Roman Empire.

My only suggestion is to pivot towards more of an appreciation of ourselves and what we can do outside of the systems we despise… or if not outside them, at least finding ways to make them fit for our own purposes. In the 1890s playwright Henrik Ibsen used to walk around Oslo covered in medals, even when he was just out to the shops. He’d awarded them to himself after being snubbed for various grants and literary prizes. Some of them were semi-legit but gained through a professional honours broker. These types of brokers still exist, and as Ibsen well knew, it was mainly their fault that instead of going to people who’d actually achieved something, various medals, titles, bursaries and honorary degrees were awarded for no obvious reason to apparent randoms and people who were egregiously crap. If other people could flaunt kudos they didn’t earn, then why shouldn’t he?

I think walking around with a bunch of self-created honours and medals as normal day wear is my new sartorial goal. Never getting into a national collection, getting a PhD, or winning a Nobel? Forget them.

Award yourself the prize.

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Studio1.1 interior

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IN REDCHURCH STREET THEY DID THINGS DIFFERENTLY

WAY BACK IN 2003 when we

moved in to share a space our friend Andy Cohen had started renting and couldn’t sustain.

By then though the street was already, subtly, at the beginning of the turn.

This was signalled to the really acute eye by the decision of the coolest gallery, Stuart Shave/ Modern Art, to move out of its tiny unsuitable space, and further into the real East, to create the mirage that was Vyner Street.

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(‘Why don’t you move to Vyner Street?’ was a regular question that we could only answer with the further question – ‘What with? Buttons?’, incredulous that people seriously didn’t get that there was no money whatsoever behind us, no Matisse in the basement nor dangerous information on a certain politician to sustain our perilous enterprise. We were doing something no one in their right mind would.)

Meanwhile we were having visits from more than one nostalgic couple to say they’d once lived round here, back in the early ‘90s when it was truly crummy, and they’d already been able to sell up and move on. Presumably West. (If only they’d waited!) All the same, definitely, 2003 is a foreign country. On certain evenings in warmish weather you could look along the street and see small crowds holding beers spilling out over the roadway, outside any one of the halfdozen points along the gallery spectrum. From the hot young commercial American-in-an-indie-band to the don’t-dreamit-be-it recent graduate. And us literally in the middle, by complete accident, hardly knowing where we’d landed.

Artist-led - what is (or perhaps what was that?)...

Not-for-profit - well that we could tell you about.

Keran was always an artist, art school long behind him and with artist friends, but that was twenty years ago, just the far/wrong side of Freeze, when contemporary art became, bafflingly and overnight, super-sexy. We didn’t know the art world and the art world didn’t know us.

For us it had been Saturday morning trips to Kiefer, Beuys and Warhol in Dering Street, where Anthony d’Offay on his own offered an education into new art on the very highest level. Alongside, there’d been the occasional friend already with a gallery or an agent, then others graduating from the Royal College or Goldsmiths. From 2003 for a while we could see the art world up close, it was around us, maybe it was

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Phyllida Barlow Demo 52 x 45 x 150 cm each 2005

As a collective we assumed passively we’d turn into a commercial gallery, in the sympathetic but restricted sense of one that sold just enough work to keep going 72

us, it was friends with mas now showing in pop-up spaces, or showing with us. Unless their hot young gallery advised against it, protecting their cvs. It was trips to degree shows, and on to artists’ studios, and to a familiar handful of spaces run by a developing network of like-minded other gallerists.

None of whom, for a whole variety of reasons, personal or circumstantial or, mostly, of course, financial, are still in business.

We’d begun as an artists’ collective of six, with every drawback that could entail. It was almost impossible for all of us to ever be in the same place at the same time (no Zoom!) and whenever most of us managed it it was hard to agree on much, starting with the gallery’s name, which fell back to the default suggestion, the name of Andy’s original studio in Bow. In a year or two the collective’s membership (monthly subscription of £100) began to fluctuate and then totter, till after a few years there were just three left, then for the last dozen or so just us two, who at the luckiest possible time were made redundant from our full-time jobs.

Even as a collective we assumed passively we’d turn into a commercial gallery, in the sympathetic but restricted sense of one that sold just enough work to keep going. Easy enough in the absurd art market, where two or three medium-sized paintings a month by an unknown young artist could do it. And we’d had two sell-out shows, one of them involving national press excitement and local tv coverage, with the bbc London arts’ correspondent stretched out on the gallery floor.

Both shows were successful for specific, and unrepeatable reasons, but then we had heard that stable sales were a position you only reached after five years. That’s an age we’ve never quite touched; like the society ladies known to Lady Bracknell who stayed 35 for ever. We had no ‘brand’ nor any interest in creating one (‘a hit and miss gallery’ was a description we took offence at, and on reflection were proud to own).

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We had no development plan either for the gallery or our careers. We’ve managed to avoid success very successfully over these two decades.

Of course we didn’t want to be a commercial gallery in the less sympathetic sense, one that chooses artists for their sellability and gives them the push when that hope finally evaporates.

Like the ones who might tell a young artist that they like their work very much but wouldn’t be able to sell it except in Holland. Who might give an artist a solo show that comes to look like a goodbye present, because they separate from them immediately afterwards. Or who might tell an artist they’d be seriously interested, but couldn’t the work somehow be five times larger? Or even the gallerists willing to work with an artist obnoxious and demanding, but undeniably in demand.

What we wanted was to work with artists we liked, (what point otherwise?) whose ideas we respected and whose work we liked, and wanted others to see. Ideally, that sold, for their sake and for ours; but it had to be taken into account that it mightn’t. We didn’t want - hadn’t much detectable potential to set ourselves up as dealers. As a corollary, we don’t see it as our business to dictate to artists, telling them what they should paint or what work they’d be best advised to show. What they get is freedom of the space. Freedom, admittedly, occasionally to fall flat. Freedom from the sensible advice that could stop that happening. But freedom all the same.

The same freedom that we chose for ourselves, or rather the one we had thrust on us. Backers could withdraw whenever it suited them. Besides, no-one offered. Funding for a gallery that does what we do (show art) where we do it (London) is barely an option. And maybe we came along too late into things to want to recast ourselves as useful in ways dictated by others.

One thing we were happy to do was run an annual ‘lottery show!’ (its relevance to success in the art world is blindingly

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obvious), though we did hear that a fellow gallerist commented ‘I thought they were a proper gallery’. And for encouraging gambling PayPal has banned us for life even though we tried telling them that the prize, a four-week solo exhibition, has in itself no scrap of financial value. The risk involved is mainly for us, of course, in the sense that for once, once a year, we don’t get to choose an artist we’re sure we can get on with.

We stick with it: it has its conceptual value, after all.

After eighteen years, where are we? While the London artworld hotspot has ricocheted from here to Vyner St to behind Oxford Circus to Clerkenwell and then back to Vyner St, we’re still where we always were, though the Redchurch St gallery tide was sucked out so long ago that in 2012 or thereabouts it was the hottest street in London, not for art but for overpriced retail. In terms of the art world ecology, though, where could we say we were?

Somewhere off to the side.

Hanging on.

Taking art seriously.

Waiting for our twentieth anniversary. studio1-1.co.uk

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Artist-run Spaces I ND EX

H

Haiti

>>

Port-au-Prince……….. http://www.atis-rezistans.com http://ghettobiennale.org Holy See

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Hong Kong

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Kowloon.................... https://www.para-site.art https://tonglauspace.wordpress.com https://www.facebook.com/negativespacehk http://floatingprojectscollective.net https://www.facebook.com/partyhardstudio http://videotage.org.hk http://woofer10.blogspot.com www.writingmachine-collective.net https://displaydistribute.com Hungary

>>

Budapest................ https://teleportgaleriaenglish.wordpress.com http://change-change.hu pinceproject.com http://www.mutogroup.hu http://budapestartfactory.com

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