The Balsall Heath Biennale Book

Balsall Heath Biennale Chris Poolman & Elizabeth Rowe Essays by Derek Horton & Dr Saskia Warren

Table of Contents Introduction p.4 Don’t shit on your own doorstep?

Part 1: How to talk about contemporary art to a dead rat p.10 The Consultation p.14 Cheddar Road ‘Community’ Garden p.22 Eastwood Road Street Party 2012 p.28 Colouring In Book / Balsall Heath A-Z

Part 2: Essays p.39 Playing with time: the Biennale and Balsall Heath in the ‘seventies Derek Horton p.49 Cultural Intermediation and the Balsall Heath Biennale Dr Saskia Warren

Part 3: Summer 2013 p.58 Biennale Newspaper p.62 Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre p.72 Merchandise p.78 Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art p.92 Public Sculpture Colouring in Posters Competition p.108 Public Art Shares p.118 Biennale Warm-Up Party/Limited Edition Bin Bags p.128 Cat Gallery p.133 How Are You Going To Engage? Two Balsall Heath Cats Speak p.142 Decorate Your House or Garden Competition: Surreal Theme p.152 Talks Programme p.158 Balsall Heath World Cup p.162 The Residents Meetings: a radio play - The Animals & Police Issue p.172 International Open Submission Art Exhibition

3

4

Introduction

Don’t shit on your own doorstep?

The Balsall Heath Biennale was a two year (2011-13) contemporary art project in Balsall Heath, an inner city area of Birmingham. It was conceived and co-ordinated by artists and sometime Balsall Heath residents Chris Poolman and Elizabeth Rowe. This book contains documentation of the project and is designed to be read in conjunction with two other documents produced as part of the project: the A-Z colouring in book and the biennale newspaper. The A-Z colouring in book presents detailed research into Balsall Heath conducted during 2012, the newspaper develops a series of propositions and ideas for the ‘live’ period of the project that ran during the summer of 2013, whilst this realisation of these projects and provides a general overview of the wider project.

The Biennale website contains full documentation of the project including audio and video of talks.

Balsall Heath Forum. Indeed, Balsall Heath has recently been selected as one of the develop a neighbourhood plan under the 2011 Localism Act (it is also the only place in the country to be simultaneously involved in a neighbourhood budgeting pilot).1 The selection of Balsall Heath as a government pilot was due to its transformation, and it has been suggested government policy, particularly the Conservative party. If you look on the Conservative party’s YouTube Channel, there are a series of videos featuring David Cameron in Balsall Heath. It’s even been suggested that the Conservative party’s ‘Big Society’ concept comes from Balsall Heath. Despite its transformation, and economically disadvantaged and like many inner city areas, Balsall Heath today is home to a diverse population of different faiths, nationalities and cultures.

Balsall Heath is an inner city area of Birmingham. This much we know. But depending on who you talk to, there are many different histories of Balsall Heath - and many different interpretations of these histories. Compared to its more Edgbaston, Balsall Heath has a contested - and ideologically contradictory - modern history. Up until the early 1990s, Balsall Heath was synonymous with prostitution, urban decay and crime. Indeed, it was recognised as one of the worst areas in the country. But over the last 20 years the area has been transformed through the work of community and religious groups, local residents and an organisation called

1 Neighbourhood planning will allow communities to come together through a local parish council or neighbourhood forum and say where they think new houses, businesses and shops should go – and what they should look like. Once written the plan will be independently examined and put to a referendum of local people for approval.

Balsall Heath Biennale

5

What’s that in your window?

Particularities of Locality

Somewhere along the way we decided we wanted to do a project in our local area - to ‘come out’ as artists to our neighbours. We had both lived in Balsall Heath for a number of years and thought the area was a fascinating context in which to make work. To mark the publicly visible second stage of the project, in July 2013 we took the momentous decision to turn our front window into a Cat Gallery, a space for contemporary art and cats to

The Cat Gallery was very much a response to the local stray cat problem and our decision four years previously to take into our home two kittens who had been born in the back garden - Benny, a tabby/tortoiseshell female and Roger a ginger tom. Outside of the context of Balsall Heath and its small armies of feral cats, Cat Gallery doesn’t easily translate. It was a reaction to something very local and in our eyes, this interest in the local

newspaper, delivered to all 5000 houses across the area, posed the question: ‘Why not turn your front window into a Cat Gallery?’ As far as we are aware, no one took us up on this offer, but we did have people knocking at our front door, either wanting to know what a Cat Gallery was, whether they could come in, and on one occasion, whether we had the internet

School syllabus was designed in response to Balsall Heath). We were very interested in not travelling, working on our doorstep and asking questions of what it might mean for an artist to work ‘locally’. Francis Frascina argues that the modern biennale is captured in Roman Abramovich’s 377ft super yacht mooring alongside the Giardini at the 2011 Venice Biennale: as ‘members of the recent global-traveling elite, they are opaque to the particularities of locality - a phenomenon associated with the biennialisation of the contemporary art world’. In contrast to this trend, the Balsall Heath Biennale was conceived in response to the ‘particularities of locality’, with the projects developed for the summer of 2013 emerging directly from the idiosyncrasies of the local area.

them. On our road at least, we began to or the people who gave out free compost, quarters, we became known as the ‘community people’ who may or may not work for the council (no one was really sure). In this sense then, the Balsall Heath Biennale was a ‘community art’ project in that it occurred within the community in which we lived - and now worked.

6

Introduction

A Balsall Heath Biennale?

The project began in 2011 with a consultation period funded by the Arts Council. At this stage we had a dangerous combination of lofty ideals and fuzzy plans, but over the ensuing six months the project morphed into a reinterpretation area for a two-year period. As a starting point we took Lucy Lippard’s notion of the ‘Community Biennial’ (although the implicit in Lippard’s proposition). At the Falmouth convention 2010, Lippard asked: What about a Community Biennial, subverting the notion of high art by inserting a practice often scorned by the global art world. Curators could consult discover the root social issues in the location, the community and activist organizations dealing with them, and seek out artists who could provide models for thinking and acting about these issues.2 One thing we discovered was that have no knowledge of contemporary art and quite possibly don’t speak English as a we thought there was genuine value in linking Balsall Heath, an economically disadvantaged inner city area with ‘biennale’, a global art world power structure.

2 Lucy Lippard, Imagine Being Here Now: Towards a Multicentered Exhibition Process, http://www.thefalmouthconvention.com/ keynote-lucy-lippard

Semantically speaking, the circulation of the phrase ‘Balsall Heath Biennale’ might have the potential to alter perceptions of the area, if only in a small way. The very word biennale posits a range of connotations and meanings and we felt the accruing of a different type of association to Balsall Heath was a valuable exercise in local re-branding.

Our ‘biennale’ can perhaps be related to Gregory Shollette’s notion of a Mockstitution.3 certain trend or mode of art practice that involves the mimicking of corporate structures and identities (he offers the example of The Yes Men or Bernadette Corporation). The Balsall Heath Biennale structure and name for deliberate effect.

It was amazing how people responded to you either via email or on the phone, when you said you were from the Balsall Heath Biennale.

It didn’t rub with Hans Ulrich Olbrist’s secretary though, who in reply to our invitation to Hans to judge the International Open Submission Art Exhibition replied: Hans Ulrich sends his thanks for your invitation to judge at the Balsall Heath Biennale on Thursday 26th or Friday 27th of September. Unfortunately, September is

3 Gregory Sholette, Speaking Clown to Power, http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/ uploads/2011/11/Speaking-Clown-to-Power.

NOCROP.pdf

Balsall Heath Biennale

7 The Politics of Sharing

a particularly demanding time for Hans Ulrich. He regrets therefore that he is unable to take on any extra commitments or to reply personally to you, as he would usually always endeavour to do. We thank you in advance for your understanding of this situation.

The biennale brand can only take you so far.

Our Arts Council application described how the Balsall Heath Biennale is an ambitious project exploring the ‘politics of sharing’ in an economically and socially disadvantaged inner city area of Birmingham. Occurring over a threemonth period in 2012, the remit of the BHB is to show how contemporary art practice can have an impact upon improving the social and physical fabric of the local area, whilst also showcasing the wider cultural offer of Balsall Heath to both local people and the wider city.

Suggesting that ‘contemporary art practice can have an impact upon improving the social and physical fabric of the local area’ might seem overly ambitious, arrogant or simply divisive, but by this stage in the project we hadn’t left Balsall Heath for months and had become obsessed with the local litter problem, whether art could solve it and if it could, whether it would be art any more. The curators litter pick didn’t happen in 2013 but there is still time. Maybe Hans Ulrich will have a gap in his diary if we give him enough notice.

Balsall Heath has a bipolar personality. It is an area renowned for its strong community infrastructure and modern history of community activism. But Balsall Heath also has a continual problem with of shared common public spaces.

Introduction

8

You wonder how can an area so often praised for its community activism, for inspiring the Conservative Party’s Big Society, look so bad?4 Our thinking became polarised around notions of the common - of common space, commonality and how people shared a local area. Broadly speaking, the common is concerned with sharing. Historically, this idea can be related to how people have (or haven’t as the case may be) shared ‘common ground’: When, in the sixteenth and seventeenth Europe, the meadows, where animals grazed, and the forests, where everyone could gather wood, were privatised, the 5

Today, the common has relevance in terms of the selling of natural resources (such as oil) to private enterprises. In the era of the internet we can think of the ‘creative commons’ - open access to cultural products such as information and ideas.

4 The Balsall Heath Biennale Colouring in Book includes an essay by anthropologist Laurence Douny called ‘The Materiality of Domestic Waste. The Recycled Cosmology of the Dogon of Mali’. This essay offers a fascinating account of the relationship between waste and recycling within the Dogon tribe of Mali. It suggests that different cultures have different interpretations personal note we found that we went from a position of some indifference towards litter and dumping in Balsall Heath to one of near obsession.

5 Pg.3, Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing, Paul De Bruyne & Pascal Gielen.

The common therefore, is about the politics of sharing - be that space, a community, information or natural resources. In light of this, and in relation to Balsall Heath, we might ask the following questions: how do people from many different cultures and faiths share a common public space? How do these different cultures function as a community?

The projects that formed all stages of the Balsall Heath Biennale aimed to explore these different sides to the area. Half of the projects tried to contribute towards Balsall Heath’s community infrastructure (and provide opportunities for local people), whilst other projects invited people to think about their use of shared public space or re-imagine how this space might be used differently (and creatively).

Ultimately - and linking both these interests - we were interested in trying to do something useful. Some projects worked, others totally failed. This publication contains documentation of both.

Balsall Heath Biennale Dr Saskia Warren and Derek Horton were invited to contribute writing to the publication, both having differing relationships to the project and area. Dr Warren had taken the biennale as a case study for a project she is currently working on at Birmingham University, Cultural Intermediation: Connecting Communities in the Creative Urban Economy.6

6 Dr Saskia Warren, an academic at Birmingham University, used the Balsall Heath Biennale as a case study in a number of papers / presentations over 2013 as part of the Birmingham University led AHRCfunded project ‘Cultural Intermediation and the Creative Urban Economy’. The research investigates governance, community engagement and practice-based interventions in the creative economy, with a focus on Birmingham and Manchester (the interviews Saskia conducted with us have been added to the database at Birmingham University).

The papers / presentations were: (1) Warren, S. and Jones, P. (submitted 2013) “Local governance, disadvantaged communities and cultural intermediation in the creative urban economy” Environment & Planning C: Government & Policy; (2) Warren, Saskia.

(2013, June). Local governance, community commissioning and intermediation in the creative economy, Presented at the Experience the Creative Economy Conference 2013, Toronto, Canada; (3) Saskia Warren (2013, June) Local governance, community commissioning and intermediation in the creative urban economy. Presented at Urban Art and The Public, University of Kent, Canterbury – UK; (4) AHRC-funded Cultural Intermediation: Connecting Communities in the Creative Urban Economy - Light-touch case study for Governance Workpackage (PI Dr Phil Jones and Co-I Dr Beth Perry).

9

In contrast, Derek Horton’s essay contextualises the biennale via an exploration of his experiences working in Balsall Heath during the 1970s as part of the adventure playground movement. The interview with two cats was a condition of them working in Cat Gallery 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, for three months over the summer of 2013.

Part 1: How to talk about contemporary art to a dead rat

12

The Consultation

Cheddar & Court Road; Jakeman, Hallam and Lincoln; Alexandra; Chesterton, Colville, Queen St, Alfred St; Mary St; Sherron Gardens, Cobden Gardens, Vincent St; Kinver Croft; Tindal St, Homer St, George St, Edgbaston Rd and Cromer Rd; Clifton, Roshven, Taunton, Kensington Avenue; Seven Streets; Strensham,

at local events. This research period also involved setting up a community garden, helping to organise a street party and becoming elected to the executive committee of the local neighbourhood forum. Finally we produced an A-Z of Balsall Heath / Colouring in book detailing our experiences and new found knowledge of the local area.

Facilitated by Balsall Heath Forum, Balsall Heath has a network of residents groups organised around clusters of streets (the legacy of the Streetwatch movement set up in the late 1980’s to rid the area of prostitutes and drug dealers). During the summer of 2012, we attended several meetings at each of these groups as we undertook a sustained period of research into the local area. The radio play script realised as part of the biennale and included within this publication is based on these meetings, offering a semi-

In effect, one form of separatism (the art-world) became replaced by another (a hyper local Balsall Heath). Like the police

issues: confusion over Khat and cats, balti-samba dances, giant rats and

step in substituting the hectic Birmingham Art World calendar for the equally hectic Balsall Heath community calendar. Out with loitering next to Eastside Projects toilets speculating about Gavin Wade’s shoes, in with Balsall Heath Forum Awards For Young People, Church Centre Book Launch’s, Community Networking Lunch’s and Open day’s at Sparkbrook Resource Centre. Throw in meetings with parkkeepers, the police, Mosque leaders, primary school creative co-coordinators and local councillors. Add in workshops, school assemblies and information stands

travellers for too long, at times we felt we may have gone too far, too deep, too quickly. Over a six-month period we rarely left Balsall Heath, but our reward was an insider knowledge of the area and it’s marked contradictions. Balsall Heath street furniture (bins and lamp-posts) for example, is painted a fetching mixture of green and yellow. Apparently as part of Balsall Heath’s regeneration, residents were asked what colours they would prefer to have these items painted; on the face of it this is a great example of how to give local people a say in their environment. However, in reality the between the Kashmiri and Irish communities, two of the area’s largest immigrant populations, both of whom have particular shades of green associated with their cultures.

The consultation period involved becoming known on the community ’scene’ as we sought to not only research the local area, but also explore local people’s reactions to contemporary art. It became a process of how you might go about talking about contemporary art to

Balsall Heath Biennale

13

which was our interpretation of the classic village fete game ‘Splat the Rat’: an oversized Attack the Balsall Heath Rat machine.

Balsall Heath has a vermin problem. If you live in Balsall Heath you will have heard about the 2ft rats living of the waste of over 40 balti restaurants. Some of you may have seen one and lived to tell the tale/tail. Local people were more than if they were rewarded with the opportunity to viciously attack a plastic rat with a wooden baseball bat. Where

Above: the controversial street furniture

a non-specialist audience (as previously conversation, was the very word ‘biennale’ itself). In retrospect, we approached the consultation process over earnestly, quickly realising the impotency of our fairly straightforward methodologies in the face of the local punter with a ferocious indifference to Artists. We required something that would draw people in and create a space in which they might talk openly about Balsall Heath, it’s issues, and the potential role of art within this. We created a series of ‘consulting’ devices and methodologies that were synonymous with the local area, anchoring our investigation around such highly local traits as rats, cats and ice creams vans.

And lots of them. Our second conversation device reworked the uber community art vehicle of the sock puppet to produce attitudinal stray cat sock puppets. Referencing the Balsall Heath stray cat problem / lineage, these generated a new local vernacular combining street / youth patois and a ice cream vans and a giant vinyl map of Balsall Heath. Great for facilitating a discussion over a bird’s eye view of Balsall Heath, children were drawn to these, often seeing it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to pull the aerial off a methodology, and accidentally most successful, was called the ‘runner bean consultation’. More on this later.

Cheddar Road Community Garden

16

Cheddar Road Community Garden

Lets set up a community garden!

During the consultation period, and perhaps buoyed on by our new-found community aspirations, we decided to set up a community garden. Or rather, we had developed a blueprint for an ambitious chilli growing project - Balsall Heath Chilli Farm - that required a community garden as it’s base. 1 1 During our initial research into Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook in 2010, we came across a little known, but pioneering community food growing project that was set up in Sparkbrook, Birmingham in the 1980s. The project was called Ashram Acres, and it involved local people, many of them unemployed migrants, reclaiming derelict land to establish a large community growing initiative. Although pioneering as a model of self-organisation, in (relying upon ‘sweat equity’), we became interested in the projects growing practices: it specialised in producing Asian and West Indian vegetables; their success relying upon the knowledge and expertise brought by migrants from abroad. Fast-forward 30 years, and ‘exotic’ vegetables are a mainstay of the UK’s culinary landscape. The chilli for example, is synonymous with Balsall Heath, in that the area is home to the famous Balti Triangle. We began to develop a project called Balsall Heath Chilli Farm, which was conceived as a mass community growing initiative. Balsall Heath Chilli Farm would have no permanent base; rather it would be the sum of its many parts and based across Balsall Heath in peoples gardens, in kitchens, on windowsills and scraps of wasteland. Alongside the growing side of things, the project would include an ambitious programme of events related to growing, including a Balsall Heath Chilli Festival. We made a small start on the project. Cheddar Road Community Garden hosted a chilli growing space (including 17 different types of chilli) and we worked with 60 primary school students at Nelson Mandela school to grow chillies for Balsall Heath in Bloom.

We approached a number of organisations across the local area about securing a potential growing space and Balsall Heath Forum suggested a patch on Cheddar Road. As recently as 1992, Cheddar Road was one of the worst roads in Birmingham, if not the UK, for prostitution - women would sit in their front windows creating a microAmsterdam quarter in Balsall Heath.

Although no longer the case, the road still retains a reputation of a sort with people coming from outside of Balsall Heath to one of the main arteries through Balsall Heath as the Rea Valley cycle route runs along Cheddar Road. Behind many of the houses on Cheddar Road, there are a number of legally binding shared gardens – literally common spaces - that no one takes ownership of. Balsall Heath Forum have been cleaning one particular space for years (approximately the equivalent of seven back gardens) only for it to become neglected again.

We decided to take on the space and were awarded a small amount of money from Community First to develop the space into a community garden, complete with polytunnel, raised beds, compost area and play area. We were interested in whether the space might bring local residents together and have an impact upon Cheddar Road’s litter problems. The garden we developed formed part of the Balsall Heath in Bloom 2012 judging trail.

The judges were impressed, except for the three metre high Giant Hogweed growing in the corner, apparently one of the UK’s most poisonous plants whose sap can cause scarring and permanent blindness.

Balsall Heath Biennale

Above & below: The abandoned garden prior to the community garden been developed.

Right: Letter translated into Arabic explaining our thinking around the garden.

17

18

Cheddar Road Community Garden On paper, in the proposal to the funding agency Community First, the garden sounded great: We aim to transform an unused shared garden on Cheddar Road, Balsall Heath into the hub for a community growing vegetables for a series of planters sited at street level. The project will identify key residents who will be active in the growing and maintenance of the garden and planters. This will combat problems of activating community pride in the local environment.

Top: The ‘runner bean consultation’.

Bottom: Street furniture on Cheddar Road.

Right: The community garden evolves to include a polytunnel and raised beds.

But the reality was very different. Our ambition to make Balsall Heath the chilli growing capital of the UK by 2060 faltered and the community garden evolved into a problem project. Prior to the garden’s development, we spent time door knocking along Cheddar road talking to residents about the garden; we even had a letter translated into Arabic (there is a large Yemini population along Cheddar Road) and delivered to every home inviting local residents to a garden open day. A few residents turned up, mildly interested, but none of them were residents whose houses backed on to the shared garden. Over the course of spring 2012, all bar one of the residents were determinedly uninterested in developing the garden (to the extent that they continued to dump rubbish in the garden) yet we couldn’t open it up to the general public as it technically - and legally – belonged to the seven houses backing onto the garden.

Balsall Heath Biennale Can you have a community garden without any community? Was this community garden art? We pondered long and hard over both of these questions and eventually decided, that with Cheddar Road Community Garden, the answer was a resounding No. Our one ‘resident engagement success’ - a Muslim women whose house backed onto the garden employed by the funding body harangued her into an interview and upset her husband. Other highlights of the project included: acquiring the moniker ‘The Council People’ as other Cheddar Road residents beckoned us to clear their over the right to tie some spring pea shoots and the calamitous ‘runner bean consultation’. Having decided to plant runner beans at the entrance to Cheddar Road in empty planters positioned there, we realised that garden canes must be in short supply in Balsall Heath: the canes holding the beans up were stolen four times. Eventually we stopped replacing them and allowed the runner beans to grow at ground level.

After 18 months of feeling like we were trespassing (technically we were) and general indifference from the residents whose houses backed onto the garden (rubbish and old pieces of furniture were still routinely dumped in the garden) we decided to pass the garden over to more experienced hands, in this instance a local food growing initiative called One Plot Urban Farming. One Plot are managing the garden and also immediately secured funding from The Princes Trust to develop the adjoining - equally neglected and overgrown - shared garden into a play area.

19

20

Cheddar Road Community Garden

Top: A jubilant Liz and a petulant Chris after the tortuous process of putting up a polytunnel together.

Middle: Sweetcorn and peas growing in the garden (before they dissapeared one night).

Bottom: Chilli plants and runner beans growing inside the polytunnel.

Balsall Heath Biennale

Top: The community garden in the summer of 2012 with polytunnel, raised beds and planters.

Middle: Play equipment added to the garden in 2013.

Bottom: The adjoining abandoned shared garden that has been developed - off the back of the community garden - into a play area by the Princes Trust.

21

Eastwood Road Street Party 2012

24 Cheddar Road Community Garden represented something of a failed experiment in community engagement.

Our disillusion was partly balanced out by an event that occurred on our road, a street party - ostensibly at least - for the Queen’s jubilee. Our contribution was a large scale Heath Robinson-esque Attack the Balsall Heath Rat machine (that required standing on the top rung of a wobbly step ladder to operate) and designing a poster. This appropriated the Balsall Heath Carnival colouring-in poster format, to produce a design that combined the artwork of Andy Warhol and a Sex Pistol’s album cover using DIY cut out newspaper lettering. Posters were distributed to all 80 houses on Eastwood Road. This was something of an experiment for us, as we had no idea how many would go up along the road, but over the course of the week the road became peppered with posters, several of them quite beautiful. In the end, with the Queen’s face messily coloured in, the road represented something of a Republican stronghold. In contrast to the heavy handedness of Cheddar Road, the street party had a lightness of touch, its success unexpected.

Right Top: Atack the Balsall Heath Rat. Bottom: Shared food at the street party.

Opposite Top:The Eastwood Road street party in full swing.

Bottom: A house lightly embracing the Jubilee spirit.

Overleaf Street party colouring posters with a Sex

Eastwood Road Street Party 2012

Balsall Heath Biennale

25

26

Eastwood Road Street Party 2012

Balsall Heath Biennale

27

Balsall Heath Biennale Colouring In Book A-Z of Balsall Heath

30

Balsall Heath Biennale Colouring In Book / A-Z of Balsall Heath

The research conducted during the consultation is captured in the Balsall Heath Biennale Colouring In Book. This takes an A-Z structure in response to the vast amount of information we collected and our dilemma as to how to organise such a quantity and range of research. The colouring in format is a nod to the colouring in posters Balsall Heath carnival distribute through local schools each year.

It contains a wealth of information about Balsall Heath, from health statistics to ice cream vans, how to join support group Saheli Women to using wire wool to deter mice infestations, as well as art world jargon, tips on how to get funding, initial ideas on proposed art works for the area.

Part 2: Essays

38

39

Playing with time: the Biennale and Balsall Heath in the ‘seventies

Derek Horton

40

Playing with time: the Biennale and Balsall Heath in the ‘seventies

Synchronicity appears when you look for it I suppose, but two events occurred essay that resonated strongly with the ideas and histories that I had been unleashed by the announcement that a steering group has been formed to commission a new public art work for Birmingham, a group consisting of an uninspiring array of councillors, property developers, marketing executives and the like.1 They want to spend over £2-million on a permanently sited artwork with what they glibly describe as ‘wow factor’, that must be ‘highly photogenic’, ‘add to the city’s cultural offer’, and ‘generate income through souvenir sales’. While in their public statements they alluded to Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago, the idea more readily evoked memories of Forward statue on Broad Street, as well as rather happier recollections of King Kong in the Bull Ring. Mason’s monument had a parochial, unambitious drabness that offended many Brummies, whilst Nicholas aspects of the city’s famously droll and self-deprecating sense of humour.2 1 ‘Steering group begins search for world-famous piece of public art in Birmingham’, The Birmingham Post, 29th January 2014. One of many tweets described this as evidence of the city’s “ignorance and conscientious stupidity”. [Since the time this essay was written the steering group have appointed Eastside Projects to oversee the commissioning process of the Birmingham Big Art Project].

2 Mason’s crudely illustrative Forward, installed in 1991, was dubbed the Lurpak statue, owing to the buttery colour of its polyester resin

Birmingham’s latest ambition towards landmark public sculpture aims higher, but it is a throwback to an idea of art as spectacle and public adornment, the aggrandising display of civic wealth imposed on a city without any real interest in the views or needs of its citizens. Such commissions rarely show any serious understanding of art’s social The second moment of synchronicity was hearing of Birmingham University’s shockingly reactionary response to student protests in January 2014.

Students were ‘kettled’, arrested, strip-searched and eventually bailed on extremely harsh conditions, and after being subjected to these disproportionate and heavy-handed tactics by the police, were then suspended from their courses by the university management.3 Birmingham University has gone to extraordinary lengths to quell dissent before, a notable example being the blocking of the appointment of Dr Dick Atkinson to the sociology department in 1968. Atkinson’s exile from the university material. Never popular, it was destroyed by arsonists in 2003. Monro’s King Kong, commissioned by the Peter Stuyvesant installed in Manzoni Gardens next to the Bull Ring, to mixed reactions, but the City Council soon lost their nerve and sold it to a secondhand car dealer who displayed it at his sales lot in Camp Hill, but it was later used to advertise a different car dealership in Balsall Heath, near the junction of Clifton Road and Ladypool Road.

3 http://london-student.net/news/02/01/ university-of-birmingham-suspends-6-studentsfollowing-protest-and-arrests/ http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/ jan/30/student-protest-arrests

41

Derek Horton was the catalyst for the foundation of St Paul’s Community Project in Balsall Heath, which he set up in the late 1960’s with a number of more or less like-minded activists, of whom I was once one.4 Since that time St Paul’s has had a continuing area, so inevitably it was at the forefront of my mind in looking at the Balsall Heath Biennale project and thinking through its relationship to my own history in the area. No one who lives or works in Balsall Heath can avoid encountering St Paul’s and, despite the undoubted commitment and good intentions of many of those involved, not least the indefatigable Dick Atkinson himself, the social values and remain open to question.5 4 Space does not permit a description of their contribution and their support for me, but I am immensely grateful to my former colleagues at St Paul’s, without whom this would not have been written: John Boulton, John Butcher, Carol Fulwood, Claudette Kanagalingam, Es Rosen, Dave Swingle, Kim Sutcliffe, Mick Turner, Sandra Uddin. And Mick at the Railway, Tim and Mary at the Old Mo’ and Joe at Saleem’s, who sustained us all!

5 After its radical beginnings in the theories expounded by Atkinson in his 1972 book, Orthodox Consensus and Radical Alternative, Atkinson’s own position and that of the St Paul’s organisation took an increasingly rightward shift. More recent books, such as Cities of Pride: Rebuilding Communities, Refocusing Government (1995), Towards Self-Governing Schools (1997), and Urban Renaissance: A Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal and the Welfare Society (2000), have New Labour and Tory politicians, including society’ policy, and Michael Gove’s ‘free school’ agenda. Tom King as Thatcher’s environment

I arrived in Balsall Heath in 1978 to work as a ‘community artist’ at the adventure playground on Malvern Street. In many accounts of the history of Balsall Heath, not least in its own website, the arrival of St Paul’s marked some kind of ‘year-zero’ in self-organisation and community activism in the area. This is not the case, and, although what we knew then as The Venture on Malvern Street came under the St Paul’s umbrella and expanded over the road to a city farm and a sports pitch, it was founded in 1969 by Balsall Heath Community Association, supported by the Cadbury Trust, with Ray Wills as worked with the pioneering Gene Pack, who, with funding from the Save the Children Fund, set up the Sparkbrook Adventure Playground in 1965, one of the Sparkbrook Carnival, forerunner to the Balsall Heath Carnival, and also largely a product of Gene Pack’s energies.

Children playing with leftover materials on construction sites had inspired C.Th. Sørensen, the Danish landscape architect credited with ‘inventing’ adventure playground to involve children as builders, secretary was an early visitor to St Paul’s, followed by amongst others, David Blunkett, Alistair Burt (who can be seen on YouTube talking about “learning from Dick Atkinson”) and David Cameron himself. Atkinson and St Pauls’ active involvement in setting up vigilante groups organised by residents and local mosques in a “clean-up” campaign to drive prostitution from the area in the 1990’s was another example of Atkinson’s controversial strategies, articulately criticised by Nick Cohen in a New Statesman article in 2000. http://www.newstatesman.comnode/137252

42

Playing with time: the Biennale and Balsall Heath in the ‘seventies

opened in Emdrup, Denmark in 1943. In British inner-cities, bomb-sites left by World War II began by the late 1950’s to be developed as playgrounds by community activists and artists following this radical Scandinavian example. In the the DIY counterculture emerging from California, and Lloyd Kahn’s Domebook (1971) and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogs (1968-72) became virtual ‘bibles’ for many of us.6 Central to the philosophy was an ideological and ethical commitment to the idea of freedom, of play unhampered by adult rules, and to children’s capability to engage in a kind of anarchic architecture. They were encouraged to use hand tools and even power tools themselves, with minimal training or intervention by adults to ensure their safety, in order to self-build an environment that they could determine and control.

Architecture, even of this anarchic sort, is always determined by available space, and I arrived at Malvern Street from Hockley Port, which then was probably the largest adventure playground in the UK, run at the time by Chris Robinson, an authentic just-back-from-India hippy who lived on a canal boat, and the playground was also loosely connected with Peter Houghton’s Birmingham Settlement, which in turn provided a home for the original Birmingham Arts Lab in Tower Street, 6 Two of the best illustrations of the impressive scale of adventure playgrounds in the 60’s and 70’s, and the extent of the active involvement of children with them, are Jack Lambert and Jenny Pearson’s book, Adventure Playgrounds (Penguin Books, 1974) and the BBC television documentary, This is Our Playground, 1969, which can be found on YouTube. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9-fhzPS8teo#t=16

Newtown.7 My move was the adventure playground equivalent of moving from Los Angeles to Manhattan, the tiny parcel of land on Malvern Street forcing us to build upwards rather than outwards. By 1980, structures of scaffold planks and telegraph poles towered over the rooftop of the Railway Inn at the corner of Malvern Street and Clifton Road, in a way impossible to imagine in the overregulated and health & safety-dominated world of 21st century recreational space.

From these anecdotal recollections, the reader may begin to realise that the invitation from Chris Poolman and Elizabeth Rowe to contribute to the documentation of their Balsall Heath Biennale project proved irresistable. It immediately sparked connections between my own history in Balsall Heath including the extent to which certain things had not changed as much as one would have expected or might have the similarities and differences between what the terms ‘community arts’, or 7 Of the same generation and from similar starting points, Peter Houghton and Dick Atkinson ended up running very different organisations. Houghton’s Birmingham centre, offered support to troubled adolescents, and was in many ways a more radical and democratic organisation than Dick Atkinson’s St Paul’s Project and Balsall Heath Forum. The Arts Lab was an experimental arts centre and artist collective from 1968 to 1982 providing an arts and performance space dedicated to radical research into art and creativity, described by The Guardian in 1997 as, “one of the emblematic institutions of the 1960’s. It moved from the Birmingham Settlement’s Tower Street site to Gosta Green in 1977.

Derek Horton ‘socially engaged practice’, or ‘arts activism’, might mean and how artists now might react to such ideas and strategies compared with their counterparts in the 1960’s and 70’s. All these terms are historically contingent of course, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of ‘relational aesthetics’ is another one that now has to be added, and may even be seen to encompass in some way many of the earlier ones.

In the ever-changing but always opaque vocabulary of artspeak, the language of arts administrators, curators and theorists, ’public art’ and ‘community arts’ are now more often referred to as ‘art in the public realm’. Hidden behind these semantics are some ideological problems.

The term ‘realm’ is based in the concept and language of ‘rule’, deriving from the Latin regalimen or regalis, of or belonging to a rex (king). A ‘realm’ then is the dominion of a king or queen, although used more widely now to refer to a organisation’s control. Most so-called ‘public’ space remains in state or private ownership and is therefore almost always controlled and regulated by institutional bureaucracies or commercial interests. To imply, as the term ‘public realm’ does, that the public somehow ‘rules’ or even has is a piece of Orwellian doublespeak with the spaces in which it might be sited. spaces need to take some responsibility for contesting rather than merely complying with the dominant understandings of how such space should be organized and controlled. Balsall Heath is a place in which the local community’s attempts to wrest some control over its

43 own space have a long history (in which my own involvement began, as I have Malvern Street Adventure Playground), and the Balsall Heath Biennale has now created its own place in that history.

Some time ago, I sat in a Spanish café watching a young man sporting a hoodie touches to his extensive (and quite skilful) tagging of an Eduardo Chillida sculpture sited on the waterfront. This caused me one work of ‘public art’ or two, and the experience reminded me of Lawrence Alloway’s somewhat ironic ‘laws’ of public sculpture which are: (1) If a work can be reached it will be defaced; and (2) If such damage reduces the level of ‘information’ conveyed by the work, it was not a genuinely ‘public’ work to start with.8 Alloway was an English critic who became much more at home in Los Angeles and, nearly forty years ago now, had some very prescient things to say about those approaches to public art that assume it should be object-centred. He argued that this “prevented artists from contributing to the formation of the urban continuum”, which he suggested was “characterised by than by the “monumentality” to which too much public art aspires.9 For art to enter the public domain is for it to take its place in the entire landscape of everyday life, 8 Lawrence Alloway, The Public Sculpture Problem, in Studio International 184 (October 1972), reprinted in Lawrence Alloway, Topics in American Art Since 1945, New York: W.W.Norton & Co, 1975 (p.248).

9 Alloway, 1975, op cit (p.246).

44

Playing with time: the Biennale and Balsall Heath in the ‘seventies

shaped by its architecture, technology, commercial and popular culture, and by the speed of its change and the contradictory permanence and entropy of its infrastructure. It is also of course for it to open itself up to appropriation by civic or corporate vested interests. Like it or not, art that enters the ring with the capitalist spectacle of corporate and civic architecture, high-tech multi-media entertainment environments and runs the risk of ending up as a marginal if not virtually invisible intervention.

Ironically however, this might actually be the source of its strength. Humility can overcome hubris, and art that recognises and celebrates its own frailty has more to offer than art that asserts its objecthood uneven contest. Overcoming a view of art as a fundamentally material practice, in which objects and spectacle are privileged, results in a more radical potential. It opens up the possibility for art practices in which the social is the form as well as the content, where social interaction is the methodology, and where artists work with people as much as with things and materials.

With considerable foresight, Alloway, observed that, “the production of public art is not compatible with the narrow base in which the artist retains for himself the role of exclusive donor of meaning.

What is needed, maybe, is an art that has to do with the formation of idioms.”10 Public art, he argued “requires nothing less than a realignment of the art / public

10 Alloway, 1975, op cit (p.246).

relationship”.11 In this context a socially engaged art practice might adopt a more micro-cultural approach, rejecting the use of public space as merely a different and theoretically more accessible site for art’s location, in favour of developing strategies through which to intervene in the private experience of the public.

Chris Poolman and Elizabeth Rowe’s Balsall Heath Biennale has in many ways been a model of this kind of strategic micro-cultural approach. It has been the opposite, and as such a welcome antidote, to most current attempts at engaging the public with art in a way that goes beyond the institutions of art’s promulgation and display. They were not parachuted into the community with which their art practice sought to engage, they have lived in it for years and been committed to it as citizens and residents as well as artists over an extended period. Then, having committed themselves to engaging with their own community as artists, they have done so consistently, including when times get tough, in ways that many artists are not willing to do and funders are rarely able to ensure.

The contemporary public art commissioning organisation Situations provides a good example of more imaginative ideas of what public art can be and where and when it can take place.12 It has developed a set of New Rules Of Public Art, worth listing here in full:

11 Alloway, 1975, op cit (p.249).

12 Situations is based in Bristol and was founded by Claire Doherty, previously a curator at Ikon in Birmingham and FACT in Liverpool. http://www.situations.org.uk/about/

Derek Horton • It doesn’t have to look like art.

• It’s not forever.

• Create space for the unplanned.

• Don’t make it for a community, create a community.

• Withdraw from the cultural arms race.

• Don’t embellish, interrupt.

• Share ownership freely, but authorship wisely.

• Welcome outsiders.

• Suspend your disbelief.

• Get lost (down unexpected paths as the work unfolds).

This is an approach that has a great deal in common with the best and most radical ‘community arts’ practice of the 60’s and 70’s and with the principles that informed the adventure playgrounds movement. It embodies a philosophy that bridges the thirty and more years between Poolman and Rowe’s time in Balsall Heath and my own.

The idea that art can take any form or mode of encounter, that it’s not about permanence, that it involves an evolving and responsive engagement with a community over time, and even the creation of new communities within that community, are all principles that have been very much in evidence in the Balsall Heath Biennale, where the ‘encounters’ have included street parties, temporary sculptural interventions on house frontages, a gallery for cats to interact with artworks, competitions, an A-Z encyclopedia of Balsall Heath, a newspaper and a temporary art school.

The need to create space for the unplanned and a recognition that artworks arrive through a series of

45 accidents, failures and experiments, is what means that public art projects take time. Poolman and Rowe have playfully turned the term ‘biennale’ on its head, taking a word that in the art world normally describes a big event that occurs every two years, and using it to name a project that lasts for two years, generating many small events throughout that time.

The two years of the Balsall Heath Biennale have allowed for moments of uncertainty and opportunities for rethinking wherein the artwork comes into focus, and for responses to and developments from artworks to unfold over time and be open to the potential for unforeseen things to happen. One of the unique strengths of Poolman and Rowe’s approach has been their long-term commitment to the two-year project in ways that mean that the distinction between ‘the project’ and the practice of their everyday life in their local community in Balsall Heath is at least blurred and mostly not even apparent.

In recent years there has been a massive renewal of interest in the art of the 1960’s and 70’s. The rediscovery by new such as Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark,Vito Acconci and Bas Jan Ader has contributed to this. So too have exhibitions such as the complete re-creation by Germano Celant and Rem Koolhaas at the 2013 Venice Biennale of Harold Szeeman’s 1969 exhibition, Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Likewise many other shows by young curators for whom the period is historically recovered rather than remembered. The curatorial strategy of London’s Raven Row Gallery for example, in various recent exhibitions documenting and reframing the work of Eduardo

46

Playing with time: the Biennale and Balsall Heath in the ‘seventies

Paolozzi, the Artists’ Placement Group, Stephen Willats, and various 60’s artists some radical work to the attention of a new generation, but it has done so within a deeply conservative and academicised framework that strips the work of its Deller’s appropriations of working class cultural life and theatricalisation of class counteracting the oppositional aspects of their content with the complicit form of their reinvention as spectacle.

Reconstructing events such as the Battle of Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, taking them out of the realm of history and into the realm of art is a banal and inconsequential political gesture. What results from these reenactments is merely pastiche, an aestheticisation of history that trivialises reality.13 The capacity of capitalism and its attendant political and cultural institutions to generate and absorb change, to incorporate and thereby nullify challenges and cancel out alternatives, to appropriate countercultures and commodify them, is frightening in its simultaneous power and invisibility. It is all-encompassing and yet so embedded in our everyday experience Balsall Heath and on the nature of so-called ‘public’ art both provide examples of the ways in which radical alternatives can so easily end up as the

13 Adorno’s observation in his essay Commitment, addressing so-called committed art, is apposite here: “For the sake of political commitment, political reality is trivialized.” (Theodor Adorno, Commitment, 1962. Reprinted in New Left Review, vol.1, nos.87-88, September-December 1974).

orthodox consensus they set out to oppose. These conservative forces can only be challenged and exposed to view by a constant renewal of humble attempts to take the small actions that individuals are capable of, seeking to effect small changes in the everyday experience of their immediate environment and closest neighbours. Chris Poolman and Elizabeth Rowe have attempted exactly this through the Balsall Heath Biennale, recalling the spirit of optimism and collaboration that has deep roots in Balsall Heath through an art practice that is unassuming in its manifestation but ambitious in its social motivation.

Derek Horton is an artist, writer and curator. After working in community arts and on adventure playgrounds, he taught art for many years in higher education, most recently as the Head of Research in Contemporary Art at Leeds Metropolitan University, until 2008. He co-founded the online magazines ‘/seconds’ with Peter Lewis in 2005 and ‘Soanyway’ with Lisa Stansbie in 2009. Soanyway combines narrative writing, poetry, music and art, including sound and video, and presents work by artists from around the world.

Now working independently, he recently showed video work in the exhibition Sublime Transactions at the Armitt Museum, Ambleside (UK), alongside works

by David Toop, Sir Peter Blake and others.

His latest project is as a curator and co-director of &Model, bringing work by international contemporary artists to a three-storey gallery in central Leeds (UK).

Derek Horton

47

48

49

Cultural Intermediation and the Balsall Heath Biennale

Dr Saskia Warren

50

Cultural Intermediation and the Balsall Heath Biennale

Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist, originally conceived the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ in 1979 to describe a new kind of actor that arose in an era of expanding mass culture in 1960s France.

This emergent professional class of TV producers, broadcasters, critics and journalists attempted to negotiate cultural taste and practice in new media industries.

Bourdieu’s main concern was the intermediaries’ competency for mediation between high and popular cultures, as they were working in large-scale, rather than elitist, literary and artistic small-scale production. Over time, however, the range of actors framed as cultural and altered from the original meaning. For instance, cultural producers and intermediaries have been discussed together as cultural entrepreneurs (IT/ Web Designers; Graphic Designers; Fashion Designers; Night-Club Promoters; Journalists) contributing to culture-led urban regeneration in post-industrial areas (Banks et. al 2000). The choices of Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Manchester are presented who engage in innovation, and economic and cultural solvent and credible careers at the city centre fringe. The different roles performed by intermediaries in an policy are contentious e.g. arts and development project workers; cultural policy advisors; urban town planning; cultural impact evaluators; city strategic marketing. O’Connor has argued that intermediaries can be viewed as complicit within the utilisation of culture in the creative economy by actively working to help “circumscribe a set of activities which can then become the objective correlate of policy intervention and measurement” (2013: 2).

In what ways intermediaries identify, stabilise, unsettle or subvert the measurement of cultural and creative activities in the messy spaces between policy and practice is an ongoing negotiation, by turns tense and playful, between policy-makers, funders, artists and participants.

As part of a wider project on the creative economy and communities, the Balsall Heath Biennale was analysed through the lens of cultural intermediation. The two-year programme - involving community consultations, events, talks, exhibitions and workshops - was of particular interest because it explored local culture and the characteristics of an urban neighbourhood, combined with working in a diverse, multi-cultural area.

An ambitious, challenging and thoughtful programme, the Balsall Heath Biennale raises some further points of consideration in light of cultural intermediation which are detailed below: 1. Neighbourhood: Balsall Heath is one of Birmingham’s Priority Neighbourhoods, which means it worst 5% nationally for multiple deprivations. Located 2.5 miles south of the city-centre, it has a diverse population of around 15,000 with residents recording themselves as 60% of Asian origin, 24% White and 10% Black. Challenges of worklessness are severe with 26% unemployed and 30% with a household income of less than £7,000. Which acutely brings to the fore the question of who is activity in the area?

Dr Saskia Warren 2. Community: (i) The biennale is a community and area based project, therefore engaging a cross-section of the residential population is central to its success. Aspects of the Biennale programme also encourage a visitor economy to Balsall Heath with a nested offer of a cutting-edge art event combined with ethnic-neighbourhood tourism. Beyond the diverse local community and visitor economy, there is an intended, artistically-literate, international community (targeted through the special edition newspaper and detailed website). In one of the talks, Public Art: How does it get made? a conversation between the artist, Ruth Claxton, and Clare Doherty, director of Situations, a public art commissioning body, the Biennale posed two connected questions which reverberate with wider debates at the local, regional and national scale: Who is public art for? Who should pay for it? (ii) Tim Hall and Iain Robertson observe that “much public art attempts to promote consensual readings of place around which communities might come together” (2001: 13). Interrogating this model, during the Q&A of the biennale talk Localism, Narrative & Myth (a conversation between Antonia Layard, Professor of Law and Geography at University of Birmingham and professional story-teller, Martin Maudsley), a discussion communities have been served by the fragile regeneration of Balsall Heath, and which have been moved on. By recording history of sex workers and vigilantes in Balsall Heath in the 1990s, the biennale re-opened the narrative of the area’s development, unsettling the ground by documenting, albeit quietly, the power

51 relations, social behaviours and violence that have divided communities in the neighbourhood. Public art is not a panacea to community cohesion. Public art can be pasts and unstable futures.

3. Public space: The project serves a purpose to invite a re-thinking and re-imagining of shared public space, including ‘confused spaces’ (those which have fallen into neglect as redevelopment processes render unclear who is legally responsibility for maintenance). Indeed, neighbourhood regeneration is embedded into the community engagement strategies of the programme. Each of the components of the biennale are conceptualized to raise people’s pride in the local area, attend to environmental issues of littering and dumping, along with marketing Balsall Heath as a potential tourism destination. interventions take an area approach that catalyses neighbourhood planning in new ways. As Poolman and Rowe stated, the Balsall Heath is not an art biennale like Venice, but a way of “celebrating, regenerating and drawing attention to the area.”

4.Venues: Community and private spaces used to stage the programme include: Ort Cafe; Calthorpe Park; Cat Gallery (in the artists’ house at 58 Eastwood Road); Balsall Heath Park; The Hillac (a Somalian restaurant); The Old Printworks; Balsall Heath Church Centre and Balsall Heath Library. In August 2013, I attended the talk on Maddox, Balsall Heath & Surrealism, by Dr Stephen Forcer, Lecturer in French Studies at University of Birmingham, which was held upstairs at The Hillac.

52

Cultural Intermediation and the Balsall Heath Biennale

While regular clients of the restaurant sat, ate and talked downstairs, the art talk and audience took over a separate function room upstairs mostly used for wedding receptions. The question of how to create truly intercultural spaces with a mingling of communities, rather than amiable co-existence (even within the same building) was presented. Step 1: same building, different rooms; Step 2: same building, same room? Step 3: coproduction and cultural exchange?

5. Methods: Impact is interwoven throughout the components through educational aims and participatory methods. The professional expertise and artistic authority of Poolman and Rowe - central to the status of cultural intermediaries and in the effective delivery of their work - is communicated most evidently by the free Balsall Heath Art School. Artistic integrity is entwined with broader social and regeneration aims, which is partly in response to funders and the community consultation.

6. Funding streams: The unstable funding environment is creating 15 components, each with multiple levels of activities, the Balsall Heath Biennale uses a model that could be scaled down with components removed or adapted if one or more funding streams were rejected. Although, in actuality, it proved highly successful with funders, which included: Arts Council England; Birmingham City Council; Near Neighbours (DCLG); West Midlands Police Force and Community First.

7. Creative autonomy: i) For the last three decades governments have been attempting to capture the activities of small independent businesses and third sector organisations in order to deliver on the aims of the state (Wolch 1990). While the rhetoric has been of bringing in external expertise, in practice large sums of public money have come with strings attached, with organisations principles being subsumed into the state agenda. ii) The Localism Act 2011 (sections 15-20) allows ministers to devolve greater power to local authorities. The Act grants powers to increase local authority and community control over local governance and funding allocations. Despite a policy drift signalled by national pilots on Neighbourhood Planning and the Community Budgeting pilots, Birmingham City council has not yet demonstrated their commitment to devolving creative economy governance.

8. Stimulating new ideas: Complex issues of cultural heritage and cultural sensitivity in a diverse city were unlocked through the Decorate Your House or Garden Competition - Surreal Theme (staged as part of the Balsall Heath Biennale 2013). A resident explained that low engagement with the competition from the Pakistani-Muslim community could be explained, in part, by the association of cash prizes with gambling. To investigate further cultural, religious, linguistic and educational barriers to engagement, and the translation of humour, additional research has been funded by the Communities and Culture Network+ on the Birmingham Surrealist Group. This research led by myself, along with Dr Stephen Forcer,

Dr Saskia Warren builds upon the platform and networks established by the Balsall Heath Biennale.

9. Measuring success?: Cultural engagement from the non-white population and young people in average (-11%) (Big City Culture 2010-15, Birmingham City Council). Moreover, and even more challenging, barriers to gaining employment are indicative of Kate Oakley’s argument that claims for the democratising tendencies and pathways for the socially excluded in the creative sector have been exaggerated: The concern of many cultural industries advocates with access for marginalised groups – ethnic minorities and women in interventions, though the ability of those interventions to counter wider market and social forces was limited, to say the least (Oakley 2009: 403-414).

For instance, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) produced a study in 2007 which showed that the cultural and creative sector has higher educational entry barriers than other sectors: 40% of creative workers have degrees in comparison to 25% in other sectors. Balsall Heath is one of the most educationally deprived areas in the UK (census 2011) which raises serious questions about how realistic it is for cultural programmes on project-byproject funding to deliver on entrenched skills and employment issues. Employment and training measures of success which are often quantitative and quantity driven, and required in much self-evaluation, sits uncomfortably with the skills-sets and delivery focus of most creative practitioners. These are artists. Not social scientists. Or Job-Centre advisers.

53 10. Is short term project funding and delivery meeting the needs of artists, communities or policy-makers?: The prospective social and cultural value of the Balsall Heath Biennale was widely recognised by funders, yet a resulting question needs to be posed on what programme. As Rowe acknowledged the neighbourhood is “multi-cultural not inter-cultural” and it “takes time to build bridges” (Interview with Rowe and Poolman 9/05/2013), for which a two year project is a start rather than conclusion.

References: Banks, M., Lovatt, A. O’ Connor, J. and Raffo, C., 2000, “Risk and trust in the cultural industries”, Geoforum 31, 453–464.

Birmingham City Council, 2012, Big City Culture 2010-15: Birmingham’s Cultural Strategy, Birmingham.

Bourdieu, P. 1979; trans. 1984, Distinction Oxon, Routledge.

Hall, T. and Robertson, I. 2001, “Public Art and Urban Regeneration: advocacy, claims and critical debates”, Landscape Research 26, 5–26.

O’ Connor, J. 2013, “Intermediaries and Imaginaries in the Cultural and Creative Industries”, Regional Studies 13, 1-14.

Oakley, K. 2009, “The disappearing arts creativity and innovation after the creative industries”, The International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, 403-414.

Wolch, J. 1990, The shadow state: government and voluntary sector in transition, The Foundation Centre, New York.

54

Cultural Intermediation and the Balsall Heath Biennale

Dr Saskia Warren is a Cultural Geographer, who works on the intersections of social science and the arts. She has a particular interest in cultural production and consumption, with a specialism in contemporary art practices. Research Fellow at University of Birmingham, she currently works on a cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary project entitled Cultural Intermediation and the creative urban economy. She completed her PhD in Cultural visual methodologies to case studies at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, her thesis investigated the value of contemporary art in different people’s lives. She graduated from University of Oxford with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Language (2006), and completed an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at Leeds (2008). Before taking her present post, she has worked as a curator, arts consultant and policy-maker, and as Research Assistant, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University (2011-12).

Cultural Intermediation: Connecting Communities in the Creative Urban Economy:

This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Connected Communities programme and is due to run 2012-2016. The project is cross-sectoral and multi-disciplinary in scope researching governance, community and creative practice in Birmingham and Manchester (led by Dr Phil Jones).Cultural intermediation is a process which connects different kinds of communities into the creative economy and wider society. It plays a critical role in raising aspirations, upskilling and building one of the most dynamic sectors of the contemporary UK economy. Individual artists, professional networks, events, festivals, commissioning bodies, creative businesses, arts and cultural organisations both large and small can all play intermediary roles. Some of the most exciting opportunities for research in this area are occurring in the city regions. In part this is because of their size and multiplicity of cultural resources, but also because these areas have large concentrations of communities suffering multiple deprivation who are being left behind by the post-industrial creative economy.

Dr Saskia Warren

55

Part 3: Summer 2013

58

Newspaper

Newspaper

60

Above: The Balsall Heath Biennale newspaper.

Previous Page: A map included within the newspaper that marked sites of cultural interest within Balsall Heath.

Balsall Heath Biennale The Biennale project reached its publicly ‘live’ period during the summer of 2013.

Alongside the Arts Council, this stage of the project was supported by a variety of unusual funding sources including Community First, Near Neighbours and the Police Property Act Fund. The biennale now included 15 very different elements, ranging from area wide competitions to a talks programme, radio play and art school. As a series of experiments in participation, some worked extraordinarily well, whilst others failed miserably.

The public facing side of the project newspaper was delivered to all houses in Balsall Heath (approximately 5000) on three blisteringly hot days at the end of June 2013. The newspaper contained information on all of our projects as well as listings and a centre-spread map for cultural activity at other venues in Balsall Heath between July and September. At this time, Balsall Heath was undergoing something of a cultural renaissance, with enterprises like Ort Cafe & Gallery and The Old Printworks popping up. Balsall Heath was also a Birmingham City Council cultural budgeting pilot. From our point of view, we felt Balsall Heath deserved to be recognised within what one councillor had termed the ‘cultural corridor’ (the stretch of land from Eastside & Digbeth, through Highgate and Balsall Heath, to Moseley and Kings Heath). The listings and map demonstrated a varied, and at times surprising, array of activities in an area not renowned for its cultural offer.1 1 During the consultation we found many visitors to Midlands Arts Centre (mac) made a special visit from outside the area to the arts

61 Whether people got as far as the listings was another matter; they may not have stick with the word biennale, but we also placed three talking stray cats on the front page of the newspaper exclaiming ‘How do you translate culture?’ in English, Arabic and Urdu. This was partly a nod to the fact that we had numerous translation issues, with our translation service getting back to us saying that our specialised, largely western, cultural vernacular didn’t translate well into other languages. Our desire to make the newspaper an ‘artwork’ resulted in an object that was perhaps overly culturally coded to appeal to a certain creative sensibility. 2

centre yet rarely ventured into Balsall Heath.

Conversely, many people from Balsall Heath visited Cannon Hill Park but didn’t go into the Midlands Arts Centre. We hoped that one of the outcomes of the map would be to open up pathways between the mac and Balsall Heath.

2 Although local people have told us that the newspaper makes an excellent door-mat and / or draught excluder.

Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre

64

Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre

Travelling around the local area over the summer, the Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre offered information on an area not renowned for it’s tourism industry. Although slightly tongue-in-cheek, the idea was underpinned by a seriousness as Balsall Heath has a fascinating modern history that many Birmingham residents are oblivious to. For us, Balsall Heath offered an alternative space of urban tourism, in contrast to city such as Bournville. If time and budget had allowed, we had planned to employ local residents as tour guides to offer an an area many Birmingham residents would generally avoid.

Originally we had hoped to site the Tourist Information Centre as a semiPortacabin. This was used in the late 1980’s as a base from which residents held pickets against prostitution and drug dealing. Old Portacabins though, are political objects, and the cabin had been reborn as the somewhat mouse infested base from which a local children’s sport organisation stored all its kit and equipment.

Previous Page: The disused Portacabin on the corner of Balsall Heath Road and Longmore Street, formerly used as a ‘Streetwatch’ base to deter prostiution and kerb crawling.

Converting the Portacabin into a fully functioning Tourist information Centre proved a step too far and we had to could be easily transported around the local area via three round trips in a Fiat Seicento.

We spent considerable time exploring the possibilities of having a genuine Indian pagoda style tent, but the cost and time were insurmountable, and we ended up from Magic Marquees of Manchester (if you concentrate, the gazebo has a faintly Middle Eastern feel to it). This was complimented by a range of props, such polypropolene mat from Ikea, trestle tables from Wickes and checked gingham cloth from Dunelm Mill. Additionally, three literature racks were slowly crafted over the course of several months from old fruit crates recycled and refashioned from the corner shop at the end of the road.

These hopefully gave the appearance of a certain ‘slum chic’ so irresistible to artists.1 The Tourist Information Centre distributed information on cultural activity in Balsall Heath, the visual arts more widely in Birmingham, the biennale newspaper, public sculpture colouring in posters, ‘Surreal House’ competition information, postcards and essays. The postcards featured a series of local ‘heritage’ sites and landmarks, such as Zaffs kebab house and Apna Ghar Asian OAP home.

Opposite Top: Tourist Information Cente at Cleanascene.

Opposite Bottom: Tourist Information Cente at Balsall Heath Carnival.

1 Anna Dezeuze, Thriving On Adversity: The Art Of Precariousness, http://www.metamute. org/editorial/articles/thriving-adversity-artprecariousness

Balsall Heath Biennale

65

66

Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre

Balsall Heath Biennale

67

68

Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre The essays hopefully offered an esoteric and tangential lens through which to explore Balsall Heath. They included writing on taxi driver’s speeding offences in Taiwan, the political ecology of the plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Tanzanian scrap recycling cycle and the making was also available at the centre - as was the opportunity to sign up for the Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art.

Previous Page: Selection of Balsall Heath related essays available from the Tourist Information Centre.

Left and below: Postcard and literature racks constructed from disused wooden fruit and vegetable crates.

Right: Six postcards from the biennale postcard range.

Balsall Heath Biennale

69

Apna Ghar Apna Ghar (meaning ‘Our Home’) provides a range of services, including day care, for men and women aged over 45 years who are physically frail and disabled and who are predominantly from the South Asian community. The Centre also offers catering services to the public (a maximum of 50 people) at a very competitive price.

Welcome to Balsall Heath This sign, on Haden Way, marks one of the seven entry points to Balsall Heath and forms part of the Balsall Heath Britain in Bloom trail. In 2012 and 2013 Balsall Heath received a silver award in Britain in Bloom.

Cars Wanted For Cash Unfortunately, this wonderfully painted facade is no longer in existence near the Stratford Road.

Hana’s Pizza House (formerly The Coach & Horses Public House) Changes in the pub trade and a predominantly Muslim population mean that there are not many pubs left in Balsall Heath. Across the local area there are numerous ‘shells’ that architecturally resemble pubs, but are now occupied for other purposes.

Calthorpe Park Hills The hills in Calthorpe Park were man made in the 1960s when the council used the area as a dumping ground for earth dug out during the building of the Belgrave Middleway.

Zaffs Mosaic Arguably the most famous fast food restaurant (and there are many) in Balsall Heath, Zaffs is open most hours. It even has its own mosaic by the front entrance.

70

Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre

Balsall Heath Biennale

71

Merchandise Workshops

74 Local people were invited to produce the merchandise for the biennale at a series of printing workshops held across the local area. We felt that embedding the production of publicity within the community would give ownership of the project to people who lived in the area.

Our rationale was that if they made the poster they were much more likely to put it up in their window and promote the biennale.

Occurring at street level, this internal merchandise production mechanism incorporated a design originally produced for the 1969 Balsall Heath Festival that simply stated ‘I’m a Balsall Heathan’. It could be suggested that there is a relationship between the area’s persistent

Merchandise Workshops litter and dumping problems and not enough people having a sense of local identity and our idea was that by using this statement it might go some small way to readdressing this problem.

But the badge also had other slightly subversive undertones: Heathan is a homophone and sounds likes the distinctly paganistic ‘Heathen’ (this is perhaps one of the reasons why we were drawn to it). Indeed, someone who worked in Balsall Heath who was a Christian found it a problematic statement as it suggests an ungodly person and refused our offer of a T-shirt on this basis.

Balsall Heath Biennale

75

76

Merchandise Workshops

Balsall Heath Biennale

77

Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

80

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

‘There’s always the dream that someone is going to join you in the art life’

Taking its name from the many ad hoc English tuition academies popping up overnight around the local area, the Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art (BHACA) offered an 11-week course in contemporary art with a syllabus designed in response to the idiosyncrasies of Balsall Heath. This included: Fischli/Weiss and parking space savers; sculpting a pair of trainers from plastic bags, tape and cardboard; alternative currencies and Balsall Heath ‘credit’; the Neighbourhood Plan and public sculpture; dumped mattresses and the readymade; ‘unadopted’ spaces’ & Wastelands Twinning. Additional sessions were run by artists Rafal Zar, Robert Grose and Beth Bramich. BHACA was probably the most labour intensive aspect of the project, the world, but potentially the most interesting aspect of the biennale for us.

Despite a large advert in the biennale newspaper (possibly, like the syllabus indecipherable to many) our most successful recruitment method was a series of laminated posters cable tied to railings around Balsall Heath. We had 24 enquires with 11 people attending an interview. Seven participants accepted the offer of a place with a further person joining the group half way through the course.

Sessions were held weekly at The Old Printworks and we also organised a series of 1 to 1 sessions with individual students.

In the ‘Interview with Two Cats’ later in this book, we talk about some of the results of the art school, particularly in relation to individual students.

Balsall Heath Biennale

Syllabus

81

PART A. WEEKS 1 - 4: DIFFERENT ART-WORLDS

WEEK 1. WHERE ARE WE NOW? Idea: Introduction to the course. Alongside a talk about the Balsall Heath Biennale project and The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art, participants will introduce themselves and their interest in art.

Question: What is the role or job of an artist? How can contemporary art exist in the ‘real’ world?

WEEK 2. SCREEN-PRINTING MERCHANDISE Idea: A screen-printing workshop in which we will print merchandise for the biennale (posters, bags, T-shirts) as a way of getting people to think more closely about their relationship with their neighbourhood and what cultural production might mean.

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

82

Syllabus

PART A. WEEKS 1 - 4: DIFFERENT ART-WORLDS

WEEK 3. ‘COMMUNITY ART’ Idea: Looking at the similarities and differences between contemporary art, craft and design through a case study of the arts organisation Grizedale Arts.

Question: What is ‘community art’?

WEEK 4. RADICAL FELT MAKING Idea: Led by artist Rafal Zar, this workshop on felt-making will explore how a traditional craft activity can be subverted in new and interesting ways.

Participants will be encouraged to experiment with this process in a practical hands-on making session.

Question: Why felt?

Top: Artist Rafal Zar in conversation with Lisa Beauchamp, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Bottom: Art school students list distinctions between art & craft.

Balsall Heath Biennale

83

PART B. WEEKS 5 - 8: THE WAYS THINGS GO (IN BALSALL HEATH) WEEK 5. CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING Idea: Explore how everyday objects can be art-works. We will look at the work of Jessica Stockholder, Hew Locke and Donald Judd in relation to objects - mattresses, furniture etc - that are normally dumped around Balsall Heath.

Question: Can anything be art?

WEEK 6. FISCHLI/WEISS AND PARKING SPACE SAVERS IN BALSALL HEATH Idea: Continuing to focus on the theme of context from the previous week, we will watch ‘The Way Things Go’ by Fischli/Weiss. We will then develop a series of sculptural ‘parking space savers’ or other interventions at street level.

Question: Can art prevent you from being bored ever again?

Top: ‘Parking space saver’ on Cheddar Road, Balsall Heath.

Bottom: Art school student devises a kinetic construction in response to ‘The Way Things Go’ by Fischli/ Weiss.

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

84

Syllabus

PART B. WEEKS 5 - 8: THE WAYS THINGS GO (IN BALSALL HEATH)

WEEK 7. ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES: THINGS YOU LEAVE OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE AND ‘BALSALL HEATH CREDIT’ Idea: Looking at non-monetary systems of exchange, we will discuss the work of artist Caroline Caycedo within the context of the ‘Balsall Heath Credit’ (items or objects that people leave outside their homes that may be of use to other people).

Question: Why are artists concerned with systems of value?

Balsall Heath Biennale

85

WEEK 8. MIMICRY & THE ‘MOCKSTITUTION’: HOW TO SCULPT A PAIR OF TRAINERS FROM LOCAL RESOURCES Idea: Led by artist Robert Grose this workshop will explore ideas around mimicry and copying originals. Using the biennale project ‘The Balsall Heath Tourist information Centre’ as a starting point, this workshop will involve using recycled materials to make sculptural, homemade trainers.

Question: Why would artists imitate corporate identities?

86

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

WEEK 9. PUBLIC ART & THE BALSALL HEATH NEIGHBOURHOOD PLAN Idea: Taking the Balsall Heath neighbourhood plan as a starting point we will explore ideas around public sculpture by looking at two biennale projects: Public Art Shares & Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters.

Question: Why do we need art in the public realm?

WEEK 10. ‘UNADOPTED’ SPACES IN BALSALL HEATH & WASTELANDS TWINNING Idea: Led by curator & writer Beth Bramich, this session will explore how Wasteland Twinning - a world-wide research initiative - and other projects working with art in the public realm, seek to re-use, map or transform abandoned urban environments.

Participants in this session will take part in a series of fast-paced group performances with the aim of physically recreating public sculptures at each of the ‘unadopted’ spaces on a tour of Balsall Heath. There will be opportunities to perform as part of a group, be part of a documentation team to capture the ‘sculpture’, to discuss why these spaces have become neglected and make proposals for how they could be used in the future.

Question: What is the relationship of art to other disciplines that deal with neglected urban environments, such as architecture or urban gardening?

Syllabus

Left: Map showing ‘unadopted spaces’ in Balsall Heath.

Right: Conceived by the academy students, ‘Naan’ is a giant concrete naan bread 60 sculpture in a potential sculpture park in Balsall Heath, loosely organised around the theme ‘Bread’s of the World’ (drawing by Muhmood Tahir).

Balsall Heath Biennale

87

PART C. WEEKS 9 - 11: ART & THE REAL WORLD

Above: A workshop led by Beth Bramich in which students were invited to replicate a number of famous public sculptures on abandoned, unadopted spaces in Balsall Heath (in this instance, The Angel of the North).

Below: Bob Parks as he gives a personal introduction to his critically acclained exhibition at Grand Union.

WEEK 11. THE FUTURE FOR YOU & THE BALSALL HEATH ACADEMY OF CONTEMPORARY ART Idea: A detailed exploration of the art world beyond Balsall Heath. We will spend the day visiting Eastside Projects, Grand Union, Friction Arts, Ikon Gallery and BMAG. This will involve taking in exhibitions, introducing professional development programmes in the region we will arrange for members of staff to give introductions). Question: How does the art world operate? Who are all these people? How do they earn a living?

88

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

Above: Art school participant Muhmood at home in his studio.

Left & below: Muhmood’s drawings of ‘Dudes’ - characters he remembers from living in Balsall Heath in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Opposite: Exhibition information for Muhmood’s show ‘Ghosts from Balsall Heath Past (Dudes)’ at Ort Cafe.

89

90

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art

Top: Handmade wastepaper basket constructed from biennale newspapers by art school student Seema.

Left: Seema gives a demonstration of how to build the basket.

Right: Seema’s job placement letter, written as part of the art school.

91

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

94

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

The Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Plan, developed under the 2011 Localism Act, contains a number of recommendations for public art to be sited at the seven entry points to Balsall Heath. The biennale public sculpture colouring in posters visualised what some of these pieces of public art might be and how they might look in Balsall Heath. 1000 public sculpture colouring in posters were distributed through three local primary schools in Balsall Heath (Ark Tindal, Clifton and Anderton Park). These posters re-imagined the local area by digitally integrating three large public sculptures by Juneau Projects, Andy Holden and Raqs Media Collective - into the Balsall Heath landscape.

Local children were invited to colour them in and put them up in their living room windows as part of an area wide competition in which over 200 houses entered. The colouring in poster idea is borrowed from Balsall Heath Carnival, a long established part of the community calendar and this probably accounts for the high number of entries (i.e. it was contemporary art by stealth). Over a two day period, we walked/drove around the entirety of Balsall Heath to judge the competition - the areas near the three competing primary schools were peppered with entries, often with three posters in each window. The winning entries received cash prizes (as advertised) but there were so many quality entries that we ended up buying additional prizes in the form of hard backed sketchbooks to hand out to another 30 talented colourers in.

Above: Prizewinning entries from two sisters.

Top right: Map of the 7 entry points to Balsall Heath as Plan.

Bottom right: A prize winning entry.

Balsall Heath Biennale

95

96

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

Above: The Andy Holden public sculpture colouring in poster in which his sculpture ‘The Third Attempt’ is re-located to the junction of Longmore Street and Balsall Heath Road.

Above left: The view from the junction of Longmore Street and Balsall Heath Road. The skyline in the background shows Birmingham Central Mosque and the Left: Andy Holden’s sculpture ‘The Third Attempt’.

Balsall Heath Biennale Right: The Raqs Media Collective sculpture ‘However Incongruous’ originally made for the Gulbenkian Foundation gardens in Lisbon in 2011.

Below right: The bottom of the Ladypool Road, Balsall Heath (looking north up towards Moseley).

Below: The Raqs Media Collective public sculpture colouring in poster in which their sculpture ‘However Incongruous’ is relocated to the bottom of the Ladypool Road.

97

98

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

Above: The Juneau Projects public sculpture colouring in poster in which their sculpture ‘Gleaners of the Infocalypse’ has been relocated to Haden Way, Balsall Heath.

Above left: The view from Haden Way towards Birmingham city centre.

Left: Juneau Projects ‘Gleaners of the Infocalypse’, originally commissioned in 2012 by Tatton Park Biennial.

Balsall Heath Biennale

99

100

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

Above: Clifton Primary School Assembly:‘Who likes money? Who likes colouring in? Who likes money and colouring in?’

Below: Highly commended entries.

Above:

Balsall Heath Biennale

101

102

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

Balsall Heath Biennale

103

104

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

Balsall Heath Biennale

105

106

Public Sculpture Colouring In Posters Competition

Balsall Heath Biennale

107

108

109

Public Art Shares

Public Art Shares

112

Imagine the improvement to your child’s prospects if they’ve had the opportunity to touch a Franz West everyday.

Public Art Shares are a new, and currently concept: while the egalitarian concept of a of public art.1 They take the system of the art market (a place, generally speaking, where rich people buy shiny beautiful things) and give the everyday person a point of access into this investment structure. The Public Art Shares ‘commercial’ can be viewed on the biennale website with the initial idea stemming from the context of the Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Plan. Should a neighbourhood plan contain provision for public art? Should public money be spent on art in areas such as Balsall Heath?

Might the general public pool their resources to purchase a piece of public art for the collective good of their neighbourhood? How would decisions about what to buy be made?

1 The Public Art Shares video works in conjunction with the Public Sculpture Colouring-In Posters and the talk by Claire Doherty and Ruth Claxton, ‘Public Art: How Does it Get Made?’ programmed at Ort Gallery as part of the biennale.

in order to purchase a piece of public art at a utopian dimension to the project, it ultimately relies upon a capitalist mechanism to function; the work would need to be sold at some point in the shareholders (and potentially re-invested logistics and ideological contradictions raised, the idea still has the potential to open up interesting new ways for public art to generate long term funds and escape the presumption that public art has to be permanent.

Balsall Heath Biennale Warm Up Party

120

Balsall Heath Biennale Warm-Up Party Building upon the success of the previous years jubilee party we decided to launch the Balsall Heath Biennale with a street party on our road. Upon completion, the biennale website featured the following - slightly provocative - text over images of the street party: Smoozing at the Venice Biennale? You Missed the Balsall Heath Biennale Warm-up Party June 2nd 2013 Great Food Great Weather And Not An Oligarch In Sight (The Mega Yacht Wouldn’t Fit Down The River Rea) In our minds at least, the street party represented an interesting counterpoint to the excesses of the international biennale. Occurring at the same time as the Venice Biennale opening parties, it used the structure of the wider art world – namely the cliché of the opening party – and tried to realise it differently. Unlike Venice, there wasn’t a drop of alcohol in site – Balsall Heath is a mainly Muslim area. There was also no travelling involved for the audience – it was literally on our front doorstep.

As part of the street party, we also everyone on the road and initiated conversations about trying to keep the road clean. These, along with the street party, were precursory trust building activities in the wider narrative of a project we are still trying to realise: artist designed limited edition bin-bags, a speculative solution to the Balsall Heath litter problem. The ‘Interview with Two Cats’ talks more about this later on.

Balsall Heath Biennale

121

122

Balsall Heath Biennale Warm-Up Party

Balsall Heath Biennale There was also the wider context of national events. A week before the street party on 22nd May 2013, British Army soldier Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was attacked and killed by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, southeast London. For weeks after this, images circulated of a bloodied Michael Adebolajo whilst the media propagated a rhetoric of mistrust between different cultural and religious groups. With the media whipping up a storm, Islam and religious tension were once again in the news. Such tensions are episodic and isolated though, as the reality, at least on our road, as in many other multi-cultural areas, is that people do live quite happily side-by-side.

Left: Publicity material for the limited edition bin bags.

Right:

123

124

Balsall Heath Biennale Warm-Up Party

Balsall Heath Biennale

125

Cat Gallery

130

Cat Gallery

Mogwan?1 Balsall Heath has a disproportionate number of feral cats. The combination of a multi-cultural population with contrasting attitudes to cat neutering, the areas large number of fast food restaurants and a persistent vermin problem, ensures that feral cats are prevalent across the area (particularly ginger ones). The Cat Gallery, a converted front bay window in our house, was something of a homage to the feral cat problem.

1 A feline take on Wogwan?

(What’s going on?)

Expected to sit next to art-work, the galleries occupants were two cats named Benny and Roger whom we took in as feral kittens four years ago. For the Balsall Heath cat born stray who has made it inside, the window occupies a privileged position of power and gloating towards distant relatives beyond the window who haven’t been so fortunate.

Balsall Heath Biennale

The Cat Gallery sought to gently re-introduce the idea of the window display in Balsall Heath. In the late1980s, Balsall Heath was the main prostitution area in Birmingham. At this time, half of the houses on Cheddar Road (100 yards from Cat Gallery) had prostitutes sitting in the windows. The Cat Gallery offered a new kind of local window display with exhibitions by Aisha Khalid and Nathaniel Pitt and a performance

by David Sherry as part of the International Open Exhibition.

Generally these were very well received, although Aisha Khalid’s exhibition, which showed two works called ‘The Container and the Contained’, prompted a minor protest.

The exhibition handout, available from a twice posted back through our letterbox torn into tiny pieces. Khalid’s piece is challenging in its re-working of Islamic iconography, and we were a little nervous about showing it. That said, we were delighted that Aisha Khalid’s gallery Corvi-Mora agreed to us showing reproductions of her work, although the carefully composed email conveniently didn’t mention anything to do with a Cat Gallery.

Above right: Benny & Roger sitting amongst the Aisha Khalid exhibition.

Middle: Detail of Aisha Khalid ‘s‘The Container and Contained’.

Right: Cat Gallery at night.

131

132

Cat Gallery

Top: David Sherry supervising his performance ‘Painting Object’.

Middle: Roger the cat relaxing on a felt blanket next to a TV showing Joseph America and America Likes Me’.

Bottom: The 24 best entries to the Public Sculpture Colouring in Poster Competition are displayed in Cat Gallery.

How Are You Going To Engage? Two Balsall Heath Cats Speak Throughout the biennale project, the organisers forced their cats, born on the streets of Balsall Heath, to participate in a project called Cat Gallery. For three months, the cats had to sit in the front window space of a terraced house on Eastwood Road whilst enduring the degradation of being surrounded by contemporary art. Here, the cats get questions. [the interview was recorded on December 12th 2013 at 58 Eastwood Road, Balsall Heath]

133

responsive to real life problems.

Benny: Very noble.

Roger: Sounds great for the Arts Council funding criteria. Contemporary art in socially and disadvantaged area. Large stray cat problem. Nice!

Chris: Well, can contemporary art survive when confronted by rat problems, litter and issues over parking? Or do the strategies associated with contemporary art simply confuse and frustrate people?

Roger: After sitting in the Cat Gallery all summer, I would suggest the latter. I feel violated.

Roger: When are you going to go and get some more of my favourite cat food from Aldi? You know I don’t like the Felix from the end of the road.

Benny: To be honest I’d rather have fresh chicken rather than the processed food.

I’ve always thought you had very common tastes Roger.

Chris: Can we talk about the project?

Benny: The Balsall Heath Biennale? I suppose so. I have sometimes wondered, what was the point of doing the project?

Roger: What exactly were you trying to achieve?

Liz: We wanted to see how contemporary art could exist on the streets of Balsall Heath.

Chris: within this space for ourselves as artists. I guess we were trying to explore whether contemporary art can be useful and

Liz: You could suggest this confusion and frustration might lead to some new solutions – it gets people questioning and thinking.

Chris: I suppose we came to see each element of the project as a small experiment or research question. Many of the projects were invitations to participate: would people come forward for the art school and what impact would it have on them? Would residents enter the Surreal House Competition? Would local children colour in the public sculpture colouring in posters and put them up in their windows?

Liz: Part of our motivation was the desire to have conversations with people outside people that are creative but not involved in a professional capacity - to mix things up a bit and have different groups of people interacting with each other.

Chris: This is why we had the

134

How Are You Going To Engage? Two Balsall Heath Cats Speak

International Open Submission Exhibition at our house - we thought it was a space people would feel more comfortable coming into. We also made sure various people we had encountered during our research period who lived in the local area took part - in particular we spent a considerable amount of time moving a piece of work by a local pensioner to exhibit in the exhibition.

Benny: And what was the pensioner’s artwork?

Chris: It was an enormous scale-model of the Belgrave Middleway Sheltered Housing Complex that Brian Cleaver, a local man who lived there, had spent four years building from Bells Whiskey box cardboard.

Liz: It is a beautifully made work, very detailed.

Chris: He had never been in an exhibition before and had a great time at the event.

He even won one of the prizes - the Zoe Lippett award for Technical Tenacity.

Roger: But do you think you have changed people’s perceptions of contemporary art with this project?

Benny: From what I’ve heard, most people were just a bit confused. Although I take your point about confusion prompting questioning, it can also leave people in the dark.

Chris: The biennale name was confusing, yes, it threw people!

Liz: But it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. If nothing else, more people in Balsall Heath now know a little bit about art biennales.

Chris: There were quite a few confusing translation issues across the project.

Trying to explain the concept of Waiter Curator - essentially an idea for holding exhibitions in restaurants on the Ladypool Road - to a curry house owner. He just wasn’t interested in something that might interfere with his business. Whilst we could see the possibilities of creating a pop up gallery quarter in curry houses in the balti triangle, he was less convinced.

Liz: It was an interesting example of how perceptions. We had been imagining that there was much unrealised potential in terms of customer base but his experiences on the front line suggested otherwise. And let’s face it - he has spent his life working in the industry so perhaps he is right?

Chris: Maybe we should have explained that ‘Waiter Curator’ referenced Bruce Benny: So is it a question of the front page of your newspaper ‘How Do You Translate Culture?’ Certain things just don’t translate between cultures?

Chris: You know, we had quite a bit of translation done – and interestingly many words didn’t translate into Arabic or Urdu - Surrealism for example. Off the back of the Surreal House contest, two academics [Dr Saskia Warren and Dr Stephen Forcer] at Birmingham University have recently got some funding to set up a surreal laboratory in Balsall Heath, which will look at, I think, amongst other things whether surrealism can be translated into other cultures.

Liz: Many things don’t translate between cultures. I’m interested in those

Balsall Heath Biennale

135

differences.

international art world.

Benny: Didn’t Liz have an encounter with the local vicar where issues of cultural translation came to the fore?

Liz: The Balsall Heath Tourist Information Centre was very similar too; a mimicking of a structure which disseminates information on activities and mainstream stuff. We liked the idea of Balsall Heath having a Tourist Information Centre that although slightly tongue in cheek offered information on local anecdotal histories.

Part of this, for example, was to have a postcard range, which may have looked ironic, but sought to re-think what constitutes a heritage site. Could an infamous local kebab house be a heritage site? Or an old peoples home? Balsall Heath is interesting in that it has this complex, contested modern history. We liked the idea that all local Birmingham areas might have their own self-initiated Tourist Information Centre’s in contrast

Liz: What was that?

Benny: An idea for a different sort of publishing fair? Come on, own up Liz. Tell the story.

Liz: Oh. Well, yes, we were attending lots of events, including ones at Balsall Heath Church Centre. We had made the decision to go to everything that was going on within this one location – and Balsall Heath has a busy community calendar, perhaps on account of all the community groups that became based here when it underwent its regeneration period. Anyway, we were at a community meal at Balsall Heath Church Centre – I was trying to explain an idea that someone had put forward to the local vicar - about holding a faith book fair in Balsall Heath. Alongside religious books, there would be books about contemporary art for instance, a different type of faith. I said to the vicar that there was a famous book publishing fair called ‘Publish and be Damned’ – and that the one we might hold in Balsall Heath would be called ‘Publish or be Damned’. She didn’t say much in reply.

Roger: Earlier you said you wanted the biennale to be useful. What do you mean by useful?

ones. Nechells Tourist Information Centre, Stechford Tourist Information Centre…

Chris: But I think there are many types of usefulness. We delivered a newspaper to all 6000 homes in the local area. This contained a map of all the cultural organisations locally – I like the idea this map may have been put to use for other purposes. But all the work we did on our road, the opportunities through the art school, I think we tried to assume a visible role of the artist within a community.

Liz: And a lot of the project was also about creativity - encouraging creativity – the Cat Gallery, the Decorate Your House Competition, the Art School.

Benny: Is art even meant to be useful?

Chris: Well, for a start we wanted to try and change perceptions of the local area.

The name of the project was about this – linking Balsall Heath with the

Benny: Can we pin you down on that one a bit more? What do you mean by creativity? I don’t think of myself as being particularly creative but I was caught up being a living sculpture in Cat Gallery….

136

How Are You Going To Engage? Two Balsall Heath Cats Speak

what are the ethical implications of using people (and animals) to realise your projects?

Chris: Well I don’t think there is always an obvious manifestation of creativity in Balsall Heath, in the way that there might be in Moseley or Kings Heath, two more middle class areas of Birmingham, where there is more arts and craft activity.

Liz: I think one of our interests is what you might call examples of vernacular creativity - the way people make displays in their gardens or windows for example - and we wanted to draw attention to this.

Chris: And by considering a parking space saver in a different context it could perhaps become a sculpture.

Roger: Sorry, I don’t drive and I’m not familiar with the concept of a ‘parking space saver’...

Chris: These are very popular in Balsall Heath because of limited parking. People will arrange different objects in the road in front of their house - like a plank and some bricks or bits of wood for example - some of them are superb and operate really successfully as pieces of sculpture.

Benny: Are you suggesting that creativity is necessary in everyday life so that people can go on to secure a parking space in an aesthetically pleasing manner?

Liz: Creative thinking can help people to And maybe their spiritual ones as well!

Chris: Different cultures have different forms of creativity I guess. Every year our neighbours bring round hard-boiled eggs for us to decorate for the Easter Egg

competition their children take part in at school. They don’t seem overly interested in decorating eggs or being creative in this sense. We won the competition for them three years ago, and came in second place last year. The winning entry combined unwanted, overly large cat toys from Lidl with three eggs in a bed in an arrangement called ‘The Easter Mouse’.

Again, we’ve felt this odd awareness of our role as artists on the street, even if it’s just decorating eggs. People assumed we could decorate eggs because we were artists.

Liz: As for the ethics of participatory art works, we are hardly operating at Santiago Sierra’s level - unfortunately! But we were always thinking about how you can make a good piece of work that includes people in it’s making or happening. This is central to our investigation - taking the tropes of community art and utilising them.

Chris: I hope you and Roger didn’t feel exploited by your involvement in Cat Gallery, Benny? I mean we do provide beds, food and lodging for you guys free of charge....

Roger: Why did you decide to have Cat Gallery and what was the rationale behind your selected shows? Were you making an analogy with us as prostitutes?

Chris: The Cat Gallery is about trying to encourage creativity I guess - it’s saying you can be non-conformist; you can turn your front room into a Cat Gallery.You don’t need to be embarrassed. Although I am a bit embarrassed to be honest..

Roger: Do you think the Balsall Heath Biennale was successful? I’m not so sure.

Liz:

Balsall Heath Biennale Saskia Warren says something about this in her essay in this publication [‘Employment and training measures of success, often quantitative and quantity driven, required in much self-evaluation, sits uncomfortably with the skills-sets and delivery focus of most creative practitioners. These are artists. Not social scientists. Or Job-Centre advisers.’]

Although ironically, something that we considered a real success of the project a job!

Benny: I was going to ask, what is the point of art education if it’s not going to help you get a well-paid job! But it sounds sort of job did you help secure?

Liz: She had come across the project via a poster in the library. She got in contact because she was desperate to take any arrived from Pakistan last year to marry someone in Balsall Heath, but needed to work a certain number of hours to stay in the country, for her visa to work. She had a couple of bad experiences working in local shops where her employers refused to give her references and generally discriminated against her. In addition, her recognised here. We interviewed her, and although her interest was much more on ‘craft’, we were really impressed by her desire to put up with contemporary art if everything, even during Ramadan when she was fasting. We spent time writing job applications with her and doing her CV. Through this she found a three month on the Moseley Road, which will hopefully lead to further employment.

137 Benny: you call ‘art’?

Chris: Finding her a job was one of the highlights of the project – although you’re right Benny, it was very far removed from making art. Again, though, it came down to this use-value of the artist and how our skills might be used in different contexts.

She was also responsible for a great conceptual piece of art-work: she made a series of waste-paper baskets from the biennale newspapers. I don’t think she realised she was saying that our project was rubbish.

Roger: So do you think it’s the job of the think it’s the job of the responsible, cat owning artist to ensure their cats always have their favourite food.

Liz: What is the job of an artist? That’s a big one. I think one of the things an artist should do is to draw attention to things that are happening in their world at a particular time. This woman had come from abroad with a valuable skillset, she wanted to work legitimately in the UK. She didn’t want cash work – she wanted to pay tax. But she needed someone to help her write a letter, redo her CV and at the job centre helping her with this sort of thing, then maybe the artist should draw attention to this gap in provision.

Benny: Issues of cultural differences seemed to come up time and time again in the project. Would you say Balsall Heath is inter-cultural or multi-cultural?

Or otherwise?

Chris: The Balsall Heath World Cup

138

How Are You Going To Engage? Two Balsall Heath Cats Speak

probably best captures this, even if as a piece of work it was something of an interesting failure. Living in Balsall Heath you can’t help but notice the fact that you are surrounded by many different cultures.

But Balsall Heath is multi-cultural, rather than inter-cultural. I think many different groups living here align themselves nationally, rather than locally. I’m always really interested in the number plates cars have around here - I’ve seen several number plates trying to spell out ‘YEMEN’ in letters and numbers. It’s a sort of performance of identity. But it’s often a national alignment, rather than a local alignment, which is perhaps why the area always looks so grubby - people aren’t concerned with the local. If you look down Cheddar Road from SMS supermarket [this image is used in the biennale newspaper] you will see a line of enormous satellite dishes all the way down the road.

Roger: Sky Sports? In to football?

Liz: Thanks Roger. But I think the local thing is really interesting. Before we started this project we lived here but had very little interaction with the space beyond our house and a certain group of people and spaces who are culturally very similar to us. I don’t think it is just people from different ethnic backgrounds who we all do. The reality is that many people who live in Balsall Heath are just moving through - they have no long term connection with the area and this means they aren’t prepared to invest.

Chris: I’m reminded of this stretching beyond the local whenever I walk down Edward Road and they are unloading Khat from Ethiopia. I think Khat has a 48 hour

Ethiopia to Heathrow, driven to Balsall Heath, and then disseminated across the area from the house at the end of our road. And this happens three of four times a week. I walk past the Khat house everyday – it’s always busy, people coming and going. The Khat is like this lifeline from another country that is shipped in.

So, anyway, we were really interested in how people might align themselves when asked to form a team, in an area of so many different cultures and nationalities.

We devised a number of scenarios based around craft type challenges that the ‘teams’ would then need to complete together - trainer making, henna team logo tattoo’s for example. It was really about seeing what sort of teams emerged, who people aligned themselves with.

Benny: And what sort of teams emerged?

Was there a Cat team? Or a Khat team?

Chris: Interestingly the teams tended to be family or country based - English, English Muslim. There were quite a few Egypt teams as well, which isn’t surprising given the recent trouble in the country.

But no, the World Cup didn’t quite work as an idea – maybe it would have done on a bigger scale and if we had more time.

Benny: How has the project changed your relationship with the neighbourhood?

Liz: Part of the appeal of the project was working on our doorstep; this is a really attractive proposition. But there are also problems with this – you feel you are at work all the time and begin to see everything in microscopic detail. We both became slightly obsessed with littering and rubbish in the area and noticed it much more than perhaps we used to.

There are also more demands made on

Balsall Heath Biennale our time. On our street, people are constantly knocking on our door –

Roger: Don’t answer the door then.

Sorry, tell us about the art school?

139 Roger: Very altruistic. Was the street party on your road imbued with a similar generosity?

Chris: The Balsall Heath biennale warm-up party you mean, it wasn’t just a street party! Although to most people it probably was just a street party.

name? Bit over the top isn’t it?

Chris: The over the top name as you call it, referred to the number of impromptu, ad hoc establishments popping up around the local area offering ‘advanced’ English tuition – often in old, derelict buildings.

The Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art was the latest local academy, offering an 11-week course in contemporary art with a syllabus designed in response to Balsall Heath.

Liz: But the biennale warm-up party / street party wasn’t just about better

Benny: Was it a success?

element for us in the wider narrative of the artist designed limited edition bin bags. In order for people to use the bin bags, we needed to gain peoples trust. So that when the time came to ‘release’ the bin bags, residents would know us and be more likely to take part. Even if they didn’t get why we were doing them, they would use them because they had seen us organise the street party and the

Liz: It was perhaps the most time

us.

of the project to capture and present to the outside world. It was also the most interesting and rewarding part. I mentioned helping one woman with her job hunt earlier, but one of the other successes was getting another participant, an Asian guy in his 50s who had been an artist since his teens but had never had an exhibition, a show at Ort Cafe. He lives with his family, yet was still managing to hang on to a small room in the house as his studio. It was packed with paintings – loads of pictures of characters from Balsall Heath in the 1970s ands 1980s - ghosts from Balsall Heath past as he referred to them. The exhibition at Ort was a selection of these works – they were really great drawings. He is now running a weekly drawing class at Ort off the back of this.

Benny: competition was part of this as well?

Liz: Yes, another way of people on our street getting to know each other.

Benny: Why the bin bags?

Chris: We had spent considerable time discussing how contemporary art might have a useful role within the local community - the ultimate expression of this, and something of a joke, was the artist designed bin bag - particularly with the local litter problem. We wondered if a bin bag designed by an artist might solve the litter problem?

Benny: But they didn’t get made?

Chris: No they haven’t been made yet.

140

How Are You Going To Engage? Two Balsall Heath Cats Speak

We’ve numerous designs, the one we ended up nearly getting produced was a piles of these gold bin bags would form the streets. In the end we ran out of time.

One of the failings of the project was that we were trying to do too much.

Roger: So this piece of work clearly failed?

Chris: Not yet, the narrative of the work was potentially just as interesting - the were all part of the bin bag work and have hopefully had some effect on the street.

Benny: But the road isn’t particularly clean is it? There’s still litter everywhere.

Liz: I think we’ve realised that these things take time and that what would be most interesting is to continue working here in the long term.

Roger: Can’t we just move to Kings Heath?

Balsall Heath Biennale

141

Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme

144

Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme

We’re not sure where the idea for the ‘Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme’ came from, but it proved to be one of the most interesting aspects of the biennale. Balsall Heath has an unlikely history of Surrealism, with English surrealist Conroy Maddox living in the area during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The ‘Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme’ was open to anyone in Balsall Heath and judged

by Dr Stephen Forcer, a specialist in Surrealism from Birmingham University.

Despite the large cash prizes on offer (£300 competition, but fortunately three of these were high-quality and formed a surreal house trail across the local area. We felt the cash incentive would be a good way of ensuring ‘engagement’ but this wasn’t the case. All of the entries were of a similar demographic to ourselves - white, middle-class, into ‘culture’.

Talking to one of the entrants, they said that their Muslim neighbours had wanted to enter but felt barred from doing so as they interpreted the cash prizes as ‘gambling’ (within Islam gambling is forbidden). There was also the question of whether surrealism was something only recognised by Western cultures? Indeed, Dr Saskia Warren & Dr Stephen Forcer have recently been successful in securing funding from the Communities and Culture Network+ to conduct research on the Birmingham Surrealist Group in Balsall Heath and whether surrealism is culturally coded. Building upon the platform and networks established by the ‘Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme’, the research will investigate cultural, religious, linguistic and educational barriers to engagement, and the translation of humour within the context of Balsall Heath.

Balsall Heath Biennale

First Prize: The Surrealist Garden ‘This entry stood out as the sort of construction that Maddox and other Surrealists might actually have made themselves, re-using a variety of objects to refer to Surrealist symbols and history, and drawing attention to itself even while it raises the question ‘What on earth is going on here?’ It looks and is - bizarre, but the entry really coheres with itself without trying too hard, and there is a great deal going on in it. We also liked the air of Paganism that it brought to a suburban house.’

Dr Stephen Forcer

145

Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme

149

Joint Second Prize: The Dali House & The Maddox House / The Surrealist Leg ‘Two brilliantly playful and well executed entries, based on artwork by Maddox and Dali respectively. Both houses had people doing double-takes and stopping to stare, and it was impossible to separate the two. Maddox would surely have approved of the sense of fun, unexpectedness and unreal scale that they bring to each house.’ Dr Stephen Forcer

Decorate Your House Competition: Surreal Theme

Clockwise from top: Dr Stephen Forcer from Birmingham University awards prizes to: prize.

Stephen and Anna Blower, Court Road, joint second prize.

Kate Thompson, Willows Crescent, joint second prize (collected on her behalf by Natalie Mason).

151

Talks Programme

154

Talks Programme

Conroy Maddox, Balsall Heath & Surrealism, Dr Stephen Forcer, Tuesday 20th August, Hillac Somalian Restaurant

The biennale talks programme featured

Somalian Restaurant used for Somalian weddings. This was the most surreal venue

The topics were surrealism, localism and myth, bees and urbanisation, the problematics of public art and stray cats.

The last two are not connected. Part of the inspiration for the talks programme was discovering that Moseley Dance Centre (located on the Balsall Heath border), a legendary Birmingham nightspot renowned for its beer-splashed

on Conroy Maddox, a former Balsall Heath resident and leader of the Birmingham Surrealists.

themed parties used to be the Balsall Heath Institute and had hosted talks at the turn of the century by amongst other Oscar Wilde.

Investigating the local area, we came across a number of unusual spaces - the highlights being Balsall Heath Church Centre’s ‘armchair’ rooms and the cavernous upstairs space above the Hillac

Chris Poolman’s personal highlight and lowpoint of the project came at his the ‘Origins, History and Usage of Stray Cats of Balsall Heath’. Publicised as a discussion of scraggology (the ethics of feral cats), the social order of New York cats, contemporary art (and cats), the local stray cat fur trade and the enduring allure of clowders (feral cat colonies), Chris’s carefully planned talk was undercut when a representative from the Cats Protection League turned up to ask some challenging questions after mistaking the talk’s promotional blurb as mocking the stray cat problem. She was appeased,

Balsall Heath Biennale

Bees, Green Roofs & Urbanisation, Dr Adam Bates, Wednesday 17th July, St Pauls Trust

Public Art: How Does it Get Made?, Ruth Claxton & Claire Doherty, Tuesday 10th September, Ort Gallery

155

156

Talks Programme

Balsall Heath Biennale although Chris felt very guilty afterwards.

Was his talk and biography really that believable?

After completing his MA in Balsall Heath Studies at Oxford University in 2011, Chris Poolman joined Balsall Heath Academy of Contemporary Art as a junior researcher in 2012 where he is currently working on a PhD exploring the links between stray cats and Art Povera in the West Midlands.

Left from top: Stray Cats of Balsall Heath, Chris Poolman, Balsall Heath Church Centre.

Localism, Narrative & Myth, Professor Antonia Layard & Martin Maudsley, Tuesday 23rd July, Balsall Heath Library.

Right from top: Images from Stray Cat talk: ‘G Locket XVIII’ Boss, the Big G Dynasty’ (Son of ‘Cardboard Cat’).

Stray Cat Fur Trading, Harborne Farmers Market.

Khat, the herbal stimulant, not to be confused with cat.

Benny the Cat. Map showing territories of Balsall Heath cat gangs.

157

Balsall Heath World Cup

160

Balsall Heath World Cup

In the Balsall Heath A-Z publication we outlined how we planned to organise a Balsall Heath World Cup - a mass performance piece involving a re-working of three-sided football, as devised by the Danish Situationist Asger Jorn to explain

“In the ambitiously conceived and documented Het Land van aankomst (The Country of Arrival), the Dutch publicist and professor of urban policy, Paul Scheffer, painted a somber picture of multicultural society. He described how

the Marxian concept of dialectics). In an area of so many nationalities and

years has remained invisible in our history and how it confronts our society with near-impossible challenges. Intriguing, for instance, is his statement that the evolution towards a ‘global village’ (cheap travel, lightening-fast internet connections, satellite TV) makes de facto integration impossible. Migrants retain family ties in their land of origin and look for brides there. Satellite dishes bring the daily news into their living room from a distant land.

By contrast, they don’t know the news of their land of arrival any more than they know her represented reality: the children’s series, the soaps, the actors; none of it means anything to them. Not now. Not ever. The result is that the contemporary city will continue to evolve into a cluster of more or less isolated islands of migrants with their own background and represented reality. And so, more and more (until recently), the obvious bridges between those islands will be demolished. Paul Scheffer teaches us that we can no longer hide behind the old notion that, if we just wait long enough, the intercultural society will come about naturally, and that we will have to make an effort to make it happen – that we will have to get to know each other better than ever before, in all our diversity; that we have to get out there, to talk and to listen.”

would offer an interesting pretext for exploring how people aligned themselves when asked to form a team (i.e. local, national, international or familial).

When it came to realise the idea towards the end of the biennale ‘live’ period, we were somewhat low on time, resources and energy. Disappointingly, the World Cup now consisted of a series of trestle tables with people undertaking a series of craft challenges in teams. Our interest remained though, in how identities are performed in Balsall Heath; microperformances that are played out daily in car number plates for example, personalised to represent a particular country.

Indeed, we had read something in a book ‘Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing’ that had made us reconsider our experiences in Balsall Heath and raised questions around general perceptions of how migrant populations reside:1

1 From ‘The Vernissage by the MartHa!tentatief: A Play about Untameable Life at the Nuffelen, Pg.94-95, Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing, Paul De Bruyne & Pascal Gielen (eds.)

Balsall Heath Biennale The quote is challenging in it’s assumption that migrant populations should take on wholesale the culture of the country in which they now reside. Whilst we would argue that cultural identity isn’t as cut and dried as this author suggests, we thought - questions in relation to whether communities such as Balsall Heath can ever be truly inter-cultural? (As opposed to mutli-cultural).2 It is also pertinent in relation to a critical reading of the biennale project. Despite our best intentions, certain events such as the talks programme, attracted an audience of similar socio-economiccultural status as ourselves - in this case a white, liberal, middle class one with ‘their own background and represented reality’.

That said, other events such as the International Open Exhibition and biennale street parties underlined the value in trying to start conversations between different groups of people and arts ability to act as a catalyst for these interactions.

2 This quote could equally apply to English ex-pats in the Mediterranean who form their own self-enclosed communities, tune into Premiership football, drink lager and read English newspapers.

161

The Residents Meetings: a radio play The Animals & Police issue

164

The Residents Meetings: a radio play - The Animals & Police Issue

Organised by Balsall Heath Forum, Residents Meetings are a long established part of the Balsall Heath community calendar. The biennale team attended 20 of these meetings in 2012 whilst researching the wider biennale project. These meetings formed the basis for a radio play recorded at Balsall Heath Church Centre on Tuesday 3rd September. policemen and balti samba dancing.

Right: Creativity and law enforcement working together hand-in-hand: PC Thomas Olphin presents Chris Poolman and Elizabeth Rowe with a cheque for the biennale courtesy of the Police Property Act Fund.

International Open Submission Art Exhibition

International Open Submission Art Exhibition

ransacked. There was something oddly cathartic about opening up your home for an exhibition to total strangers, particularly as your home is rented accommodation that had seen better days.

The slide projector installation in the bathroom required the bathroom light permanently removed; this was for the work, but it also conveniently disguised the grottiness of the bathroom too. This may have been a piece of what is referred to as ‘curation’.

Advertised in the biennale newspaper, across the local area and through numerous art channels, the International Open Submission Art Exhibition was open to anyone. Over 30 people showed their artwork in an exhibition at our home in Balsall Heath. Whilst exhibitions in houses

175

aren’t a particularly radical idea, our interest was less in the art, and more in what happens when you mix up different groups of people - our neighbours, local residents, people we had met through the project and an art audience. In a similar vein to the biennale talks programme, we tried with the International Open Submission Art Exhibition to get people into one another’s spaces.

We thought it would be interesting to open up our house to anyone, and we suspect some of our neighbours probably came in just to look at the house rather than the art. That said, the poster advertising FREE FOOD above the window may also have brought people in (the ‘David Sherry is in the House’ tagline also promoted many enquiries: who is this David Sherry?).

176

International Open Submission Art Exhibition

In the preceeding weeks, everything in the house was piled up into three rooms whilst the rest of the house/garden became an exhibition space. Over the course of the day and night about 150 people came. The evening featured performances by David Sherry (Painting Object and The History of Wrinkles in Art), a BAZ polytunnel bar in the back garden, the Biennale Balti served in the kitchen, henna tattoo’s (by ‘Tatty Chris’) and prizes awarded by a number of distinguished judges: Gavin Wade (Director of Eastside Projects), Sarah Shalgosky (Curator, Mead Gallery), Zoe Lippett (Curator, The New Art Gallery Walsall), Cheryl Jones (Director of Grand Union).

For us, the highlight of the night was a piece of work by local pensioner Brian Cleaver. He had spent four years building an enormous scale model of his sheltered housing complex from Bells whiskey box cardboard. We came across Brian during the consultation, via our local councillor, and we went to great lengths - hiring a van, roping in friends - to move his model from his sheltered housing complex into our house for the night. Brian won one of the four awards on offer - Zoe Lippett, curator at The New Art Gallery Walsall, awarding him The Zoe Lippett Award for Technical Tenacity.

Balsall Heath Biennale

177

178

International Open Submission Art Exhibition

Balsall Heath Biennale

Left: David Sherry’s Painting Object performance with Dan Hayward.

Above: BAZ Polytunnel Bar in the backgarden.

Right: BAZ Barman Mat Westbrook convening with gourds. Eating (of course).

179

182

International Open Submission Art Exhibition

Above: ‘Painting Object’ painting the living room window.

Left: David Sherry’s ‘Painting Object’ sketch.

Right: Previous page: ‘Painting Object’.

183

184

International Open Submission Art Exhibition

Pensioner Brian Cleaver receives an award from Zoe Lippett, curator at The New Art Gallery Walsall.

Balsall Heath Biennale

185

Birmingham Art World Fat Cats discuss what food is best served to entice the general public to their events.

188

Published by Poolman Rowe All works © Chris Poolman & Elizabeth Rowe, 2014 ISBN 978-0-9929667-0-6 www.poolmanrowe.com www.balsallheathbiennale.com poolmanrowe@gmail.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except by written permission from the publisher, except in the context of cat magazines or in accordance with the Copyright Design and Patents Act, 1988. The publisher has made every effort to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made, we ask copyright holders to contact the publisher.

Images of the International Open Submission Exhibition: Patrick Dandy.

Image of ‘Cash for Cars’ on p.71: Ian Francis.

Supported by Arts Council England, Birmingham City Council, Near Neighbours and the West Midlands Police.