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Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural Myvillages (Editors) MIT Press & Whitechapel Gallery, 240 pp

THE RURAL IS the latest offering from the Whitechapel Gallery’s ongoing publishing series, ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’. Assembled by guest editors and co-published by the eminent London public gallery and MIT Press, over forty themes found in contemporary visual culture have been explored since the series’ inception in 2006, with inquiries ranging from Boredom (2017) and Sexuality (2014), to Utopias (2009) and The Artist’s Joke (2007).

Inevitably, with wide-ranging approaches and particular genealogies possible with any of these titles, ‘Documents of Contemporary Art’ offers mere brushstrokes in complex and multifarious fields of interest. Accordingly, The Rural does not pretend to be a penultimate volume of its topic – instead it declares on the back cover that it offers “an urgent and diverse cross-section”. The Rural is guest edited by Myvillages, an international artist trio comprising of Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra and Antje Schiffers, whose collaborative practice advocates for “a new understanding of the rural as a place of and for cultural production”. Their selection of forty-five excerpted texts seek to discuss notions of the rural in a myriad of viewpoints, where ideas of art are seen outside of a metropolitan existence.

Divided into sections, akin to the style of a users’ manual, thematic groupings are featured, such as ‘Orientating the rural’, ‘Rural relations of production’ and the provocative ‘Art in all the wrong places’. Excerpts and reprinted texts dating from the 1950s onward appear from geologists, artists, sociologists, philosophers and curators. Marxist Henri Lefebvre’s essay, ‘Perspectives on Rural Sociology’, examines how rural populaces are structured in terms of economy, culture and the forming of agrarian life over time, citing examples in France and the United States. New York art critic, Hal Foster, speaks of artistic and political transformation being located “elsewhere, in the field of the other” in his essay, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, a key text that consolidated and spurred on much contextually-led art practices of the 1990s and 2000s.

These significant critiques sit beside a newly commissioned text, ‘The Peasant Paints’, by artist Sigrid Holmwood, contrasting the rural peasant as subject matter for historical painting against the actuality of a ground-up Swedish rural vernacular painting movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, Kathrin Böhm interviews artist Grace Ndiritu, whose nomadic lifestyle and itinerant practice has, over twenty years, seen her adapt to everyday life in alternative and sometimes spiritual communities on the rural fringe. Added to this cache are land artist Robert Smithson’s well-known musings on mining, quarries, ecology and art, while in ‘Global Villagers’, the anarchist writer, Colin Ward, examines the beginnings of globalisation of the rural.

An interview with Belgian artist Renzo Martens – whose 2008 video, Enjoy Poverty, bluntly dealt with the intricacies and frustrations of being endemically poor in Africa – is a valuable and earnest account of an artist intervening and working with a specific place, The Congo, over a substantial time period. He founded the Institute of Human Activities in 2012, from which former workers on the site of the first Unilever plantation now sculpt self-portraits in river clay, that are then 3D-scanned, cast in chocolate in Amsterdam, and sold in the western art market – hence providing tools for financial gain and a form of social mobility to a poverty-stricken locale.

Other contributions include an excerpt from Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art, co-edited by Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty, one of the seminal books for independent curatorial practice, still relevant almost a decade after its publication. O’Neill conducts a case study into the history and legacy of Grizedale Arts, predominately a residency programme for visual artists based in the Lake District in the UK. Operating from an embedded place of deep cultural roots (for example, referencing nineteenth-century critic, John Ruskin, and his ideas around art, nature, labour and society) and maneuvering within the everyday life of the region, Grizedale Arts have been flexible and committed in their approach to the support of artist’s research and production of new artworks outside of traditional gallery spaces and urban centres. O’Neill writes that Grizedale have expanded beyond their immediate environment in Cumbria, to undertake projects in small villages in Japan and China.

Except for an interview with artist Anne-Marie Dillon in County Down, there is no other mention of cultural initiatives or artworks embedded in rural Ireland, despite the growth of many small-scale independent projects over the years. I don’t think such exclusion is necessarily reflective of an inferior scene, but rather points to a lack of accessibility for international research to find out what occurs here – the need for boosts in artist-centric research funding and more dynamic public programming incorporating voices from afar can be mentioned here, of course. By way of reparation, an upcoming volume in the series, entitled Health, will feature writing by Columbian curator Catalina Lozano, developed during her stays in the Irish countryside since 2016.

Beyond these localisms, The Rural is otherwise generous and giving in its geographical scope, spreading its tentacles as far as Thailand, Russia and India in a quest for a multifaceted critical culture of art.

Michele Horrigan is an artist currently on residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. She is founder and curator of Askeaton Contemporary Arts since 2006.

The Rural can be purchased from MIT Press. mitpress.mit.edu