Hi Sarah,
Thank you for the useful comments, I'm glad to see some notes from the
drop-in audience perspective as so much of this show has been geared
towards the groups and artists using the space. As many of your points
are about the prominence of Liverpool issues in the show its definitely
key to understand the local context in which this show operates before
getting into more debate.
Liverpool is an interesting place. Its small, just 400,00 people, yet
houses 8 major arts institutions/organisations of national calibre. As
the local debate surrounding the Capital of Culture year highlights,
that can be a lot for a small city to take - local culture can be
usurped and left aside. Yet as a relative newcomer, there also doesn't
seem to be that inherent distrust of arts institutions that many other
cities have. In a lot of ways I think tenantspin and our collaborations
programme are so successful because Liverpool's residents are just
really up for it (but of course thats not true - there is much more to
it than that, tenantspin and the like make it look easy). Once and
awhile its useful for these organisations to stage exhibitions that have
a very local context even if they are very national or international
institutions - as long as they're wholeheartedly interested in doing
these shows and can find a context for doing them that is interesting
for them and their work. Stefan Szczelkun's books, Eyebeam's work, Simon
Yuill's essay on distributive networks, FACT's collaborations work -
more on all this below - it seemed natural that a 'lab' show in
Liverpool about this topic, would highlight the local context.
I've trimmed your & my comments for readability so list, do go back and
read the full mails if you need the full context of Sarah's or my posts.
Sarah Cook wrote:
> But in terms of set-up from FACT's curatorial side of things, for
> instance, the N55 project is a kind of swap shop which is in the front
> medialounge space, while across from that in the lobby is the great
> Ghana Think Tank project, which takes the form of a video interview
> booth, or vox pop space with suggestion box and bulletin board
> (visitors are invited to leave their problems about climate change and
> life in Liverpool, and these ideas will be farmed out to a think tank
> of community activists in Ghana to solve, reversing the so-called
> first world third world knowledge and resource exchange). This project
> is great and would have benefitted from having more space to breathe
> if it were installed in the main gallery 1 (or in the medialounge if
> sound bleed were a problem) whereas the N55 swap shop would have
> brought another layer of activism and engagement into the gallery space.
Its worth pointing out the way this part of the building works and what
kind of traffic we get through it. Because of our cinemas, where we show
both arthouse and mainstream film, we get a huge number (thousands) of
audiences every month who come through the space from our front entrance
and disappear upstairs for a few hours - getting these audiences into
the galleries has been one of our priorities lately. We're also smack in
the center of Liverpool off one of its main shopping streets, in a
shopping hungry city, and people use our building as a shortcut from the
shopping street (Bold Street, Wood Street) towards the docks or smaller
streets around the Ropewalks area. The media lounge is our most open
space - its the first thing you see when you come in the building - and
we use it often for highly engaging or interactive work, sometimes as an
interpretation space. Placing the N55 piece in the media lounge makes it
function very much like a shop - lots of footfall past it, highly
visible through wide open doors, the enticement of more 'stuff' to add
to the shopping bags that many people are clutching by the time they
walk through our building. The Ghana Think Tank piece on the other hand
may suffer a bit from not having enough room in the atrium but gains in
the sheer number of people who interact with the piece and the kinds of
interactions that happen - our problems box is always full of really
interesting problems (though perhaps that says something more about
Liverpool...) and 'non-art' audiences looking at the solutions and
documentation have great conversations about them.
> Upstairs in Gallery 2 there is a slightly odd assortment of projects
> installed to look more like a traditional art exhibition focused on
> the topic of utopian and distopian views of the future as affected by
> our current conditions of "peak oil and "peak credit": a sculpture by
> Nik Kosmas and Daniel Keller (AIDS 3D), a video by Melanie Gilligan
> ("Crisis in the Credit System"), and a copy of the spoof New York
> Times Special Edition produced by the Yes Men, the Anti-Advertising
> Agency and other collaborators in New York. While the
> sculpture/installation needs a dramatically lit space and is very much
> a do-not-touch work, and thus justifies its placement in gallery 2
> rather than in the messy lab/studio downstairs, I'm not sure what it
> actually adds to the theme and debate of the show (it feels a little
> bit like an odd-work out). The newspaper which was an inherently
> social-network led project has been 'museumified' by its installation,
> appearing as a rare object of art rather than something to use and
> think with. It might have been better downstairs in Gallery 1 where
> people could really lounge out and read it (rather than feel like they
> are the performer/object on show if they sit and read it upstairs),
> and documentation of its production could have been included alongside
> (as a kind of activist how-to). All the more as downstairs there is an
> entire library of zines and self-published material, and a video
> documentary about the zine scene in Portland as well as Stefan
> Szczelkun's Survival Scrapbooks (pages from these published manuals
> from the 1970s are projected on a big screen). By contrast Gilligan's
> fictional film work is amusing and clever, very much art, and makes
> sense installed in its own space, but probably could have held gallery
> 2 on its own. In short, a lot more, or a lot less, finished art works
> on the thematic topic would have strengthened the presentation in my
> opinion.
I won't take each point up but Gallery 2 is indeed quite a separate
thing to the ground floor spaces. The theme is dystopian/utopian views
on the future but very much rooted in the present and by riffing on
corporate culture (slick Barcelona chairs, polished black floors, the
AIDS 3D office cubicle, Melanie's hedge fund protagonists) and bringing
other topics into the debate (finance and capital) steers clear of
eco-disaster-porn and tries to expand the concept of environmentalism
and what 'sustainability' entails. The AIDS 3D piece, besides being
beautiful, interesting and one of my favorite individual pieces in the
show, brings a perspective I thought was important to represent - two
very young artists who project both a hopeless defeatism about the
future of our planet and yet are relentlessly optimistic about
technology fed on too many science fiction novels. The Yes Men piece - I
had thought about including the documentation but instead thought it was
better to absolutely museumify it rather than half way, co-opting it
into a completely different context. In all, I'm quite happy with the
way Gallery 2 works as a whole, perhaps it should exist alongside,
rather than as part of, the Climate for Change show (we used to
sometimes do this - separate shows for the separate galleries) but
bringing these other aspects that aren't recognizably 'green' into a
'sustainability show' was important to me.
> The problematic thing about this is that the desk spaces allocated for
> resident artists are up on a custom-built mezzanine level in the
> gallery, not accessible to the public (this is also where TenantSpin
> have their studio, producing programs for FACT.TV). So it is possible
> to be at the desk and see what is going on below, but not be seen or
> actually have to engage with the public (useful for artists to take a
> break from being on-show all the time). I'd be interested to hear from
> Heather as to how much time she manages to spend in the gallery, and
> whether it is at the big tables down in the 'lab/studio' or up on the
> mezzanine.
Its here where I think your comments are most useful, especially with
the research you've been doing with SCANZ, Eyebeam, Interactivos, etc.
To answer this question directly - the artists in residence have all
been using the tables downstairs to work. The upstairs mez is crucial
for having a break, making a private call or meeting, and leaving
valuables, but the downstairs space is inherently more fun and
interesting to work in so its where people naturally gravitate. I've
managed to spend most of my time down there, at the tables on my laptop.
We've got gallery assistants who are going out of their way to explain
to drop in audiences whats going on in the space (they're learning
though and being really proactive but not overbearing is a fine line) so
as I'm working away on my laptop I just make sure to keep a dialog with
the artists/groups in residence and catch people who look especially
lost, and occasionally try to facilitate some cross overs when it feels
natural (for example spotting particularly knowledgeable local people
dropping in and introducing them to Steve for his Liverpool Wiki
workshops, or overhearing a local artist talking about a small problem
he was having with an arduino on one side of the room while expert Hans
was sitting on the other, so linking them up).
>> Perhaps a minor point here but one of the strategies we've come up
>> with is having, alongside the fellows coming into residence, also
>> inviting Eyebeam's technician (Jamie O'Shea) to be in residence
>> leading up to the show, helping to install - working with our
>> technicians to set things up, where they share skills and knowledge
>> between them that will hopefully help integrate the artist residents
>> into our community. Its going to be interesting to have a different
>> type of residency alongside the more typical artist-in-residence.
>
> I applaud this idea and saw it work really well at Eyebeam when
> Laboral sent their technician Gustavo to participate in Interactivos?
> organised in partnership with Medialab Prado. The Interactivos? art
> works would not have been finished and gone up on show without Gustavo
> there. From what I could tell FACT had most things in hand
> technically, knew the installation/lay-out plans well in advance,
> meaning Jamie spent his time in Liverpool collaborating with the
> Eyebeam artists on how their projects would be best presented in the
> space. Hopefully there was some local knowledge exchanged in the process.
I think there was - its true that by the time that Jamie got here, our
install team was well underway with the show but his role was crucial in
working with our team to prepare for the Eyebeam resident's arrival,
where he had a more intimate knowledge of the projects they'd be working
on and the details that would make them successful. (one key learning I
have from this show is that those preparation conversations are
extremely difficult to have remotely, with different time zones and
different priorities - yet they are absolutely key to this kind of
residency-based exhibition). Things like plans were sent in advance and
discussed with the Eyebeam fellows and staff - the mez idea (having a
quiet work area separate from the gallery) actually came from Eyebeam
when I visited them last summer. Sounds like Gustavo was able to have a
deeper engagement in Interactivos but having Jamie here I think did work
well.
> The difficulty with this is how to explain to audiences walking in off
> the street that this is what is happening in Gallery 1, and who is
> making, or has made, what. FACT know their audiences better than I do
> so Heather and the others can comment on this directly. But I know
> that at the opening event and the following morning there were
> comments made about why FACT was taking on lab-residency based
> activity, with a direct social/government agenda (climate change),
> which other organisations might be better resourced and more
> appropriately positioned to fulfill. What I mean is that it is great
> to have put a window through from the gallery to the lobby so that
> people coming to the cafe or cinema know there is a gallery there and
> are more inclined to see what's on, but that it is a shame that one of
> the few (only?) venues in the UK well equipped to show media art in
> all its forms has to give up a precious slot on its exhibition
> schedule to present activity which could be equally well shown in the
> cafe, the cinema, the lobby, the shop, the street and in a community
> centre/hall/office down the street.
Here is where I disagree. I know that FACT is a very unique organisation
in the UK with a lot of resources that other organisations or
individuals would love to have access to, but lets not be 'precious'
about our exhibitions. A strength of media arts organisations like ours
(and many others) is that we are pushed to innovate in the delivery and
curating of exhibitions because of changing technologies and challenging
art forms, and I think that gives us a real bonus - that we are allowed
to be flexible and try things out and change things up. Lets also not
blow things out of proportion - FACT will continue to show black box and
white cube art. We've shown it for 20 years, from Tony Oursler to
Pipilotti Rist to JODI to any number of the hundred and hundreds of
artists and art works that we've been involved with. Its not often (or
ever? There are a couple of similar ones but not quite) that we do an
exhibition like this and we definitely love gallery art. But considering
our exhibitions slots too 'precious' will undermine our capacity to try
new things and be flexible, responsive and out there. Its a license we
have that somewhere like the Tate doesn't. Rigorous, yes, accountable,
yes, (part of why this is a great conversation to have) but not
precious. More to this below...
> I think FACT knows this, as its community notice board is not in
> Gallery 1 but in the cafe (although slightly inaccessible behind
> tables). What are the actual resources that FACT is bringing to this
> exchange? Furniture (plywood again! but at least apparently leftover
> building materials from Liverpool's Capital of Culture programme) and
> a large meeting space with free wifi and projection
> (amphitheatre-style seating), but more importantly, the local
> expertise and connections of its fantastic collaboration program staff
> and the (unsustainable) airline tickets to bring in the artists they
> have for the residencies they've arranged. All of these are very
> relevant.
>
> But what are we losing in exchange? At the Artist's Breakfast comments
> were made by the artists that their activist work was about changing
> cultures of consumption. For instance, by working with Hans Christoph
> Steiner and learning how to jailbreak or unlock an ipod's operating
> system and load Linux and PD on it, participants are introduced to the
> idea that culture isn't something which has to be made by someone else
> for us to consume, but can be something made by us (the same ethos on
> view at the MakerFaire at the Newcastle Science Festival this past
> weekend). That's fair enough in my book. But when Steve Lambert then
> commented that if it weren't for punk music he might not have gotten
> involved in community radio and learned those crucial skills for
> creating his own culture it occurred to me that _someone_ had to
> promote that punk band, someone had to play them on the radio, book
> their gig, go out of their way to hold up the band as the best punk
> band out there, so Steve could learn how to discern quality from the
> quantity, or learn at least what he liked.
As Steve exclaimed when I read this comment at the big table in the
gallery with him - it was the punk band themselves who did all that! I
don't want to get too tripped up on that metaphor but really, I think
thats a brilliant point in the context of this discussion. Yes at some
point those bands were being picked up by mainstream radio and on
magazine covers but my bet is that Steve found the band 'before they
sold out' :)
> Which is where the role of the curator and the arts venue comes in. If
> venues like FACT change their mandates and agendas from
> showcasing/showing/exhibiting/commissioning world-class art works to
> bringing in the community to create culture together we've lost a part
> of the useful filtering system which promotes the education of
> audiences to discern the best from the rest, and we've lost the
> segment of the audience that is engaged with art, with art history,
> with media history, with theory, with craft, with technique, style,
> skill, with narrative, with storytelling, with 'evocative objects',
> with aesthetically transporting experience, with witnessing (all the
> things that the three works installed in Gallery 2 aim to engage
> viewers with).
>
> I know I sound like an elitist, but please just take this as an angle
> on an argument, not necessarily a fully-formed opinion. At Eyebeam I
> often argued with Steve that art didn't always have to be useful and
> itself directly change the world, but had to at least change how the
> world looked to the people who had viewed the art. Similarly, at the
> Artist's Breakfast discussion Graham Harwood (of Mongrel) pointed out
> that it is exactly within the realm of art that the really gnarly and
> thorny issues of living in a mediated world can be discussed, can be
> laid out with all their problematics, can be reflected upon. So more
> art I say!
> [This of course ties in to all the debates we've been having about
> open culture, open source, user-generated content, etc. Perhaps in May
> we can talk about the Montreal Biennial, which seeks to directly
> address these issues.]
But then I think the same thing, about gnarly and thorny issues, applies
to arts organisations as well - perhaps that is what FACT is bringing to
the table here, a place for all these groups (and artists) to create
culture together under a banner of some common and difficult questions
that are hard to talk about but to which they, through their practice,
demonstrate clear answers. Again lets not get carried away here though -
we're certainly not changing our mandate to completely stop showing
artwork in our galleries. But the strong reaction its elicited in you
signals to me that its important to do it sometimes, if for the right
reasons.
Though I don't want to cloud the useful discussion from your drop-in
perspective, it might be good to describe where the exhibition came
from. While its been in incubation for a number of years - from a desire
to do something live and local in the gallery space - some renewed
inspiration came from Mike (Stubbs, FACT's Director) visiting Eyebeam
during their Feedback show. Keen on the topic of sustainability and keen
to reinvigorate our own research programme, having Eyebeam's residence
in residence (at FACT) seemed like a good turn. On both sides we didn't
want to simply tour the Feedback show - Eyebeam were interested in
exchanging knowledge stemming from our collaborations programme, it
being one our strengths, and the question became how to embed the show
with some local context and draw on that expertise as well. There is
more history to this exhibition but its been an idea in the works for
awhile.
When I took the exhibition on, I discovered Stefan Szczelkun's Survival
Scrapbooks (thanks Saul) and Simon Yuill's excellent essay where he
discusses them in the context of distributive networks - it became the
inspiration for the show and Stefan's work the title image. If we're
talking about sustainability, hands-on lab residencies, and local
context it seemed that Liverpool's own local DIY communities should
feature in the show, Stefan's work being a nice context and bridge. This
also comes from positive experiences I have with particularly strong DIY
community networks - spending a week in a tiny room during a 'code
sprint' with the developer of the free software group pure:dyne; working
with amazing young people in east London while I was at Space Media
Arts, whose network for sharing and enjoying off-the-radar grime and
house music was incredible; an illegal race through the Mersey tunnel
with a group of fixed gear bicycle riders; my housemate making an
elaborate homemade system of tubes and barrels for chemicals and used
chip oil to make biodiesel in our garage - forgive me if it all sounds a
bit twee, and I think those groups and people are doing just fine
without a big arts institution taking interest in them, but I found it
impossible to curate a lab-based hands-on exhibition about
sustainability without wanting to share the importance of some of those
kinds of extremely relevant, local, groups to this debate and see them
interact with our artist residents. So we've invited some of them in to
use the space if they wanted to and many of them have taken up the offer
because they have for whatever reason - whether its a projector, free
wifi, seating, tables, workshop tools, foot traffic, visibility,
institutional cred that they can use to their advantage - found it useful.
Anyway besides some alarmist comments I think mostly what you're getting
at here is not the motivation or inclusion of these groups but how the
experience was constructed for a drop in visitor like yourself or how we
structure the programme - which is very useful to discuss and I welcome
more reviews. Its a live exhibition so also its helpful as we're
changing things all the time. I don't think an exhibition of
documentation of our collaborative projects would have been the way to
go either but lets have more experimentation to find the best model and
framework for these kinds of exhibitions.
Thanks Sarah,
H
--
Heather Corcoran
Curator
FACT
88 Wood Street
Liverpool, L1 4DQ
t: + 44 (0)151 707 4425
f: + 44 (0)151 707 4445
http://www.fact.co.uk
Bookings: +44 (0)8707 583217
Information: +44 (0)151 707 4450
FACT is proud to be in LIVERPOOL, EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2008
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