Here is the Guardian‘s blog about Arts Council cuts, with live updates coming in throughout the day.
Also, congratulations on these new NPOs: Auto Italia, Studio Voltaire/IntoArts, Phoenix Arts, Bow Arts Trust, Peer, Stanley Picker Gallery, The Drawing Room, UP Projects, Workplace Gallery, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Spike Island, Project Space Leeds.
UP
Firstsite, Colchester: 28.2%
Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire: 74.8%
Derby Quad: 13.1%
Nottingham Contemporary: 2.3%
The New Art Exchange, Nottingham: 22.6% Art Monthly: 20.9%
Artur Żmijewski has been appointed curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which will take place in early 2012. The artist is well known for orchestrating social experiments – as in his two pivotal works Them (2005) and Repetition (2007).
Visual artist Artur Żmijewski, born in 1966 in Warsaw (Poland), works almost exclusively with the media of photography and film. He is particularly interested in the power of art and its relation to politics. From an almost anthropological viewpoint he investigates social norms, morality and representations of power in today’s society and the effects that art have on it. Żmijewski studied in the sculpture class of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski at the Warsaw Art Academy from 1990 to 1995 as well as at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1999. His work has been internationally shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2005 he represented Poland at the 51st Art Biennale in Venice. He is member of the Polish political movement “Krytyka Polityczna” and the art director of the magazine of the same name. Żmijewski lives and works in Warsaw.
The selection committee for the curatorship of the 7th Berlin Biennale consisted of Jacob Fabricius, Malmˆ Konsthall; Bartomeu Mari, MACBA; Matthias Mühling, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich; Joanna Mytkowska, The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; and Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Biennial.
Established in 1998, the Berlin Biennale has become a major international event for contemporary art. Located in Berlin, in the midst of the vibrant cultural scene in the fast-changing capital of Germany, the Berlin Biennale has received an enthusiastic response from the audience as an experimental, forward-looking and contextual show. The six editions of the Berlin Biennale that have taken place to date explored a variety of exhibition formats and involved diverse curatorial agendas. Previous curators have been:
1st Berlin Biennale (1998): Klaus Biesenbach with Nancy Spector and Hans Ulrich Obrist
2nd Berlin Biennale (2001): Saskia Bos
3rd Berlin Biennale (2004): Ute Meta Bauer
4th Berlin Biennale (2006): Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick
5th Berlin Biennale (2008): Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic
David Shrigley has produced an animation, titled ‘An Important Message About the Arts’, as part of an artist-backed campaign opposing proposed 23 percent cuts to arts institutions in the UK:
To support the campaign, please sign this petition, which is aimed at the Secretary of State for Culture, Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
More information:
‘Radical cuts to current levels of arts funding will decimate what has been one of the UK’s chief success stories over the past 20 years, and will bring an end to the UK’s reign as a global capital for culture.
Arts organisations all accept the need to reduce their budgets. But while the arts can possibly sustain a ten percent funding cut, the 25-30% cuts that the government is currently considering would result in the closure of many smaller arts organizations and would also have a crippling effect on the functioning of the country’s leading arts venues.
The arts are a major employer, and they generate far more revenue than they cost to fund. In addition they are a major attraction for tourism in the UK. While cutting arts funding may save money in the short term, in the long run it risks undermining what has been one of the country’s most vibrant areas of growth over the past fifteen years, and destroying one of the national achievements that we should be most proud of.’
The Falmouth Convention – a three-day programme of artist-led talks, field trips and artist talks – was convened by independent curator Teresa Gleadowe, aiming to ‘explore the significance of time and place in relation to contemporary art and exhibition making’. There was also an implicit objective of focusing conversation (or canvassing opinion) about a bid to bring Manifesta to Cornwall in 2014, with much of the discussion directed towards hot topics about biennials’ relationship to tourism and their responsibilities to local communities (the latter question especially relevant to Cornwall, with its longterm St Ives artists’ colony). One success of the weekend was, for me, that this question seemed significantly more complex – and far from being answered – at the end of the conference than at the beginning. In fact, most seemed to reluctant to argue the case for biennials now, more than one speaker noting that the large-scale survey show now tends more often to the hysterical than to the historical.
A broad range of curators – including Lucy Lippard, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kitty Scott – with experience of both organizing residency programmes and commissioning site-specific were invited, alongside a number of artists with links to the area: Tacita Dean (who was at Falmouth School of Art during the ‘80s), Adam Chodzko (who had a retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2008), Jeremy Millar (who is currently exploring the Cornish myth of Tristan and Iseult) and Simon Fujiwara (who grew up near St Ives).
The weekend’s focus was on the tensions between residents and residencies, and how artistic production can be enabled (or compromised) locale and localism – subjects that Lippard, the first evening’s keynote speaker, literally wrote the book on. In her key 1997 book The Lure of the Local, she argued against the ‘absence of value attached to specific place in the contemporary cultural life’.
Much of Lippard’s presentation – titled ‘Imagine Being Here Now: Towards a Multicentred Exhibition Process’ – focused on Galisteo, New Mexico, where she has been living since the early ’90s (she is soon to publish an extensive history of the area from 1250–1782). Lippard’s central criticism of SITE Sante Fe Biennial was it habit of ‘ballooning in’ artists rather than allowing for either a sustained dialogue or for local participation. As one audience member wondered in the Q&A session, when does one become a ‘local’? How many years does it take for dues to be paid?
An ambiguous note, with regard to Manifesta, was introduced: why position these biennials in places that are already known locations or tourist destinations? What about suburbia? (Lippard has previously quoted Rebecca Solnit’s definition of suburbia as a ‘voluntary limbo, a condition more like sedation than exile, for exiles know what is missing.’) She proposed a community biennial of activist organizers and local people, lighter on curatorial conceit and more breadth of accessibility. Lippard has, intentionally and by her own account, been out of the international art loop for the past couple of decades. This absence sometimes apparent, no more than in her broad criticisms of large-scale shows and biennials’ lack of interest in local politics. Resurgent interest in the legacies of locally orientated ’80s artist-activism, as well as recent biennials in Berlin and Istanbul that are far from unengaged. Lippard was closer to the mark when looking further back, noting that the art of the ’70s still defines much of what artists do outdoors – from handsome, temporary monuments to slight interventions.
Tacita Dean’s talk, titled ‘Being Commissioned’, made an eloquent argument for the ‘importance of ignorance and blindness’ – the opposite of Lippard’s thesis of understanding through long-term involvement – whereby misreadings can be creative rather than potentially dangerous. In giving an example of this, Dean discussed her early film Disappearance at Sea (1996), one of the first pieces she ever made in a place – Berwick-upon-Tweed – which she had absolutely no connection to. Defined the art of being commissioned as ‘being highly disobedient’ when faced with curators’ intentions.
Bassam el Baroni from Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), one of the three collectives curating Manifesta this year, gave an honest account of how different curatorial or artistic practices can become instrumentalized. Manifesta 8’s subtitle, ‘Dialogue with North Africa’, was apparently chosen before ACAF’s application was even selected – Baroni understandably had a number of doubts about overseeing what he called an ‘arranged marriage’ between Murcia and Mahgreb.
Other presentations returned to how best to structure openness when organizing residencies and how to allow for sufficient research when curating exhibitions. Hans Ulrich Obrist, discussed the 2007 ‘Everstill’ show that he curated at Lorca’s house in Grenada, for which the participating poets and artists were given a two-year research period. Obrist ended up advocating – affectingly, if somewhat ironically for a man who doesn’t seem to sleep – a kind of slowness. Kitty Scott presented the Banff Centre residency programme, and its intention to leave space for failure, while Adam Sutherland from Grizedale Arts in the Lake District took the opposing view: artists have to be useful; there has to be some legacy.
In the 2005 book Place, written by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, ‘place’ is defined as the projection of history onto a landscape. One definition of a successful biennial, mentioned by Millar in his closing comments, could be the production of history from a landscape. What would it mean to host Manifesta in a dispersed and rural setting? For one day of the convention, delegates were split between six different field trips. Mine, titled ‘Studios and Stones’, began at Barbara Hepworth’s studio in St Ives and continued along the coast towards Zennor, stopping at Eagles Nest (Patrick Heron’s old house and studio), the Tinners Arms (where DH Lawrence once lodged) and Carn cottage (once home to Bryan Wynter and said to be used by Aleister Crowley). Amid the quoits, this was the landscape sketched by ‘The Dark Monarch at Tate St Ives at the beginning of this year.
The convention finished with a few warnings. Andrew Nairne (Executive Director for Arts Strategy at Arts Council England) warning about ‘Hurricane George’ on the horizon (for non-UK readers: that’s a reference to George Osbourne, the Chancellor, who’s about to present a particularly bleak emergency budget). Open-ended outcomes are not quantifiable, and so are disliked by the government? Serota suggested that closing the widening separation between research, production and presentation might be one answer. Finished with hopeful suggestion that the attendees and participants were galvanized by even the possibility of a bid. Lippard voiced the final word of caution: ‘I’m fascinated by the idea of not doing Manifesta, frankly – but the, I don’t know where the money would come from…
The artist list for the seventh edition of the British Art Show – which takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK – has been announced. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton (a contributing editor of frieze) , this year’s BAS opens at Nottingham Contemporary (pictured above) and will tour to the Hayward Gallery, then venues in Glasgow and Plymouth. This is apparently the first time in 20 years that the exhibition – which was originally intended to take art to ‘the regions‘ – will be coming to London.
The BAS has kind of a spotty history: the first edition, which opened in Sheffield in 1979 and was selected by the FT‘s art critic, William Packer, was criticized for its predilection for established white male artists; in 1995, a large portion of the show was seen as being too closely aligned with Charles Saatchi’s collection. As Neil Mulholland wrote in friezefour years ago:
‘An attempt to celebrate the resurgence of a ‘British’ art that had allegedly been repressed by the Modern Movement, the BAS was part of a reactionary Postmodernism that included Margaret Thatcher’s sabre-rattling, Merchant–Ivory costume dramas, Peter Fuller’s young-fogey Marxism and working-class girls with Princess Di haircuts. Such dusty ‘British’ values were, of course, specifically rooted in a south-eastern English aristo-bucolic mindset. This arrière-garde was quickly usurped by the New Object Sculpture and New Image of the 1980s (BAS 2) and the Brit Art of the 1990s (BAS 4).’
I’m more hopeful about this year’s edition: the artist list is strong, if low on big surprises. A few quick observations: while the gender balance isn’t quite the 50/50 of Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker’s BAS 6, it’s not bad, and there’s a definite tendency towards film (Duncan Campbell, Emily Wardill, Kirschner & Panos, Otolith, Luke Fowler) and sculpture (Karla Black, Steve Claydon, Roger Hiorns, Ian Kiaer etc) that seems to me fairly reflective of what’s going on in the UK at the moment, despite the relative lack of performance. There are some crossovers with the Tate Triennial – Charles Avery, Spartacus Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Nathaniel Mellors, David Noonan, Olivia Plender, Tris Vonna-Michell – but not as many as may have been expected (surprising that Ryan Gander hasn’t been featured in either?). The best-represented gallery is, by my count, Hotel, who must be happy with four of their artists on the list (Blightman, Campbell, Claydon and Noonan), while a few prominent London galleries are nowhere to be seen.
This year’s show is subtitled ‘In the Days of the Comet’, after H.G. Wells’ 1906 novel of the same name. According to the curators: ‘The story charts the appearance of a comet over the UK that releases a green gas creating a “great change” in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how “the now” might be understood.’
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