CHRIS FREMANTLE

ecoartscotland library as bing

Posted in Exhibitions, News, Research by chrisfremantle on October 10, 2022

‘ecoartscotland library as bing’ will be included in the Staff Outing II exhibition of works by Gray’s School of Art Fine Art staff at LookAgain Project Space, Aberdeen

A colleague challenged me, suggesting that imagining the ecoartscotland library as a bing – a spoil heap of waste from an industrial process – is anti-intellectual.

The ‘ecoartscotland library as bing’ series of works explores the claim of British conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) that education can produce waste in the same way as other industries. Latham names certain forms of education as the ‘Mental Furniture Industry’. At the time the MFI chain in Britain supplied flat pack furniture. Latham proposed that the Mental Furniture Industry has produced three centuries of undetected tipping.
‘ecoartscotland library’ as bing is firstly an exploration of the materiality and aesthetic. The bings, defined as waste, have over time become sites of significant biodiversity – waste can support new lifewebs (see Barbra Harvie’s report). This provoked me to question how ecological thinking can lead to a healthier web of life. What sort of actual relationship is there between the ecoartscotland library and the web of life? What forms of understanding can the library create? Are some of them material? Aesthetic? We value relationality, but we also need to value difference. Conceiving of the ecoartscotland library as a bing is a way to experience it as a ‘strange stranger’ (in Tim Morton’s sense). It is not anti-intellectual, but rather an inversion of values to provoke an exploration of relationality and difference.

Staff Outing II is open from 15th October – 20th November 2022.

Tagged with: bings, ecoart, john latham, LookAgain

Artists and scientists that co-create regenerative projects in cities? Yes, please. But how?

Contribution to TNoC’s Roundtable

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research by chrisfremantle on September 23, 2022

Honoured to be able to contribute along side a great group of people all working on regenerative approaches all over the world.

My contribution to The Nature of Cities Roundtable on co-creating regenerative projects in cities focuses on an approach to evaluation that works across arts, culture, science and environmental management. Based on work done by Laura Meagher, Catherine Lyall and Sandra Nutley and further developed with input from Dave Edwards, the framework draws attention to conceptual shifts, capacity building, instrumental impacts, attitudinal shifts and enduring connectivity. It is focused by the challenges and impacts of working across different ways of knowing and ways of working.

The whole round table is great with stimulating and informative perspectives from all sorts of different contexts.

PhDs by Public Output Pt2 – is collage a good way of thinking about this?

Posted in PhD, Research, Texts by chrisfremantle on July 21, 2022

Detail from timeline included in PhD, designed by Dr Cara Broadley

These reflections follow a piece published here in 2020 looking at four examples of other PhDs by Public Output.

I came to realise as I prepared for my Viva that my PhD by Public Output was in effect a curious exercise in collage. The PhD comprises a thesis (essay hereafter) and a portfolio. My portfolio is an assemblage of material, the earliest piece dating back to 2006. One constraint was that the portfolio had to comprise peer reviewed materials. There are 8 pieces in the portfolio I submitted, 5 referenced in the main essay and 3 in an appendix.

Since 2006. I have written perhaps 600 posts to my personal blog (here) and 735 to ecoartscotland. The latter includes guest posts for which I was editor. Across both it’s a mix of notes, announcements and essays. My ORCID profile includes 37 pieces of work which count as substantive academic publications. The essay focuses on the 8 pieces in the portfolio and references another 19 pieces (supplementary materials). I used a numbering system to ensure that the essay could be correlated with the portfolio and supplementary materials.

I think I got more out of participating in the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities’ ‘Practice Research Assembly’ in 2020 than I contributed! In particular, Joyce Yee speaking about experimental formats prompted me to develop a timeline for my portfolio. The timeline enabled me to explore the links and connections between the various elements. The timeline included the portfolio and the supplementary materials (but not the material on the two blogs!). With the help of Dr Cara Broadley, a colleague and design researcher with a specific interest in timelines, this became a figure in the essay part of the submission. The timeline creates a sort of order, intended to help readers (and examiners) navigate and understand the density and patterns in the portfolio. What is only partially represented is the sense of selection from a larger pile of materials – none of the other unused material is in anyway visible (as it is at least by implication in the cutting out an image from a magazine).

I conceptualise the process as collage because, unlike a conventional PhD, the materials in the portfolio are ‘givens’ and the task is to write an essay including:

(b) a review of the current literature;
(c) a discussion of the contribution and impact made by the works submitted to the general advancement of the field of study and research concerned; a common theme must be demonstrated; and
(d) a demonstration that the work constitutes an independent and original contribution to knowledge.
RGU Academic Regulations 2020

It is the demonstration of the “common theme” that is critical and which drives the idea of collage as a way of thinking about the PhD. All the other requirements can be met by a list, but the requirement for a “common theme” means composing something coherent out of the portfolio – a new meta-narrative.

Constraints abound: not all of the works listed on ORCID are peer reviewed and RGU’s Academic Regulations specify minimum and maximum pieces for the portfolio.

The pieces themselves are a bit like found objects. Re-reading something written 15 years ago is, at the very least, rediscovering something. One piece felt very dated – writing about Web 2.0 and co-creativity without knowing how it would be co-opted by populist politicians to promote alternative facts. Equally a piece ‘in development’ at the outset of the process became vital to the portfolio and needed to be published in a peer reviewed Journal to become eligible.

Much of the portfolio is made up of co-authored pieces, an aspect which is critical to my “common theme”, but it also means securing permission from all the co-authors. Luckily a couple of massively co-authored pieces (one with 183 authors!) didn’t form part of the portfolio.*

I thought my “common theme” was ‘participation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity’ but I had a moment, whilst out riding my bicycle during lockdown in early 2021, which made me rethink the argument in terms of what it means to ‘think ecologically’. The relationality that underpins participation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity is still important, but it needs to be balanced with an understanding of difference. This reconfiguration meant that the portfolio had a better mix and the “common theme” was more interesting (and provocative?). I presented this to my supervisors with great excitement. They didn’t get it. I went away and wrote it up. That generated a lot of questions. I had to dig in on the literature to ground this reframing. It came together with their help. They also insisted on specificity. Every ‘it’ or ‘this’ was replaced with a named object for the avoidance of doubt.

Tim Ingold, talking about artists researching, suggests that, unlike in some other disciplines where a hypothesis is established and then tested, we behave more like dogs in a field – our process of research might seem like random movement but it follows its own logic and reaches its conclusion. This helps when we think about collage as an analogy – configuring the materials and reconfiguring them until a compelling composition is resolved. Selecting from a large pile, sometimes using a rule e.g. all with yellow elements, or in this case all peer reviewed.

The value of this has, without question, been the need to reflect on, re-read, and make sense of a body of work which assembled in response to opportunities, projects, calls for proposals, and the way that working in the gig economy of the arts plays out. As I was writing I came across Iain Biggs’ essay on ‘ensemble practices’** published in the Routledge Handbook on Art in Public Places alongside an essay Anne Douglas, Dave Pritchard and I wrote on the work of the Harrisons (Helen Mayer Harrison 1927-2018 and Newton Harrisons b. 1932) in the context of global environment policy (which also includes a timeline). Working as a producer for artists’ works in public places, Iain Biggs provides a useful de-centring, and introduces the conception of ‘mutual accompaniment’ which is very sympathetic to the pedagogy of the arts and the work of a producer. This deepened the notions of participation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and complemented the conceptualisation of ‘joining a conversation’ which I found in the Harrisons’ work.

You can read the essay ‘Working together on ecological thinking: relationality and difference’ here https://doi.org/10.48526/rgu-wt-1712793. I’ll be posting the elements of the portfolio (abstracts with links) to this blog over the next few weeks. It will all be shared on Twitter.

* It is worth noting that in assembling the ‘package’ for examination, the essay is a separate pdf from the portfolio. This is because the portfolio needed to contain published pieces covered by copyright, so on the institutional repository you will find the essay and links to all the cited pieces, but they aren’t packaged together. If you want the whole package contact me.

** Biggs, I., 2020. Ensemble Practices. In: C. CARTIERE and L. TAN, eds. The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Taylor & Francis (Routledge).

Tagged with: collage as method, collage as research, PhD by Public Output, Tim Ingold, timeline

In Your Hands – Fruit Routes at Loughborough

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research by chrisfremantle on May 19, 2022

I was invited to the celebration of 10 years of the Fruit Routes project at the University of Loughborough. Anne-Marie Culhane, artist, and Marsha Meskimmon, Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough, invited me to contribute a short presentation. The morning was spent discussing Fruit Routes, its development and its future. The afternoon was spent visiting the orchards and in more informal conversations. The event was the launch of the Fruit Routes Charter, the basis for it going on.

I was keen to travel and participate because this is one of several durational artist-led projects concerning orchards and foraging. Others include the current The Far Orchard project at The Barn in Aberdeenshire, Dundee Urban Orchard developed by Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins, the work of Common Ground’s Save our Orchards, and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s Portable Orchard Survival Piece #5 originally made in 1972 and remade several times since. This is by no means a comprehensive list of artists projects related to orchards, fruit and foraging.

The Fruit Routes Charter, launched at the event, is focused on setting out the basis for the continuation of Fruit Routes, moving beyond being a project. It highlights the permaculture principles underpinning Anne-Marie Culhane’s approach. Through highlighting patterns of events (principally planting and harvesting) and approaches to organising (ensuring a warm welcome for inhabitants of Loughborough as well as students whose first language might not be English). It highlights principles for foraging as well as for publicising. The Charter is intended to inform the steering committee responsible for the ongoing development of Fruit Routes. It might inform a lot of thinking about the relationship of art to life.

My presentation follows:

My colleague Anne Douglas and I are currently working on a book on the early works of the pioneering artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Helen died in 2018 and Newton carries on. We are showing his work, On The Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland at the World Congress of Soil Science this summer, hopefully including a work that they started doing in 1970 and have made again several times.

This work is called Making Earth. According to Newton Harrison it takes 8-12 weeks and involves sewage, river loam, worms, and garden waste. Newton is clear that the reason for doing this work, and the reason they’ve done the work several times for different exhibitions, is that it is incredibly easy to destroy soil and very hard work to make it.

As we know our lives are dependent on soil – I expect you all read George Monbiot’s article on the secret world beneath our feet in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago – if not it is worth checking out.

So my title for today comes from an article by David Antin – he said in a review in 1970,

The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world.
ANTIN, D., 1970. Art + Ecology. ArtNews.

In terms of art practices that are concerned with ecology there are several common characteristics

a focus on systems, rather than objects (Brian Eno “Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience”),
learning through experience and in particular sensory place based experience,
collaboration, participation and interdisciplinarity.

I find Gert Biesta’s phrase really valuable too.

…in the world without occupying the centre of the world.
BIESTA, G., 2017. Letting Art Teach: Art Education ‘After’ Joseph Beuys. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press.

But Antin’s articulation focusing on dependencies is a useful heuristic. I like his ‘its own condition for existence’ ie that the work’s very existence reveals dependencies, or that the work reveals dependencies in the world.

We might be more used to hearing the word ‘interdependency’ and I’m not offering dependency as an alternative – Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian philosopher of science and colleague of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, usefully says

Nor should the intertwining interdependencies be confused with a network of interlinking dependences. It is easy to understand why, without water or light, a plant dies. This fits the definition of ‘dependence’. But interdependence implies a way of being sensitive that is a form of venture.
STENGERS, I., 2020. The Earth Won’t Let Itself Be Watched. In: B. LATOUR and P. WEIBEL, eds. Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. pp. 228–235.

Interdependence implies a way of being sensitive. But dependence is dependence for life. The writing Anne Douglas and I are doing on the Harrisons focuses on how they developed a practice and ‘committed to doing no work that did not attend to the wellbeing of the lifeweb’.

David Antin was a colleague of their at the University of California San Diego.

Antin’s articulation is useful because it means that we can see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in the Sanitation Department of New York City is clearly an ecological art. Her first project as artist in residence in the Sanitation Department was called Touch Sanitation. Over a period of about 11 months she travelled across NY City meeting all 8500 sanitation workers saying to each of them “Thank you for keeping New York City alive”

Her Manifesto of Maintenance Art asks

After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
UKELES, M.L., KWON, M. and MOLESWORTH, H., 1997. Maintenance Art Activity (1973) Artist Project: Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Documents, 10, pp. 5–22.

I almost don’t need to highlight how Fruit Routes articulates dependency as well as interdependence, how its own condition for existence or those of the world.

I’m currently working with Prof Dee Heddon on one of the Research projects with the Future of UK Treescapes programme and amongst other things we are developing a set of case studies around artists working with treescapes (forests, woods, trees). One of the things that Dee has highlighted as becoming apparent is the importance of maintenance arrangements – for example Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks in Kassel, Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain in Finland. These works have lifespans beyond the human and certainly beyond the artist – they exist as art but also as forestry (urban and otherwise).

The projects are dependent on care and maintenance, replacement of dead trees, etc, as well as in the case of orchards, use – we are dependent on them, and they are dependent on us in varying ways.

But the orchards also evidence the dependencies of the world. I work at a campus University and we still have swathes of mown grass. We are University as golf course. Our campus doesn’t remind us of the ongoing processes of life. It doesn’t attract insects and it isn’t made untidy by fruit dropping to the ground. Infact it is always tidy.

I want to end by reading a meditation by TJ Shin I found recently. It’s published in a magazine devoted euphemistically to those things we call ‘facilities’ otherwise known as toilets.

Notes from the event

The Fruit Routes initiative is built on principles of women’s leadership and indigenous ways of knowing. A number of key thinkers were cited including Rachel Carson, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, Greta Gaard, Felix Guattari and Lorraine Code. Although Loughborough might be described as focused on technology, Fruit Routes is not a top down initiative, and it recognises that the challenges we face at a planetary scale require local action. Fruit Routes is focused by place, identity, materiality and history, and thinks in multi-scalar terms – it is specific in its place and relates to other edible locality (city, town, campus, etc) as well as addressing national, continental and global challenges of food and justice. It seeks to address what Amitav Ghosh calls the ‘crisis of the imagination’ in his key book The Great Derangement.

Fruit Routes was described in terms of ‘thinking the land’, recognising that trees have been in the landscape of Loughborough for much longer than the University. Fruit Routes also provides a different time-cycle to the academic. The Harvest Festival happens in the autumn. It acts as a focus for Architecture School’s Summer School providing a brief for an apple store. Planting happens in the winter and spring.

Fruit Routes has had a documented impact on the mental health of students, and has an alumni community of its own. It creates connections between the University and the Town, particularly with the annual Harvest festival, as well as engaging teams within the University such as Gardening and Security.

Fruit Routes has had to find space within the Campus and it has focused on ‘edge’ spaces so as to ensure it didn’t conflict with developments. It has addressed a number of University strategies and priorities including Biodiversity for Business, creating a place to meet between disciplines, offering challenges and also sharing. It enables intergenerational learning.

Tagged with: Anne Marie Culhane, Fruit Routes, Loughborough, orchard

Culture for Adaptation, Adaptation for Culture – New Report

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research by chrisfremantle on November 8, 2021

Adaptation to climate breakdown has largely focused on infrastructure and strategy, aiming to secure resources and political priority. Recently both the European Union and the US National Academy of Sciences have published reports which highlight the need to co-create with inhabitants to achieve successful adaptation.

Leslie Mabon and I were the Robert Gordon University team appointed to evaluate the ‘Cultural Adaptations‘ project led by Creative Carbon Scotland. ‘Cultural Adaptations’ involved four Cities’ Sustainability teams and cultural organisations sharing expertise – expertise on adaptation needed by cultural organisations, and expertise on co-creative approaches needed by adaptation professionals.

We have summarised some key points in this piece for Yale Climate Connections which also links to the full report.

Tagged with: climate change, co-creativity, Cultural Adaptation

Working with Allan Kaprow

Posted in CV, Exhibitions, On The Edge, Research by chrisfremantle on January 23, 2021

Anne Douglas produced Calendar Variations as a project amongst a group of researcher artists including Reiko Goto, Georgina Barney, Fiona Hope, Jono Hope, Janet McEwan, Chu Chu Yuan and myself. Anne took Allan Kaprow’s Activity entitled ‘Calendar’ as a starting point, asking all the participants to respond individually to the text. We then came together for two days to negotiate a collective response. As a collective we explored what might be considered the minimum intervention – walking a square into long grass. We did this at The Barn in Banchory (above). My own work with ‘Calendar’ is documented here and below are a pair of works that resulted from an analysis. Other drawings explore wet and dry (proxies for life and death) in various ways. I also did a curatorial exercise documented here.

Chris Fremantle, CV, Acrylic and Pencil (2015) installed as part of *Staff Outing* exhibition, Look Again Space, 2018.

Calendar Variations publication More recently I discovered that Jupiter Artland had also invited some artists (Andrea Büttner, James Hoff, Peter Liversidge, Cinzia Mutigli, members of ORBIT Youth Council and the Wilson family) to respond to Kaprow’s Scores and Activities. You can see their work here. Kaprow’s Scores and Activities are one of the inspirations for a book coming out of the ecoart network to be published in 2022 by New Village Press. The book, entitled Ecoart in Action, comprises contributions by 67 artists. The contributions are all exercises, recipes or instructions for activities; case studies of activities; or provocations towards developing activities. Some are more literal than Kaprow’s, with obvious pedagogical outcomes. Others are elliptical and open-ended like Kaprow’s, leaving those undertaking to work out what might be learnt or done for themselves. Kaprow continues to inspire.

Tagged with: Allan Kaprow

PhDs by Public Output/ Published Work

Posted in CF Writing, PhD, Research by chrisfremantle on October 8, 2020

I’m currently undertaking a PhD by Public Output (also known as a PhD by Published Work) through Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University (RGU). I’m a part-time member of staff – Research Fellow and Lecturer. I’ve been associated with On The Edge and Research at Gray’s for 20 years, in various capacities (Director of Partner Organisation, Member of Project Steering Group, Contracted Research Assistant, Research Resident, Co-Investigator on Projects).

A PhD by Public Output collects a selection of previous research (publications and projects) and frames the overarching enquiry, identifying the significance, originality and rigor of the contributions.

In summary, RGU takes the view that a completed PhD should provide material sufficient for 4 journal articles, and therefore if you have 4 peer reviewed journal articles all focused on a common theme, you can write a 10,000 word thesis which demonstrates the overall contribution and submit this along with the outputs. (Each institution will have its own regulations.)

Gray’s School of Art, RGU, has played a notable role in particular in supporting established practitioners to undertake practice-led doctoral research.* There are fewer examples of Practice-led PhDs by Public Output. I’ve identified four examples including one from Gray’s:

Suzanne Lacy, 2013. Imperfect Art: Working in Public A Case Study of the Oakland Projects (1991-2001).

Minty Donald, 2014. Exploring human/environment interdependencies through critical spatial practice.

Ross Sinclair, 2016. Ross Sinclair: 20 Years of Real Life.

Nicola Triscott, 2017. Art and Intervention in the Stewardship of the Planetary Commons: Towards a Curatorial Model of Co-inquiry.

Full References including links are below.

Before I unpack these I should say that Prof Emeritus Anne Douglas always draws attention to key artists’ writings which demonstrate Practice-led Research before it was an institutionalised process (e.g. Cage, Kaprow, Bernstein, Harrisons, Denes) and Anne’s essays on Practice-led are worth reading too (I’ll do a separate blog on that subject).

Suzanne Lacy

Lacy’s thesis is a reflection on a series of projects, the Oakland Projects, undertaken in collaboration with other artists, large numbers of participants, as well as with a range of institutional partners in Oakland California over 10 years. The thesis incorporates extensive description and discussion of the projects as well as two DVDs of video and TV. Lacy’s text broadly falls into three sections:

methodology,
description and reflection on the Oakland Projects,
discussion of art and pedagogy.

The description and reflection of the projects comprises 110 pages of the 190 pages of the document. The Oakland Projects, whilst taking place in public, are not written up and reflected on elsewhere by the artist. Rather her contention is that the projects constitute arts-based research in and of themselves, not through exegesis or discrete academic texts.

Lacy’s PhD by Public Output therefore constitutes a major reflection on a body of work and the process which supported it, the Working in Public Seminars (2006-08), is an important aspect of methodology, if unusual. Prof Anne Douglas was Lacy’s Supervisor and proposed the seminars as part of the methodology (see https://ontheedgeresearch.org/working-in-public/ for full details).

The seminars, enabled by support from Creative Scotland, opened up reflection and interrogation of a key body of work by an internationally recognised artist. The programme included public events as well as a programme of seminars for a selected group of established practitioners based in Scotland. Lacy was able to engage in deep reflection, in particular with the group, on 10 years of work in one community. The focus of this reflection is captured in the titles of the three events: ‘aesthetics and ethics’, ‘representation and power’, ‘quality and imperfection’.

Lacy had previously published Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1994), a collection of essays by key practitioners, and has published in Journals as well. One essay in Mapping the Terrain in particular, Allan Kaprow’s piece discussing Project Other Ways is referred to extensively. This too is a personal reflection by an artist on a work that confounds simple analysis as either art or pedagogy – a fundamental theme for Lacy.

In her thesis Lacy describes her methodology as three fold:

review all the material associated with the Oakland Projects (20 boxes plus a considerable body of video and TV material)
interview 40 individuals involved with the projects
present this material as part of the Working in Public Seminars

Lacy describes her contribution in the following terms,

“Although in the last chapter I suggest a few directions for assessing the success or failure of this work as social action and the perfection or imperfection of it as art, I think the major contribution I can make here is curatorial, assembling some of the multiple narratives and, through interviews, multiple voices of the project. (Perhaps because early in my education I was trained in science, I realize that an “evaluation” from my vantage point would be extremely flawed in terms of any “truth” it might reveal, considering my inherent bias as one of the primary makers.)”
(Lacy, 2013, p. 5)

Lacy focuses in particular on the importance of ‘Building a Critical Position for the Artist’s Voice’, saying “…it is the practice, however, that remains fundamental to my analysis – what I know from what I have learnt while making art.” (Lacy, 2013, p. 13).

Lacy highlights a key example of the multi-vocal approach, as demonstrated by Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy Initiative and the Critical Perspectives Project. This involved groups of writers reflecting on civic projects from differing perspectives. Lacy highlights others who engaged with the Oakland Projects in depth, as well as her several roles: “…as one of the creators of the artwork, as a curator and recorder of the narratives, and, through writing it down, as contributor to the discourse in the field.” (Lacy, 2013, p. 17). She goes on to ask, “What is inside the practice that only the practitioner can articulate?” (Lacy, 2013, p.18).

Turning to the third section on art and pedagogy, pedagogy is intimately linked with public practice, particularly through the concept of ‘public pedagogy’. For Lacy this is the key intersection that she is concerned with and seeks to navigate. Lacy’s practice is fundamentally concerned with forms of representation, particularly in the media, starting with the invisibility of rape and in various works using this as a lens with which to explore questions of equity and exclusion. She identifies the development of feminist pedagogies and situates her practice within this story, articulating her concerns with class and race, and the emergence of ideas of intersectionality.

This in turn correlates with Lacy’s concern for the development of the ‘Artist’s Voice’. She quotes Arlene Raven saying “Our processes prefigured the emerging public art practices today that move fluidly among criticism, theory, art making and activism.” (Lacy, 2013, p. 145). She has previously articulated her multiple roles within the one dissertation (art maker, curator of multiple perspectives, and narrator).

The form of theorising is distinct, drawing on personal engagement with the emergence of feminist art practices and thinking amongst a community of which Lacy was a part. Her citation is often based on direct engagement with the authors. She particularly highlights Raven’s articulation of the ways that feminist attention to contextual social and political events in turn required nuanced ethical thinking on the role of this reconstituted artist in the public sphere. Lacy discusses her own underpinning engagement with questions of equity in multiple contexts.

Having established the context she turns to her argument for arts-based research (or as she calls it ‘Research as an Art Practice’). The first element of her argument focuses on her own question led approach, and the way that expands as she engages with others (in the Oakland Projects, youth specifically) to be a shared set of questions.

Lacy explores the idea of ‘curriculum’ in her expanded (public) pedagogy, highlighting five areas within the overall framework of the Oakland Projects. This highlights the complexity of the Oakland Projects but also the interweaving of multiple aspects – modalities, contexts, participants and audiences – in the media, in formal and informal sites of learning, in youth development and in elements more conventionally recognisable as ‘art’.

Lacy in following sections unpacks both aesthetics and ethics in relation to the Oakland Projects, including where these can come into conflict. In particular Lacy discusses the role of institutions as partners in these projects. She summarises seven key practices adopted within the projects. These are drawn from good practice in youth work and adapted to the circumstances that include large scale public performance, but are also in place to ensure that the projects are not co-opted by partners.

Lacy’s conclusion highlights two contributions. One focused the value and significance of the voice of the artist, and the second on the understanding of feminist art and pedagogy, particularly public pedagogy. She identifies areas for further work and also returns to Kaprow, and in particular his interest in ambiguity, and the way the Oakland Projects reveal the tension between aesthetics and ethics played out in works that have a fundamental public pedagogical character.

Other examples

The three other examples, Minty Donald (external supervisor for my PhD), Ross Sinclair, and Nicola Triscott, all offer different lessons.

Minty Donald’s thesis (2014) is supported by 3 Journal Articles and 1 Book Chapter which between them address two discrete projects, of which extensive documentation is supplied. The focus of the thesis is the development of practice-led approaches to critical spatial practice, particularly in the context of performance and increasingly engaging with a New Materialist conception of agency.

The focus of the framing essay is on the overarching principles Donald identifies in the exemplified practice concerned with the tension between the ways space, place and site carry meaning and embody histories, but are also fluid. The theoretical frame has several dimensions:

a concern with context bringing together post-structuralist writing (Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre) with public art and site specific theorising (e.g. Rendell, from whom she takes the conceptualisation of critical spatial practice) and with de-colonial literatures (e.g. Massey).
a concern with heritage and in particular the relationship between heritage and performance. A key concept for Donald is nostalgia and how this is understood.
New Materialism (eg Bennett). This dimension is identified as the emergent focus within the practice.

It is interesting to note that, possibly because this is a PhD by Published Work, the range of theory highlighted is broad. The clear identification of the different dimensions is helpful.

In the context of practice-led research, the theoretical context is critical, as is the historical context – the precedents and significant peer and predecessor practices. Donald highlights her practice as a scenographer and unpacks how that informs her practice in the works under consideration in terms of scenography specifically and the wider context of issues within performance. Donald links aspects of scenography with New Materialism. She links the concerns in performance with practices in public art (Wodiczko, Alys, Starling), creating a clearly articulated territory for her practice.

Donald discusses her understanding of practice as research drawing on a range of literature. She draws out arguments for “…a persistent concern for those engaged in practice-as-research: the relationship between praxis and discursive reflection on, or exegesis of, that praxis.” (Donald, 2014, p.16). This approach allows the practitioner to reflect on their own intentions and the ways in which they had to adapt in relation the ‘resistances’ of the world.

Donald highlights the generative character of practice-as-research, drawing attention to the particular forms of ‘not knowing’ and ways of working with ‘not knowing’ to reveal new insights.

Donald touches on the collaborative aspects of several projects where she worked with others, sometimes in a role which organised others (directorial/curatorial).

These sections, setting up the theoretical, professional and methodological aspects are followed by description of the projects profiled leading into a discussion of the insights in the associated Journal Articles and Book Chapters.

In the work Glimmers in Limbo Donald is concerned with the binary of tangible/intangible in heritage, something she suggests as a false dichotomy. Donald is concerned with “…the potential of critical spatial practice to bring about what Nigel Thrift describes as an extension of ‘the imagination into matter’. (Donald, 2014, p. 26)

Donald’s articulation of her work Glimmers in Limbo in relation to New Materialism highlights the aspect of agency. Hauntology, the exploration of the ways that material histories of places remain present even after erasure, offers another frame for these concerns, it places less emphasis on agency in the materiality.

In The River Clyde Project Donald is focused on “…ideas of space/place as networked and always in-process.” (Donald, 2014, p. 30). Donald discusses Bridging, a work which opens up new issues for her practice. She explores Tim Ingold’s concept of meshwork in relation to the project because it enables us to ‘see’ the agency of the material, in this case the rope, within the performance. This in turn leads to opening up ecological concerns in ways that humans and materials are encompassed by wind and tide. The role of these encompassing elements in frustrating the artists’ intention is key, opening up new insights.

This section concludes with discussion of a work in progress, High-Slack-Low-Slack-High, for which there is no published corollary. She discusses the parallel research trajectories of herself and collaborators exploring tides, a development from the earlier Bridging project.

Donald identifies aspects of both projects that influenced policy – of the Merchant City Initiative’s understanding of the Britannia Panopticon and of the Velocity programme’s thinking about the regeneration of the Clyde.

In Donald’s conclusion she highlights the importance of experimentation to her research trajectory because it reveals, particularly in failures, the agency of materials and environments in ways that would not otherwise be apparent. Donald indicates the future direction of research particularly into ways of working that reveal forms of agency – quoting Bennett, ‘tactics […] to discern the vitality of matter’ (Donald, 2014, p. 47).

Ross Sinclair

Ross Sinclair’s thesis is different from the others reviewed in that he focuses on his Real Life Project, an ongoing ‘everyday life as a work of art’ process which he has been engaged with over 20 years.

In his abstract, Sinclair sums this up saying,

“This has built a 20-year durational performance project that connects with the public at a dynamic intersection of ideas, context, performance and art-practice. This project was initiated when the words REAL LIFE were tattooed in black ink across my back, at Terry’s Tattoo parlour in Glasgow in 1994.”
(Sinclair, 2016, p. 6)

The form and voice of the thesis are distinctive not least in being informal and personal in a way the others reviewed aren’t.

In practice the thesis is based on a series of 5 monographs (publications associated with solo exhibitions) plus two pieces in Journals. However Sinclair articulates another version of the ‘Prior Publication’ writing,

“…the published evidence of its public dissemination via diverse heterogeneous outputs: starting with the tattoo, then the photograph, the cover of a magazine, the performances, the multiples, the exhibitions, the interventions, the t-shirt paintings, the installations, the dialogue, the hybrid sculptures, the physical structures, the songs, the paintings, the live music, the diverse contexts, the cd’s, the neon signs, the galleries, the shops, the streets, the posters, the records, the billboards, the conversations, the arguments, the planning, the travelling, the meetings, the fund-raising, the talks, the teaching, the publications and finally this submission of Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Work.”
(Sinclair, 2016, p. 29)

Sinclair provides an overview of the context in which the Real Life Project emerged, including the significance of the Artist Placement Group manifesto and the rubric ‘The context is half the work’ to the Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art, as well as the strange status of Glasgow negotiating it’s post-industrial future. There is a self-reflexivity in this thesis that is sometimes complex to unpack. The historicization of the practice started as early as 1994 when Sinclair created the Museum of Despair in a shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and offered the detritus of 5 years’ practice for sale. From artist as flea market to artist as Co-Investigator in an AHRC funded project investigating the context in which the artist emerged (The Glasgow Miracle, Materials for Alternative Histories, 2012-13).

Sinclair positions the tattoo as a key sign, needing to be, “…traversed along the critical ley lines of Debord / de Certeau / Baudrillard / Barthes / Borges / Eco…” (Sinclair, 2016, p. 33). It acts as the pivot of his analysis, raising a series of issues including the understanding of signs, the relationship between the art world and commerce, the relationship between the artist and the spectator.

He also positions it ‘spatially’ in relation to the concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, suggesting that the works, in part because they are centred around his unstable presence, “My character is an active performer, everyman, an individual, confused living human presence, e Pluribus Unum: but a member of the public too.” (Sinclair, 2016, p. 35).

Sinclair juxtaposes his own articulation with a significant body of quotation, including key citations which speak to his thinking (in addition to those noted above, Lefebvre), but also texts by leading curators (Archer, Brown, Gillick, Mulholland, Richardson, Verwoert) that reference, interpret and position the Real Life Project. His use of de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ both reminds us of the positioning of the individual and the positioning of the institution, providing Sinclair with the opportunity to explore the ways in which the Real Life Project is positioned adjacent to the audience (but perhaps still at the behest of the institution – not least as a teacher in Higher Education undertaking a PhD by Prior Publication). He highlights the changing relationship with audience as the individual outings for the Real Life Project increasingly open themselves up to participation by audiences. Sinclair turns to the discourse of socially engaged art (Bishop, Kester, et al), positioning his work in a Brechtian space of critical distance through presenting the audience with disruptive situations. In the end Sinclair is seeking to distinguish the Practice-led researcher from the critic and art historian, and claiming value in the artists’ voice (a theme in Lacy’s PhD too).

That being said, Sinclair is right to highlight the significance of the sequence of publications as a key part of the Real Life Project and a significant body of constructed (self) understanding and (self) construction. He concludes by suggesting that the Real Life Project demonstrates Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic mode of existence, “The publications reflect the rhizomatic evolution of the RLP and articulate the contribution made to contemporary art-practice in Scotland, UK, and internationally over two decades via the medium of a single-authored practice-led project that could be characterised as organic, research-led, horizontal, non hierarchical and dialogic.” (Sinclair, 2016, p. 61). The Rückenfigur of Caspar David Friedrich is central to the conception of the Real Life Project, and the modalities of Romanticism, particularly in terms of the authority of the individual, even if only to be tactical are inscribed throughout this thesis.

In relation to the concern to understand structure and approach, voice and positioning, the Real Life Project is distinctive, partly as the most carefully designed of all the examples, but also because of the particular self-referentiality, the curious Beuysian totality, even gestamkunstwerk, of the project. The lack of any reference to Beuys (or Kaprow whose Blurring of Art and Life should surely have featured as a key text) is curious.

Nicola Triscott

Triscott’s thesis addresses 5 projects from 2010 to 2016 across a range of contexts, including outer space. The portfolio supporting the thesis includes 5 exhibitions and a public monument; 3 books associated with various of these projects including 3 authored chapters; a chapter in a collection; and a conference paper. Triscott includes a detailed breakdown of outputs from each project. In this she identifies her various roles including curator, co-curator, editor, author. She highlights the role of writing in the formats noted above as well as in a blog (Triscott, 2017, p. 28).

The focus of Triscott’s thesis is three-fold:

curatorial practice;
interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary art, critical art;
the global/planetary commons.

Her three research questions all raise issues in curatorial practice.

The second key term for Triscott is ‘interdisciplinary’ She briefly unpacks histories associated with the development of thinking and practice in response to specialisation in the sciences. She reflects on her own process of developing ‘multi-disciplinary expertise, listing what she describes as, “…basic knowledge of areas of science and technology (such as synthetic biology, genetic engineering, biodiversity studies, and climate change research), outer space systems and policy, as well as current debates in areas such as STS, cultural and political geography, and international governance.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 28).

The third key concept Triscott invokes is ‘planetary commons’. Here she is referring to not merely the legal definition of global commons (“…the high seas (including the frozen Arctic ocean), the atmosphere, Antarctica and outer space…” Triscott, 2017, p. 19). She seeks to focus on in her words,

“…the planetary turn in the arts and social humanities … to redirect the emphasis of inquiry from governance, with its systems of regulation, to stewardship, the notion of responsible use and protection, as well as allowing greater consideration of non-human actants (other species, objects).”
(Triscott, 2017, p. 19)

In this Triscott is not suggesting that the art needs to address the planetary scale but that art is increasingly engaged with issues which affect the planet in different ways in different places – that there are common concerns including outer space, the Arctic, biodiversity and scientific knowledge (all aspects of the projects discussed).

Triscott positions herself as contributing to the reconfiguring understanding of curating as a practice, and to the development of the understanding of research in curating from a practice-led perspective (as opposed to for instance as an art historical endeavour, a more traditional frame for research in curating). Triscott references Dewey (as does Lacy) in her argument for experience-based understandings of knowing and knowledge. She argues that, “This curatorial knowledge takes two main forms: curatorial knowledge from the projects and knowledge about broader curatorial methodologies and frameworks.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 20). She unpacks forms of knowledge (informational and transformational) and approaches to curatorial practice (active, dialogic, critical interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, experimental institutional, experiential/ performative). Triscott brings Science and Technologies Studies (STS), drawing on Stengers and Latour, to bear on her curatorial practice involving artists with scientists and other disciplines. She provides a nuanced reading of concepts such as collaboration and cooperation. In doing this she is both articulating her practice and also articulating her understanding of research and method.

She carefully positions the challenges arising from the approach she has developed, saying, “The overarching aims of these inquiries are to co-create knowledge and foster new forms of cultural production. These transdisciplinary inquiries are not separate from the distribution and display aspects of art.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 25). This in turn raises challenges both in relation to curatorial practice, which is still largely understood as a monologic endeavour, and also in relation to academic research, where she points out that the ‘Principal Investigator’ is still the normative and institutionalised way of working. She draws on Heron and Reason’s articulation of co-inquiry to inform her curatorial and interdisciplinary practice and to clarify where her practice is different.

Section 2 provides a Contextual Review of her three key issues, exploring curatorship in relation to institutional developments in the UK and Europe from the 1990s leading into developments in curating interdisciplinarity including discussions of various configurations and constructions. This in turn leads into a discussion of art-science initiatives and the need for criticality, particularly in relation to assumptions or claims of the authoritative world view of science, or the universal applicability of its methods (again drawing on Latour, Stengers and Haraway). She then turns to ‘planetary commons’ and juxtaposes it with Anthropocene as a framing for addressing current challenges, arguing that the latter term, “…fails to orientate us towards the type of change that is needed to transform the political economies of extraction, consumption and inequality that underpin the catastrophe and that spread its impact unevenly.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 48). Triscott’s provides a detailed discussion of the modalities and significance of commons and its reemergence as a critical concept since the 1990s. Combined with planetarity (as opposed to globalisation), the concept of commons forms the grounds for the interdisciplinary curatorial practice under discussion.

In her conclusion Triscott argues that the model she has developed through her practice over 10 years can be understood through three concepts, all drawn from or related to STS thinking. She is focused on ‘matters of concern’ (Latour), seeks the co-production of knowledge, and this is achieved through ‘an ecology of practices’ (Stengers), which she further elaborates.

Discussion

Reflecting across the four examples, Ross Sinclair’s thesis (2016) is perhaps the most leftfield in part because the practice he has developed over 20 years, the Real Life Project, is from the outset historicised and self-reflexive in itself. ‘Real life’ is constantly in question and the thesis adds another layer of how ‘real life’ can be art (or in this case Practice-led research). The discussion of publication (even including the ‘REAL LIFE’ tattoo itself) and the attention Sinclair has given to publication within his practice is valuable.

All four comprise different combinations of journal articles and book chapters alongside projects captured through documentation (as noted above). Lacy and Sinclair in particular include materials such as video, and Triscott includes a public monument created by artists where her role was curator (i.e. not primary originator).

Each addresses theory (as noted above); the context and development of the practice; as well as methodology, both in the sense of the methods used in assembling the thesis, as well as the methods used in the practice and outputs.

All four specifically address the voice of the practitioner, and the value of practice-led research as a means of opening up the knowledge of the practitioner to others. The importance of knowing how to create, techne, alongside theory and knowledge of acting, of understanding other human beings, phronesis, is widely explored within the literature of practice-led research (cf Coessens, Crispin and Douglas, 2009, p. 76-8).

This approach allows the practitioner to reflect on their own intentions and the ways in which they had to adapt in relation to the ‘resistances’ of the world. If we accept Duchamp’s analysis in The Creative Act (Duchamp, 1957), in which he articulates the relationship between the artist’s intention and the spectators’ experience, then the practitioner cannot attempt to address the significance of the work to posterity. That is the realm of the spectator. However the practitioner can speak to their understanding of ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’

Douglas, reflecting as Supervisor on Lacy’s PhD, highlights this key purpose, “…Suzanne embarked on the research to deepen her own understanding of what it takes to practise well, with quality, in public life. She was seeing many poor examples of practice. She wanted to explore this work through the experience and voice of the artist because the artist had the deepest knowledge of what was involved in producing the work.” Douglas, 2016, p. 4). Douglas goes on to say, “Suzanne’s approach to critical reflection and analysis was simultaneously performative and pedagogical.” (2016, p. 5). She reflects, “In this PhD – and this is perhaps unusual – she was simultaneously ‘research student’ and mentor to us in learning what the practice could be along with figuring out an appropriate way of researching it.” (2016, p. 5). This opens up aspects of practice-led research which arise from the combination of reflection and theorisation, as well as the context and complexity of working with established practitioners.

Reviewing these theses in particular has informed the structure and voice I am adopting. Lacy, Donald and Triscott all raise issues of collaboration and multi-authorship in various relevant ways which are relevant to my own work. This review has enabled me to better understand how to contextualise the various contributions in my outputs as well as provided me with a sense of how my work sits in relation to others undertaking similar exercises.

Notes

* Prof Emeritus Anne Douglas oversaw a significant number of PhDs including by established practitioners (Goto-Collins, 2012; Chu, 2013; Smith, 2015; Gausden, 2016; Price, 2016).

References

COESSENS, K., CRISPIN, D., and DOUGLAS, A., 2009. The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Leuven: University of Leuven Press.

DOUGLAS, A. 2016. Practice-led research and improvisation in post modern culture. Presented as part of the docARTES: crossing borders programme, 26 February 2016, Ghent, Belgium. Available from: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/246562/practice-led-research-and-improvisation-in-post-modern-culture

DUCHAMP, M., 1957. The Creative Act. [online] available from: https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/aspen/mp3/duchamp1.mp3

DONALD, M., 2014. Exploring human/environment interdependencies through critical spatial practice. PhD by Published Work, University of Glasgow. Available from: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4932/

LACY, S. 2013. Imperfect art: working in public: a case study of the Oakland Projects (1991-2001). Robert Gordon University, PhD Thesis. Available from: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/240070/imperfect-art-working-in-public-a-case-study-of-the-oakland-projects-1991-2001

LACY, S., 1994. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press.

SINCLAIR, R., 2016. Ross Sinclair: 20 Years of Real Life. PhD by Published Work, The Glasgow School of Art. Available from: http://radar.gsa.ac.uk/4817/

TRISCOTT, N., 2017. Art and Intervention in the Stewardship of the Planetary Commons: Towards a Curatorial Model of Co-inquiry. PhD by Published Work, University of Westminster. Available from: https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/e987be50137cb09003ed3c4c525f7a6861a50d7373417d8fcb3c4633ef08e4eb/7743765/Triscott_Nicola_thesis.pdf

Tagged with: Anne Douglas, Gray's School of Art, Minty Donald, Nicola Triscott, on the edge, PhD by Public Output, ross sinclair, Suzanne Lacy

https://www.conjunctions-tjcp.com//issue/view/8832

‘Failures in Cultural Participation’ new issue of Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation

Posted in Failure, Research by chrisfremantle on October 4, 2020

“This special issue of Conjunctions is edited by Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson. It explores how cultural participation policies, projects, and practices could be improved through recognising the pervasiveness of past failures. The issue thereby attempts to challenge existing narratives of unqualified success by offering alternative narratives that consider failure from different perspectives and at different points in the design and implementation of cultural participation policies and projects. In doing so it highlights the extent to which success and failure coexist and the richness of insight that comes from considering both. This matters because it is only such open and honest critical reflection that has the potential to facilitate the social learning needed for those who can exert the most power in the cultural sector to acknowledge the extent of the structural change required for cultural participation to be supported more equitably.”

Published: 2020-10-02

Tagged with: collaboration, Failure, participation, participatory

Failures: Mental Furniture Industry Externalities

Posted in Failure, Research by chrisfremantle on August 12, 2020

The following failed as a proposal for a Flattime House Delta Research Residency.

ecoartscotland library as bing #1 (2016) digital image (published in Performance Research)

Statement of Interest

Latham offers a radical critique of ‘knowledge production’ linking the Mental Furniture Industry (MFI) with waste landscapes. During his Scottish Office Placement he reimagined the ‘bings’ (spoil heaps from the shale oil industry) which dominate the Lothian landscape as ‘monuments to our time’ and wrote to various authorities seeking their protection. In the ‘newspaper’ publication for his Fruitmarket exhibition of 1976 he explicitly links the bings with another of his key concerns – the MFI. The bings are an indication of his conception of the scale of the MFI, both in temporal as well as spatial terms.

Latham’s conception of MFI raises questions about production: about the waste produced, but also of caretaking, which is often overlooked. Care is a process, or in Latham’s terms an event. Care has two aspects. Firstly it requires attention to all forms and dimensions – mental, social, environmental. Secondly care is about extending life. Some have been legally protected. They do evolve over time. Latham’s reframing of them as ‘monuments to our time’ is apt as they have become biodiversity hotspots in monocultural landscapes.

ecoartscotland’s library, comprising books, DVDs, etc., is mobile in order to interact with practitioners and projects in specific contexts. It is related to the Martha Rosler Library and Nils Norman’s Geocruiser. However, if it is understood as a manifestation of the MFI, then it is necessary to test the relationship between the library and the bing. Is the library a form of waste from a process of accumulating cultural capital? Or, as with the bings, can it support the emergence of a diverse ecosystem?

The Delta Research Placement will provide a period of focused attention on the materiality of the MFI as manifest in the both analogue and digital forms. The Ligatus Archive will be mined as a resource, both for further understanding of the MFI and bings, but also as a visual material source. FTHo as a live/work space will be investigated with a particular focus on waste and care.

Latham’s methods of working, such as collage and stop motion animation, will be used to appropriate the results of research into new forms with the support of the digital producers. Further analogue and digital experiments with the materials of ecoartscotland and FTHo (and potentially the Tate and other sources) will be undertaken.

Two specific areas of investigation are currently envisaged. Experiments to date have taken the Moodiesburn bing, the simplest form (reverse and tip), as a model. The ‘Five Sisters’ offers a more complex formal model to investigate, and the ‘Niddrie Woman’ a massive improvised model. These experiments have resulted in temporary arrangements of books as well as collaged images. Secondly the time base of the Ligatus Archive will be taken as a starting point for investigation in juxtaposition with the ‘plan and elevation’ of the bings as objects. ‘Reverse and tip’ will be explored as a literal and metaphorical process.

The contribution to the new digital platform will consider the issue of waste and the emergence of diversity.

*ecoartscotland library as bing #2* (2018) digital image

Artist’s Statement

I am an arts worker. I work as a producer, lecturer, researcher, writer and artist. In 2010
I established ecoartscotland as a platform for ongoing relational work, growing and connecting the community of people interested in this form of hybrid practice. ecoartscotland has various aspects: events, exhibitions and publishing. It includes the mobile library.

My practice involves a dynamic and iterative relationship between research and practice. A consistent theme is the reuse of visual and conceptual strategies.

I have an ongoing interest in exploring failure as part of a creative process. The development of ecoartscotland library as bing (2016) came from the rejection of a more conventional proposal to represent it in a compilation on artists’ libraries. Reading the catalogue essays from Mental Furniture Industry (2013) led to reconsidering the library as material through various analogue experiments and digital manifestations. This is in line with other in-progress projects including Calendar Variations, a drawing project which explores changes of state (wet to dry, living to dead).

Building on extensive research and producer work with the Harrisons (Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison) I, with colleagues, have recently presented readings from their works. This reuse-to-keep-alive raises questions regarding re-presentation and re-performance which are rarely explored in the visual arts.

I am employed part-time as a Research Fellow and Lecturer at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University. I am a contributor to the Mental Furniture Industry (MFI) through being an ‘active researcher’ with targets for publishing and impact.

I live in Ayr in South West Scotland. This opportunity to work remotely with FTHo and the Archive would provide invaluable time to develop experimental work.

*ecoartscotland library as bing #3* (2020) digital image

Here is the announcement of what was selected http://flattimeho.org.uk/projects/ftho-news/delta-d-research-placement/

Tagged with: bings, Flattime House, john latham, mental furniture industry, mfi

Abstract: The Hope of Something Different

Posted in CF Writing, News, PhD, Research, Sited work by chrisfremantle on July 12, 2020

Educational theorist Gert Biesta proposes that we need to be ‘in the world, without occupying the centre of the world’ (2017 3). This injunction provides a frame with which to interrogate the hybrid practice of ecoart. This practice can be characterised by a concern for the relations of living things to each other, and to their environments. Learning in order to be able to act is critical. One aspect is collaboration with experts (whether those are scientists and environmental managers or inhabitants, including more-than-human). Another is building ‘commons’ and shared understanding being more important than novelty. Grant Kester has argued that there is an underlying paradigm shift in ‘aesthetic autonomy’, underpinned by a ‘trans-disciplinary interest in collective knowledge production’. (2013 np). This goes beyond questions of interdisciplinarity and its variations to raise more fundamental questions of agency. Drawing on the work of key practitioner/researchers (eg Jackie Brookner (1945-2015); Collins and Goto Studio, Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b 1932)) and theorists (Kester, Kagan) the meaning and implications of not ‘occupying the centre of the world’ will be explored as a motif for an art which can act in public space.

Biesta, G. 2017. Letting Art Teach: Art education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press.

Fremantle, C., 2015. ‘The hope of something different’. In A restless art: thinking about community and participatory art [online] https://arestlessart.com/2015/12/17/chris-fremantle-the-hope-of-something-different/

Fremantle, C. 2015. ‘Art and Ecology’ in Interesting Times: Environmental Art Festival Scotland. Dumfries: EAFS.

Kagan, S., 2013. Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity. 2nd Edition. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Kagan, S., 2014. “The Practice of Ecological Art”, Plastik: Art & Science, http://art-science.univ-paris1.fr/plastik/document.php?id=866

Kester, G., 2013. “On Collaborative Art Practices”, Praktyka Teoretyczna, http://www.praktykateoretyczna.pl/granth-kester-on-collaborative-art-practices/ accessed 7.12. 2015

Published: ‘What if?’ Introduction for North Light Arts 10 Year exhibition

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research, Sited work by chrisfremantle on July 9, 2020

North Light Arts kindly asked me to write a short piece by way of an introduction to their 10 year exhibition.

Gert Biesta proposes that we need to be,

…in the world, without occupying the centre of the world.

Whilst Biesta credits this idea to a French Educational Philosopher, Philippe Meirieu, Meirieu’s comments seem to be in the context of the classroom, and Biesta certainly uses the phrase in a larger sense, as part of what it means to be educated (see in particular Letting Art Teach: Art education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys, ArtEZ Press, 2017).

But for me this phrase speaks to an ecological understanding, or even ‘becoming earthly’ (in Latour’s sense). Ecological approaches to art are distinctive – they ask us to re-imagine our relationship with the world, as part of it, with art being not simply a human commodity or communication. Rather art is potentially a way to experience and understand the livingness and agency of the world, to share experiences with the more-than-human.

North Light Arts, under Susie Goodwin’s leadership, have put myriad aspects of the environment of the East Coast town of Dunbar as the focus of artists’ residencies.

John Muir, mostly known for his key role in the creation of the National Parks in the USA (remember the 1903 picture of him with Theodore Roosevelt on the top of the world?), was born in Dunbar. He provides North Light Arts and Susie in particular with inspiration. Muir is remembered for saying,

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

Tagged with: Gert Biesta, John Muir, Joseph Beuys, North Light Arts

Published: Improvising as a method in the time of Covid-19

Posted in Arts & Health, CF Writing, News, Research by chrisfremantle on July 7, 2020

The Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance kindly published some thoughts on artists and improvisation, drawn from the writings of Professor Emeritus Anne Douglas and the work of Dr Chris Dooks.

This came out of a discussion during a meeting of arts and health networks (WAHWN (Wales), ArtsCare (Northern Ireland) and ACHWS (Scotland), as well as APPG AHW and CHWA (England). We were talking about how artists were adapting to continue to work with various communities, not only shifting online, but also finding new analogue ways.

Improvising provides a different way of thinking from statistics and modelling, which have dominated the news and discussions certainly since lockdown, but actually well before that, and in other discourses such as the climate crisis too. ‘Improvising’ can also be a critique of politicians, but where artists are doing it, the approaches are tested methods, not on-the-fly half-baked patches.

Thanks to Anne Douglas for her comments and Chris Dooks for allowing use of his work.

Tagged with: Improvisation, Improvising

Failure talks

Posted in CF Writing, Failure, Research, Uncategorized by chrisfremantle on April 26, 2020

A recurring theme has been failure. This has resulted in publications (paper in iJade written with Dr Gemma Kearney, Business School, Robert Gordon University) and talks (principally for the Scottish Graduate School in Arts and Humanities Summer School 2016-18 presented with Elizabeth Reeder, Creative Writing, University of Glasgow).

Recently I’ve prepared the talk in four segments which can be watched online.

Pt 1 focuses on the prescriptions and fables that surround failure. Pt 2 draws on the research Gemma Kearney and I did into Gray’s School of Art staff perceptions of failure in their own practices and teaching. Pt 3 draws on Elizabeth Reeder’s talk for the Summer School as well as on Gert Biesta’s art pedagogy to discuss methods and desires. Pt 4 highlights some of the references and discusses them briefly.

Tagged with: Elizabeth Reeder, Gemma Kearney, iJade, International Journal of Art and Design Education, Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities, SGSAH

The Art of a Life Adapting, published in Leonardo

Posted in Arts & Health, CF Writing, News, Research, Texts, Uncategorized by chrisfremantle on March 10, 2020

‘Drawing 2016’, pen (Sharpie), found object, sculptural object, 2016. (Photo: Fergus Connor)

Statement ‘The Art of a Life Adapting: Drawing and Healing’ just published in Leonardo Vol 53 No 1. You can find an earlier version here. Drawings are here.

There is a lot of talk about adaptation in relation to the climate crisis, but there is also an increasing recognition that cancer survival rates mean that a larger proportion of the population is and will be living with the long term consquences of cancer treatment. This has been highlighted by the EU Horizon programme, “The EU has already placed the needs of survivors as one of the key pillars of its Beating Cancer Plan and has now launched a consultation aimed at identifying where research is needed most.” (‘Treating cancer is only part of the journey’: the overlooked needs of cancer survivors, online.)

The role of arts and cultural practices, as well as approaches to understanding adaptation conceptually and practically, all need further consideration (see recent blog on climate adaptation). We know arts & culture has multiple contributions to make, including:

offering forms of autonomy in palliative care, as explored in the ‘Tracing Autonomy’ project by Prof. Ben Colburn of University of Glasgow, Jeni Pearson and Kirsty Stansfield of the Art Room in the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow.
playing a role in ’emotional regulation’ (Daisy Fancourt’s recent research provides significant evidence), but there are also issues around ‘uncertainty’ which also connect climate-related adaptation with cancer-related adaptation.
opening up ways of ‘living with uncertainty’, which medics recognise as an important part of their professional practice, but is equally significant for patients.

Tagged with: adaptation, arts & culture, cancer, EU Horizon, health, practice-led, Research, survivor

Adaptation and failure

Posted in CF Writing, Failure, Research, Uncategorized by chrisfremantle on February 3, 2020

Harrisons-South-Gallery-Installation-view-3-2009

Greenhouse Britain installed at the Feldman Gallery in New York City

Ten years ago I was working with the Harrisons on Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. They insistently focused on ‘adaptation’ although Defra, who were funding the work, wanted the focus on ‘mitigation’. Now public policy is addressing adaptation (cf Climate Ready Clyde) as well as the Cultural Adaptation project (which I’m helping to evaluate as part of my work as a Research Fellow at Gray’s School of Art).

Mitigation is easier to plan and measure. How much reduction in carbon dioxide emissions has this initiative achieved?

Adaptation might be based on strengthening infrastructure and systems, but the shape of the challenge is timescale for knowing whether it has worked or not – this might be a decade?

So understanding what failure means in this context is important. In particular the challenge is that methods and approaches with known outcomes can seem attractive (less likely to fail) but can only deliver what is already understood. Embracing change must mean also embracing failure as a possibility.

The voices speaking as the projection of sea-level rise onto the island of Britain plays out ask,

Will it be enough?

As the most extreme model suggests
to halt the juggernaut of the ocean
if carbon use is stopped
almost all at once
almost all over
in the next 10 years?

Later they ask,

Would it be enough?

To begin now
a transglobal discourse in which
the Global Domestic Output
is discussed
agreeing all efforts be directed to commit
1% of the Global Domestic Product
to the reduction of the carbon surge
to near zero
in order to reduce
the ocean rise?

And again later,

Would it be enough?

to transcend economic thinking
and begin creating
a domain
of ecological thinking
that regenerates
the great carbon-sequestering
world systems
that operate in the forests
and the oceans
while leaving
ancient carbon stored
as coal and oil
in their present inactive states?

This repeating pattern of ‘will it…?’ / ‘would it be enough?’ asks about how we imagine risk of the unknown, risk of failure.

The issue of failure and why it matters in experimental projects is explored in this blog from the Cultural Adaptations project (including more on failure from previous publications).

Tagged with: Cultural Adaptation, Failure, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, method

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5818-8208

Enrolled as a p/t student for PhD by Public Output

Posted in CF Writing, CV, PhD, Research by chrisfremantle on October 14, 2019

Abstract

There is increasing interest in the contribution that the arts can make to the major challenges facing researchers, policy makers and societies more generally. Artists are included within multi-disciplinary teams addressing environmental research subjects (amongst others). Hybrid practices such as art and ecology (‘ecoart’) have established themselves at the intersection of disciplines, adopting approaches from the environmental sciences into arts practices. These practices are often situated within the broad category of Environmental Humanities, however there are distinctive aspects, particularly around the orientation towards collaboration which means that ecoart has a specific contribution to make.

The research, in opening up the specific contribution artists can make to public life, as well as their development of hybrid practices through collaborations with other disciplines, addresses a number of important challenges identified by policy makers. These can be broadly characterised as ‘wicked problems’, problems beyond the scope of any single discipline. This includes in particular global warming: sea level rise, heatwave and biodiversity loss. Other ‘wicked problems’ include healthcare (and specific conditions including cancer and dementia), social injustice, and natural hazards.

The articulation of the contribution, approaches and effects of artists to and within multi-disciplinary teams is key to growing an interdisciplinary culture to address ‘wicked problems’. Clear articulation of how artists’ work works both in terms of the process of development, particularly when it involves collaboration with other disciplines, and well as how it works with audiences and participants, is critical to the realisation of a meaningful contribution.

Practice-led approaches, including live projects as well as reflecting on exemplary practices, provide means to open up and discuss both the contribution made by artists as well as the interactions with other disciplines – the forms of inter- and transdisciplinarity that artists ‘bring to the table’.

Drawing on more than 10 years of work, this PhD brings together outputs including Chapters and Papers on the work of pioneers of the art and ecology movement, Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932); live project work as Producer on their key project ‘Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom’ (2006-09) and currently as Associate Producer on ‘The Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland’. In addition to opening up the approaches of the artists to creating the works and their approaches to collaboration with other disciplines, the research discusses the utilisation of key questions that shape the design process in other contexts including public art in healthcare settings. The discussion of collaboration and inter- and trans-disciplinary work is informed by Chapters and Papers addressing another live project, the Land Art Generator Glasgow initiative, as well as reflections on issues of participation and collaboration.

Tagged with: collaboration, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, interdisciplinarity, participation, PhD

‘Disciplinarity and Peripheries’ at Gray’s Research Conference

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research, Texts by chrisfremantle on September 29, 2019

‘Peripheries’, Gray’s Research Conference, takes place on Friday 4th October. I’ll be presenting on disciplinarity and it’s edges.

Abstract:

By analogy disciplines are a form of ‘centre’ and work across disciplines involves focusing on edges. Some people conceptualise disciplines to have ‘near’ and ‘far’ relations i.e. visual art is ‘near’ art history and ‘far’ from environmental modelling. Gavin Little talks about radical and moderate saying,

“The radical variant involves scholars working across major discipline boundaries—such as theatre and environmental science—while the moderate one takes place between scholars in intellectually cognate disciplines such as law and policy, philosophy and religious studies, politics and history, or visual arts and media.” (Little 2017, 6).

Murdo Macdonald quotes George Davie’s The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect saying,

“…the most important side of any department of knowledge is the side on which it comes into contact with every other department. To insist on this is the true function of humanism.” (Macdonald nd, np)

Disciplines certainly don’t sit tightly next to each other and there are definitely gaps between them – we only need to think about the rationale for ‘multi-disciplinary teams’ in ensuring that these gaps are addressed and acknowledged in for example healthcare between clinical, nursing and other health professionals. Nicolescu goes further and argues that the ‘space’ between disciplines is full with an “information flux” (much as geographical peripheries are full). (Nicolescu 1993, 6)

This conceptualisation also raises interesting analogies in the other direction, including the possibility that attention to linking two ‘centres’ can produce, in the ‘periphery’, a new centre. The interdisciplinary developments between biology and chemistry resulted in due course in the emergence of bio-chemistry as a new discipline (and thus a new ‘centre’).

One of the abiding ‘disciplinary’ debates is whether the objective is synthesis and holism – is the objective to produce centres or even one totalising centre? Or is it as Murdo Macdonald, following George Davie, suggests about specialisations (centres),

“But it also creates blindspots, eddies of ignorance in epistemological space, which can only be perceived from another perspective. This is interesting from our perspective here because it shifts the emphasis of interdisciplinarity from the purloining of other disciplines’ methods in the hope that you can apply them within your own discipline, to illuminating, by the methods of one’s own discipline, what those other disciplines may be methodologically unable to access.” (Macdonald nd, np)

This presentation will be a meditation on the issues of disciplinarity as a spending time with edges and differences, drawing on the writings of Basarab Nicolescu (multi-, inter- trans-disciplinarity), Gavin Little (proximity and distance), and Murdo Macdonald & George Davie (the Scottish tradition of the Democratic Intellect).

References

Little, G. 2017. ‘Connecting Environmental Humanities: Developing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Method’. Humanities, 6(4), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6040091

Macdonald, M. 2007. A Note on Interdisciplinarity. https://www.academia.edu/39621092/A_Note_on_Interdisciplinarity.1

Nicolescu, B. 1993. Towards Transdisciplinary Education. Invited talk at the International Conference Education of the Future, Memorial da America Latina, Parlamento Latinoamericano, Sao Paulo, Brazil, October 4-8.

Nicolescu, B. 1997. The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University Condition for Sustainable Development. Talk at the International Congress Universities’ Responsibilities to Society, International Association of Universities, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, November 12-14, http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b12c8.php

Tagged with: Basarab Nicolescu, co-creativity, collaboration, Democratic Intellect, Gavin Little, George Davie, interdisciplinarity, murdo macdonald, participation, participatory, transdisciplinarity

Abstract: A Funeral March for Economic Valuation

Posted in Maintenance, News, Research by chrisfremantle on September 24, 2019

Accepted for the Valuing Nature Conference at the end of October
This presentation will explore the various ways that we can think about ecosystems that are degraded or dying and how this relates to questions of economic valuation – what does it mean to attribute a monetary value to the Great Barrier Reef, apparently a significant asset for the Australian economy when the Reef by all accounts will be at least three quarters dead within a generation or two?
Drawing on the work of artists who have raised issues of care and maintenance including Mierle Laderman Ukeles and theorists such as Tim Morton, the presentation will juxtapose articulations of economic valuation (eg bees and the Great Barrier Reef) with creative approaches to death and dying. The aim of the presentation is not to offer a solution, method or answer, but rather to evoke the contradictions inherent in thinking about environment.

Tagged with: economics, Funeral March, valuation

What art have I seen? Placing Sound

Posted in Exhibitions, On The Edge, Research by chrisfremantle on July 25, 2019

Maja Zeco performing her work ‘Hold In/Breathe Out’

Maja Zeco opened her exhibition ‘Placing Sound’ at Gray’s School of Art where she is just completing her practice-led PhD with a performance of her work ‘Hold In/Breathe Out’. This work might be a meditation on the experience of immersing yourself in everyday life and stepping out into perhaps your own mind, or in some sense private space. Zeco filled a large bowl with water and as she immersed her head completely in the water, triggered a soundscape of an urban environment with associated imagery. As she came back out of the water about 30 seconds later she ended the audio imagery. She breathed in silence. Her urban included images of streets and buildings and I’m pretty sure I saw an artillery piece.

Spead across three rooms, this exhibition represents nearly 10 years of work exploring sound and performance. One room is quartered and composed of sounds from the North East of Scotland (Aberdeen and Banchory) and from Bosnia Herzegovina where Zeco was born. Voices and bird song, trees and traffic all layer over each other drawing you to different points in the room as different elements come forward.

The middle room has video and physical documentation of two performance works. In one case, One Thousand Pomegranate Seeds’ bringing the action in the video into another form of presence with the physical evidence of the event in front of you whilst watching its making. Below is the promo video from Horsecross, Perth, where the work was originally performed.

The first room you encounter (I started with the last) again brings together different forms of documentation, physical remains and video, of performance – in this case ‘Silencer’ and in another part of the room the space in which Zeco performed ‘Hold In/Breathe Out’.

What counts as ‘impact’?

Posted in Failure, Research by chrisfremantle on March 11, 2019

Does an email citing a published ‘output’ inviting you to submit papers and join an editorial board of a new Journal count as impact?

I’m asking this because I regularly get emails mentioning the paper Gemma Kearney and I had published in the International Journal of Art and Design Education which, according to Google Scholar, is the 3rd highest rate Visual Art Journal.

I’ve pasted a typical email in below.

The paper, Owning Failure, has been cited three times (again according to Google Scholar), but I’ve had countless emails about it.

Other papers are more frequently cited, but this is the only paper ever mentioned in these invitations.

So good Journal, low citations, lots of soliciting emails… is that any sort of impact?
From: Journal AJAC
Sent: 08 March 2019 07:37:13 (UTC+00:00) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London
To: Christopher Fremantle (gsa)
Subject: Dear Fremantle, C; Kearney, G: Invite You to Submit Papers and Be Editorial Board/Reviewer Panel Member

International Journal of Literature and Arts
(ISSN Print:2331-0553 ISSN Online: 2331-057X)
Open Access Policy (OA) Peer-review 50-70 Days Paper Publication
[http://img.literarts.org/logo /w523582388996.png]<http://www.literarts.org/home>
Dear Fremantle, C; Kearney, G
International Journal of Literature and Arts (IJLA) is a peer-reviewed academic journal, establishing a solid platform to all academicians, practicing managers, consultants, researchers and those who have interest in emerging global trends in literature and arts.
Having been greatly attracted by your paper titled “Owning Failure: Insights Into the Perceptions and Understandings of Art Educators”, we wholeheartedly invite you to submit papers and join the Editorial Panel/Reviewer Team.
Become the Editorial Board Member/Reviewer
We have been dedicated to building IJLA into a world’s top journal. Well-known experts are cordially welcomed to join the Editorial Board/Reviewers Panel.
Have any interests of joining the Editorial Board/Reviewers Panel?
Please find more here: http://www.literarts.org/joinu s
Advantages of Joining the Editorial Board/Reviewers Panel:

1. Quickly improve your perceptibility in your research fields.
2. Get cutting-edge materials on latest scientific discoveries.
3. Authoritative certification in PDF format launched by the editorial office.
4. Have your personal profile listed on the journal’s page.
5. 10% off of the original APC.

Submitting Your Article
IJLA was launched with the aim of promoting academic communication all over the world in a more productive way.
During the past years, lots of scholars have contributed many papers to the journal. With your contribution, experts from all over the world will achieve more in the process of scholarly research. We invite you with sincerity to contribute other unpublished papers that have similar topics to the journal. Your further research on this article is also welcomed.
If you are interested in submitting a paper, please learn more here:
http://www.literarts.org/submi ssion
Here attached the abstract of your research which has impressed us most:
Title: Owning Failure: Insights Into the Perceptions and Understandings of Art Educators
Keywords: failure; artists; practice-led; pedagogies; learning
Abstract: Failure forms an important dimension of art and design and is inherent in creative endeavours. This article explores current literature on failure in the art and design context and offers a contribution through qualitative research drawing upon interviews with lecturing staff in a UK art school. The findings from this research emphasise the complexity of the concept of failure. Three key themes emerged regarding respondents’ perceptions of failure: failure as a process, as a means of learning and as an issue in assessment culture. This research is exploratory in nature, and whilst the limitations of the small sample are accepted, the article contributes to the dialogue and discussion surrounding the often emotive concept of failure.
Regards,
Margaret Fredricks
Editorial Office of International Journal of Literature and Arts

Tagged with: impact, International Journal of Art and Design Education, REF2021, spam

Transformations 2017

Posted in CV, Research, Texts, Uncategorized by chrisfremantle on June 6, 2017

Abstract for the Transformations 2017 conference in Dundee. Accepted.

ecoart as a practice of understanding the world

In 2007 the artist Eve Mosher drew a line on the streets of New York based on current science indicating the impact of a major storm surge – a hundred-year flood. The line followed the contour 10 feet above sea level. Mosher used a ‘heavy hitter,’ the wheelbarrow-like device used to mark the lines on sports fields. Mosher worked on High Water Line, as she titled the project, on and off for six months, photographing the line as she made it. The context was the noted total lack of discussion of climate change in the City and National elections.

Not long after Hurricane Sandy struck New York in 2012 The New Yorker magazine carried a story (Kolbert) about High Water Line. In the article Mosher is quoted saying, “I wanted to leave this visually interesting mark, to open up a space for conversation…” and goes on to say, “The other part of the project was to try to prod some kind of conversation on a government level.”

Some artists describe what they do as ‘eco-art’ (and themselves as ‘ecoartists’). This neologism is a contraction of “art (or arts) and ecology”. It represents a still emergent form of practice (albeit with a history back to the late 1960s) which is distinctive in several aspects, not least in seeking to ‘do good in the world’.

Key elements of ecoart include a focus on context and a concern with human interaction with ecological systems; the frequency of interdisciplinarity between artists and scientists (natural and social) drawing out the complexity of these ecological interactions; the embedding of dialogue leading to wider learning by others living and working in the context.

These elements, along with more formal considerations of making art, combine to form the aesthetic, the tangible and experiential quality of the work, the focus of judgement by the artists concerned.

Mosher’s High Water Line demonstrates all of these characteristics. The context, New York, is where Mosher lives and the work explores the relationship between the artist, other inhabitants and the immediate ecological systems. The context is also the issue of climate change, and in particular the issue of public discourse at the community and civic levels. Mosher drew on readily available science modelling the increase frequency of storm surges. Mosher was doing a field study of published science, exploring what it ‘looks like on the ground’ and what it means to inhabitants. In terms of formal considerations the work, the use of everyday, non-art equipment and materials, the temporal intervention where ‘the work’ exists in documentation, and the performative and social character situate the work in relation to other artists’ practices. Critiques of this work might ask whether it is a work in its own right, or simply and illustration of existing science? Is it merely an exercise in climate change communications, or an artwork in its own right? A key question is the status of learning, Mosher’s own and her intended audiences, within the work – does if form an essential aspect of the aesthetic of the work?

There has been considerable focus on developing our understanding of the aesthetics of social and participatory practices (Bourriaud 1998, Helguera 2011, Jackson 2011, Kester 2004, 2011), but less attention has been paid to ecoart practice. Specific attempts (Kagan 2011) to explore ecoart as an art engaged with sustainability have drawn on thinking about auto-poesis as well as Gregory Bateson’s writings. Others (Douglas and Fremantle 2016a, 2016b) have focused on the formal aspects that are rooted in what might be called core art practices such as composition and improvisation.

The purpose of this paper will be to propose an understanding of education and learning within the practices of selected ecoartists.

Bourriaud, N. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse du Reel

Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C. 2016. ‘What Poetry Does Best: The Harrisons’ Poetics of Being and Acting in the World’ in Harrison, H.M. and Harrison, N. The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce Is on the Horizon. Prestel, pp 455-460

Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C. 2016. ‘Inconsistency and Contradiction: Lessons in Improvisation in the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’. In Elemental: an Arts and Ecology Reader. The Gaia Project, pp 153-181.

Helguera, P., 2011. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. Jorge Pinto Books

Jackson, S., 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London and New York: Routledge

Kagan, S. 2011. Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity. Transcript Verlag

Kester, G. H., 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Duke University Press

Kester, G. H., 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press

Kolbert, E., Crossing the Line, The New Yorker, November 12, 2012 accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/11/12/crossing-the-line-3, 31 October 2016

Imagining the Mediterranean

Posted in Failure, Research, Texts, Uncategorized by chrisfremantle on June 4, 2017

This abstract was submitted to the Imagining The Mediterranean Congress scheduled for September. Unfortunately it wasn’t accepted.

Science and Cultural Heritage: Transdisciplinary Practices and Artists

Current socio-political contexts are shaped in increasingly complex ways by environmental issues which in turn are informed on the one hand by natural sciences and on the other by cultural factors. There are considerable challenges in adequately integrating specialist scientific perspectives with those from the humanities: yet policies (particularly for change adaptation and resilience) are likely to be much more successful if they take on more holistic approaches.

The intergovernmental Convention on Wetlands, the Ramsar Convention, established to protect the values and functions of wetlands, addresses this challenge through the Ramsar Culture Network. The Network includes interest groups and specialist experts in thematic areas ranging from indigenous knowledge and spiritual values to agriculture and food, youth, tourism, art and architecture.

This paper will focus on the role of artists (a term which will be explained as embracing contemporary practices that may surprise some readers by the variety of scientific and socio-political roles that are played), highlighting key examples of artists involved in wetland biodiversity and related cultural heritage. Some artists choose to engage with non-arts contexts, including projects with scientists, planners, landowners and local communities.

In the immediate Spanish context, artists have been drawn to record and represent Las Tablas de Daimiel, one of the first Ramsar designated wetlands in Spain. In particular Ignacio de Meco whose paintings document the landscape and form an important record of a changing environment (2010).

Lillian Ball’s GO Doñana (2008) project, part of an on-going series based on the game of Go, was an invited part of the International Bienal of Sevilla. As the audience interacted with the projected Go board, each move activated the video/sound viewpoints of scientists, farmers, environmentalists, landowners, and park guides.

In a wider Mediterranean context the artist, biologist and environmental activist Brandon Ballengée has worked with the Parco Arte Vivente in Turin (2011). His ongoing project Malamp, focusing on mutations in amphibians, is pursued throughscientific enquiry, art installations and “eco-actions” involving varied communities in field work.

Further examples include Liz Nicol’s on-going work in the Venice Lagoon and Shai Zakai’s work Concrete Creek (1999-2002) in Israel as well as Jane Ingram Allen’s ongoing Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project.

Some of the strongest impetus for attention to these matters in the Ramsar context has come from initiatives pioneered in the Mediterranean region, and global leadership continues to be provided from this part of the world. The paper will draw out the transdisciplinary characteristics of artists’ practices which address both the cultural and scientific aspects of environmental contexts and policies.

Bibliography

Allen, Jane Ingram. Cheng-Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project. https://artproject4wetland.wordpress.com/about/

Alvarez-Cobelas, M., Cirujano, S. and Meco, A. ‘The Man and Las Tablas de Daimiel’ in Ecology of Threatened Semi-Arid Wetlands: Long-Term Research in Las Tablas de Daimiel. Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York: Springer. 2010

Cravero, Claudio. Praeter Naturam: Brandon Ballengée. Parco Arte Vivente, Centro D’Arte Contemporanea, Torino. 2011.

Culture and Wetlands: A Ramsar Guidance Document. Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, 1971) Culture Working Group. Gland. 2008. http://www.ramsar.org/sites/default/files/documents/library/cop10_culture_group_e.pdf accessed 26 April 2017

Zakai, S. Concrete Creek: Artist’s Statement 1999. http://www.shaizakai.com/text.php?NID=256 accessed 30 April 2017

http://designresearchfailures.com/

Design Research Failures

Posted in Failure, Research by chrisfremantle on October 29, 2016

This project by Soren Rosenbak was developed for the Design Research Society conference 2016 and now has a web site with all the submissions and the opportunity to comment on them.

Interesting as part of the Design Research Society’s 50 year anniversary. Humble. Participatory in the right ways – community building and empowering. Causing of reflection.

Design Research Failure

Posted in Failure, Research by chrisfremantle on August 11, 2016

#fiftyyearsoffailures

What art have I seen? A partial history of the Artist Placement Group

Posted in Exhibitions, Research by chrisfremantle on August 6, 2016

Roger Coward speaking about his Placement with the Department of the Environment in Small Heath, Birmingham

Tagged with: Artist Placement Group, Barbara Steveni

‘On truth, doubts, and pain: The significance of ideas of objectivity’ a contribution by Daniel Goldberg – Centre for Medical Humanities.

‘On truth, doubts, and pain: The significance of ideas of objectivity’ a contribution by Daniel Goldberg – Centre for Medical Humanities

Posted in Arts & Health, Research by chrisfremantle on April 16, 2015

Although this article comes from the Medical Humanities and is tagged for arts & health, it has a wider resonance raising issues around the role of imaging in determining what is real and what is not, what is causal and what is not. Broadly the piece argues that pain is a useful area of research for understanding how ideas of objectivity have emerged. The author argues that, “…the history of objectivity literally is a history of scientific imaging…” and “…profound changes in ideas of truth and knowledge are coextensive with profound changes in ideas of medicine and medical practice.”

Tagged with: arts and health, Imaging, Medical Humanities, Pain

Leicester leads new approach to maternity bereavement services

Posted in Arts & Health, News, Research by chrisfremantle on December 16, 2014

Clear articulation of the design requirements and challenges of user consultation in dealing with dignity from this project in Leicester. Similar issues in New South Glasgow Hospitals’ Dignified Spaces project – you can see creative consultation process and initial design thinking here.

Thinking about failure

Posted in CF Writing, Failure, Research by chrisfremantle on October 24, 2014

Slides of a paper on failure co-authored with Dr Gemma Kearney and presented at the NSEAD/iJade conference in Liverpool.

Tagged with: art, design, Failure, Karl Popper, Lisa Le Feuvre, pedagogy, Richard Branson, Samuel Beckett, Woody Allen

London LASER reflections

Posted in CF Writing, CV, News, Research by chrisfremantle on June 17, 2014

The two other speakers at the London LASER took us on a tour of the edge of two different human experiences.

Los Ferronautas, who are currently working with Arts Catalyst, took us on a journey of exploration of the railroads of Mexico, largely abandoned post the neoliberal-driven privatisation in the mid 90s. An extensive passenger network now lies in ruins because it was not ‘financially viable’. It only provided a means for Mexicans to get around their large and mountainous country. Somehow you know that the automotive industry had something to do with this. Los Ferronautas built a hybrid vehicle (SEFT1), an “abandoned railway exploration probe” that could travel on road and rail, and used this to explore what remains of the network. They found that it also acted as a “transmitter of stories.” In parallel they explored the visual representation of the network including early 20th Century paintings celebrating the engineering (initially exported from Britain and Ireland).

Cristina Miranda de Almeida took us on a journey around our increasing hybridity as the internet of things emerges. She explored the emerging interval space between ‘here and there’, ‘you and me’, the past, present and future, different scales and durations. She started with the beautiful analogy of data emerging from under water (behind a screen) to become part of our everyday lives, quoting Manuel Castells saying that soon computing will be paint on the walls.

For me the real moment of joy was when she show an image of a CAD rendering of a building entitled ‘spam architecture.’ As I’m sure we all have, I’ve notices the ‘flows’ of subject lines in my spam folder and wondered what could be done by exploring the patterns that lie in amongst this waste material. The way Alex Dragulescu has worked with this aspect of ‘big data,’ turning it into a proposal for architecture, put a big smile on my face.

We also had a good, if too short, discussion on multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity which I found really helpful in pushing my thinking further, so thanks to those who asked really good questions. My presentation is below. Thanks again to Heather Barnett for putting the programme together and continuing to make the London LASERs well worth the trip.

MerzBarn

Posted in News, Research, Sited work by chrisfremantle on June 11, 2014

The Chicken Shed near MerzBarn on the Cylinders Estate near Elterwater in the Lake District (Photo Chris Fremantle)

When you visit the MerzBarn at Elterwater, now being cared for and developed by the Littoral Trust, you realise that Kurt Schwitters may have “ended up in Langdale like a piece of flotsam on the currents of a world war,” but it is a remarkable place and his presence is distinctive. Schwitters is also somewhat of a Trojan Horse. Living as an artist refugee he painted landscape scenes and portraits whilst simultaneously working on a new Merzbau (Schwitters called these works Merzbau which translates as ‘Merz buildings’. He called this work specifically MerzBarn. Merz is a word Schwitters found in the process of making a collage in 1919). On the one hand he conformed to a Lake District stereotype, and on the other he steered the direction of 20th Century Art.

You can see there are some serious tensions embodied in this landscape. It was necessary in the mid 60s, and probably in the terms of the time correct, to remove one whole wall of the Barn and take it into a museum to be preserved. Thus the ‘art’ bit of the Merzbarn is now in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. The analogy might be the Elgin Marbles: something conceived of as a ‘whole’ (art and architecture) that has been separated. Art, sometimes the legacy of great cultures, is political, but is often managed by people who are unwilling to acknowledge the political dimension as ‘present’ rather than historical.

So outside the MerzBarn each year Littoral organises an event where the names of all the artists included by the Nazi Party as Entartete Kunst Degenerate Art (including Schwitters and more than 100 others) are read out and then written in chalk on the wall of the MerzBarn. This symbolic act might seem curious standing outside a tiny barn on an estate in Cumbria, rather than perhaps in a square in Berlin or at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but the symbolism of the last place a refugee artist worked is rich and powerful (and draws other artists to work there now).

The avoidance of politics in art were replayed in the Schwitters in Britain exhibition at the Tate last year where it was clear that the curators focused on the paintings with only nods to the other media such as the sound poetry and the Merzbau. The curators of the contemporaneous Duchamp exhibition The Bride and the Batchelors at the Barbican succeeded in creating a space for works across multiple media including dance and performance, sound, set design and visual art. The curators at the Tate chose a different trajectory, offering what was really a conventional exhibition of paintings with some contemporary art tacked on the end (not that Provost and Chodzko’s contributions were negligible). But the positioning of contemporary art in the exhibition inevitably pushed the works by Schwitters into the past in a way that the construction of a multi-media environment at the Barbican brought Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Johns and Rauchenberg into the present. A different trajectory was created by the reconstruction of the MerzBarn in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London as part of the Modern British Sculpture show.

The Langdale landscape is in a constant state of flux: a dialogue between human and non-human agencies. It was the non-human agencies that necessitated the removal of the ‘art’. But the way the Littoral Trust is imagining the site conceives of the MerzBarn (the original barn with the missing wall reinstated) in a state of flux. The circumstances at Elterwater are open to that process of change, where the part of the work in the care of the Hatton is ‘preserved’. The Littoral Trust brings its 30+ years of knowledge and work as a social and political art organisation to the development of the MerzBarn. In addition to events to honour the memory of artists called ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi Party, there is an art making and outdoor education programme for children and young people – and of course Schwitters’ Merz works, his use of found waste materials, and his ‘painting with nails’ approach are a Trojan Horse in the context of conventional primary school art.

As the Armitt Museum (which has its own collection of Schwitters’ works from his time in the Lake District) website says in describing the first Merzbau, “It was unfinished because it was unfinishable; it was environmental and engulfing in scope, but its significance was that it marked the birth of installation or conceptual art that we see today.” In the capable hands of the Littoral Trust the state of unfinishedness is an asset and an opportunity.

AESOP 1 | A Framework for developing and research arts in health programmes.

AESOP 1 | A Framework for developing and research arts in health programmes

Posted in Arts & Health, News, Research by chrisfremantle on April 4, 2014

If you are interested in planning research and/or evaluation into your arts and health projects, then you need to have a look at this new tool. The point is that research needs structure, to be done reasonably consistently, and this looks like a very good way to build some consistency.

Very much look forward to hearing more about this as it develops.

Digital health comes to the UK | Nesta

Posted in Arts & Health, Research by chrisfremantle on March 20, 2014

If you are interested in things like biosensing and the internet of things (or perhaps people) then this article Digital health comes to the UK | Nesta is very relevant discussions about putting people at the heart of health and well-being.

Some of the ideas are very challenging and we are deeply into the realm of biopolitics (sensors embedded in medication reporting when it’s taken and how it’s digested). There is no question that the relationship between the body and the world is going to change through various forms of bio-sensing – see for instance the work of Manifest.AR.

I wonder what Michel Foucault would have made of this? I know Ivan Illich would have fought against it tooth and nail.

Recent publications on art in new healthcare buildings

Posted in Arts & Health, Research, Sited work by chrisfremantle on March 18, 2014

Updated 22 3 2014

This is a short summary of books on arts & health from Glasgow and Scotland that I’m aware of and have on a shelf. Any reminders and recommendations happily received. Artists and organisations try to produce books of these projects because firstly they are participatory and durational so sometimes the book is the only tangible outcome, but secondly they are not generally visible to the public beyond immediate communities hosting the projects, so this is the only means of showing what happened and why it mattered.

There have been several books produced to document arts projects in new healthcare buildings in Glasgow. These join the books produced by Art in Hospital highlighting their long term work with patients. Also included in this provisional bibliography are other books of Scottish projects.

Space to Heal: Humanity in Healthcare Design. (2009) is published by Reiach and Hall Architects, and reflects their thinking at the time they completed the New Stobhill Hospital. Includes essays by Andy Law (Architect) and Thomas A Clark (poet).

The Grace of the Birch: Art Nature Healing, the Collection for the Ward Block, New Stobhill Hospital (2011). Edited by Dr Lindsay Blair documents the new Collection of artworks forming a ‘choosing wall’. Probably available from Reiach and Hall (above) or Jackie Sands (below).

Aware of Time: Art Poetry Healing, Renfrew Health and Social Work Centre (2012). Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board. ISBN 978-1-906150-17-4. Documentation of the project with Richard Dunn and Toby Paterson, curated by Dr Lindsay Blair. Probably available from Reiach and Hall (above) or from Jackie Sands, Arts & Health Senior, Health Improvement, NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, West House, Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Great Western Road, Glasgow, G12 OXH.

Dignified Spaces: Designing Rooms for conversations within the clinical environment. (2013) Alexander Hamilton’s catalogue associated with the exhibition/website on the Dignified Spaces project for the New South Glasgow Hospitals, setting out design ethos and participation programme. Available as download (catalogue dignified spaces), or from Jackie Sands (as above). This project was also presented at the European Design 4 Health Conference, Sheffield, 2013 and will be included in the proceedings.

Art in Hospital publications
If they are still available, they can be obtained from Art in Hospital (Order form here – contact details on the website).

“I’ll be doing this sky in my dreams tonight” Art in Hospital (2006). Published by Art in Hospital. This is an excellent overview of the work of this organisation which has been working with patients in hospitals in Glasgow since 1991.

Object Scores, Kirsty Stansfield and Art in Hospital (2007). Published by Art in Hospital. Documents, through reproducing an extended email exchange, the Object Scores project.

The Pattern of a Bird. (2008). Published by Art in Hospital. ISBN 13 978-0-9554440-2-9. Documentation and essays on arts in palliative care.

Artlink Edinburgh publications

A number are available electronically from the website.

200 Years 200 Objects. Mark Dion. (2013). Published by Artlink Edinburgh and Lothians. ISBN 978-0955188268. Part of the Ever Present Past project.

Extraordinary Everday: Explorations in Collaborative Art in Healthcare. (2005). Published by Artlink Edinburgh ISBN 978-0-9551882-0-6. Documenting and discussion the Functionsuite programme of work, 14 collaborative art projects that took place in hospitals across Edinburgh and the Lothians between 2003 and 2005.

Something in the Pause (2009) Nicola White. Published by Artlink Edinburgh ISBN 978-0-9551882-2-0 and available electronically as above. A story about an artist, and infomatics specialist and a man with a liking for music.

Other Scottish

The Sanctuary: The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh: A space designed by Donald Urquhart. (2003). Published by Ginkgo Projects ISBN 1-904443-01-X Documents the award winning Sanctuary at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Copies might be available from Ginkgo Projects.

ARTworks Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital 2006-2009. Published by Grampian Hospital Art Trust. documents the participatory work leading to installed artworks in the new Children’s Hospital in Aberdeen. It should be available from The Archie Foundation or from the Grampian Hospital Art Trust.

Creative Therapies. Undated, self-published. Documentation of their art therapy work with East Dunbartonshire and South Ayrshire Councils which is probably available from them.

Art in Salutogenic Design Dominic Pote

Posted in Arts & Health, Research, Sited work by chrisfremantle on March 16, 2014

This blog by Dominic Pote discusses well-being and how artworks can contribute to a sense of health. It draws on ideas of ‘coherence’ as a way to understand health and well-being. Well worth reading Art in Salutogenic Design | by Dominic Pote Fine-art photographer.

Presenting at Enhancing Lives Through Arts & Health, Houston, TX

Posted in Arts & Health, CF Writing, Producing, Research, Sited work, Texts by chrisfremantle on March 7, 2014

My proposal for a paper “Scottish artists bring nature into healthcare” has been accepted for the Global Alliance for Arts & Health 25th Conference in Houston, Texas in April.

The abstract is,

Scotland has a strong portfolio of arts and health projects including both public art installations within healthcare buildings and participatory programmes, in particular with people with long term conditions. This presentation will focus on public art installations by artists and designers which use biophilic and other design approaches to bringing nature into buildings. It addresses the conference themes of Patient Care, Healing Environments and Caring for Caregivers.

It is well known thanks to the work of Robert Ulrich that views of nature contribute to patient recover, and it is clear from the work of Stephen Kaplan that views of nature can play a role in restoring our ability to give our attention. OPENspace Research at Edinburgh College of Art (http://openspace.eca.ac.uk/ ) has further substantiated the connections between nature and wellbeing focusing on inclusive access to the outdoors.

In Scotland there have been a number of projects in the context of Healthcare where artists and designers have specifically sought to use art and design to bring nature into buildings in addition to what the architects and landscape designers are able to achieve.

Four key examples are:

Thomas A Clark’s (http://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/) project with the architects Reiach & Hall, ‘A Grove of Larch in a Forest of Birch,’ for the New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow integrated poetry and visual arts into what the architects described as the architecture of waiting. The Aim was to create spaces in which users of the hospital could wait for appointments in “a place apart having the brightness and stillness of a woodland glade.”

Alexander Hamilton’s (http://www.alexanderhamilton.co.uk/) Designing for Dignity (http://designingfordignity.co.uk/Inspired-by-Nature) is an approach that draws on a deep understanding of the Victorian poet and artist John Ruskin and of the more recent Biophilia Hypothesis. Hamilton is currently developing designs including furniture and art for the Quiet or Family rooms in the New South Glasgow Hospitals based on an extensive programme of creative engagement. Hamilton is also working on the design of a healthcentre in Glasgow.

Dalziel + Scullion’s (http://www.dalzielscullion.com/) practice is increasingly focused on addressing nature deficit disorder. Their work encompasses exhibitions and public art. Their scheme for the wards of the New South Glasgow Hospitals will bring the whole landscape of Scotland into one building. Their project Rosnes Benches, currently being installed in the landscape of Dumfries and Galloway, they have also contributed work to the Vale of Leven Health Centre (http://www.wide-open.net/index.php?page=vale-of-leven)

Donald Urquhart has completed public art projects for four mental health hospitals including most recently Midpark Acute Mental Health Hospital (http://www.wide-open.net/index.php?page=healing-spaces) and developed Sanctuary spaces for both hospitals and universities. His award winning design for the Sanctuary at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary has become a benchmark (http://www.ginkgoprojects.co.uk/projects/royal-infirmary-edinburgh).

These artists and others demonstrate key aspects of the role of art in bringing nature into healthcare contexts including focus on characteristics of nature such as colour, pattern and movement. As artists they use attention, framing and synthesis.

In addition to sharing these developments with the conference audience I hope to identify other artists exploring similar issues.

I’m very much hoping to find other artists and designers working along these lines with the depth of thinking as well as the quality of work.

Illuminating art, design and health

Posted in Arts & Health, Exhibitions, Research by chrisfremantle on January 29, 2014

Lisa Pacini and Christine Istad,
Sun, 2012 – photo courtesy of Marres

Two interesting trajectories across the need for light particularly in winter. The one is a blog from the Wellcome Trust on research being undertaken by their Research Fellow, Dr Tania Woloshyn, on the history of phototherapy, and the other is an exhibition at Marres House for Contemporary Culture in the Netherlands entitled Winter Anti Depression where they have created an Art Resort, a sensory environment in response to the winter.

The idea that the lack of sunlight affects those of us living in northern climates is not new, and research into the history of treatments highlights the complexity of the amount of sunlight that is healthy.

The exhibition demonstrates a number of art and design approaches to activating the senses. Different works explore different senses from textured surfaces that you feel through your feet, to sounds to cocoon you in your bed, to light and colour. The installation comprising a range of yellows is particularly evocative (see below).

Light and colour are increasingly significant in the design of healthcare contexts. New technologies such as ‘Sky Ceilings’ and lightboxes can bring a feeling of daylight into rooms that lack windows. The ‘temperature’ of light, especially with the increasing availability of LED bulbs, is enabling much more sophisticated design of environments. But what is clear is that light and colour are not ‘universals’. On the one hand their meaning is culturally informed, and as these examples highlight, also informed by seasonality. We might want healthcare to be 24/7, but our bodies respond to seasonality just as they do to day and night.

Katja Gruijters
Saint John’s wort Lab, 2014, photography Jonas de Witte Courtesy of Marres

Things I’ve been trying to remember

Posted in News, Research by chrisfremantle on January 14, 2014

From ‘painted illisions’ The Art of Cornelius Gijsbrechts, London: National Gallery, 2000

I was trying to remember the details of this painting last year. Imagine trying to google ‘trompe l’oeil painting of reverse of painting’. Without the artist’s name I think this painting may actually be impossible to find.

Tagged with: Trompe L'Oeil

HANGING OUT WITH TIM ROLLINS AND K.O.S. – The Brooklyn Rail

Posted in Civics, News, Research, Texts by chrisfremantle on December 20, 2013

One of the earliest entries in this blog, back in 2004, resulted from reading a text by Tim Rollins that formed part of the Civil Arts Enquiry at the City Arts Centre in Dublin.

I had the privilege of attending a workshop at the Talbot Rice in Edinburgh with Tim Rollins and some of the Kids of Survival in August 2012.

Now Brooklyn Rail has published an excellent article, Two Days in the Lives of Art as Social Action, which name checks the event in Edinburgh.

Last light on a Granny Pine in Black Rannoch Wood, Thurs 21 November, 2013

Posted in News, Research by chrisfremantle on November 27, 2013

Last light caught on Granny Pine in Black Rannoch Wood, Thurs 21 November 2013, Photo Chris Fremantle

Tagged with: Goto and Collins, Rannoch, Trees

Practising Equality

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research by chrisfremantle on October 22, 2013

Over the past year I’ve been working with Prof Paul Harris and Prof Anne Douglas to explore common issues across art, design, architecture and media/Web 2.0 focusing on issues of co-creativity and participation. This short video made for a presentation at the Moving Targets Conference earlier this month highlights a few key thoughts and the paper will be published imminently in Participations Journal. I’ll post a link in due course.

Postscript

I just finish posting up this link to work we’ve been doing on participation and co-creativity, go back into my email and there is an Art&Education announcement of a major conference in Montreal entitled The Participatory Condition http://www.pcond.ca/ . Interestingly they have in their blurb aligned participation with democracy, something which we seek to question in our paper, and although they use the term relational, they don’t raise questions of the aesthetic of participation, questions which are critical within the art discourse but have not impacted on the discourse in design, architecture let alone media/Web 2.0.

What has art ever done for science?.

Wellcome Trust asks, What has art ever done for science?

Posted in Research by chrisfremantle on October 15, 2013

Interesting blog post on the Wellcome Trust – offered a short comment based on Jill Scott’s observations.

Tagged with: art and science

Deep Routes: research, scale and indigeneity

Posted in CF Writing, News, Research, Sited work by chrisfremantle on September 26, 2013

The Financial Times at the end of 2012 carried a review of an exhibition by Zeng Fanzhi at the Gagosian Gallery. The review opens with the following couple of sentences,

It has finally happened – a solo exhibition of a Chinese artist whose power and interest does not depend on Chinese themes or subject matter. Since the 1990s, China has been the promised land of the global arts scene, but not one of the numerous group shows staged in the past decade – at Tate Liverpool, the Saatchi Gallery, the Hayward – has been able to make a case that artists from the region are of more than local concern.

The image that accompanied the review is of one of Zeng’s paintings, a reworking of Durer’s ubiquitous Hare some 4m square, the surface appearing to be deeply cracked. Whether this was an ironic statement on the import of the canonical tradition of Western Art from the perspective of the East, or an aesthetic judgement, or the quality of the reproduction on pink paper, I don’t know. I didn’t see the exhibition and I haven’t read the press release.

It may be that in the ambit of art criticism published in the FT and moving elegantly between the transnational art fairs and galleries that construct value through those environments, this artist is significant. It may be that because this artist reworks iconic images from canonical western art that they are therefore of ‘power and interest.’ Their ‘power and interest’ might perhaps lie in the exquisite development of the surface of the canvas through brilliant brushwork, or their use of colour, seeming to soak the hare in the night-time neon lights of Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York or LA.

This painting, and the others in the exhibition, and in fact all the work for sale in Gagosian, or in any of the other key galleries and art fairs, only exists at the global level. As the review rightly states what is important at this level is that the work cannot be of local concern, it must speak to The Universal, the abstracted, deterritorialised. It will exist in no-place because thanks to the hard work of the FT reviewer and the hard work of the Gagosian curatorial team ensuring that their merch is only seen in the right places, it’s value has nothing to do with an specific locality, any personal intimate space, any town or region. It might hang in a domestic interior for a period, but it is more likely to go into storage in a warehouse somewhere as an investment: value stored for future exchange.

The reviewer wouldn’t have to highlight this point reviewing a Richard Serra exhibition (such as the one that opened Gagosian’s London space). It would be taken for granted that Serra was of global interest and power, an important element moving in the circuits of value of the international art world. A Chinese artist has now been allowed into this club.

↔

Claire Pentecost, in her essay (pdf: Pentecost Notes on Continental Drift) Notes on the Project Called Continental Drift offers an alternative structure for thinking about art. Her structure, and the wider structure of the book Deep Routes: The Midwest In All Directions (Compass Collaborators, 2012 see bottom for ways to get a copy), precisely values an analysis which is interested in multiple levels (p.17),

We aim to explore the five scales of contemporary existence: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental and the global. Within the mesh of scales, we want to understand the extent of our interdependence, how any action we may take has effects on and is shaped by all these scales at once. We attempt to understand these dynamics so that we can understand the meaning of our own actions, the basis for an ethical life.

But for Pentecost, global is not the exclusive realm of ‘power and interest’. Rather her global is a scale at which it is necessary to look to see the entwined flows that articulate our everyday lives. She wants to look at the food on our table (perhaps the jugged hare) and through following the lines of connection to see that we are connected to the workers making ceramics in China for sale in IKEA in Long Island City (cf Ai WeiWei perhaps). And through that examination to see the Phillippino crews of container ships continuously circumnavigating the planet (cf for instance Allan Sekula). For her the global simply cannot exist in isolation. No artist’s interest and power should be divorced from local themes and subject matters. It is simply not possible – those elements can be ignored, but they still exist – practically speaking iron ore is mined, corten steel is produced in foundries, barges, trucks and planes move sculptures. There are social and environmental interactions. A sculpture can be a sign separated from all the realities that are involved in it’s production and presentation – deracinated – separated from all considerations except value to enable it to circulate freely in this global space.

And where the exhibition at Gagosian and the review in the FT are elements in the urgent construction of capital, Pentecost takes us on a detour into a mis-remembered quote trying to latch onto an articulation of a different way of dealing with signs and the value they convey, or actually deferring dealing with signs and value (p.23),

… to the point where many of us aspire to practice an intricate, processual, and research-motivated version of art that resists evaluation by the prescriptive teams of institutions and markets.

Where for the critic and the gallery the essential acts are focused on the carefully orchestrated production and affirmation of the sign as value, Pentecost following the French artist Francois Deck, suggests that the most important act is to operate at the point before the sign is ‘finalised’ and value is conferred. So the artwork is always unfinished, it is always a project, precisely because at the point we confer value, that thing, whatever it is, whether food or art, moves into warehouses and other structures designed to enable and enhance the mobility of capital.

Pentecost’s essay is one of two that open up Deep Routes. Pentecost establishes some key points in a landscape characterised by the financial crisis and the occupy movement. The themes and contexts of the book are focused by the specificity of the midwest of the United States of America. Reading the book we get to know particular places such as Beardstown, IL, exploring through Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross’ glossary of terms the ‘vertical integration’ of a small town into global commodities markets through ‘the cold chain,’ ‘engineered tiling,’ GMO, chemical fertilizers and GPS mapping. Matthias Regan’s narrative offers a different trajectory, of a Greyhound bus journey from Chicago to Detroit. This is a gentle, reflective meditation on breakdown in which (p.188),

The future does not emerge from amongst the technocratic elite; it will not be driven by new inventions in digital media. We should seek it instead in what is meager and humble, tentative and transitioning. Not rushing away from breakdown, but opening ourselves to its after effects.

↔

The other key trajectory established from the outset in Deep Routes takes us into indigenous experience, practice, pedagogy and critique. Alongside the spatial, economic and experiential journeys of the other authors, Dylan AT Miner’s interviews with First People’s organisers punctuate the book. Miner has been pursuing a project of imagining that we can all be indigenous – it’s not a condition restricted by genealogy, but rather a practice and a philosophy – a way of making sense of the world.

Near the end of the book, in the last interview, Jill Doerfler and Miner discuss tribalography, a methodology developed by by LeAnne Howe. Jill studied with LeAnne and explains the emergence of tribalography (p.228),

LeAnne has explained that tribalography grew out of the Native propensity to connect things together. It is the idea that Native writers often tell stories that combine autobiography, history, and fiction; we tell stories that include all these elements and also work in collaboration with the past, present, and future. …

Jill goes on to say,

These stories are not generally about finding out what really happened but are meant to teach us something and show us our place within our families, communities, nations, and the world. I found that in addition to serving as a critical lens for literary study and as a theoretical framework for cultural analysis, tribalography can also serve as an abundantly fruitful methodological approach relevant across the interdisciplinary field of American Indian studies.

I happened across Deep Routes staying with Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis in Chicago in the autumn of 2012 (I was introduced to them by Brett Bloom when I asked him for help finding somewhere to stay in Chicago). They had just received delivery of a number of boxes from the printers. There was one on the coffee table. I picked it up and started reading. I realised it was the sequel to MidWest Radical Culture Corridor: A Call to Farms, which I had come across a few years ago. I was in Chicago for the International Sculpture Conference, but in many respects this book is better art than much of what I saw in the conference presentations. Not only did I meet Sarah and Ryan, but also Claire and Brian Holmes who came up with the concept of Continental Drift, and is the ’embedded’ critical theorist.

We ate preserved pears from the tree in their back garden and Sarah articulated some of the stress of working as a volunteer artist in a maximum security prison on her days off from teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For me the description of tribalography tallies with my experience as an associate of a practice-led research programme. Practice-led research in the arts is autobiography. It is often history (contextualising practices in relation to precedents). It moves across the past, present and future (it has been said that practice-led PhDs are ways for artists to reinvent their practices). Truth in the sense of replicable experiment is not at the heart of practice-led research. But most provocatively fiction is sometimes there too (Sophie Hope’s work Participating in the Wrong Way certainly brings ‘fictionalising’ to bear on research).

Methods, whether Pentecost’s revisiting of the Modern School movement of the early part of the last century or tribalography, positively radiate out of this volume. It is built on the experience of a creative community that exists in a particular territory. Their art is research motivated, processual and intricately interwoven at different scales and with different collaborators. Ironically this work is of global power and interest even if it is all about the Midwest.

You can order a copy here, or if you are in Scotland and we can meet, then I’ll lend you one.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Rural Health and Creative Community Engagement – University of the Highlands and Islands – jobs.ac.uk.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Rural Health and Creative Community Engagement – University of the Highlands and Islands – jobs.ac.uk

Posted in Arts & Health, News, Research by chrisfremantle on September 6, 2013

Just saw this on jobs.ac.uk – another important development.

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (PDRF), funded until June 2016, to conduct qualitative work within Highland. The work will explore the nature of the relationships between rural community life, identity, health and well-being.

The post is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council as part of a large grant in the Connected Communities Programme, led by Prof. Gareth Williams at Cardiff University. The overarching aim of the project is to establish how community representations produced through creative arts practices (e.g. storytelling, performance, visual art) can be used as forms of evidence to inform health-related policy and service development. Through analysis of existing representations of communities in literature, film etc. and the production of new community self-representations, the work will explore the relationship between ‘official’ representations of community health and well-being (e.g. in statistical data) and how communities understand and present their own health and well-being.

The project will take place across five distinct case-study communities in Wales, Scotland and England. This post will be based within the UHI Department of Diabetes and Cardiovascular Science (Inverness) and affiliated with the Centre for Rural Health (a joint research centre for UHI and the University of Aberdeen). The PDRF will be report to Dr. Sarah-Anne Munoz who is leading the remote and rural work within the larger project. The PDRF will carry out a remote and rural community case study to feed into the wider project. As one of several PDRFs appointed to the project, the successful candidate will be expected to collaborate with the other PDRFs and members of the academic team. This will involve attending team meetings throughout the UK.

The post involves a focus on understanding and gathering existing representations of a Highland community; both artistic (e.g. in literature) and formal (e.g. statistics) and then using creative engagement methods (e.g. life mapping, storytelling and deep mapping) to work with community members to generate new self-representations. This work will be in partnership with arts and health organisations/professionals.

The successful candidate will have a PhD in a health humanities area relevant to the project themes and have experience of carrying out qualitative research. Experience of using participatory and/or creative methods would be beneficial.

The closing date is Sunday 29 September 2013 and interviews will be held on 15 October 2013 in Inverness.

Incubator for Northern Design and Innovation

Professor Gavin Renwick on “working with elders” 22 August, Ayr

Posted in News, Research by chrisfremantle on August 1, 2013

ayr converses presentation/conversation

Be Strong Like Two People: Learning from the Elders of the Tlicho First Nation People in the North West Territories of Canada

Gavin Renwick, Professor and Canada Chair of Design, University of Alberta

Thursday 22 August 2013 : 6pm – 9pm : Ayr Auld Kirk Hall (Upper Hall)

Gavin Renwick, Professor and Canada Chair of Design at the University of Alberta, has spent more than ten years working with the Tlicho first nation people in the North West Territories of Canada on their land claim to the Canadian Government. Renwick was until recently Professor of Art and Policy at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, where he continues to be a visiting professor. His role with the Tlicho has been as a cultural intermediary assisting with the articulation of the understanding of land and inhabitation of the Tlicho, who are a nomadic people.

Renwick has regularly reported on key aspects of the thinking of the Elders, particularly around their relationships with young people. In his presentation, Gavin Renwick will explore the Elders understanding of the pressures on the young. First, the need to be “strong like two people”, which is a reference to the need for young people to be both strong in their own culture and strong in western culture. The second is the need to be “modern in your own language”, which clearly sets out one way to address the first challenge.

Gavin Renwick is originally from Motherwell. He was brought up among the last generation of Lanarkshire people who worked in coal, iron and steel. He has realised projects across Europe, as well as in Turkey and Canada. His present work utilises practice-led methods that place the practitioner-researcher as a cultural intermediary between indigenous and metropolitan culture. His applied and curatorial practice aims to facilitate cultural continuity for traditional communities. For the past decade he has been working between Scotland and the Canadian Northwest Territories, most recently for the Tlicho (formerly Dogrib) Dene community of Gameti as founder and coordinator of Gameti Ko, an incorporated society directed by a board of Elders.

The presentation/conversation will be chaired by Chris Fremantle, ayr converses co-founder with Lianne Hackett.

Following the presentation and Q&A, there will be the opportunity to converse with a glass of wine or soft drink. A small collection will be made towards venue hire and refreshments.

Please confirm your attendance by Friday 16 August info@ayrconverses.org.uk

Gavin Renwick’s website

Sambaa K’e Print Studio

Afternow- the future of health

Posted in Arts & Health, Research by chrisfremantle on June 10, 2013

AFTERnow is a collaborative enquiry into the impact of modern culture on health involving Professor Phil Hanlon, Dr. Sandra Carlisle, Dr. David Reilly, Dr. Andrew Lyon and Dr. Margaret Hannah. Our work was funded for six years by the National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Well-being in Scotland and supported by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.

As the era of seemingly endless growth comes to an end, we all need to find new ways to live our daily lives. How do we redefine ‘prosperity’ in this new world? How do we imagine and then create a future that is profoundly different from the way we live today? There is a growing realisation that we all have to learn how to live with less. So what’s the answer? How should we live?

Mr Seel’s Garden – Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Mr Seel’s Garden and other food research

Posted in Food, Research by chrisfremantle on June 7, 2013

Research projects on food

Concerns such as food miles, climate change and unhealthy lifestyles mean that local food-growing initiatives are becoming increasingly popular. But how do you make them work in a city? Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden, an AHRC-funded project funded through Connected Communities (webpage) [link], is delving into the history of local food production in Liverpool to find out.

‘If you want to learn about food sustainability, one way of getting ideas and being inspired is by researching your area to see how people used to get their food,’ explains project lead Dr Michelle Bastian of the University of Edinburgh. ‘Finding out about the past can help us think about different possibilities for the future.’

Also saw this through the Cultural History group

Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded PhD working on food distribution networks between 1920 and 1975. This studentship is one of eight fully-funded awards made by the newly-established Collaborative Doctoral Partnership managed by the Science Museum Group. The project will be supervised by Colin Divall (University of York) and Ed Bartholomew (National Railway Museum, York). The studentship, which is funded for three years full-time equivalent, will begin in September 2013.

The Studentship

How and what we eat is high on public and political agenda. While the particulars are new, the underlying issues are long-standing. Industrialization of the UK’s food supply from the late-C18^th enabled unprecedented levels of urbanization and population growth but destroyed local, regional and even national sources, encouraging consumption based more on price than nutritional value. Today’s globalized food-chains can deliver huge amounts of high-quality food: but they also allow unscrupulous suppliers to escape the scrutiny of national and even international regulators.

This project explores one critical shift in Britain’s food supply in the last century: the change over the roughly half-century from 1920 from a rail- to a road-based system of distribution within the UK: from port to market, from farm yard to manufacturer, town shop or supermarket. This change was perhaps not inevitable: while the railways’ inter-war battle with road hauliers reflected traditional concerns such as price, reliability and security, neither service provider was able to demonstrate a clear advantage. Hence there was considerable scope to persuade consignors; the railways’ interest in marketing passenger traffic had some purchase with regard to goods. How did the railway companies imagine, market and deliver the distribution of food between the world wars? Railway publicity suggests that the high profile given to food distribution was partly an attempt to win public and political opinion to the companies’ case for more regulatory freedom. And how did road hauliers (including own-account operators like the food retailer Sainsbury’s) respond to such initiatives before 1939? What did consumers think?

The Second World War is sometimes portrayed as a temporary period of reprieve for rail distribution before the ‘inevitable’ victory of road haulage. But this project might explore whether the war and the following decade of austerity prevented the railways acting soon enough on pre-war ideas about how to handle food. It will also complement existing studies of British Railways’ attempts to reform freight services from the 1950s by analysing the particularities of food distribution. While exogenous factors such as better lorries, state-funded improvements to roads (notably motorways) and wider changes in food retailing (especially processed foods and just-in-time deliveries to supermarkets) arguably increasingly favoured road distribution, BR continued to develop and market services targeted at food suppliers and retailers until around the mid-1970s. How did BR work with the food industry? Did Beeching-era ideas like Freightliner have any role in the motorway age? Could the railways have kept more of the bulk transport of imported foodstuffs? Did food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers drive innovations in food distribution, or did they adapt to initiatives from the haulage industry? And how did the road and rail operators ‘sell’ their competing notions of modern food supplies to consumers and politicians?

This is chiefly a qualitative study that will draw out the connections between the imagining of food distribution systems, the politics of building food chains, and the practices of using them in the period ca 1920-75.

How to Apply

Applicants must have a good undergraduate degree in history or other relevant discipline, and should normally also hold a master’s (or equivalent) degree in an appropriate subject. A full statement of the AHRC’s criteria for academic and residency eligibility is available on the AHRC website www.ahrc.ac.uk.

Applicants should submit a short curriculum vitae and a brief letter outlining both their

qualifications for the studentship and their ideas about how the research might develop. This should be in the form of a single MS Word, Open Office or PDF file no more than three pages in total, using a typeface no smaller than 11 point. The names and contact details of two academic referees should also be supplied. Applications should be sent to Colin Divall at colin.divall@york.ac.uk to arrive no later than 12.00 Wednesday 12^th June 2013. Applicants should not at this stage make a formal application to the University of York.

Interviews for short-listed candidate will be held at the National Railway Museum, York, in the morning of Friday 28^th June 2013.

For further information, please contact either of the project supervisors: Colin Divall colin.divall@york.ac.uk or Ed Bartholomew ed.bartholomew@nrm.org.uk.

Provocation for ArtWorks blog

Posted in CF Writing, Research by chrisfremantle on May 11, 2013

You have in front of you a typewritten text. It could be poetry. It is an invitation to action, but not exactly an instruction. It reads:

planting a square of turf
amid grass like it

planting another
amid grass a little less green

planting four more squares
in places progressively drier

planting a square of dry turf
amid grass like it

planting another
amid grass a little less dry

planting four more squares
in places progressively greener

This is an artwork by Allan Kaprow, a score in his terminology. Kaprow wasn’t a musician, and in using the term score he was borrowing the terminology of music.

Reading the ArtWorks’ programme’s International Next Practice Review by Chrissie Tiller and in particular the Participation Spectrum proposed by the James Irvine Foundation, it strikes us that this work could operate at any point along the passive to active audience spectrum proposed. It could simply be read by an audience, or at the other end of the spectrum, made by them. A group of artists and researchers from Gray’s School of Art took this score as a starting point to make new work. We called that Calendar Variations. Were we artists or audience? Were we performing Kaprow’s score?

But what was Kaprow doing? Would he have defined his practice as participatory?

We’d like to suggest that Kaprow is breaking out of the norms of being an artist. The score was a prototype for a co-creative relationship. Kaprow authored the score, but other people played it.

Perhaps Kaprow simply thought that music benefited from having three different roles of composer, performer and audience, where in visual art there might be understood to be only artist and audience. Of course the performer could be many things: composer; professional performer, hired to perform the work; or member of the audience who goes home and performs the work themselves. Is the person who whistles the melody also more than passive audience?

But it could also be another composer who creates new work in response to the original, or a painter who makes something in another form. The more improvisational you get, the more that the role of the composer recedes and the role of the performer comes forward. Kaprow’s Calendar Activity is something with which to improvise. As soon as you set out to perform it, you realise that you have to interpret it.

Having done a series of projects on social practices, we have recently been working on improvisation, looking to understand the aesthetics of social practice.

Currently we are exploring participatory and co-creative practices across art, design and architecture.

Professor Paul Harris, Professor Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle
Gray’s School of Art

This was just published as a provocation on the ArtWorks blog and is an element of a wider programme of work on participation and co-creation across art, design and architecture.

My responses to Calendar can be found here.

Portraying the change – evaluating 14 years’s work

Posted in Research by chrisfremantle on April 29, 2013

How can you describe a cultural programme that has extended over 14 years, 9 countries and 3,000 projects? How do you account for its outcomes, the change it may have contributed to, and the effects on culture or society?

Portraying the change. Fascinating in depth report prepared by Francois Matarasso on the Swiss Cultural Programme in South Eastern Europe focused on participants, rather than organisers.

Two views of participatory art

Posted in Research by chrisfremantle on March 18, 2013

Eleanor Heartney’ review in Art in America provides a useful comparison of Kester and Bishop’s new books which continue the argument between these key theorists of socially engaged and participatory arts practices.

Tagged with: art, claire bishop, Grant Kester, participation, participatory