What art have I seen? Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly at the new Gagosian as well as the Polaroid works at Davies Str. Understand why he’s in amongst the Abstract Expressionists though the ‘blotting paper’ works are also quite conceptual in their way. They feel like Judd’s technical drawings shown at Talbot Rice a few years ago, adjuncts to the ‘real’ work. But compared to the works in Houston these have a much harder edge.
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/cy-twombly–october-10-2015
What art have I seen? Escher and Avery
M.C.Escher exhibition at the Dean Gallery. Charles Avery at the Ingleby.
What art have I seen? KennardPhillips and Holoturian
KennardPhillipps (Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps) Here Comes Everybody at Stills is immediately angry: angry about Shell drilling in the arctic, angry about George Osborne, angry about media manipulation.
Ariel Guzik’s work Holoturian in Trinity Apse courtesy of Arts Catalyst, is a slow steampunk meditation on the parallel lives of cetaceans.
What art have I seen? Crawick Multiverse
This was an opencast coal pit up until a couple of years ago. I do wonder what members of the Society for Ecological Restoration meeting in Manchester next week would make of it?
Help Place of Origin
We need your help. Kemnay Community Councillor David Evans just contacted me about a proposal to further surround Place of Origin with housing. Some of you will know that when I was Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop we worked with three artists John Maine RA, Glen Onwin RSA and Brad Goldberg (Texas) to create a landscape and viewpoint at Kemnay Quarry called Place of Origin. John Maine framed it as making landscape as art.
So Place of Origin as an artwork made out of 100,000 tonnes of quarry waste and about 7000 trees mirroring Bennachie in the way the Japanese gardens mirrored the wider landscape is all about views. When you are standing at the top you have views for 360 degrees with the quarry in front of you and Aberdeenshire’s beautiful countryside around with Bennachie in the distance. The artists also thought hard about how the landscape and viewpoint would look in the context of Kemnay village.
Anyway there is a proposal from a volume house builder for 49 new houses on greenfield immediately adjacent to the artwork. At present as you ascent the viewpoint you rise above all the housing on Fyfe Park, but this stuff will be on higher ground and will immediately be in your face.
The developer tried to get the housing into the Local Development Plan a couple of years ago and it was refused so they appealed – the Scottish Government’s Reporter commented as follows, “The site is on rising ground and any development would be elevated above the existing housing adjacent to the A933. When viewed from the approach to Kemnay from the east, particularly from the B993, a development on site H1 would seriously intrude on the view of the ‘Place of Origin’. Furthermore, the development would seriously detract from views southwards from the ‘Place of Origin’ viewpoint. Consequently, it is considered that site H1 should not be allocated for housing.”
We are so grateful that Kemnay Community Council are strenuously objecting and they have noted a number of reasons including impacts on the school, the medical centre, the traffic and the stormwater drainage as well as the impact on the artwork. I hope that you will take the time to go online and make a comment. I think frankly you can pretty much reiterate the comments of the Scottish Government Reporter and note that the artwork won both an Aberdeenshire Council Planning Award, as well as a national Saltire Award. You might also make a general reference to Aberdeenshire Council’s various policies on Landscape and in particular the value of place-making.
If you can take the time to object I would appreciate it a lot as would the people in Kemnay who look after Place of Origin. The link, email address and postal address for objections are all on the web page.
What art have I seen? Paramus
PARAMUS. Exhibition by Javier Vidal Aguilera
Javier Vidal Aguilera’s Paramus at The Lighthouse in Glasgow, a development on his MFA Art Space and Nature Degree show
http://www.thelighthouse.co.uk/visit/exhibition/paramus.-exhibition-by-javier-vidal-aguilera
What art have I seen? Spiral Jetty
Spiral Jetty – photo Jake Fremantle
To visit Spiral Jetty you have to pass through the Golden Spike National Historic Site, created in 1957 to mark the point where the east coast and west coast railways met in 1869. It now comprises 2,700 acres of scrubland, but not Spiral Jetty – you clearly pass through ranches to get to the Jetty – the signs saying anyone leaving the road is trespassing are pretty clear.
Imagining Spiral Jetty, February 2008 https://chris.fremantle.org/2008/02/05/robert-smithsons-spiral-jetty-threatened/
November, 2009. Smithson, Aldiss and Earthworks https://chris.fremantle.org/writing/earthworks-brian-aldiss/
What art have I seen? Roden Crater
Roden Crater seen from near Leuppe
For more read https://chris.fremantle.org/2004/02/07/james-turrell/
Unveiled: The art which will help and heal in new hospital | Herald Scotland
Nice piece Unveiled: The art which will help and heal in new hospital | Herald Scotland by Helen Puttick, Health Correspondent, in the Herald about the Therapeutic Design and Arts Strategy for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s new South Glasgow University Hospital and Royal Hospital for Sick Children. I’ve been responsible for responsible for the overall programme, working with Ginkgo Projects, since 2010 (this might sound like a long time, but bear in mind the NHS Capital Planning team have been working on it for 10 years).
Experience Based Design in healthcare
Some resources that the NHS provide to support Experience Based Design:
Case Studies: The ebd approach case studies – NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.
Tools: Resources for ebd – NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement includes consent forms as well as templates.
Yes, Everyone Can Be Stupid for a Minute – NYTimes.com
This Corner Office interview with a silicon valley tech CEO has stayed with me for a long time. Basically he reckons everyone says something stupid in a meeting occasionally and this guy has a rule that you can say – That thing I just said was stupid. Let’s move on. Otherwise politics kicks in, people defend their positions, etc. He’s also good on teams. Worth having a look at some of the other Corner Office interviews too.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/business/08corner.html?referrer=
What art have I seen? Richard Diebenkorn and Conrad Shawcross
Richard Diebenkorn at the RA and Conrad Shawcross’ installation in the courtyard.
What art have I seen? Ben Woodeson
Ben Woodeson‘ exhibition Obstacle at Berloni has all the things you’d expect – thing that make you feel the work not just see it, things that imply imminent danger. The basement gallery is bathed in a hellish light but there’s a Tom and Jerry mousetrap dimension promising exploding neon, shatter glass and escaping poisonous gas. Woodeson’s homage to Carl Andre gives you a shock. His precarious glass pieces hint at Latham’s God is Great. What is really good about this work is the way your body is sensitised as your mind is stimulated and your curiosity (does that really balance?) is peeked.
imagivation – drewwylie.net
Andrew Ormston recently blogged on the two types of innovation and the need for a theory of innovation that is more than just positivistic is very provocative. It resonates with Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold’s observation that innovation can only be identified in retrospect, and that in the ‘now’ we are actually improvising. It also resonates with the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, who for 50 years have been making works about places. They say,
We hold that every place is telling the story of its own becoming, which is another way of saying that it is continually creating its own history and we join that conversation of place.
All of this requires at least a concept of ‘responsible innovation’ if not a much deeper discussion of the stories we want to tell of our futures. Andrew’s blog is here: imagivation – drewwylie.net.
What art have I seen? Ian McNicol
Ian McNicol is featured artist at Glasgow Print Studio at the moment
What art have I seen? Gary Fabian Miller
Garry Fabian Miller’s exhibition at the Dovecot in Edinburgh comprises photographic works, tapestries and rugs both of his own design and also belonging to Winifred Nicholson as well as some of her paintings which have inspired Fabian Miller. Beautifully composed and judged.
Light Flight: New Work by Penny Clare
Penny Clare’s new exhibition is here www.actionforme.org.uk/light-flight Chris Dooks introduced me to the work of Penny Clare a while ago and its great to see more of her work. Anyone with a special interest in health and well-being should check out her story.
Moving Image Season: Clyde Reflections, from art-science team Hurrel and Brennan, 28 May – 5 July 2015
Very much looking forward to chairing the discussion on 13 June…
‘Still from video: Hurrel & Brennan (from underwater footage by Howard Wood)’ courtesy and © the artists
There are a host of brilliant events and openings happening this month in GoMA, including the next installment of the Moving Image Season, Gallery 1. Clyde Reflections, an audio-video installation by the collaborative art/science team artist Stephen Hurrel and social ecologist Ruth Brennan, was selected by the curatorial team as beautiful and thought provoking work to continue the programme in the main gallery. It also relates to ongoing conversations that the gallery has been having about climate change, Glasgow and the visual arts while hosting Early Warning Signs, by Ellie Harrison and for Glasgow Green Year 2015.
“We are delighted that Clyde Reflections has found a temporary home at GoMA as part of the upcoming Moving Image Season. Our approach to producing this film was to interview a diverse range…
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‘On truth, doubts, and pain: The significance of ideas of objectivity’ a contribution by Daniel Goldberg – Centre for Medical Humanities
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.”
What art have I seen? Danish Diaspora Scotland
At Roselle House Galleries including work by Nickolai Globe who also has work installed in the new South Glasgow University Hospital
Write, Erase, Do It Over: On Failure, Risk and Writing Outside Yourself
Toni Morrison interviewd about failure. She has a very clinical approach to it. It needs excised. Its about discipline. Its nothing to do with fear.
http://www.americantheatre.org/2015/03/10/write-erase-do-it-over-on-failure-risk-and-writing-outside-yourself/
Terry Pratchett RIP
In about 1990/91 I was knocked off my bike and spent 3 weeks in St Thomas’. My brother brought me a paperback of Weird Sisters. I laughed so much. Mind you I was on morphine based painkillers.
On the importance of being negative | Science | The Guardian
I don’t understand the detail of the science, but as highlighted in this piece, the increased tendency to publish failed experiments as a result of the growth in the number of open access journals is important.
As the author of the article says of the paper, ‘It is not destined to be highly-cited because, as the last line of the summary on page one makes clear, the results are negative: “in no case were specific protease–substrate interactions observed.” ‘ So not only were they not able to generate the interactions they had hoped to be able to generate, they also don’t expect the paper to be widely cited – acknowledging failure in this case opens up another form of failure.
On the importance of being negative | Science | The Guardian.
Failure, Diebenkorn
Diebenkorn was more troubled by easy perfection: he wanted his paintings to resolve problems but not so thoroughly that they seemed pat or pretty, the marks of struggle erased. The more restructios he could create for himself, the freer he could be in improvising his way to a solution. But it also mattered to him that his errors lingered on as the repentance marks of pentimenti, the term for when an artist has second thoughts, redoing part of a painting, but leaving traces of what has gone before. In Diebenkorn’s work, these regions, which he called “crudities”, can be vast, ghost tracts of colour imperfectly repressed, or alternatively small spatters and splodges, accidents that opened up a new road to “rightness”.
Olivia Laing, Lovely imperfection, The Guardian, Saturday 28 February 2015.
What art have I seen? Drawing at RSA
Scottish Drawing exhibition at the RSA in Edinburgh – a few thoughts on what was unexpected, familiar, unfamiliar, obsessibe, a reminder, revealing, evocative, relational, quiet, surprising, severe, known and unknown, small.
Unexpected
Most Marion Smith
Next Will Maclean
But also Glen Onwin one unexpectedly direct Galena; one intriguingly complex – The unchanging and the changing; and one I think I knew about – Flow of Near Solids (A proposal)
Familiar from recent encounters David Blyth.
Unfamiliar Alfons Bytautus, Lorna McIntosh.
Obsessive Charles Stiven.
Reminder James Castle.
Revealing Joe Fan, particularly Spring Time Chaos.
Evocative Annie Cattrell Sustain, Sustain I and II
Relationships between for instance Frances Pelly’s PI, a concertina of drawings of a sleeping dog and CameronWebster’s visual narrative of house from sketch to completion.
Quiet works including Andy Cranston and Anne Douglas
Surprising Leon Morrocco. Vibrant, engaging, challenging the chromophobia of drawing.
Severe Arthur Watson
Known Frances Walker and Doug Cocker and unknown Fiona Dean.
The smallest revealing the most – Andy Stenhouse’s Tone Poem : Tone Dee (Harbour).
Missing Donald Urquhart,
The Question of Light: Tilda Swinton’s speech at the Rothko Chapel | Connerhabib’s Blog
Having been to the Rothko Chapel and having lived in Scotland for more than thirty years and spending the best (and worst) of that working with artists, this resonates… the older I get, the more I realise, “both this and that are true at once…”
http://connerhabib.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/the-question-of-light-tilda-swintons-speech-at-the-mark-rothko-chapel/
What art have I seen? Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth’s neon works installed Spruth Magers. The banding on the photo is I assume a frequency related to the neon/camera interaction. This work in the basement made the Greek myths into daily appointments. Upstairs the neon treatment of Freud’s proofs of the galleys was one of a sequence of manifestations of others’ works including artists (including Judd and Calvin and Hobbes), theorists (including Adorno) and scientists (including Darwin).
What art have I seen? Adventures of the Black Square
Whitechapel Gallery’s first class exhibition, Adventures of the Black Square. They take us for a very interesting walk following the black square in the 20th Century art, dance, design, architecture and craft. Particularly appreciated juxtaposition with David Batchelor’s Monochrome – 500 white quadrilaterals he’s found on his travels (and in the corner one screen showing the black ones).
What art have I seen? Rights of Nature
Not enough time between conference presentations to properly appreciate this very significant exhibition.
What art have I seen? Mike Nelson
Eighty Circles through Canada (the last possessions of an Orcadian mountain man), Mike Nelson’ show at Tramway in Glasgow. As an homage and as an exhibition it’s just right – very well judged. The two sides of the wall – one a sequence of slides of landscapes which you realise all feature a ring of stones, the remains of a camping fire; the other the remains of a life, some tubes of paint, some climbing equipment, a photo album, some clothes, old books, tapes of classical music, gridded out detritus. Melancholy even without the back story. But also somewhat humourous – you see rings of stones by rivers, in forests, burbling streams and with majestic mountains in the distance, and then you see one with a big rig going past – not all walks are in pristine wilderness.
What art have I seen? Maclaurin Festival
The whole of the Maclaurin Collection is on show at the moment including early 20th C British artists influenced by Futurism, St Ives School, every notable Scottish artist from the second half of the Century, the Bestiary, and really good work by Nash, Deacon, Hamilton Finlay and Maclean. Interspersed are works purchased from the Maclaurin Schools Competition. Well worth checking out. Not sure the recent acquisitions stand up well. Hopefully seeing the whole collection together will inspire the Trustees to be more careful and ambitious in their future purchases and perhaps learn from the founding curator and used exhbition offers and residencies to facilitate acquisitions.
artinscotland.tv ‘s piece on the show with Mike Bailey
What art have I seen? Horst
Horst at the V&A – would have liked to see some of his marked up photos next to the retouched published images. Also interesting to see that both Horst and one of his models spent time in the Louvre studying poses. But you can also see what the Street Photographers were reacting against – fashion photography as the ultimate constructed image.
What art have I seen? Post Pop
Rachel Whiteread homage to Gorgio Morandi in the Post Pop: East Meets West at the Saatchi Gallery.
Leicester leads new approach to maternity bereavement services
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.
What art have I seen? David Blyth
David Blyth’s astounding exhibition at RGU. Exploring and exploding taxidermy. Stories of Cyril the Squirrel and the Blyth’s Fitch Ranch in Manitoba in the 30s and 40s. Years of stripping back stories.
What art have I seen? Mark Neville
Mark Neville’s London/ Pittsburgh at
Alan Cristea.
Recent work by this Pulitzer nominated artist photographer exploring two juxtapositions of social inequality – one in London and the other in Pittsburgh (Braddock/Sewickley).
Mark said, “I had viewed both London and Pittsburgh through a prism mixed with Charles Dickens and Norman Rockwell. Sometimes the bringing together of two bodies of work made in different locations can generate new insights and reflections upon social divisions in each.”
What art have I seen? Schiele and Johns
The Courtauld has two fascinating exhibitions – Egon Schiele The Radical Nude and Jasper Johns Regrets. This analysis of the Johns exhibition from its showing at MoMA in New York is worth reading.
Ten thoughts from Johnny Galley
Read Johnny Galley’s blog on the seminar at Talbot Rice. I’ve posted on Tim Rollins and the K.O.S. before and was privileged to be at this event. I also use Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam’s observation about innovation and improvisation.
Tim Rollins and KOS, New York, late eighties
In August 2012, Tim Rollins and KOS arrived in Edinburgh in advance of the opening of their exhibition, The Black Spot, at the Talbot Rice Gallery. In partnership with the gallery, Artworks Scotland organised a day’s seminar for practicing artists and educators, which sought to explore ‘what was there to learn from Tim’s long practice?’ By gathering written responses of the seminar from five practicing artists and educators, we have sought to collate multiple responses that may be of transference to other educators working in the field:
The following are some ten thoughts, responding to the artists’ reviews, of what artists’ might take from Tim Rollins’ practice.
1. Charisma
There is no doubt that Tim has presence. Attendees talked of being ‘intoxicated’ by Tim’s presentation, and by his style of presentation. Holding a room, being confident, being a performer…
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What art have I seen? Uwe Stoneman at Tent
Will you miss the seabirds when they are gone? Uwe Stoneman works for the RSPB and is also an artist. This group of work uses a documentary approach as a means to speak about something where the level of care makes any other approach to difficult.
You Can Contribute
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
The Ayrshire Health and Arts Blog will record and provide a place to discuss the new developments in the community and mental health facility that’s being built in Irvine and we’re excited to have the chance to tell this important story. We will be covering:
- key milestones in the construction process
- interesting developments and opportunities in arts and health/arts for health and wellbeing / social inclusion, locally, throughout Scotland and internationally
- hosting guest blogs that show the value and relevance of the arts in mental health and the health-care environment (or other related environments).
The guest blogs, so far contributed by John Fulton (Art Therapist/Principal Art Psychotherapist in South Ayrshire Psychological Services) and Donald Urquhart (one of the Arts Co-ordinators on the project), will be written by artists, mental health practitioners, architects and the community and we’d…
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Tempting Failure
Check out @an_artnews’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/an_artnews/status/526811922512216066?s=09
Davis & Jones’ MOVE
Very nice response to the process of building a new hospital – “Davis & Jones invited surgeons and engineers to visit each others’ places of work and explore similarities and difference…”
The result is a new work commissioned from a medical illustrator comprising a pair of images. MOVE.
Thinking about failure
Slides of a paper on failure co-authored with Dr Gemma Kearney and presented at the NSEAD/iJade conference in Liverpool.
What art have I seen? from Pushkin Museum
A Literary Landscape in Russian Art at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. A selection of prints and drawings by students (who have done residencies at the Pushkin Museum perhaps a little like Hospitalfield?). Quality classical drawing and printmaking skills on display from early 20th Century to present day.
Energy Cities and Cultural Development
Walk Among The Worlds by Maximo Gomez. Photo: Alain Sojourner http://alainsojourner.com/nuit-blanche-toronto-2014-walk-among-the-worlds/
We’ve never been to a conference on the cultural and creative industries at a University that didn’t have someone providing a theoretical critique of the subject. On 1st October Robert Gordon University and the City of Aberdeen co-hosted an event which drew on the experiences of other energy capitals to understand cultural and creative industries development. Pacem critique, this was a morning full of insight into the sorts of strategies, policies and actions that make a difference to cities and see the arts thrive as part of their communities. It benefited from specific experience of being a European Capital of Culture (something Aberdeen aspires to) and it was a good renewal of the process of building a culture and arts development agenda for Aberdeen.
The subtitle was ‘Global Energy Cities and Cultural Illumination’ but the real point is that…
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What art have I seen? Losq, Bechers and The Nakeds
Nemora at the Fine Art Society, Juliette Losq’ black and white ink and watercolour scenes of post apocalyptic greenworld overwhelming our cities. These paintings extend space through devices such as infiltrating a fireplace or surrounding a grandfather clock and also replacing its face. For all those attempts to question the frame and break out of the container (like the plantlife evoked in those overlooked and unplanned spaces behond retail parks) it was the framed work Scumsucker (2011) which resonated the most reminding me of the space in which John Wallace’s Cinema Sark was exhibited a year ago during the first Environmental Art Festival Scotland: the undercroft of the M6 as it crossed the river Sark defining the border between England and Scotland.
Bernd und Hilla Becher at Spruth Magers. I wonder who decided on the composition of the groups of 9 images in particular? Was it the Bechers? The groupings are very subtle.
The Nakeds at the Drawing Room. Ought to have been inspiring and provoking in the way their Abstract Drawing exhibition was. Perhaps the failure is exemplified by a success. One of the standout pieces is Fiona Banner’s block of red text on a page (a print from Arsewoman in Wonderland I think). The text is a verbal description of a woman in a porn film. The description creates a clear sense of the artist’s eye travelling over and exploring the image (presumably frozen on a screen). It’s deeply personal and distinctive. It’s in no way salacious – quite the opposite – it wouldn’t make it into a volume of erotica. But the rest was in danger of sameness failing to extend vigorously into enough different spaces of drawing the human body. The are too many pieces that feel like sketches off the studio floor – the two small pieces by Beuys feel like that, though the Warhol drawings are revealing. But there are none of Gormley’s drawings using his own semen or any Duchampian work made with naked bodies and paint. Egon Schiele is at the heart of the thinking, but in a way he dominates the aesthetic too much and the conception not enough. The aim of the exhibition, to explore the space between the nude and porn, is really interesting but the curation doesn’t really stretch it enough. Schiele obviously made work for distribution as porn, so did Turner. I wonder who else did as well?
Arts & Health: Economics and the dangers of Randomised Control Trials
Couple of really interesting presentations and discussions at the ESRC funded Arts, Health & Wellbeing Research Network meeting in London. Unfortunately this was the last event in the series, but I’m sure that a longer term programme will emerge, especially when it was noted that there have been some 200 participants of which approximately 50 have been Phd students.
The first interesting area was a presentation by David McDaid on health economics and how that field interacts with research and decision making. We know that decisions about healthcare are made on the basis of efficacy and cost, but McDaid unpacked some of the basics for us. He highlighted that when looking at the economics of any decision about healthcare we need to understand:
- the cost of inaction;
- the cost of action (and here he pointed out that understanding project or programme costs is very difficult and arts organisations can be quite opaque about their costs. Costs also need to include in-kind costs absorbed by partners.);
- The cost effectiveness of the action in comparison to other potential actions;
- levers for maximising value (ie how to maximise the money spent by working on uptake and participation).
In terms of the cost of inaction he highlighted three areas to consider:
- Cost of every visit to the GP (which in the figures he showed was about £45 per appointment);
- The higher cost of attending Accident and Emergency;
- The even higher cost of hospitalisation.
- In parallel with this are the informal care costs (ie how much is the family bearing factored at hours times the minimum wage), and the out of pocket costs for the individual for treatments or lost earnings.
Some really interesting challenges emerged in response to McDaid’s framing of the economics through the example of ‘arts on prescription vs. individual therapy sessions.’ Firstly, why these are presented as alternatives when in many cases they might be complimentary? Secondly why reduced contact is presumed to be good when there are circumstances where greater contact with healthcare workers is the good outcome. To which David responded, “These are all good points, but the model of decision-making in healthcare economics is simplistic.”
On the back of McDaid’s presentation were two evaluated project case studies, one using reading with people with chronic pain, and the other using arts on prescription for people with depression and anxiety. Both were really significant, but looking at them through the lens McDaid had provided, you’d note:
- the need to focus on efficiency of delivery, maximise participation, understand operational finances and share models;
- be prepared to scale up from projects to programmes.
The afternoon presentations focused on the perceived weaknesses of two Randomised Control Trials recently published. Without trying to rehearse the details, some interesting points emerged which suggest that using Randomised Control Trial (the gold standard for evidence in healthcare decision-making) to prove the value of arts interventions is not something to be undertaken lightly.
Arts interventions need to be understood as “complex interventions” as defined by the Medical Research Council and interestingly this means that any “complex intervention” should,
- Start with a theory;
- define which ingredient(s) essential;
- include process analysis.
In terms of theory, healthcare is looking for the ‘theory of change’ that the study is going to test, but that ‘theory of change’ requires the practitioners (not just the researchers) to be very clear about their practice, and to deliver that practice in a consistent way in relation to the theory. (This clearly links to the ongoing development of a qualification in participatory practice by the ArtWorks programme in Scotland, jointly funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Creative Scotland.)
Perhaps one of the characteristics of any theory of change in the arts is the fundamentally voluntary nature of participation in that change. It’s one of the problems pointed out with Randomised Control Trials – people get selected to participate in the arts randomly. This is slightly problematic, particularly when you’re asking someone to engage in creative activity or even singing.
The point about defining essential ingredients is important – process-based work is often about context, empowerment and empathy as well as specific activity, but it’s extremely difficult to study more than one factor.
Finally the process analysis is important, on one level because that might a way to balance the attempt to define the essential ingredient, but also because timing and pattern are important in experiential work, e.g. participants are often interviewed for the baseline and then interviewed at the end of the programme, precisely the point where they might be feeling a sense of loss of an activity that had been enjoyed. Even a Randomised Control Trial is subject to such factors: not only what questions are you asking, but when are you asking them.
There was reference made to another Randomised Control Trial focused on singing, to be published imminently, which was ‘successful.’ It will be interesting to understand how this was constructed. But going back to McDaid’s point, scale may be critical because at least one really good, well evaluated, project was unable to engage with the Clinical Commissioning process simply because it’s too small (and most arts & health organisations are small even in the cultural sector, let alone in relation to healthcare).
The understanding of “complex interventions” in the medical literature bears further scrutiny and some references were suggested including Marchal (2013) (and Yin (2009) on “systematic case theory”).
Theo Stickley started the morning by offering an imagined scenario around the trajectory from the materialist understanding of healthcare that characterised the 20th Century through a transition to an holistic understanding of healthcare that could characterise the 21st Century. Whilst it’s important that the practitioners delivering arts in healthcare are well trained and professional, that they can articulate clearly their theory of change, as well as the economics of their interventions, the belief that the Randomised Control Trial is the way to prove the value might genuinely jeopardise what makes the arts distinctive from other interventions. We must become more articulate about the characteristics and values of our artforms and forms of intervention to ensure that they have equal status with the economics and the criteria imposed by the methods of research.
Only one speaker said, “and the art produced in this project was good too. We were proud of it.”
Presentations can be found here.
The Scot who burned down the White House
Burning of the White House by British forces, 1814
The Scots have had had a remarkable impact on American history. Less well-known is the Scot who burned down the White House and inadvertently helped inspire the American national anthem, a “mad, romantic, money-getting” Cochrane.
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CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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