Failspace Presentation
Presentation given at the Failspace Conference, Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, 7 December 2022
Introduction
In terms of the earlier discussion about self-disclosure I am he/him, short, pale skinned, grey haired and dressed in grey and black
I’m also aware as a middle-aged middle class white male I have a form of privilege which makes it easier to talk about failure. This is particularly manifest in a certain form of confidence in the ability to work with dominant narratives and construct versions of reality.
Story telling is at the heart of the problem with failure. Storytelling and neoliberalism.
Storytelling because we find it very difficult to end stories with failure and on some levels storytelling is our business. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, the pioneering artists working with ecology, ecologies, watersheds, planning and the global environmental crises had a saying ‘every place is the story of its own becoming’ ie that the way things become is organised by the story it is telling itself (Harrison and Harrison 2007).
Neoliberalism because it has constructed a culture of competition – competition is one of the pillars of neoliberalism alongside privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and free trade.
So the work this contribution draws on started with a ‘research’ residency at Gray’s School of Art when I was still a freelancer (at that point having been made redundant twice). I was asked to work with a group of staff to establish a ‘research theme’ – as part of that process I interviewed 8 members of staff. In preparing for the interviews I added a question about failure on instinct. Otherwise all the questions were things like ‘what does making mean to you?’ – too comfortable.
When the research residency ended the ‘research theme’ stalled and never developed in any useful way. The book we discussed drawing on the interviews never got written.
A couple of years later I got hired onto Gray’s as staff (other things I had worked on at Gray’s had been more successful). I was asked to manage Design in Action, a research project, and there was already a Postdoc in place. Gemma Kearney was from the Business School with an interest in Entrepreneurship. We ended up discussing failure and used the interview material I had collected as the basis for a paper (Fremantle and Kearney 2015).
The heart of the paper is the sequence of observations made by the lecturers, artists and designers.
Questioning of the concept of failure, specifically, considering if failure is an end-point or part of an overall trajectory
‘Maybe they’re just experiments. Failure, perhaps, becomes a bit more strict about it.’
‘There are pieces that I’ve made over the years that I’ve not been pleased with, but they’ve always been ‘not a failure’ because they’ve stepped onto something else.’
I always juxtapose this with the story about Cezanne. According to Renoir Cezanne sometimes came, ‘…away disappointed, returning without his canvas, which he’d leave on a rock or on the grass, at the mercy of the wind or the rain or the sun, swallowed by the earth…’
So the stories we tell ourselves of failure as process need to be juxtaposed with the actual judgements of outright failure.
The potential to learn from failure
‘If I saw myself in the light of all the failures that I’ve made – I’m much more of a failure than a success – but then, I’ve learned much more from those failures than the successes.’
‘There is a quote from Dieter Roth. He reached the point in his practice where he deemed everything he did was of equal value; nothing as such was a success and nothing was a failure. Ever since I came across that, I’ve been fascinated by that notion because, again, it almost, in a sense, is the antitheses of teaching and especially assessment; we’re making value judgements on whether things are successes or failures.’
“It’s important to exhibit your mistakes. Man is not perfect. Neither are his creations. I’ve given up using sour milk. Instead I use music. I sometimes fasten a tape recorder onto paintings or objects and have the music pour over the spectator/listener. This creates as certain effect: those who look at the art don’t realize how bad it is when they hear the music. For the music is even worse. Two bad things make one good thing.” (1978)
The role of failure in assessment
‘…so, if you can have a discussion whereby you say that failure is OK and that it might even be a good thing, then the student is only going to say “Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I can’t fail my assessment.”… It is really, really difficult. I think the whole assessment process makes it difficult to have a proper discussion about failure’.
What we realised was that when it comes to assessment there is this slippage
“Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I can’t fail my assessment.”
If I fail my assessment I’ll fail my course and then I’ll be a failure.
I was co-present for the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities together with Elizabeth Reeder who leads the Creative Writing Masters at Glasgow.
We developed a presentation and I think it was the second time we delivered the session someone asked about Mental Health and Creative Failure.
Since then I’ve given a mental health warning at the start of each session. When I had to record the session so it could be delivered during lockdown and I had to break it up into 4×15 minute chunks I had to put the mental health warning at the beginning of each – that still oddly resonates in my mind.
But the point is critical – all the talk of using failures creatively is fine except when the failure has led someone into some sort of depression or anxiety, at which point offering them “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” is actually dangerous.
However discussing failure carefully and opening it out as a subject which we can engage with does seem to be useful – I’ve used live polling a couple of times now asking students at the beginning of a session and at the end what words they associate and the anxiety words reduce in frequency. I’m not a psychologist and it isn’t a controlled trial, but it is an area that I want to explore further because in particular of the link with assessment – the double bind which has the affect in the end of making students cautious – “Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I can’t fail my assessment.” The response to this is to be risk averse.
I’m not sure exactly how the processes of assessment in education and evaluation in organisational systems are related.
Being here today has helped me realise that my concerns with failure are from the perspective of practitioners much more than from the perspectives of policymakers or funders, or from the perspective of arts admin – but then I teach in the Art School, not in our School of Creative and Cultural Business… I don’t come at it from the issue of participation and the challenge that the research team set themselves – of the wider issue of who participates in arts and culture.
I’m also not regularly involved in evaluation per se, though sometime research papers reporting on projects are also playing an advocacy role.
However I was part of a team commissioned by Creative Carbon Scotland to evaluate a EU funded project on the relationship between culture and climate adaptation (Fremantle and Mabon 2021). The other member of the team – Leslie Mabon – is an urban climate adaptation specialist. It was a highly experimental project – climate adaptation has been the ‘poor cousin’ of climate mitigation, and it was only at the point the project was happening that the importance of public engagement in adaptation was beginning to be recognised at the strategic level – certainly only a few years before it was seen as a matter for infrastructure and technocrats.
Leslie and I from the outset agreed that we could only do a formative evaluation because there were really no comparable projects against which to evaluate Cultural Adaptations.
What was interesting was that one of the partner organisations TILLT, which has a very long track record of doing placements of artists in industry and public bodies brought up the issue of failure and had reflected on it organisationally (Cultural Adaptations 2020).
There examples are all to do with project management, expectations and communications, and they had as an organisation clearly reflected on the failure and developed effective responses.
The model is that TILLT organises for an artist to work on a placement in a non-arts organisation – sometimes the non-arts organisation is commercial, looking for ‘out of the box’ thinking and they fund the placement. Sometimes the organisation is public or third sector and TILLT does the fundraising.
The artist placement is supported by a TILLT member of staff, originally called a project manager, but for a long time now called a ‘process’ manager.
What TILLT told us about their experiences of failures focused on in the first instance on the gap between the person in the organisation who thinks bringing an artist in is a good idea and the people in the organisation who are expected to benefit from the artist’s input.
Since then TILLT have always had ‘project groups’ including staff as well as management, artist, and process manager.
Another example fundamentally changed TILLT’s approach – for the first ten years the underpinning assumption was that the artist’s role was to disrupt in some way. This approach came to a head when an unnamed artist in an unnamed organisation did a whole date of activity around the theme of ‘death’.
The Director of TILLT told us:
“I had no idea of what the artist and the process manager was planning, and when I on the Monday after found some papers in the printer about experiences and thoughts about death I contacted the client’s contact person to ask how it all went. I got some very hard feedback from her and also very personal. She explained that they all had a very distasteful feeling after the lab, and that she, who was taking a plane the day after the lab, had a panic attack during the flight…
Their conclusion was:
“Today we want to create relations to the participants instead of uncertainty. If you have trust between the artist and the group you can have them do anything and really expanding the comfort zone. If you have no trust nothing will change.”
In terms of the evaluation we delivered it included failure as an issue.
Adaptation requires trust and a willingness to understand and work with the issue of failure.
Exploring what success might mean and embracing shared ambition are both critical parts of learning from different expertise. Criteria for success in adaptation are difficult because success is the avoidance of disruption and collapse.
In the conclusions the term we used was ‘success criteria’.
Turning to some conclusions…
It is interesting that for TILLT it was only in a failure of something that had been working well, that a new model was developed. They had been using a disruptive model for 10 years, presumably effectively. Someone pushed it too far and that resulted in an opportunity for development. They offered it as an example of failure, but they also offered it as an example of development and innovation. Of course they were able to tell us these examples with hindsight. The examples weren’t fresh.
In the end we need to be really careful because the criteria against which we judge failure become normative, are intended to be habitual, and are disciplining – and here I’m channelling Foucault (Conway 2021).
I think for me the areas of future work are around how addressing failure as a subject might actually reduce anxiety. But how we equally need to be willing to deal with discomfort.
And secondly around the way failure might also be something to do with not knowing, and how this might be a form of resistance to neoliberalism and the dominance of competition as an organising principle.
References
Conway, Will. 2021. ‘Going Astray’. RevoltingBodies (blog). 13 December 2021. https://revoltingbodies.com/2021/12/13/going-astray/.
Cultural Adaptations. 2020. ‘Learning from Failure in Experimental Projects’. Cultural Adaptations. 23 January 2020. https://www.culturaladaptations.com/resources/learning-from-failure-in-experimental-projects/.
Fremantle, Chris, and Gemma Kearney. 2015. ‘Owning Failure: Insights Into the Perceptions and Understandings of Art Educators’. International Journal of Art & Design Education 34 (3): 309–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12083.
Fremantle, Chris, and Leslie Mabon. 2021. ‘Cultural Adaptations Evaluation Report’. Edinburgh: Creative Carbon Scotland. https://doi.org/10.48526/rgu-wt-1513437.
Harrison, Helen Mayer, and Newton Harrison. 2007. ‘Public Culture and Sustainable Practices: Peninsula Europe from an Ecodiversity Perspective, Posing Questions to Complexity Scientists’. Structure and Dynamics: EJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hj3s753.
‘Failures in Cultural Participation’ new issue of Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation
“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
Adaptation and failure
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).
Errata – Brief Interruptions. Futurefarmers at CCVA
“In Paul de Man’s notes on irony he asserts, citing Baudelaire, that falling can enable a duplicate consciousness wherein one observes and laughs at oneself without hierarchies of different subjectivities: one becomes aware of oneself as human and an object in the hands of nature.” Rebecca Uchill, Errata (2017)
What art have I seen? Devils in the Making
Devils in the Making, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
Thinking about failure
Slides of a paper on failure co-authored with Dr Gemma Kearney and presented at the NSEAD/iJade conference in Liverpool.
Failure
Beach structure. Photo Chris Fremantle
Simon Biggs and the CIRCLE (Creative Interdisciplinary Research in Collaborative Environments) have a day called Glitch’d: Purposeful Mistakes at Edinburgh College of Art next week. They say,
The glitch is the defect or malfunction; when technology misbehaves. Distinct from noise, which corrupts information, the glitch affects the decisions our technologies increasingly make for us, amplifying the outcome. This one day event, encompassing promenade performance, an intelligent search engine, technological demonstration, dance performance and manipulated light installation, explores how interactive media art projects can offer insights into the affects and effects of the glitch.
Info here.
Methodologies of Failure
Justin Langlois put a set of questions (a self-evaluation toolkit?) directed at artists engaged in social practice on Portland’s Art and Social Practice Masters blog. It’s humourous, provocative and pointed.
we tried something, we failed, we burnt it down
“How you can be doing that work, how you can be this radical alternative, and those oppressive structures return so unconsciously?”
Transcript of a discussion about collectives and failure. Collectives, which are meant to be a radical alternative to the marketisation of the individual in the art economy, end up sliding unconsciously into patriarchies, or being co-opted by institutions and failing in the ambition to be radical.
Fail better | e-flux
Fail better at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (not a case of What art have I seen?)
“Try again / fail again / fail better,” is an inspirational quote by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. During his visit to Germany around 75 years ago, Beckett made a number of extended visits to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and now—in keeping with his famous motto—the Kunsthalle is presenting a diverse selection of films and videos on the theme of failure. In works dating from the 1960s to the present day, internationally acclaimed artists explore this complex phenomenon, highlighting not only the playful, amusing and surprising aspects of failure but also its mournful and tragic dimensions.
Grupo Etcetera on failure
From Grupo Etcetera presentation at CCA Glasgow.
Errorism: practice philosophy that bases its actions on error
Errorists: multitudes, subjects or groups that practice errorism
“The Movement also opens ways to consider the notion of error as a fundamental human condition in the capitalist world that eschews mistakes and failures.”
see also http://actipedia.org/project/international-errorist-movement
Failures
I’ve started adding examples of failure into my blog. I’ve tried to put them into the blog at the time they happened. This will probably mean that there is a clump retrofitted into the time before I started actually keeping the blog. And to be honest I’m not going to be able to put anything that’s going on right now that might constitute failure for obvious reasons, so this will be a backwards looking exercise.
The first I put in is a misunderstanding from the late 90s. I was running SSW and trying to learn about artists working in the landscape. I was picking up on references to John Latham and his work in Scotland. I had heard that it had something to do with the bings of West Lothian. So I was down, probably visiting with relatives and went looking. I came across the Five Sisters near a now defunct retail park. I took a load of pictures. I thought at the time John Latham was an important largely unknown British land artist in the American sense. I thought he had literally shaped this monumental earthwork. It took a while for me to understand what was really going on. I did write about that a while ago here.
I think this is typical for me. Often I’ll misunderstand something to start with, and it will take a while for me to get it the right way around, sort out what’s important. Interestingly Johan Siebers recently highlighted the Slow Science movement and in their manifesto they say,
We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.
The next example is a piece I was asked to write as an introduction to a catalogue. This would be around 2001. The catalogue was for the exhibition Common Place at The Lighthouse in Glasgow. I was living and working up in the North East of Scotland and I got completely obssessed by farm bothies, bothy ballads, Bob Dylan and the way that these were connected. I wrote the piece. It definitely wasn’t what was wanted. There is a model for writing an introduction to an exhibition catalogue and I missed that model completely. It’s taken me a very long time to work out that models are important. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. I like starting with a blank sheet of paper. Not everyone else does. You can read it here.
This brings me onto another failure – if being made redundant from a local authority is a failure (could it actually be a badge of success?). Before I went freelance I worked as the Arts Links Officer for South Ayrshire Council. They made me redundant at the end of the contract in 2006. I went freelance and have not looked back. Even in South Ayrshire, where I still live, I think I’ve achieved more since than I ever did during. But I do think there was a conceptual failure on my part. I don’t think I understood that I was simply there to deliver on existing models. What I should have been doing was networking with other Links Officers to find out what was being done in other Local Authorities across Scotland and simply bring those programmes to South Ayrshire. I was doing some of that, but I was always looking to make it distinctive, specific to that place.
Another much earlier failure, again at SSW, was not managing to deliver the tenth edition of the Scottish Sculpture Open. That should have opened in 1999 in early July. I had a number of meetings with SSW Board members and we discussed and or approached a couple of people to be guest artists (I remember Martin Puryear and John David Mooney). I remember writing to Puryear and sending him some images of Kildrummy Castle. He didn’t want to do it. The Sculpture Open had been done on a shoe string in the past and we had, with the ninth edition, tried to do it properly with at least some fees and production expenses. It has to be said that there were a few other things going on at the time, but essentially I definitely failed to keep the programme going.
So why put examples of failure into my blog? Failure is something we don’t talk about enough. There is Beckett’s brilliant quote,
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try Again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Failure is about taking risks. There seems to be a bigger and bigger gap between the public sector and the private sector in terms of risks. It is talked about a bit in terms of design and innovation – fail fast, fail frequently. On the other side the requirements in the public sector for clear identification of outputs, outcomes and risk assessments are all limiting the bureaucratic exposure to risk and pushing it onto individuals and organisations.
Working with staff at Gray’s School of Art on a research residency last year we discussed failure a lot. The staff highlighted how difficult it is to promote failure as an important way of working for art school students. All the staff were quite happy to talk about failure in their own practice. Most said that failure was a more common experience than success. No one had any problem talking about failure.
But they described the situation where students need to be prepared to make works that fail, but they are constantly worried about grading and being failed. How can you develop a practice that has a healthy relationship with failure if the structure you are working in constantly threatens you with failing the course?
Failure is about learning. By listing failures I am also listing things I have learnt from (or should have learnt from). Talking to Chris Hewson from Manchester School of Architecture, who’s doing research into multi-faith spaces, he said that the Planner on the research team is always wanting to visit spaces that don’t work, rather than the ones that are exemplary. He says you learn more. People can tell you exactly why spaces don’t work, but find it more difficult to explain why things do work.
There are some good books on failure:
Antebi, N., Dickey, C., Herbst, R. (Eds). (2007). Failure! Experiments in Aesthetics and Social Practices. Los Angeles, CA : The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/ accessed 26 November 2012.
Hope, S. (2011). Participating the Wrong Way: Four Experiments by Sophie Hope. London: Cultural Democracy Editions. http://culturaldemocracyeditions.sophiehope.org.uk/ accessed 26 November 2012.
Le Feuvre, L. (ed). (2010). Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art). London: Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Failure – unrealised projects
Murdo Macdonald had told me about the duplication of statues of Robert Burns. The ones we are familiar with in Scotland also exist in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We made a proposal to the Maclaurin Trust to develop an exhibition for the 250th anniversary of the birth which was going to happen in 2009. We did a presentation to them. They never responded – they must have buried it. Read it: Proposal Burns Statues MM.
Failure
I failed to understand John Latham’s Placement at the Scottish Office: see short text describing failure written in early 2005 about a misunderstanding that must have taken place before 2003 – probably in the late 90s.
Failure
I was asked to write a text by the Lighthouse for a catalogue associated with their exhibition Common Place. I got the wrong end of the stick and wrote something about Bob Dylan and Bothy Ballads (you can read it here). My piece was never published. They had to get someone else to do the job.
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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