Essay

The Futures Market

In his book Material Thinking the artist Paul Carter reminds us that,

“...in ancient Greek thought, chaos did not have its present day meaning. It signified ‘the yawning or gaping open of time and space to permit creation’.”

The proximity of chaos to creation might well explain the raw, unprocessed nature of much of the work produced by the artists on the Space for 10 project over the last year and a bit. I would even hazard that some of this new work is not yet fit for a viewing audience. But this should not be thought of as a failure of the project, rather it is the result of us artists taking our Space for 10 brief seriously indeed. As Carter notes (and Space for 10 acknowledges), matter is created through the opening up of time and space. However the Project went further than merely engineering a place and a time forrtists to produce. It invited us to re-assess what we were doing in order to ‘refresh, re-direct and progress’ our practice.

I imagine the hypothesis as follows. After an artist subjects his or her practice to a certain amount of self scrutiny, re-evaluation takes place and something new emerges. In order to produce this new thing we might need to dismantle trusted processes, treasured forms, familiar ways of thinking. This theory speculates that it is important that artists do this from time to time in order to reinvigorate their practice, to prevent them from ‘going stale’ and to avoid the fate of endless and uncritical repetition. It works on the premise that artists seek, as well as need, such testing. As Ryan Gander put it,

“If I make a work that is successful and I know how, then it is no longer challenging. [The work] has to take you to a place you don’t know, somewhere that scares you.” (1)

And though the artist may initially feel lost in this new place, the wisdom tells us a good artist should never play safe.

My research with contemporary artists tends to suggest that this theory makes sense for many contemporary practitioners. It appears to be true that the artist’s ambition is to seek the new or the unknown. For example painter Merlin James comments when discussing his own making process,

“It’s to do with trying to get to unfamiliar territory.” (2)

Indeed the idea of the new, perhaps what Rosalind Krauss terms the “working assumption” of “originality”, has long been the yardstick with which to judge the merits of a work. (3) Here is the sculptor Alison Wilding reflecting,

“What I’m trying to do is to make a new thing which is increasingly more and more difficult.” (4)

Wilding’s drive could perhaps be characterized as an echo of Ezra Pound’s modernist imperative, “Make it new!”. One should also add, as a word of caution, that this sense of discovery is usually felt at a local level – the critic or connoisseur may be unable to detect the artist’s innovation. But for the artist, even with these caveats, this sense of entering unknown territory still appears to be crucial. To continue the metaphor (as it is so serviceable) the questing propels the artist to continue making, for it is the unforeseen destination that provides the most tantalizing goal.

The Space for 10 artists were in the happy position of being given a fee, critical support, a space to work; the catalysts for change. This award raised the possibility that we might get to a place we hadn’t been before. And, at this juncture, it seems to me that, in their different ways, the artists rose to this challenge. Some however (and I include myself) are still unfamiliar with their new surroundings.

Orienteering

One of the things that struck me about the artists’ response to the project was an initial sense of them find their bearings. How do you orientate yourself in a place you don’t recognise? In a commendably straightforward manner these artists employed strategies of visually documenting and mapping. Perhaps it is to be expected that artists with a material practice like these should physically engage with what is around them. It should be noted however that the results of this direct approach often twist and turn in unpredictable ways.

Those artists transported to a new environment often began by documenting their surroundings in film and photography. The Caravan Gallery’s photographic inventory of places in the North East was made more poignant by their subjects’ predicted disappearance under the banner of ‘regeneration’. Although grounded in very different practices, the responses by Kypros Kyprianou and Alma Tischler Wood to their more immediate studio environment was to test (with compelling wry humour) the received notion of the artist’s studio as a utopian space. Andrew Sneddon explored how we imaginatively invest in places, exploiting the way fictions attach themselves to sites. Bob Levene’s series of drawings, As Far As The Eye Can See, offered a more embodied perception of her surroundings, a sort of visual deliberation on the ‘God in the Quad’ philosophical dilemma. Bettina Furnée also mused on the particularities of the site of her residency, subtly questioning the authority of Cambridge University Library by her exploration of the subjectivity of words.

In their different ways then the artists re-orientated themselves. They began to test, culturally and perceptually, the new space they had entered.

In process

One of the most important aspects of the Space for 10 project was that no ‘outcomes’ were prescribed (and whoever wrote this into the funding application is to be thoroughly congratulated). The artists weren’t required to show what they had done at the end of the residency except in the most informal way. This led to the genuine possibility that the work could exist ‘in process’, a rare opportunity in our audit-driven times.

Work in process is by definition continuing, staving off resolution. Process offers a ‘safe haven’ for the artist, providing the possibility for valuing endeavour over products. I believe this allows two things to happen. Firstly the artist’s sense of the possible outcomes is broadened. Anything might happen – it won’t, but it is important to think it might. Without a specific resolution in sight the artist can exist in the process non-sequentially, living amongst evidence of initial explorations, material experiments, unfocused desires, blind alleys, slight asides as well as labours of love, moments of utter playfulness and sheer boredom. Traces may get left to serve as a prompt to the future, a key thought not yet explored sufficiently waits for its time - as Bob Levene said when showing us an image of a tentative experiment,

“I didn’t make that into anything, but I will.”

Dwelling in process the artist and their work elastically move between past and present, as Brian O’Doherty eloquently articulates it,

“Studio time is defined by [a] mobile cluster of tenses.” (5)

Secondly without the public viewing in sight, the artist can listen to his or her own judgements and attune the decision-making process. Free from others’ expectations the artists can bring the work closer and closer to their true concerns. This is not to say that artists don’t need an audience, far from it, it is just that the timing has to be right. New work needs a breathing space.

The making process itself conjures challenges that the artist responds to. Although these days the artist rarely characterizes their encounter with material as traditional mastery, artists continue to see the making process as a way of bringing the unforeseen into play, of courting the unknown. When difficulties and doubts arise artists occasionally feel as if the medium comes to their rescue, issuing challenges that they must respond to. Sometimes the artist ‘suspends’ his or her conscious deliberations whilst making, creating a sense that the medium has its own volition and that the work ‘talks back’. For Space for 10 Paul Housley and I returned to printmaking after a gap of 20 years. Working with what felt like a new technical process allowed us to re-think the ways our images acquire meaning through their fabrication and medium. Juneau Projects used their residency to explore that most unstable of materials, other people. Their music collaborations provided an excursion into the pleasures of such an unpredictable process. Rather than medium it was scale that Torsten Lauschmann was able to explore in his large studio at Spike Island. This immersion in the immediate demands of process allowed the artists to test their methods and, crucially, to formulate new ones.

Reflection

Space for 10 provided a forum for the artists to meet in the shape of professional seminars but also, rather more unusually, provided us with ‘mentors’. These were art professionals chosen by the Project and ourselves, with whom we discussed our work and related issues. I have to say that this mentoring cannot have been easy. As “artists who [had] achieved a notable level of success”, we were neither young nor impressionable. Yet luckily mentors were recruited because the importance of talking through our new work and processes was recognised as crucial. Over the last few years I have spend much time interviewing artists and analysing their statements (6). This has demonstrated to me that how artists voice what, why and how they do what they do has a fundamental role in formulating what they continue to do. In the narratives we form around our practice and in the stories we make, we make ourselves and begin to map our future production. How artists articulate and present their work, or make sense of their process, does not only impact directly on the artworks but also affects their continuing sense of (artistic) identity (7). The mentors thus trod a difficult tightrope; they needed to challenge but also support, to foster speculation but maintain rigour. Happily for me my mentors met these demands.

So, we were given spaces, our time was paid for and we certainly all made work. But did we achieve that additional goal? Did we ‘progress’ our practice? Did we reach the uncharted territory so desired by artists? I think that if we did it was not in quite the way that I suggested earlier. Rather than conduct an orderly assessment of our practices and then determine a change of direction, this was a project in the word’s truest sense – it threw us forward to a new destination. Space for 10 catapulted the artists into the demands of unknown places, processes and debates. And it is from this vantage point that we now review our past and retrieve that which is still relevant.

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