Books on modern art often have a number of things in common. They have primarily been concerned with European and American art. They also have a tendency to be historically structured around named art movements and the personal histories of recognised artists. If we reject the notion of discrete, hermetic, self-contained, clearly identifiable movements, and get beyond the individuality of
A Language of Contemporary Art
(As reflected in relevant articles, books, texts and exhibitions) This exploration into the language of contemporary art has a number of origins and was done for several reasons. Its origins stemmed from my decision, several years ago, to delve into contemporary art: in terms of trying to understand it better; in terms of trying to get a sense of how
the pasts and the presents: a small-scale public art activity
The challenge was to create a simple object to be placed in a public setting in a way that could interact with an existing sense of place, and potentially prompt new perspectives for users of that space. The place chosen was a major public square in central Birmingham (UK). This acts as a place for occasional protests and demonstrations, as
Aspects of the contemporary – a context for thinking about art
In another piece of writing, it was suggested that elements of thinking about art would need to be viewed within some understandings of the contemporary context. What is it about society today that shapes how art is produced, exchanged and consumed? What is unique today about the conditions within which artists work and audiences approach the art made? What follows
Art, stability and change
Art can be viewed through the lens of change or through a lens of stability, in relation to a number of things:
- The purpose of art in society: its ability to reflect change or to support stability.
- The consistencies and variations within the work of a particular artist or a group of artists.
- The adoption of new techniques, styles and technologies, or the adherence to fixed canons.
- The extent to which art saw its purpose as celebrating progress and development, or regretting the passing of the established ways.
- The interplays between art and any wider social changes.
- The overt use of change and transformation as tools for the making of art works.
In current culture, a key role for art is being able to reflect on change, or to challenge change, or to push changes further, faster and deeper. Without this relationship to change there can, from this perspective, be no art of any consequence. Art simply becomes neutral landscapes, still lives and portraits or, worse, becomes a source of resistance to change, a carrier of nostalgia, an ideological proponent for stability in all things.
Read moreAn adaptable framework for self-directed art learning
Moving from traditional to contemporary; and from improving to established
This exploration was partly driven by an interest in art and partly by an interest in learning. The art-interest was a desire to move from doing quite ‘traditional’ art – landscapes, still life, some simple portrait work – at a level that was beyond Beginners Group and still ‘Improving’ … and to get somewhere closer to being able to do more contemporary work at a level that I might consider ‘established/confident in my own activities’. The learning-interest was part of my exploration of ‘pulled-in’ learning ie not taking a structured course, with fixed timetables, over a defined timescale – but moving in whatever ways seem appropriate, along flexible pathways, pulling in resources/learning as and when needed, and speeding up/slowing down as the situations allow. What follows is some attempt to put this down as a set of intentions (rather than a fixed curriculum) that tie in with my existing interests. It starts with some ‘entry point ‘ descriptions of where I am now; and sketches out some possible lines I might follow … just for interest/fun and from a desire to learn rather than a need for a qualification.
Read moreA brief view of some of Birmingham’s dalliances with varieties of localisations
The city as a local entity
It is a long time since Birmingham was recognised, by Charter, as an administrative structure in its own right. Various surrounding towns and villages were incorporated into the city, making it the largest local authority in Europe.
There have been recurring issues lasting until the present:
- What freedoms and flexibilities does the city have, or is it there mostly as a locality for the delivery of central government diktats?
- The city has always looked for Birmingham solutions to Birmingham problems (from early sewerage systems; civic developments; slum clearances and Manzoni planning; ….) but with the dangers that its size makes Birmingham ‘over-important’ or that its history as the City of a Thousand Trades encourages it to dismiss ideas not Made in Birmingham.
Birmingham has had various attempts at getting a local dimension to city planning and governance, to service delivery, and to the engagement of residents in neighbourhoods in key actions in their locality. Some key features, and tensions, of these are set out below. This is not an in-detail account of all aspects of localisation in cities, but a brief overview of some developments within one city.
Read moreCities and Housing Issues – a bit of an exploration
In various European and North American cities visited in the last decade, housing has been a recurring theme, both as an everyday lived concern of residents and as a policy concern for city decision-makers.
Whilst there seem to be universal issues, generic across all such cities, each city has its own particular set of housing concerns shaped by that city’s culture, history and the interplay between local and national legislation. Although many of the observations are at city level, it is recognised that none of the cities mentioned are homogenous entities. Each city has its variety of neighbourhoods and its diversity of residents: its physical and social nooks and crannies.
This exploration has been based on looking at newspaper articles, journal articles and policy documents, as well as a degree of wandering and observing the day-to-day facets of a select number of similar cities. It is, therefore, by its nature only a partial view of the complexity of things. It certainly does not set itself out as a well-referenced academic study, nor try to represent every aspect or every city. Any errors, omissions or assertions are personal ones.
The housing concerns of cities looked at tended to centre around the same issues: affordability, renting, house-building rates, local renovations and redevelopments, levels of public/private investment, land ownership and land use, homelessness, who gets to make which decisions, how we define ‘home’, and local/national interplays.
Housing is seen as a key social and political issue for those cities. Declarations and proposals are made at various levels of city/regional/national government, with various ways forward being proposed. At the same time, despite strong commitments to change, the difficulties do not seem to go away in other than piecemeal ways.
What follows is a summary of some of the key points in those observations – not from the viewpoint of a housing expert but from the perspective of an interested bystander who puzzles why the same key issues continue to be revisited with, in many cases, few real permanent inroads being made to fix the problems
Read moreBirmingham : a creative city?
This was written as part of a consideration of how developments might lead a city to think of itself as being a creative city. It started as thoughts linked to an online course run by the University of Toronto.
In terms of population, Birmingham is the UK’s Second City. It is located in the centre of England. Road and rail networks criss-cross the country here. Politically, it sees itself as second in importance to London but keeps a wary eye on Manchester which rivals it for this claim (on the grounds of seeming more inventive and more productive). Its population is steady at around 1million people.
This takes it out of any superstar city league, although it has aspirations to be a modern, world-connected city with a bright future. It is, relatively, a city of young people, a city with a tradition of creativity and industriousness, and a city of opportunity (even if more for some rather than for others).
Whilst not a recognised ‘World City’, Birmingham has a set of formal relationships with cities from around the world: ‘partner city agreements’ with Lyon, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Milan; and ‘sister cities agreements’ with Chicago, Guangzhou and Johannesburg.
It is a city that has undergone, and is continuing to undergo, economic transitions. It was settled in the 7th century and grew slowly as a set of farms and homesteads at a river crossing. It was granted a market in 1156 and by the 17th and 18th century was a place bustling with small workshops creating swords, guns, chains, machinery, jewellery, household metalware and so on. It had the conditions necessary to move ahead through the rapid industrialisation of the middle-late 1800s. It was regarded (or badged itself) as the Workshop of the World, the City of a Thousand Trades – certainly ‘Made in Birmingham’ was stamped on a large proportion of metal goods that supported development at home and in other countries.
This gave the city much of the shape that it has today – in terms of road structures and areas of terraced low-rise brick houses (even if the worst of these were demolished in the slum-clearances of the 1950-80 period). By the 1960s it had become seen as a place reliant on motorcar use and motorcar manufacture. When this industry restructured and some parts moved abroad, Birmingham was heavily affected, although it never became one of those semi-abandoned, semi-boarded up cities as it tried to reinvent itself as a tourist destination turning the unused industrial canals in the city centre into wharves for bars, restaurants and meeting places.
It has, more recently, shifted from a largely manufacturing base to an economy substantially reliant on service/ retail/ hospitality sectors and sees a future for itself as a place of finance, knowledge and enterprise. It wants to be a city that works for all, with an ambiguity about whether this is possible.
Read moreContemporary Public Art and non-capital Cities (of NW Europe and N America) – A framework for exploration
What follows is seen as a set of lines for thinking along, routes of exploration, rather than chapter headings or specific research topics (although things may end up being both of those at some stage in the future). There are various crossovers between several the elements listed. It is not intended as a description of all the thinking that can be done around topics of contemporary public art and cities, more of a personal guide for activities, readings and exploration.
My focus on contemporary public art (loosely defined) is a way of limiting things by excluding historical monuments and modernist pieces of public sculpture. The option of excluding capital cities is based on the belief that such cities are often unusual, with more in common with each other as a group of global cities than being representative of their nation’s cities. Limiting the geographical focus to north-west Europe and north America is partly based on my personal experience (and ease of travel from a base in Birmingham, UK) and partly because cities in those locations broadly share some sort of underlying culture. If opportunities arise to look at cities in other parts of the world, these will be taken.
This framework-for-thinking has already shaped activities between 2015 and 2017, and will continue to guide activities over the period 2017-2025. Outcomes will include deeper personal understandings of the relevant topics; contact across a network of key intermediaries with personal, occupational or academic interests in public art and cities; as well as various writings and presentations around key themes that emerge.
An early action is to share this framework of ideas with others, as well as scheduling visits to more cities and undertaking more studies. Cities already visited have included 10 UK and 4 US/Canada cities. Proposed visits in 2017-2025 will be to at least 30 further cities (10 UK; 10 US/Canada; 10 mainland European).
A potential Curriculum for Significance
All children and young people need access to significance – but each will have different routes towards it. ‘Significance’ here is more than general wellbeing or some sense of being involved in society. It goes to the core of how each person thinks and feels about themselves, their core identity, and the extent to which this is seen as being of value (to themselves; and in the perception of others) – to what extent any person has significance in a world that is complex and uncertain.
It is tied closely to emotional health, to feelings of hope and of value, and to a constructed sense of self. Hopefully such a sense of significance will be built around positive, productive facets – developed through nurtured opportunities. If this is not the case then the person may grow a sense of absolute insignificance – feeling of being worthless – or will create their own significance through antisocial routes.
One strong strand of my own professional training was based on a belief that a key purpose of doing teaching, or youth work, or adult learning, was to enable each individual worked with to develop and strengthen their own significance. Whilst most education and social activity nods towards a need to foster personal development, this now seems to come well below concerns around skills development. It is true that developing robust literacy, language, numeracy or other skills provides a strong base for developing significance, but it also feels as if current education and training practices are in danger of focusing on routine skills at the expense of developing positive feelings of significance.
The current concerns around levels of emotional health, anxiety and self-harm throughout society would suggest that significance, and how it gets actively fostered, is worth more attention than it currently appears to have. Steps on the way to fostering stronger, positive significance for individuals can form some sort of development curriculum for life. What follows is an attempt to set out the wide range of things that might be built into everyday activities – at home; in the community; at school, college or university; or in the workplace – such that there can be a stronger focus on enabling the development of significance.
It is not proposed that these form distinct taught topics or sessions but are signposts to opportunities that can be taken at every relevant opportunity, in many various contexts. Read more
Public and Private Issues
As with a number of other articles on this site, this is meant to be in the spirit of an exploration, bringing together a number of different aspects of a broad topic and seeing if any sense can be made of it all.
At one level, this is a matter of simple semantics: whatever one understands words like ‘private’ and ‘public’ to mean – but language matters as words shape an understanding of things, even things as tenuous as ideas – and those understandings can have everyday impacts on how people operate in the world – which, themselves, if repeated, begin to act as structurings within which things become taken as normal.
There are a number of elements around which understandings of public/private can be organised:
- People designing things or doing things – in public/ in private
- Things belonging to; consumed by people – as individuals (private); as society (public)
- Organisational structures … private company/ public company … private/in common
- Management of services to people – arranged as privately-purchased/ arranged as publicly funded
- Different political conceptions around privatisation and nationalisation – the amount of control attributed to State processes or to market processes
It is the last two of these that will be taken as the starting point, if only because political debates around public/private still occur with some vigour.
Some lines of thought arising from being researcher-in-residence
During the researcher-in-residence sessions at Grand Union gallery’s Im Bau exhibition (Artist: Aideen Doran, 2015) a set of recurring threads of thinking were revisited over and over.
Also thrown into the mix was a visit to New York, midway through the researcher-in-residence period. Although I had gone for other reasons, connections to the emerging thoughts from my sessions at Grand Union were uppermost in my mind as I wandered around that city so that the visit became yet another researcher session.
These interconnecting, and at times repeating, elements formed a loose framework that allowed for some reflexive thinking on cities, change, development, progress, decision-making, planning, style, art, the contemporary, memories etc.
Acting as researcher-in-residence took my thinking far and wide: moving across ideas, circling round and round (like some armature of connectivities), sometimes getting the wide overview and sometimes homing in on a detail.
The focus was always on the content of the ‘Im Bau’ exhibition, and the lines of thought that could be spun out from that; and on my own interest in cities, urban issues and decision-making.
The sessions extended understandings, appropriated ideas from elsewhere and made links between previously separate considerations.
What follows is an attempt to corral some of those swirls of thought under a small number of relevant headings, knowing that not everything can be tidied up in that way.
