Due to the magnificent idiocy of ACE and Nottingham Council the largest remaining artists studios dedicated to ‘dirty’ work outside London has come to an end with the loss of three floors of working professional artists spaces. The landlord wants to ‘maximise’ the vialbility of the structure i.e. make more money…so goodbye art…
In its place we can sit and ponder the messy new and still unfinished Centre for Contemporary art and wonder what might have been achieved by a sensible use of £19 million (and rising) pounds of euro money instead of building a hole in the ground filled with badly built tacky gold shell…too late to worry now….
As Goldfactory space in those studios it too has ended in present form…the research space gone too….
We would like to thank all those who supported us..even ACE who gave an initial £5000 R and D grant……
We look forward to more crass over intellectualised lectures and mediocre ‘cutting edge’ shows in the new jewel in crown…
well those digital artists who left will
the rest probably can’t wait to dance on its grave if continuing rumours about its viability in a depression turn out to be true….
such stupid dreams…
happy new year
GF
I have placed a link to ‘Train Diary’ on front page of website.
http://shaunbelcherwriting.wordpress.com/
This was the project I did not complete and show at Lincoln because I became so disillusioned with the course. Instead I showed the ‘Suit of Nettles’ PR show cop-out..to fill the space as I felt this project was too complicated for what was basically a craft show….
The basic premise is as follows and over the next few weeks I shall start filling in the journeys week by week…
Every journey to Lincoln is annotated in a sketchbook. Informed by a reading of a single chapter from W.G.Sebald’s book ‘Rings of Saturn’. Thoughts and observations are written down as they occur with no linear logic.
(The following article started out as a coda to the evaluation I was asked to write for the Derby Postgrad. Course and ended up as a stand alone piece on my Moogee art criticism blog)
http://belcheresque.wordpress.com
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose
Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, no no
Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues
You know feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.
Kris Kristofferson ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’ Lyrics
A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.
Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy, for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no short cuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. There is only the experience.
Jeanette Winterson - ‘What is art for?’ - Guardian 2002
Where are we now? - the bigger picture
Arts planning and funding in the U.K. has been thrown into turmoil by two or three concurrent factors. One a slowdown (pace - ‘recession’) globally which may well remove the Labour Party from power in the next two years.
Two a diversion of a significant amount of lottery funding to the Olympics (even if there were no Olympics to pay for the income from lottery is in a downward spiral).
Thirdly a cut-throat bottom-line cash-driven business model in arts education that is pumping out a hundred fine art graduates per institution into the muddy waters of U.K. Creative Industries PLC. Even the most hard-nosed ACE administrator realises that the gravy will be spread thinner and thinner soon on some very poor fare…
Where are all these new ‘geniuses’ going to go?
‘Free Enterprise’?
So here I am 50 years old and advocating ‘Freemium’ policies, freecycle marketing and not-for-profit artists organisation and pressure-groups. I must, therefore, be mad?
I honestly believe this is the only sensible way forward…the arts council’s golden goose has probably laid its last golden eggs for a while in terms of low-end funding..
For new models perhaps we should look to American free enterprise models that are not based on ’state funding’. We need enterprise, imagination and communal enterprise to survive this recession.
Nottingham was the base for the East Midlands Group in the 1970’s that survived and prospered because all of those things..not just because it was state-funded. It high time that artists stopped ‘competing’ like so many little businesses for government ‘largesse’ and actually started producing high quality work people actually might want to take an interest in.
This starts with reskilling our fine arts graduates instead of spilling them out with pretentious notions and badly conceived ideas of being the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Removing the skills base was one of the tragedies of the past two decades of art education.
GLOBAL/LOCAL?? Digital freedom?
The free market is dominant to a degree we have never seen before and it destroying not only local communities but the old ‘communal’ bonds between creative individuals. Grants and lip-service cannot change the digital wrecking ball creating havoc with creative copyright. Protecting one’s work digitally is impossible. All creative output can be copied and distributed freely…those who do not accept this are swimming against a very strong tide.
The only ’saleable’ commodity left to the artist is his/her own ideas and experience and the ‘authenticity’ of their personal appearances..or substitute appearances in shows etc. Crafts practitioners are strong on the ‘authentic and personal’ properties that sell items but fine artists no longer are because of recent changes in fashion. To have abandoned traditional skills just at the point where they are most needed is madness. I call this kind of art and skills based production ’slow art’ to differentiate from the internet’s dissemination of ‘fast food art’. This ‘fast art’ is eroding the market for all the arts…
A ‘near-perfect’ copy of a Francis Bacon can be painted in China in the time I have taken to write this evaluation ….so why bother being Francis Bacon any more the students argue..we have ideas…such wonderful ideas….Indeed all 100 have wonderful ideas..it is putting them into ‘practice’ literally that requires skills and understanding as well as ideas.
Some digital artists are already ‘outsourcing’ their creative output to others on a massive scale..just like companies.
It began with YBA’s (Hirst and co. had most ‘artifacts’ ‘made-up’ for them) now everyone’s doing it…especially those students coached early in their career in networking and the ‘wow factor’.
Students are no longer taught to make paints or stretch a canvas or cast bronze ..we have entered a period of ‘Warholian’ education.
True ‘authenticity’ is in short supply now and Fordism is a more relevant philosphy to artists now than the ‘Van Gogh’ suffer and paint model..ironically both he and Picasso engaged in bartering - swapping paintings for food and drink when poor….plus ca change….
Everything else in the arts has been up for grabs since the internet was invented.
To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson in ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’…..
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to sell.
Nothing ain’t worth nothing less it’s free
We are all living in the freemium economy.
‘Conrad Atkinson Remix 1978-2008′ by Moogee the Art Dog
has been selected for ‘Penned’
July 17, 6-8pm, 2008 - Opening Reception
July 18-20, 2008 - ARTSCAPE
at the Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore
An exhibition of pen and/or marker drawings including photographs of the pens used to make them. The more than 100 drawings in this exhibition cover a broad range of pens from the generic ball point to the traditional rapid-o-graph and feather quill to the modern array of jell and artists’ pens.
This exhibition will travel to Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA and Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC and possible other galleries in the coming years.
ARTSCAPE BALTIMORE WEBSITE
A fellow artist’s comments on show.
I think this is a good show to be in. It’s travelling to a lot of trendyish galleries and will be seen extensively around the US. The Arlington centre is a DC district space. The N Carolina one is, I think, well visited. There is most likely tobe a New York venue as well.
Artist/curators who are working on the exhibition:
Cynthia Connolly, artist, photographer, Director, Ellipse Arts Center,
Arlington, VA;
Bill Thelen, artist, Director, Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC;
Andrew Jeffrey Wright, artist, co-founder Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA;
Wendy Yao, Owner/Director, Ooga Booga, Los Angeles, CA;
Kim Domanski and Gary Kachadourian, Artscape, Baltimore
http://www.nottinghamstudios.org.uk/ladybay
Last year I was an exhibiting artist at this two-day arts event.
This year I am working with Wolfgang Buttress, Nick Butcher of Folkwit Records and Mark Coyle of Folkspace to start a mini acoustic music festival alongside the art and gardens events.
Very early days but looks promising for a larger festival in years to come situated on ’south-side’ of Nottingham and focussing on new-folk, blues and acoustic area.
This links in with my Trailer Star Lounge social network
http://trailerstarlounge.ning.com
http://folkwit.biz
http://www.folkspace.org/
On behalf of Goldfactory I am now maintaining the Nottingham Studios ‘Gateway’. This is a one-stop portal for all contemporary arts activity in the East Midlands area.
http://www.nottinghamstudios.org.uk
Along side this I have deployed a phpbb forum called GOLDFORUM which a multi-level forum for users to exchange information on the arts which subdivided into regional areas.
It remains to be seen if used on as large a scale as the now defunct previous You Are here website. All of this done with no funding and no support from ACE…..laughable really. Maybe one day they will catch up….
Goldforum
http://www.goldfactory.org.uk/forum
Finally I now working on a Trent Fine Art M.A., alumni website which called Culturgen and which will go live later in year. This will be an interactive arts forum/profile/social network portal designed to link ex-graduates around the world.
I have already linked on left hand side of this blog to the Connect 2008 blog which helped somewhat in creating a group profile for exhibition. In my opinion things could have been developed a lot further in this direction.
Metro Newspaper - 28.04.08
Left Lion Nottingham Magazine Artist profile #22 April-May 2008
‘Conrad Atkinson Remix 1978-2008′ by Moogee the Art Dog
has been selected for ‘Penned’
at the Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore
An exhibition of pen and/or marker drawings including photographs of the pens used to make them. The more than 100 drawings in this exhibition cover a broad range of pens from the generic ball point to the traditional rapid-o-graph and feather quill to the modern array of jell and artists’ pens.
This exhibition will travel to Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA and Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC and possible other galleries in the coming years.
Artscape Baltimore Website
Goldfactory East Midlands arts forum launched June 6th
http://www.goldfactory.org.uk/forum
based on the solid phpbb software seems to be working fine if little light on users so far…
also redesigned main Goldfactory website to include next gen gallery slideshows and random archive selection.
http://www.goldfactory.org.uk
