Locating the Producers_introduction

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Introduction

Locating theProducers:An End to the

Beginning, theBeginning ofthe End

P a u l O N e i l l &C l a i r e D o h e r t y


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Introduction

1 Stevphen Shukaitis, Imagined Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization inthe Revolutions of Everyday Life (New York, Autonomedia, 2010), p. 9.

2 Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks,Theatre/Archaeology(London and NewYork, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2001).

3 Doreen Massey, A Global Sense of Place, Reading Human Geography, edsTrevor Barnes and Derek Gregory(London, Arnold, 1997), pp. 315-23.

4 This research project was initiated in response to a call for cross-collaborations between industry and education partners. The GreatWestern Research initiative provided funding for a three-year researchfellowship led by Situations at the University of the West of England,Bristol, in partnership with Dart ington College of Arts (which subsequentlyconsolidated with University College Falmouth) and ProjectBase inCornwall.

place-based exhibitions and projects and the productive, con-temporary, lived experience o place proposed by geographers suchas Doreen Massey and Tim Cresswell and archaeologists such as

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks.2 In armative strategies andpolicies, place was being promoted as an existing, stable (perhaps

historically embedded) entity to which artists were invited to re-spond, or as something which could be rebranded through com-missioning whereby location (and consequently place-based art-

works) would be aligned with cultural tourism. By contrast, inthe academic sphere, place was increasingly being recognised as aconstellation o social relations, meeting and weaving together ata particular locus (...) which is extroverted, which includes a con-sciousness o its links with the wider world, which integrates ina positive way the global and the local.3 And at the heart o thiscontradictory pull between a stable, knowable place and a state ofux, an event-in-process, was the curator-producer.

By 2006, the curator-producer had emerged as the linchpin innegotiations between artist and place. At the point at which thisresearch project began,4 we could distinguish the twenty-rst cen-tury curator-producer rom the museum custodian by their activeinvolvement in the production o the artwork; by their consid-eration o the need to work rom an inormed, embedded posi-tion, and the responsibility to account or considerable expend-iture o public unds on artworks that must be locally relevant butalso internationally signicant. We recognised that experiencedcurator-producers were keen to avoid the pitalls o the pseudo-ethnographic commissioning process outlined in Miwon Kwonsinfuential book, One Place Ater Another: Site-Specifc Art and

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Locating the Producers

The banal requirements of form necessitatewhat appears to be a beginning, but is purelyincidental, or perhaps born of habit, repetitionor trauma. We actually begin in a middle, in amuddle, perhaps a puddle, running across thestreet () the beginning and the end may very

well represent the same location, a non place of(im)possibility, containing seeds for a radicallyalternative present, continually folding over itselfand refracted through patterns, modulationsand intensities: spasms and shifts divided byrecurrences and undercurrent.1

Locating the Producersbegan as a curatorial dilemma which camegradually into ocus during the rst ew years o Situations, a pro-gramme engaged in the production and critical analysis o artworkscommissioned in response to specic local conditions since 2003.Our international lecture series and symposium on RethinkingContext in Contemporary Art in the rst two years o operation

was conceived in recognition o the burgeoning eld o context-specic curating and commissioning, as maniested in large-scale,international biennial exhibitions, public art regeneration initia-tives and o-site gallery programmes; all o which were challeng-ing the orthodoxy o site-specicity. I, historically, certain ormso permanent public art commissioning had been aligned to theproduction ogenius locior sense o place as exemplied by LucyLippards response to the rootlessness o modern society in The

Lure o the Local: Senses o Place in a Multicentered Society we iden-

tied that emergent projects, such as Jeremy Dellers Battle o Or-greave or Francis Alss When Faith Moves Mountains, exemplied amore dynamic understanding o place. We also ound a parallel orthis progressive sense o place in comparative disciplines such ashuman geography and contemporary archaeology.

There was clearly a disparity between the armation o place as advocated in cultural policy documents, consultancy briesor the commissioning o artworks within the context o regenera-tion, and, to some extent, in the curatorial rhetoric surrounding


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Introduction

5 This development of the research began in 2007 on the appointment ofPaul ONeill as GWR Research Fellow at UWE and through discussion withAntonia Payne and Claire Doherty, the focus shif ted from research acrossvisual arts sectors to the specif ic concerns of durational commissioning.

6 Kevin Lynch,What Time Is This Place?(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1972),p. 1.

7 Patricia C. Phillips, Temporality and Public Art,Critical Issues in PublicArt: Content, Context, and Controversy, eds. Harriet F. Senie and SallyWebster (Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992),p. 304.

being within time that surpasses itsel in a manner that makes du-ration the very material o individual creative action. This idea oduration, and the transitory attribute o time as a means o struc-turing the fuctuating encounter with public space, has become arecurring moti in the search or a more proound understandingo place within public art as that which is always hybrid andneither xed nor clearly bounded to a location.

Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art was itsel devised as a durational research process, which wouldinvestigate how public art and its curation has begun to recognisethe signicance o engaging audiences and encouraging research-based outcomes that are responsive to their specic contexts, audi-ences and locations over time. We chose to ocus specically on verelevant European projects at dierent stages in their temporal de-

velopment: The Blue House (Het Blauwe Huis), IJburg, the Nether-lands (20042009); Beyond, Leidsche Rijn, the Netherlands (19992009); Trekroner Art Plan, Roskilde, Denmark (2001present);Creative Egremont, Cumbria, UK (ongoing since 1999) andEdgware

Road Project, London, UK (20092011).The projects were selected according to the ollowing criteria:

each should demonstrate an individual commissioners invest-ment in maintaining a committed, long-term, durational ap-proach to commissioning contemporary art in a specic place,generating a public maniestation;

each should have taken place since 2000;

each should have had a commissioning process and outcomewhich lasts or more than 100 days (the standard time-span o

an international large-scale exhibition); each should involve the engagement o local residents.


Locational Identity, while seeking the spark o the alchemical processthrough which a truly remarkable work or project might emergethat would resonate beyond the specics o a given location.

Despite the importance o th is creative role and the rise o post-graduate curatorial courses, we recognised that there was a consid-erable gap in methodological research on place-based commission-ing. Until 2006, research had primarily been conned to the impactassessment o artistic projects and the nature o place specicityin socially-engaged practices. During the course o our prelimin-ary research, we identied evidence o longer-term, durationaland cumulative approaches being adopted by curator-producers,

which might be considered as a corrective to the itinerant modelo the curator/artist-nomad critiqued by Kwon.5 It was at this pointthat the consideration o time and, more specically, duration became the ocal point o the three-year research project which

we hoped would lead to a provisional response to the disparitywe had identied at the heart o context-specic, or place-bound,

curatorial initiatives.

DurationWriting in 1972, in his infuential bookWhat Time is this Place?, KevinLynch proposed the term time-place as a substitute or place, im-plying a necessary shit beyond a primarily spatial coordinate andtowards a temporal construct.6 Two decades later, Patricia C. Phil-lips argued that a more progressive public art must account or a re-consideration o time. She concluded her essay with the statement:

The temporary in public art is not about an

absence of commitment or involvement, butabout the intensification and enrichment of theconception of public. () A conceptualisation ofthe idea of time in public art is a prerequisite fora public life that enables inspired change.7

As Henri Bergson acknowledged in The Creative Mindin 1946, du-ration is not only a psychological exper ience a transitory state obecoming it is also the concrete evolution o creativity, a state o


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Introduction

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8 The full archive ofLocating the Producers may be accessed at the Situations

office in Bristol, UK.

on their projects, speaking back to the research by way o a conclu-sion to this publication.

As the title o this research suggests,Locating the Producersin-tentionally problematises the question o how such projects wereinitiated and sustained and by whom. In their survey o sustain-able collaborative projects dedicated to social and environmentalchange, Clare Cumberlidge and Lucy Musgrave draw out some keyshared principles, to suggest that such projects: propose renewalas a continuous, open-ended process; take a holistic, multidimen-sional approach to their designated situations; maximise resources material, human and economic; use local distinctiveness as astarting point or a vision o the uture; engage proessionals to

work outside their normal sphere o practice and share an aware-ness o symbolic value.

In recognition o the act that durational approaches in specicplaces are, as Cumberlidge and Musgraves study attests, not par-ticularly unusual, we must emphasise that the purpose o this study

was specically to ocus on the emergent aspects o commissioningthat are common to projects which share a durational approachand, through a comparative study o each in-depth case study, de-termining whether aspects o these projects might help us to rec-oncile the contradictions o the place-based curatorial endeavour.

We aim to show that a undamental shit in thinking about thetime, rather than simply the space o public art commissioning isrequired to eect change at the level o policy.

Charismatic AgencyOne o the most prevalent characteristics o commissioning prac-

tices that has emerged through our research is the signicance toeach project o charismatic agency, whereby a key element o an indi-

viduals curatorial practice is the visionary means they use to engageparticipants and visitors and to secure unding. In this way, whileauthorship o specic acets o the project such as particular archi-tectural interventions, residencies or texts might be clearly attrib-uted, ownership o the project as a whole invariably becomes shared.

Led by Paul ONeill, this research project involved extensive sitevisits, archival research, ocus groups, programmed public eventsand semi-structured interviews through which the procedures andintentionality o the curator-producers were to be assessed againstthe main outcomes as they were understood by the commissioner,curator, artist, resident, participants and lead researcher.8 In par-ticular, we were interested in asking how social orms o artisticco-production were developed or a specic place, situation or en-

vironment, allowing the artistic and curatorial objectives to un-old over time through diverse modes o both local and dispersedorms o participation. Each case study would examine multipleaccounts o the commissioning process, which, in turn, wouldbe cross-reerenced with other accounts rom within and acrossall the case studies. By bringing these case studies together here,along with complementary texts by participant-observers/speakersin the research project, such as Mick Wilson and Dave Beech, wehope to contribute to a deeper understanding o what is at stake in

commissioning place-based artworks, to test out a new vocabularyto qualiy curatorial methods and, potentially, to propose a set orecommendations or changes to public and cultural policy.

By choosing to represent each o the projects through a singlecase study written by the lead researcher, we must acknowledgethe partiality o presenting the multi-dimensional and durationalnature o each project in a single, digestible orm. In recognition othe need to oer up a point o response or the curator-producers,all ve projects were invited to contribute an insert to the book.

The Blue House has provided a timeline o all the invitees, projectsand events that took place at IJburg over its our-year duration,

as a means o mapping a trajectory o how the project developed;Grizedale Arts has written a maniesto or the uture; Kunstplan

Trekroner has compiled images o one o the uture outcomes othe project, in which local inhabitants have begun to realise theirown interventions into the built environment; Edgware Roadscuratorial team has invited artist, Susan Heuna, to produce a ser-ies o postcards and Beyond has produced a CD Rom archiving ten

years o activity. For the nal chapter in this book, commissionersand curators were reunited to refect on the impact o this process


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9 See Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaborat ions and its Discontents,Artforum (Februar y, 2006), pp. 178-79.

10 Jacques Rancire, Problems and Transformations in Critical Ar t,Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Pressand Whitechapel, 2006), p. 90.

11 See Paul ONeill, Three Stages in the Ar t of Public Participation: TheRelational, Social and Durational, Drive, (May-September, 2010), pp. 11-16.

12 Arts Council of England, Great Art for Everyone, November 2010.

tion to the object but require the presence o the viewer.10 Whatthe durational projects considered in this book suggest is that aconsideration o sociality must surely extend to the nature o co-production in relation to time, as well as to space or place, i thenature o social engagement at the heart o the artist ic or curatorialendeavour is truly to be understood.11

Given that the sustainability o such projects necessarily reliesupon the circulation o social capital and in turn, on a orm o giteconomy, one potential criticism o this model o sociality is thatit may be susceptible to cronyism. But, rom the evidence in thispublication, we might argue that these projects rely upon commit-ted, inormed and involved temporary constituencies which gatheraround a particular durational project, and that this evidence mustbe considered in relation to the unding imperatives o public artin order to extend opportunities or more people to experience andshape the arts.12 The concept o participation is constantly beingormed and reormed out o extant social processes, political con-

testations and external orces, but, rom the case studies outlinedhere, we could conceive o participation as a orm o civic practice.

We could move away rom an abstracted idea o participation as event-based and experienced en masse towards something on-going, experienced individually, sometimes discordantly, which isenacted by us as citizens. In this sense, durational commissioningprocesses that employ co-productive and socially-engaged modeso operation move away rom the spectacularised mode o socialrelations, dened by Guy Debord, in which shared experience isatomised and consumption is undertaken without agency to createa alse togetherness. The signicant conclusion or commissioning

practice is that a durational approach to events and projects seemsto allow or the ormation, dispersal and reormation o tempor-ary, active communities so as to avoid the pseudo-ethnographic

Another key aspect o all the projects under discussion is thatthey began with an individuals commitment to resisting a prob-lem-solving or instrumental approach. Instead, there appears to bea prevalent belie in the need or public art to engage with its mostimmediate public constituencies through hospitality and the devel-opment o relationships built on trust, beore decisions are madeas to how to proceed. However, there is also recognition on behalo the individual host, or instigator, that such processes might notalways be convivial and that the conficts, ailures and dierencesinherent to each project oten contribute to their critical success.

All o the curator-producers acknowledge the importance o hav-ing political will behind them, whether they have been supportedby a specic policy, local council or individual with a vision orpublic art in their region. In many cases, there are multiple char-ismatic agents at work during the commissioning process romcurators to artists and residents, to planners, city administrators,developers and those responsible or the raming o arts context or

situation and its social and spatial reception.

Sociality and ParticipationIn his text or this book, on organised networks, Ned Rossiteroers a consideration o how commissioners employ their char-ismatic agency through networked models o sociality to allowor co-habitational time. Here, the open-endedness o the processis employed as a means o resisting the instrumentalisation o art.Rossiters text provides an example o how the commissioners em-ploy a working method that considers the dynamic ormulation oplace whilst also prioritising the discursive, the processual and the

relational as media in their own right. By prioritising sociality, en-gagement and presence, inter-subjectivity also becomes a primarymedium o artistic and curatorial investigation.9 While much re-lational art o the 1990s intended a more socialised and collectiveorm o immersive experience, the taking part in art as a socialevent is largely regarded as contributing to a merely metaphoricalorm o arts co-production, its meanings and its values. As JacquesRancire writes o relational art, its intention is to create not onlyobjects, but also situations and encounters that are not in opposi-


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13 For an introductor y analysis on Bergsonisms, see Suzanne Guerlac,Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (New York, CornellUniversity, 2006), pp. 1-13.

14 Elsewhere, Claire Doherty has suggested that exhibitions such asSkulpturProjekte Mnster and the Folkestone Triennial can no longerbe experienced as cohesive exhibitions of art in public space due to the

multiple temporal and discursive modes in which art ists are now working.There is room, however, for a model of curating in place over time whichallows for a cumulative engagement between artists and specific places,which raises questions about the promotion and analysis of curatorialprojects within the context of global cultural tourism. See Claire Doherty,Curating Wrong Places or Where Have all the Penguins Gone? CuratingSubjects, ed. Paul ONeill (Amsterdam and London, De Appel and OpenEditions, 2007), pp. 100-108, and Jane Rendell, Constellations (or TheReassertion of Time into Critical Spatial Practice), One Day Sculpture, eds.David Cross and Claire Doherty (Bielefeld, Kerber Verlag, 2009), pp. 19-22.For an overview of issues l inked to the emergence of curatorial discoursesduring a period of proliferation of large-scale international exhibitions,see Paul ONeill, The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse, IssuesinCurating Contemporary Art and Performance, eds. Michle Sedgwick(Bristol and Chicago, Intellect Books, 2007), pp. 13-28.

Duration is problematic because it is presented as a solution orarts social contradictions, whereas the only v iable political solutionmust be to problematise time or art. Duration cannot, thereore,become the deault that is employed as a solve-all solution.

Duration is not simply a corrective to short-termism, nor is adurational relationship to specic contexts particularly rare. Wemight conclude that there has been no great paradigm shi t, no sig-nicant durational turn as such. Rather, we can discern a shake-up o the temporal limits o extant models or curating public art,

which must be conceived as part o a cumulative process. The sig-nicance o duration does not lie, thereore, in a single extendedproject, but rather in the relationship between projects in placeacross time. What is intriguing, however, is that, despite the actthat the value o the commissioned events and projects lies in theirability to cohere cumulatively, and thereore demand some kind orecognition, their potency or gathering temporary constituencieslies precisely in their ability to surprise and unsettle.

In considering the case studies outlined here, we might also con-clude that a spatio-temporal constellation o artworks and projectsover time might be the best possible solution to the exhaustion othe site-specic curatorial model.14 Durational projects accord toEdward Sojas notion o thirdspace,

parachuting o the curator or artist to work with a passive targetgroup deprived o agency.

Added to this, a durational approach encourages subsidiary au-diences to orm, beyond the initial participants or co-producers,permitting others to receive the project anecdotally through thedispersion o the narrat ive o the project by its participants and leadcommissioner/producer over time. In this way, all o the projectsdiscussed in this book transcend their immediate relations be-tween time, place and their temporary constituent publics toconsider that what has happened will live on not only in the mem-ory o those who took part and experienced it. Projects are trans-lated and extended into the uture, whether that is through artists

work or through residual resident initiatives that endure beyondthe project lietime or as something which is discussed in subse-quent art discourses.

The Value of DurationDuration has its own extrinsic values, such as temporality, mobil-ity, agency, change or aect.13 Durational approaches to public artinvolve a process o being together or a period o time with somecommon objectives, to constitute a new mode o relational, conver-sational and participatory practice. There is a multiplicity o modeso interaction between people, which has a destabilising eect onthe perception that there is an actual time and place in which toexperience or participate in an event. This is most evident in thenumber o people contributing to these projects who are unawareexactly what they are taking part in and what the outcome is to be;their participation is not something that can be measured or evalu-

ated in a clear way, especially when even the initiators o the pro-jects are not ully aware o what has been done, who took part andwhat was achieved, because to do so in the process o the projectsdevelopment would be to curb the possible spaces in which the un-expected could happen.

This is not to say that duration as long-termism is the a priorisolution, but rather that duration aims to problematise the timecomponent o arts engagement with publicness and civic responsi-bility.As Dave Beech indicates in his responsive essay in this book,


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Introduction

15 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the GeographicalImagination,Human Geography Today, eds. Doreen Massey, John Allen

16 Jacques Rancire, On the Shores of Politics (London, Verso, 2007), p. 61.17 Claire Bishop, February 2006, op cit.

tions o its reception, one might discern varying degrees o an-tinomy within the projects under consideration here.17 But, inter-estingly, these projects may also be seen to embody the work oBishops critical nemesis, Grant Kester, in that the commissioners

work rom a position o solidarity rather than simply as provoca-teurs. As many o the curator-producers have suggested in relationto their sense o responsibility to community, the eectiveness othis solidarity depends on the commissioners sensitivity to localpolitical dynamics, histories and cultures and on the possibility oongoing relationships.

These projects display an intentionally slowly-evolving discur-sive process that enables an exploration o the particularities oplace in tune with the expressed needs o residents. This discov-ery is surely one o the primary outcomes o this research thata participatory process does not necessarily mean consultation,but rather extended periods o time allow or a generative, ratherthan a xed, outcome. Further consideration ought to be given to

the issue o time as a method o de-spectacularisation, specicallyhow public time is more generally ramed by these projects. In this

way, a space o co-production could emerge out o an expectationor the unoreseen, the unexpected, the yet-to-come. I we are tothink o participation as more than a closed, one-o relational orsocial interaction with art, duration must be considered as a tem-poral process o cohabitation, whereby time can contribute tosomething that is immeasurable, unquantiable and unknowablerom the outset. Thereore, participation can only be experienceddurationally, as a lived dierence that extends beyond a moment-ary engagement with art and with one another.

EndingsThis book is not simply a call or longer-term projects or or thecommissioning o temporary versus permanent artworks, butrather or the potential o short-term and durational projects tobe realised as part o longer-term, cumulative engagements which

as Lived Space is portrayed as multi-sitedand contradictory, oppressive and liberating,passionate and routine, knowable andunknowable. It is a space of radical openness,a site of resistance and struggle, a space ofmultiplicitous representations (...) It is a meetingground, a site of hybridity.15

These projects (as thirdspaces) clearly produce place as it is prac-tised and lived; they provide a space o interrelations, always in theprocess o being made and remade, not only materially but alsosocially.

Beyond Spectacleand Counter-Spectacle

During a 2007 symposium at Tate Modern entitled RethinkingSpectacle, Claire Bishop considered the denigration o the term

spectacle, particularly through the writings o Hal Foster andBenjamin Buchloh and the ways in which process-based, sociallyengaged artworks have been proered on the basis o counter-spectacle, as a solution to the atomisation o communities. Onecould consider the ve projects under scrutiny here as beingaligned with the counter-spectacular, in the sense that the im-mediate impact o events, works and projects is localised and noteasily disseminated through iconic images beyond their immediateparticipatory context. One can certainly discern new operationalorthodoxies in these practices as a kind o simulacrum o every-day activity including local estivities, screenings, discussions,

communal cooking and eating, designs or new meeting points andgathering places all o which seek to activate moments o com-munal publicness.

But, as Rancire has warned, participation doesnt guaranteecritical legitimacy,16 which has particular resonance within ourevent culture. Considering Bishops 2006 assertion that, the bestcollaborative practices o the past ten years address the contradict-ory pull between autonomy and social intervention, and refect onthis antinomy both in the structure o the work and in the condi-


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18 See Bruce W. Ferguson and Milena M. Hoegsberg, Talking and Think ingabout Biennials: The Potential of Discursivity,The Biennial Reader, eds.Jelena Filipovic et al. (Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010), pp. 361-375.

recognise the process through which small-scale, limited constitu-encies gather or a nite period o time around particular projects.

This would require the rejection o the itinerancy and over-production that has characterised public art commissioning overthe past ten years, in avour o embedded, committed practice oremerging curators, artists and commissioners, alongside undingand commissioning opportunities committed to longer lead-intimes and ewer predetermined outcomes.

While diverse in their objectives and outputs, all the projectsdiscussed in this book have presented a longer-term view o the

ways in which commissioners, artists and curators can respond toa specic situation by considering art as a co-operative productionprocess that is neither autonomous nor over-regulated. By takingaccount o participation with art, and in art, as an unolding andlonger-term accumulation o multiple positions, engagements andmoments registered in what we account or as the artwork, we maybe able to move beyond the individual participatory encounter o

an eventul exhibition moment. This leads us to understand par-ticipation not as a relation or social encounter with artistic pro-duction, but as a socialised process necessary or arts production.Such a shit in the perception o participation must acknowledgethe dierent duration-specic qualities o art as something drivenby ideas o public time, rather than space, so that we can begin tounderstand the complexities o artistic co-production within thelogic o succession, continuity and sustainability rather than dis-continuity in a unitary time and place.

Durational projects could be considered as discursive exhibi-tions that evolve over time, but, instead o prioritising the moment

o display, or the event o exhibition, they allow or open-ended,accumulative processes o engagement.18 Such projects necessitatea shit in our consideration o the curator-producer rom an indi-

vidual ocused on the unearthing or endorsement o an existinghistorical sense o place through the commissioning o autono-mous, permanently sited artworks to a creative praxis characterisedby complicit participation in the making o place through a serieso cumulative and dispersed encounters over time.

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