Without independent artists the major arts bodies will die

Um, here is an interesting read. This article looks at decreasing funds for the independent artist.  Any thoughts on this?

I archive here.

http://theconversation.com/without-independent-artists-the-major-arts-bodies-will-die-26924

Without independent artists the major arts bodies will die
May 28, 2014 3.01pm AEST

The morning after budget night on May 13, independent artists woke to a familiar alarm. It was Groundhog Day for “the heavy-lifters”, the independent artists of Australia’s arts sector. Their miserable livelihood was once again targeted by high office in Canberra when they bore the brunt of the cuts to the arts budget.

On the other side of the ledger, the 28 organisations that comprise Australia’s Major Performing Arts Group (AMPAG) remain hermetically sealed by the largess of Arts Minister and Attorney-General George Brandis.

Brandis' classification of the major organisations as a protected species – in pre-election and latterly budget mode – has implicit within it the inverse proposition that independent artists are fair game. Budget 2014 was only the beginning.

The challenge for the arts sector is a compelling one. Independent Australian artists are the lowest paid members of the Australian workforce. Direct funding for individual artists in Australia has fallen by about a third since the 1990s. In real terms, they earn far less from their artistic practice than they did 20 years ago.


Attorney General George Brandis speaks to the media during a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. AAP Image/Stefan Postles
Independent artists are barely visible at the elite levels of governance, their numbers are decreasing and their autonomy has been compromised and curtailed by policy that has institutionalised them within organisations, venues and programmes.

To satisfy majority funding criteria, artists must have one of the above as a partner, presenter or producer just to get a show up. Operating with any genuine independence is a thing of the past.

The issue, of course, is not one of the current government but one of governments, in general, and the arts sector’s capacity to respond and take care of itself and artists in the face of regressive government action.

The arts sector needs to accept responsibility for the inequity on which its success is achieved and not blame it on government action. Depending on how the figures are interpreted, AMPAG members take between 65% and 80% of the Australia Council’s budget. As of last week, their slice of the pie got a whole lot bigger.

Led by AMPAG, the arts sector has fashioned for itself the identity of “an industry”. But what industry operates on the corollary of the majority of its primary workers living on or below the poverty line?

For artists, the arts industry is a mirage. Its values are steeped in the market: competition over cooperation, profit over equity. While they may serve the ambitions of the major players in the Australian performing arts, they do nothing but disenfranchise artists. Through this prism, Brandis’ patronage of AMPAG is the act of a minister taking care of those he views as fellow travellers and disregarding those he doesn’t.

In the wake of this budget, AMPAG needs to do the heavy lifting that artists have always done. And I don’t mean just cut a bit of fat internally. I mean show responsible sector leadership.

For artists to have any faith that those better off than them have their best interests at heart, the major organisations need to push back against the Ministers' assumptions by initiating a cut on their own subsidies to ameliorate those applied directly to the independent arts sector.

Many will argue that this is an over-simplification of a complex problem. None of those will be artists whose median earnings from their artistic practice are just A$7,000 a year. Most will come from arts managers who earn almost ten times that on average.

The collateral damage in the arts sector will be significant if the major arts organisations don’t push back. The professional field knows that the independent and small-to-medium sector is a separate ecology fulfilling a separate mission to those of the major organisations.

The depth of conservatism in the majors is historically counterpointed by the independent sector which consistently delivers on its mission of innovation, experiment, cultural diversity and risk-taking.

Few of the dynamics of the small-to-medium arts organisations and independents have correlatives in the mainstream; few companies in the majors and the small-to-medium/independent sector share the same artistic values, organisational design or professional aspirations.

The solution is not for the mainstream to bring independent artists into their fold as has been suggested but to support and nurture their independence outside of it.

By advocating for and facilitating a larger pool of discrete money for independent artists and their activities, AMPAG will ensure continuity of the arts sector’s greatest strengths: diversity and innovation. If it fails to act collectively, these will be compromised.

Put simply, the independent sector is the oxygen of the mainstream. Cut off the supply and the major performing arts organisations will suffocate. If they don’t step up, they’ll die. It’s up to them.

Another two art fair for the Art Week 2016. Wow, I didn't even know.
Just as many people are complaining about Art Week fatigue, we are informed of another two more art fair. Do you think that there are just too many events this week?

We managed to get tickets for Arts Stage from Yeo's Workshop, guest of Bose and visited Art Stage. There is a lot of art and many people visiting.

I heard that sales for the fair had been lukewarm from some exhibitors while some say they did ok (So can't tell if the market is bad). I wished I had more time to look at all the art fairs and hope to be able to write something in the future about commercial galleries,

On the ST article, it will be a great move for NAC to give fair coverage by including all of the art fairs happening at this time. It will be a great push for the other two art fairs with the publicity and giving the art audience more options.

However, I don't think NAC has any obligation to 'promote' all the art fairs. Arts Week is NAC's event, it's their choice for whatever reason.

I document the article below.

http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/arts/two-art-fairs-excluded-from-singapore-art-week-booklet-one-cries-foul?&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=addtoany

Two art fairs excluded from Singapore Art Week booklet; one cries foul

PUBLISHED

JAN 14, 2016, 5:34 PM SGT

UPDATED

JAN 19, 2016, 2:07 PM

Nur Asyiqin Mohamad Salleh

SINGAPORE - The omission of two art fairs from the Singapore Art Week booklet has spawned conspiracy theories among a few art insiders that this is to give prominence to Art Stage Singapore, the premier international contemporary art fair and anchor event for the week.

The Singapore Art Week is an umbrella showcase of the visual arts. It opens on Saturday and runs till Jan 24.

Two fairs - the inaugural Singapore Contemporary Art Show and the Art Apart Fair, both of which open to the public from Jan 22 to 24 - are listed on the Art Week website, but not in the booklet. Meanwhile, Art Stage, which is held from Jan 20 to 24, is listed both in the booklet and on the website.

Art Apart founder and director Rosalind Lim told The Straits Times she wrote in to the arts council on Jan 9 to ask about their policy for listing events in the booklet, but has received no explanation.

While her fair - which attracts about 3,000 visitors each year - has been excluded, smaller events and activities - like a bilingual calligraphy forum and walking tours - have made it to the booklet, she noted.

 

"Being an art fair, we are a crowd puller, so overseas exhibitors and visitors come by, and then they spin off to drop by the other little events that may interest them. So that's the importance of an art fair: it's good for tourism and good for the art scene here," said Ms Lim.

"I don't understand why tiny events are being listed in the booklet - not that they're not a good thing - but not the two big fairs. These small events will not pull exhibitors or art lovers from overseas."

The booklets can be picked up by tourists at points around Singapore, and are also circulated overseas, she said.

Singapore Art Week was started in 2013 by the National Arts Council (NAC), Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and Economic Development Board (EDB). Ms Lim's fair was listed in the first two booklets, when they were produced by the tourism board, but has been left out since then.

While Art Apart, a home-grown art fair, was notified by the tourism board about the production of the booklets and was invited to submit an application for inclusion in 2013 and 2014, "for the 2015 and 2016 booklets NAC did not manage to notify us", wrote Ms Lim in her e-mail to the arts council.

"We were directed to submit only in consultation with STB for the 2016 booklet." That, she said, was either in late October or early November last year.

The director of Singapore Contemporary Art Show Douwe Cramer, said he was suprised that the fair was not featured in the programme brochure - especially as the event is expected to attract 20,000 visitors.

But his team's attention is now on the upcoming inaugural edition of the fair, "then to work with the NAC and other departments on plans for the second edition" in 2017.

He adds: "We have kept the NAC abreast of our plans from the outset, and are sure that next year, as an established fixture on the Singapore arts calendar, we will be included."

Meanwhile Dr Pwee Keng Hock, the managing director of Utterly Art - a Singapore gallery that is participating in the Singapore Contemporary Art Show - sent e-mails to the arts council and to the press, wondering whether the move to omit the two fairs reflected "the bias as to how different art organisations are viewed in Singapore".

"The first booklet of the first Art Week was very inclusive, so I don't understand why it has to be so exclusive now, especially since you did reach out to us originally… It's not as if NAC was aiming to be more institutional and non-commercial since Art Stage and Gillman Barracks are included," he wrote. Gillman Barracks is a cluster of international and home-grown galleries located off Alexandra Road.

And while the fairs are listed on the site, the booklet, explained Dr Pwee, is important as it is distributed to visitors to events and - more importantly - to foreign visitors and collectors.

Art Weeks centred around major art fairs, like Art Basel in Geneva, all have auxiliary fairs running concurrently with the main one, he said, adding that he wondered if the omission of the two art fairs was a move to "protect the status of Art Stage… from the competition".

In a joint statement, Art Week organisers - the arts council, STB and EDB - said: "We strive in every edition to highlight as many events as we can to give audiences a good sense of the diverse offerings under Art Week. But as the programme booklet has a limited number of pages, we have to prioritise every year as it is not possible to highlight everything in the printed guide."

The website thus serves as the primary platform that lists all events comprehensively, it said.

"The marketing support given this year recognises the contributions of Singapore gallerists and fair organisers, including Singapore Contemporary Art Show and Art Apart Fair, to our vibrant arts ecosystem. We will review Art Week's programmes and explore how we can support such commercial players in future editions."

Anyhow Blues Project: Can Cannot Also Can

Anyhow Blues Project: Can Cannot Also Can
Date: 15th and 16th April 2011

Time: 7.30 pm to late
Venue: The Substation, Theatre
Address: 45 Armenian Street, Singapore 179936 

Lee Wen makes a full circle with a return to his earliest forays of poetry and singing. Besides the other influences it was through poetry reading and jamming at The Artists Village that started him on the road to performance art and other experimental practices.

Lee Wen’s lyrics are gutsy and poignant, sometimes personal and other times more socially relating to current cultural climate both local and global. Songs like “Art is ...Dead” deliver a punchy tune with simple lyrics warning us of the impending death trivializing our humanity by placing emphasis on market values and mindless consumer tastes for shameless repetition of tested formulas rather than research, innovations and explorations of new ideas or debate on social values.

Zai Kuning guitars.
Reef (Under the Velvet Sky) bass
Hafiz Bastard (Pazahora) drums

Program:
Performance by Lee Wen (solo) 7:30pm
Concert: 8:00pm to 10:00pm

Admission :
S$10 only
(you are allowed to sneak in free by order of the Anyhow Blues Project)
after all this is not a Bob Dylan gig!

More information, please visit:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=187015654669308

http://rootedintheephemeralspeak.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/can-cannot-also-can-lee-wen-anyhow-blues-project/

http://www.substation.org/can-cannot-also-can/

We hope to provide you with current information about our own projects or news. If you prefer not to receive this information then to unsubscribe please send an email to us with ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’ in the subject line.

__._,_._____,_._,___

Breaking the Ice conversation documentation

IT has been a year since these documents appear from my phone. After this phone goes kaput... then it appears. 

Anyway, Breaking the Ice is the first feature film that is based on a visual artist in Singapore which I have seen. It features artist, Jeremy Hiah. 

I wonder if there are other films based on a visual artist in Singapore previously. If so do let me know. Leave a comment below. 

https://youtu.be/aQ9ckTdKZSg

BREAKING THE ICE (M18)

What: Nizam Khan weaves together  a filmed piece of performance art by Singaporean artist Jeremy Hiah with imagined and actual images from the artist's daily life.

Where: National Museum of  Singapore

When: Dec 10 2014, 9.15pm

The Substation’s 25th Anniversary Conference: Reflections

Some thoughts on Substation's 25th anniversary. Also anyone who have not seen the show by debbie ding at the library. Do catch that. It will be great for some feedback on this article and the overall event..

You can read this article on the Post-Museum site. 

Found out about the work of Assemble. I loved their 'can-do' approach. In many ways, I feel that their form of architecture proposes a different kind of practice for architecture. Kind of remind me of FARM's work. (find out more about them: http://www.farm.sg/information ).

Not exactly the same but I was thinking of their earlier period in 2005 that kinda reminded me of this uk FAT. (find out more about them: http://www.fashionarchitecturetaste.com/)




From: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/may/12/assemble-turner-prize-2015-wildcard-how-the-young-architecture-crew-assemble-rocked-the-art-world

The street that might win the Turner prize: how Assemble are transforming Toxteth

It’s not quite a pickled calf – but the rebirth of a troubled Toxteth community might be art. The story of the street and the young architects succeeding where every official plan has failed has caught the art world’s attention

By Oliver Wainwright 

At the end of Granby Street in Liverpool’s Toxteth, past relentless rows of tinned-up houses punctuated by half-demolished corner shops, the mood is unusually festive. Television crews have been here for the past few days, camping out amid the jungle of pavement plant pots and poking their cameras into tumble-down terraces. But for once they haven’t come to report on the sorry story of urban dereliction that has plagued these streets for the past 30 years. It’s not the usual social affairs correspondents, but packs of bewildered cultural critics – because this is the street that’s been shortlisted for the Turner prize.

“Our first reaction was a sort of surreal amazement,” says Ronnie Hughes, a member of the Granby Four Streets community land trust, which is now at the centre of the art world’s attention for the way residents have been taking the future of their streets into their own hands. “But then again, the community has had practice at this. It’s the same way that Liverpool reacted to becoming Capital of Culture in 2008: there was dancing in the streets because we’d won something, rather than particularly knowing or caring what it was we’d won.”

Cairns Street in Toxteth, which Assemble have helped to transform after decades of ‘managed decline’. Photograph: Andrew Teebay/Liverpool Echo

Most locals might still be in a state of baffled amusement that the DIY handiwork of a young London-based architecture collective, Assemble, in doing up some of the area’s empty homes has been shortlisted for the country’s most prestigious art award. But the members of Assemble are at an equal loss for words – mainly because they’re far too busy for the news to have sunken in. There is work to be done.

In the back yard of one of the houses, a couple of the group are pouring pigmented concrete to make a series of fireplace surrounds, beautifully cast in moulds made of debris collected from one of the derelict properties. Indoors, others are convening a meeting with future residents to present options for their new floors and front doors, around a group of intricately crafted doll’s house-sized models.

“Assemble are the only ones who have ever sat and listened to the residents, and then translated their vision into drawings and models, and now into reality,” says Erika Rushton, chair of the community land trust that has been working with the designers during the last couple of years to bring these neglected houses back to life.


It is a moment that has been sorely awaited. Since the 1981 riots, which saw buildings torched and 500 people arrested, Toxteth has suffered from decades of “managed decline”, with life inexorably drained from its streets. Eleanor Lee has lived here since 1976 and seen most of her neighbours leave.

Plans for Assemble’s renovation of the Granby Four Streets area of Toxteth in Liverpool

“After the riots, an invisible red line was drawn around the area,” she told me when I first visited the area in November last year. “It was an unspoken policy of no maintenance and no investment. Once houses are boarded up, it sends a signal.” Bins weren’t collected, streets weren’t swept, and Granby became a no-go area.

There are now just 70 residents clinging on in an area of 200 homes, a post-apocalyptic statistic that is the result not of some great environmental disaster or mass industrial collapse, but of a series of failed regeneration plans. New Labour’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders is one of the most recent of such schemes that have systematically eviscerated the communities here to make way for promised visions that never arrive.

“Everyone just offered a total solution,” says Rushton. “Every house would be done, with no recognition of what people have crafted into their individual homes, or the value that people had invested in the street with planting and building furniture.

“Regeneration is always this blunt, abstract, over-professionalised thing,” she adds. “But Assemble have shown how it can be done differently, by making things that people can see, touch, understand and put together for themselves.”


After attracting funding from a Jersey-based social investor, Steinbeck Studio, which also brought Assemble on board, the community land trust formalised its plans and took control of 10 empty properties from the council last year. They are midway through being refurbished to Assemble’s designs, with the help of local apprentices, in a strategy that makes the most of what is already there, celebrating the generous ceiling heights and big windows of the existing structures, in comparison to the mean-minded hutches that have been built in the tabula rasa approach nearby.

“We want to celebrate the idiosyncrasies of the existing derelict buildings,” says Assemble’s Lewis Jones. “If a floor is missing, why not leave it out and have a double-height space? There isn’t the usual pressure to extract the maximum possible value from the site and put profit before people.”

As part of a second phase of work, Assemble has imagined a spectacular winter garden within the empty brick shell of a gutted house – an idea that might form part of their installation for the Turner show at the Tramway in Glasgow later this year.


“I just love their attitude,” says Lee. “They are so bold and fearless in their designs, and their vision for housing isn’t limited to the usual cream-coloured boxes. They are architects working truly as artists.”

The Cineroleum … Assemble’s first project converted an abandoned petrol station into a temporary cinema.

For Assemble themselves – all still in their mid-20s, and not one of them even yet qualified as an architect – the nomination has come as a bit of a shock. When they first got together as a group of recent graduates to build a temporary cinema in an abandoned petrol station in Clerkenwell in 2010, they can have had little idea that, just five years later, they would be shortlisted for the Turner prize. But not much about the dazzling trajectory of this loosely assembled collective of designers and makers was ever really planned.

The 18-strong group has since gone on to build a portfolio spanning everything from temporary theatre structures and artists’ studio spaces to community housing strategies and new town squares – as well as staging a mysterious ritual happening at the Serpentine Pavilion last summer. They might not be qualified architects, but that wasn’t much of an obstacle to them landing a £2m competition to build a new art gallery for Goldsmiths College last year, or to building an adventure playground in Glasgow, or to proposing a revolutionary new housing strategy for Liverpool.

The diversity of Assemble’s work is matched only by their ability to make things happen in unlikely circumstances, where the usual necessities of a client, site or budget might not be in ready supply. The Cineroleum in Clerkenwell came about, they said, from a collective desire to build something; the result exuded their pleasure in the process of making, a feeling that has infused their work ever since. Sheets of Tyvek, the foil-like waterproof building material, were turned into walls of sumptuous, silvery swagged curtains, hoisted in a dramatic reveal at the end of each screening to leave the audience exposed on the edge of a busy main road. Formica was used to make intricate marquetry tops for tables and stools, while plastic tiles were vacuum-formed on site (using a jury-rigged hot air gun and a vacuum cleaner) to transform the ceiling of the former garage shop into something special. The building process was as much a performance as the final event itself.


Assemble have never claimed to be artists – and their shortlisting has no doubt raised some eyebrows in the rarified realms of the gallery world – but in both their approach to materials and the collaborative process by which their projects are made, their work transcends the norms of conventional architectural practice.

Folly for a Flyover … their second temporary events space was conceived as a little house trapped beneath a motorway.

A year after the Cineroleum, they built a second temporary events space under a motorway flyover in east London, commissioned by arts organisation Create, its pitched roof poking up between the roaring lanes of traffic like a fairytale cottage that had lost its way. Made of wooden bricks sawn from railway sleepers and hung like drapery over a scaffolding frame, it was built by an army of 200 volunteers and provided a surreal theatrical setting for films, talks and children’s play sessions. Its bricks went on to be reused to make planters for a local primary school.

The more interest they received in their talents, the more the group began to coalesce as a formalised practice. These initial projects caught the eye of the London Legacy Development Corporation, the agency charged with co-ordinating the spoils of the Olympics, who offered them a warehouse space in Stratford on a peppercorn rent, while it awaits development by Ikea’s property arm. With a fully equipped wood shop, welding facilities, ping-pong table – and a kitchen where they take turns to cook lunch each day – it is a lively laboratory for testing their ideas at full scale, and developing new hybrid materials with an almost alchemical sensibility. There are chunks of “papercrete”, which they used to make tables for a British Council exhibition, samples of “rubble-dash” render for a little performance temple for OTO Projects, along with sliced tree-trunk furniture and sheets of pummelled metal that look like battered steel drums – a cladding test for another forthcoming project.

Yardhouse under construction … erected with the collective spirit of an Amish barn-raising.

Across the yard, the LLDC has since commissioned Assemble to build an affordable workspace building, the Yardhouse, which exhibits a similar level of care and fun as their temporary venues, elevating cheap materials into something refined. It is a basic timber-framed shed – once again erected with the collective spirit of an Amish barn-raising – full of spaces for like-minded makers, arranged around a processional staircase, with elegantly welded chandelier light-fittings. It is wrapped with a candy-coloured facade of hand-made concrete shingles, which has become an accidental Instagram sensation, turning this East End industrial estate into an unlikely place of pilgrimage for the selfie brigade.


Such things might make their projects sound like fleeting designer stage-sets or marketing-friendly “pop-ups” produced by agents of gentrification. But that would miss the point that Assemble’s work is founded in an interest in issues, and sites that go way beyond constructing pretty scenography in gritty industrial locations. It is about engaging with people on their own terms, driven, as they put it, by “a belief in the importance of addressing the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which spaces are made”.

Theirs is a down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude that comes in part from the mix of disciplines involved. While many of them studied architecture at Cambridge, others came from backgrounds in English, history and philosophy, or had worked as builders or technicians. As one member said of his non-architect colleagues in a recent interview: “They can be so much more astute and direct than the rest of us, who are loaded with the language of obfuscation and meaning with which architectural education indoctrinates you.”

Their plain-speaking approach seems to go down well with their clients, too. Countless are the architects who talk of engaging with communities, wielding Post-it notes and collaborative board games, but Assemble do it for real, often embedding themselves in places for months at a time.

New Addington town square … the result of weeks of testing uses with temporary structures and events.

I saw them in action in New Addington, the Croydon council estate long damned as a “benighted ghetto”, where they took up residence in an old kiosk on the town square and staged community events during a number of weeks, as full-scale tests for how the public realm might be improved. After orchestrating such things as a stage for pensioners’ tea dances and ramps for young skateboarders, and reorganising the market, they proposed permanent improvements along similar lines. The result is a low-key collage of pieces that have since taken on a life of their own.

I’ve seen them at work in Dalmarnock in the east end of Glasgow too, where the regenerative juggernaut of the Commonwealth Games razed the local high street and bulldozed the local park to make way for a “transport hub” for the games. Assemble have since been helping to pick up the pieces, building an adventure playground that prioritises mud and understands the fun to be had with logs, sewer pipes and tree-houses, instead of the officially sanctioned play equipment beloved of risk-averse local councils. In June, they’ll be unleashing further ideas about play with a Brutalist Playground installation at the Royal Institute of British Architects, injecting a much-needed dose of whimsy into the prim surrounds of Portland Place.

All this and more is what piqued the interest of Alistair Hudson, director of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and one of this year’s Turner prize judges. He invited himself to visit the Assemble studio earlier this year. They didn’t know why he had come and, as usual, they were mostly too busy to talk.

Receiving the phonecall from Penelope Curtis last week – an occurrence met with equal bafflement – Assemble’s first reaction was to call the Granby residents. If the community didn’t want the attention, they wouldn’t accept the nomination.

“They were very conscious that the residents had been battling to save their the street for 25 years,” says Rushton. “It had been a gradual process, beginning with the community doing guerilla gardening and setting up a monthly street market, which gradually changed the reputation of the place and started to bring people back during the last five years. It’s not something that’s happened overnight.”

Back in Granby, the residents couldn’t be prouder of the Turner prize news.

Goldsmiths Art Gallery … being carved out from a series of extraordinary spaces within a former Victorian bathhouse.

“It’s just a fantastic boost for the whole area,” says Delucia Emina, 31, who set up the Baby Dolls beauty salon on Granby Street last year, the first new sign of life the high street had seen in a decade, where most of the units remain boarded up. Born on Granby Street, Emina moved away at age eight, but recently returned, buoyed by the fresh shoots of optimism poking up through the pavement cracks. Since she set up in July last year, a kebab shop has sprung up next door, and she’s planning to expand across the street.

Whether any of this is of interest to the Turner prize judges is neither here nor there. Assemble’s work with the residents is thankfully bereft of any of the pretensions that the bestowal of such a gong implies. But if the prize wants to look outwards and engage with the real world, then its arbiters need look no further.


• This article was updated on 15 May to add further detail about Assemble’s Granby Four Streets project