Equal : How I Got Here?

Equal : How I Got Here?

Emma Cocker

Introduction

What I am proposing for this presentation is a story of how I got to do what I am doing, and why I have chosen to stay working in this field. It is a look at the possibilities and also the problematic offered within gallery education. In the collision between art and audience, it is partly about what happens in the discursive space when art goes public

Professional Practice and Feeling Fraudulent

Whenever asked to talk about professional development my initial reaction seems always one of feeling slightly fraudulent, that I am here somehow as an impostor, or as a fake. Certainly, what I do now is undoubtedly connected to art education and particularly to gallery education, but how I got here remains in part a mystery, a tangle of decisions and choices taken, and of those turned down, or cast aside… I would like to believe that I have always adopted a rigorous approach towards professional practice, however thinking back I am not too sure….

Strategy or Circumstance? Falling into Place

My own professional practice has at times been marked by Uncertainty & doubt, by changes in direction and even through bouts of sheer panic! From an early age I didn’t exactly dream of being a gallery educator… Rather more I fell into it somehow along the way. I sort of happened upon it. Back in 1993 I was an undergraduate student beginning a degree in ‘Fine Art: Video and Photography’. I wanted to be an artist. A decade or so later I am not necessarily in the place that I thought I would be… This decade of time represents a steep learning curve for me; a host of challenges along the way, and the beginnings of a longer process of thinking and enquiry which has ensured that many of the ideas that I had previously formed about art, artists and the art sector have either been disappointed, disrupted or somehow ditched along the way.

Gallery Education

What I propose to touch upon in the presentation are:

• how I got here…projects, pathways and career route
• some of the ideas and issues connected to gallery education
• some of the frustrations and opportunities of working in this field
• successes and limitations of project work
• the broader context – a changing position within art practice?
• survival strategies – a recruitment call

Collisions and contradictions: My Contradictory relationship with the art sector

I feel at times as though I have a contradictory relationship with art – it is a kind of love/hate relationship. For me the art sector is full of contradictions, of oppositional forces at play. It is the clash between the forces of:

• empowerment & elitism
• counter culture & commercialisation
• integrity & cynicism
• debate & dumbing down
• access & exclusion
• education & curation

Gallery education operates at the heart of this debate in its attempt to negotiate or mediate a relationship between art and audience. Artist Polly Gould in a recent Transmission lecture described it as being marked by a desire to ‘link the rarefied field of aesthetic representation and cultural discourse to the lived realities of different communities”. How to establish this connection between an essentially abstract cultural activity and a sense of any actual lived reality is a key question for artists, organisations and in the wider cultural arena. At its worst gallery education is simply about dumbing down, diluting, making safe, rendering the complex into an accessible and often didactic formula. At its best it can be about making real connections and building a vibrant and challenging dialogue or context within which contemporary art practice can operate. Contact, exchange, interaction, debate, different voices

The Guilty Artist & Feelings of Failure?

In a recent speech (at the 2004 engage conference dinner) the artist Richard Wentworth made the claim that for many people thinking about a career in art was more about what they didn’t want to do…. rather than what they did.

He talked about how undertaking a degree in Fine Art was like the thin end of a wedge that promised to open up a range of possibilities- however the question remains around what those possibilities are and a debate then plays out in terms of how different careers are arranged and positioned within different art world hierarchies. I must admit that I felt a great pressure on completing a course in Fine Art to be an artist, to get a studio, to continue making work. There can be an enormous sense of guilt in not being able to do these things, a feeling of failure….

So questions that arise may well be:

• Does studying Fine Art automatically mean I will become an artist?
• What is this thing called ‘being an artist’?
• Are there different kinds of artist?
• Are there different kinds of art practice?
• What marks out these differences?
• What other careers are there in the arts?
• What experience do I need to do these things?

My Professional practice

In 1997 I began as a volunteer at Site Gallery and on a number of other connected projects. Volunteering was for me the way in – a strategic stepping stone towards other things. It was a point of contact, a ticket into networks, an opportunity for training, for development, for new experiences.

During this time a number of connections and parallels seemed to emerge that would later be crucial to my own career pathway. Whilst I have been involved in a range of projects, I want to really focus on my involvement and interest in two areas of the work I have done to date and ones which for me mark out the something of the potential and significance in terms of gallery based practices which connect to the relationship between or a socially engaged practice and to the idea of dialogue and exchange

Art: Artists: Audiences A Socially Engaged Practice

"The social spaces through which we live do not only consist of physical things: of bricks and mortar, streets and bridges, mountains and seashore, and of what we make of these things. They also consist of those less tangible spaces we construct out of social interaction. The intimate social relations of the kitchen and the interactions from there to the back yard and the living room. These local spaces are set within, and actively link into, the wider networks of social relations which make up the neighbourhood, the borough, the city. Social space is not an empty arena within which we conduct our lives; rather it is something we construct and which others construct about us. It is this incredible complexity of social interactions and meanings which we constantly build, tear down and negotiate. We are always creating, in other words, not just a space, a geography of our lives, but a time-space for our lives." Doreen Massey

Not too long after graduating I became involved in a number of projects connected to ideas of ‘mental mapping’, personal geographies, and local distinctiveness. Projects that involved individuals through interaction and collaboration to collate and reflect upon their cultural heritage and their specific place in the world. These included:

‘Living Book’, Derwent Valley, Derbyshire

Based in the community centre on the edge of Ladybower, this socially engaged project involved photographic workshops, discussions, collecting of stories, looking through albums, events, walks, and interviews. The resulting book was not narrative based but a collection of overlapping, contradictory, different individual voices

‘Beating the Boundaries’, Groundwork: Burton-upon-Trent

Similar project based on the idea of round walks, parish maps, to evoke and also challenge the idea ‘beating the boundaries’ which is a ancient tradition of marking and protecting the edges of space, territory

‘The Way We Are’

Commission for the year of photography and electronic image in Yorkshire and Wakefield Museum and Art Gallery

For ‘The Way We Are’ I was commissioned as an artist by Photo '98 (year of photography and electronic image in Yorkshire) through Wakefield Museum and Art Gallery, to work in the former mining communities of South Elmsall, South Kirby and Upton (SESKU) in the eastern district of wakefield. I was involved in working with local residents in a process of recording everyday life in the area. The Way We Are was an invitation to many to tell their stories, to record their hidden histories. Hundreds of cameras were circulated and used, hundreds of images were created and archived. Wakefield Museums & Arts archived a selection of these images as a resource for historians and communities in generations to come (here the issue of selection, intention and censorship becomes particularly pointed). A collection of all of the images was shown in an exhibition Pontefract Museum. Not all of the photographs produced during the project were included in the exhibition: films still remained in the communities and have not been returned. However the project was intended to be open-ended: with the idea that (at least on paper) additions to the collection could be made at a later date. The exhibition therefore had the potential to be altered or amended; reflecting perhaps the changes that naturally take place within a community; the arrivals and the departures <births, deaths; people moving into a community and also moving away from it>. This is the mutable society Doreen Massey speaks of: a society that is "always mobile, always changing, always open to revision and potentially fragile."

Key issues within these projects

• Hidden or forgotten narratives

• Process and product
• Censorship and selection
• Whose voice?
• Responsibility
• Inclusion/exclusion
• Relationship between education and curatorial practice

There were also questions around working in partnership, sustainability, negotiating a range of different agendas and the issue of artistic integrity, which have remained as constant threads throughout my practice. There was also the issue that many people were immensely distrustful of art, believed that it wasn’t for them and felt initially reticent about the idea of creativity and expression of any kind…

Impact at Site Gallery - Context in galleries

Working with Different audiences @ Site including Fused, courses and workshops, accredited training,

action research

Access and inclusion

Since 1999 much of the work at Site education has been driven by an attempt to broaden the gallery’s audience group, and to challenge some of the barriers and preconceptions that perhaps exist. The gallery has a vibrant history of working with different community and voluntary groups. This breadth of activity and audience has contributed to the special dynamic within the education programme and gallery; and the different interpretations, perspectives, and points of view offered by participants has ensured that the gallery continues to reflect upon its place as a site for connections and confrontations between the artist and the public.

• Collaborations with AMP (youth arts) on the Fused programme, workshops that bring artists and groups together to explore issues emerging out from exhibitions such as Face On, portraiture with Colley Young Mums; We are No longer Ourselves: with Darnall & Tinsely Asian Girls group; Con Art and Digital trickery with Stepping Stone

• Over the last 5 years hundreds of participants from organisations & groups who have come to the gallery for taster sessions, workshops and events. In particular we have worked in close partnership with Nomad Plus & Young Women’s Housing Project (who are both organisations that support vulnerably housed young people).

Context

It is possible to articulate these projects through a framework making references to arrange of contextual or theoretical arguments:

• Nicholas Bourriaud’s –Relational Aesthetics
• The Transmission: Speaking and Listening lecture series in 2004 which focussed upon the idea of Responsibility
• The idea of a third space: Various cultural theorists have put forward the concept of a ‘third space’; of situations where two things encounter each other or collide to create new spaces, ‘where difference is neither the One nor the Other, but something else besides, in-between’’ (inc Fredric Jameson and Homi K. Bhabha). Festivals such as Documenta XI, Venice Biennale 2003 have similarly articulated themes of “third space”, hybridity, translation, cross currents
• Participatory practices- context and histories of artists’ collaborative practices
• Government agenda around social inclusion, prevention of crime, health

However for me these projects are also to do with a range of unique experiences: creating darkroom spaces in kitchens, community centres and the toilets of local libraries, attending brownie meetings, gossiping at coffee mornings; working with groups to trace the origins of local streams….

They have involved debating the ethics of placing bets at ferret racing events; listening to individuals recount personal histories or hanging around with youth workers in the dark behind Poundstretcher to hear groups of girls tell tales; crack jokes, smoke fags, and sing songs. For me this kind of practice is important because it volatile, unpredictable, uneasy, it can be a practice that is racked with disaster, and misunderstanding. It can also be a practice that brings different individuals together who would never usually meet, forces conversations that would never usually happen, makes you question a whole range of beliefs, ideas and systems that you had previously come to accept as givens.

Debate & Discussion: Galleries as sites for exchange.

I want to set out a series of projects which focus on the role of dialogue and exchange, but would like to establish a context by referring to recent paper at the engage conference 2004 by independent researcher Emily Pringle: “Dialogue: its place within gallery education’. In the text, Pringle discusses the concept of dialogue and how it is played out. She cites number of definitions:

• Oxford Dictionary ‘discussion between representatives of different groups, an exchange of proposals’
• Paula Frier, Brazilian educationist: dialogue as fundamental to gaining knowledge “it is the moment when humans meet to reflect on their reality as they make and remake it“
• Constructivism: A theory of learning and knowing that holds that learning is an active process of knowledge construction in which learners build on prior knowledge and experience to shape meaning and construct new knowledge.

The key elements within this are: Working together, sharing and re-ordering own knowledge collaboratively. It is a dialogue characterised by sharing, openness, honesty, risk taking and readiness to reassess existing models. Programmes are marked to promote open-endedness.; discursive processes, and to enable people to slow down and thing critically and reflectively. It is concern with possibility of different meaning, asking questions, and range of interpretations

I also wish to add to these concepts the idea of Culture in flux as discussed by Maaretta Jaukkuri in ‘Unfolding Perspectives’ the catalogue text @ kaisma ARS 01. Referring to other theorists, Maaretta Jaukkuri discusses a culture defined through reference to motion rather than stasis, in a ‘constant state of hybridisation, which is brought about by the energy flow arising from constant crossing of boundaries’. Using the metaphor of the river, the influence of cultural exchange and dialogue appear as cross currents of different strengths.

This interest in dialogue and exchange can be seen in many cases within a range of Conferences, symposia, gallery talks, and Transmission: Speaking and Listening- which take up the idea of discussion as a central drive of its publications

*Conferences, symposia and screenings: bringing together diverse contributions from artists, curators, theorists and writers.

*Insite: a programme of informal gallery talks.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening, the artists’ talk series in conjunction with Sheffield Hallam University

*Projects: based around the exhibition’s programme or stemming out of contemporary art practices

However I also want to refer to a couple project models that extend this sense of exchange and dialogue through practice

Reality Shifts 2003

Reality Shifts was an exciting photography project based around the exhibition by Anneè Olofsson at Site Gallery. In her work at Site, Anneè Olofsson presented images from a zone between sleeping and waking where reality is somehow twisted to reveal its darker underside. In this world the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred and nothing is what it at first seems. Strange characters play out odd stories, familiar objects transform into absurd shapes and mysterious situations unfold. Anneè Olofsson presents visual situations that are touched by a sense of the familiar, representing family groupings, or figures captured asleep or in domestic surroundings. However the familiarity or ordinariness offered is more like that of a dream world; a nightmare zone between sleeping and waking where reality is somehow twisted to reveal its darker underside. The images present uncertain narratives, ambivalent meaning that needs to be deciphered. In elegantly staged tableaux a father’s touch seems transformed into a taboo gesture; a bedside story becomes a parental breach of privacy; and the inhabitants of domestic spaces appear to be absorbed by or locked into their furnishings, rendered invisable by their surroundings.The family unit is often at the heart of this compelling body of work that, in Olofsson’s hands, is transformed into something uneasy. The situations presented in her photographic images and videos may appear straightforward: relations of power, family connections, bonds of affection and intense emotion; but there is a unsettling sense of making visible small, even unconscious fears. The work plays at the edges of cultural taboos, exploring emotions and pyschological states which are stifled, repressed and left unspoken. The process of liberating such thoughts and anxieties, and the sharing of intimate knowledge may be carthartic. However the rigid poses, and the hidden, turned or masked faces reinforces the sense of discomfort, and is symptomatic perhaps of both embarrassment and vulnerability.

Over 3 days a group of young people worked with photographer, Imogen Powell to explore the exhibition and create their own responses to it using the gallery’s high quality studio and camera equipment. Drawing on the work’s reference to film and cinema, as well as its connections to other contemporary art; they worked together to create a series of images which were shown on the projection window at the gallery. Exploring themes such as dreams, disguise, concealment, portraiture, and performance; the group learnt how to use different lighting techniques, studio approaches; and cameras; as well as a range of printing processes. The resulting images transformed Sheffield’s streets into the locations for bizarre cat-and-mouse chases; Film Noir antics and mysterious rendezvous.