Nevenka Šivavec
A Conversation with Daniel Jewesbury
First of all, I am interested in the phenomenon and (relative) success of the various artists who run different organisations in Belfast. You seem to be involved in a few of them as an active member. What is the current situation within these organisations? How do the artists from the younger generation perceive this form of self-institutionalisation?
I have to say that younger artists seem fairly interested in the approach of artist-run groups. I'm interested in your term 'self-institutionalisation' as that carries both positive and negative connotations. Clearly the need for setting up one's own institutions was most keenly felt here at the time when there simply were no pre-existing spaces open for younger artists to show their work. It might be presumed that that's all changed now, that there are many different outlets for artists leaving college today, but it's not so. The artist-run groups are obviously far more influential and important, but beyond them there is still very little. One thing that concerns me slightly is that younger artists have not shown very much desire to rejuvenate this process, to start up their own spaces and organisations. I think that the artist-run groups have become almost like mainstream institutions in this respect, in that they appear to younger artists as if they have always been there; what's more, with such a range of groups now active, there's very little incentive to start something 'new', indeed it's very difficult to find a novel angle, to identify a 'niche' that's not already served. There's something to be said for the traditional Japanese approach to architecture: tear it all down after seven years and start again...
There's a range of very active groups in Belfast now (and a new artist-run gallery is opening in Derry soon). It's still a precarious existence but I'd have to acknowledge that we're taken far more seriously now by funding bodies than ever before. I also think that, at long last, there's an awareness within some of those bodies, at least, that we have something genuinely distinctive here, in that these groups are not set up simply to copy the mainstream, or to provide a back door into it, or whatever, in the way that so many artist-run groups in Britain have been (particularly in Glasgow and London). The organisations in Belfast really are engaged in creating their own contexts, parallel to, and distinct from, the mainstream institutions. It's curious that there's a sort of residual distrust of this approach amongst some artists, curators and critics in Dublin; there seems to be a belief that up here we're all just snubbing the art market and the mainstream art discourses out of petulance or plain badness, as if what we do must actually be in reference to that. Of course it's not, at all, but I suppose when you think you're in the centre of the universe, you have to believe that everything else revolves around you.
A quick survey of artist-run organisations in Belfast would lead to a list something like this: Catalyst Arts (gallery, running since 1993); Factotum (publisher of the newspaper The Vacuum and of the books Belfast Songs and Belfast Ordinary); Cinilingus (film and video organisation); Flax Art Studios; Queen Street Studios; Belfast Exposed (photography gallery and archive, just about artist-run, and operating very much in that ethos); and Source magazine (photography). Individuals in these organisations are involved in other projects on an ad hoc basis.
Could you tell me - from your personal point of view - what kind of artistic work or activities can resonate with a politically troubled City as Belfast. Would this be public art, community art (by the way - community art is something which is almost non-existent in Slovenia), art in the form of straight activism or art for the 'sake of exhibiting'? In short: how do you see the role of the artists and art today - especially as you have the experience of working in a politically unstable environment?
This is a very tricky question, because we have to unravel all those terms to arrive at some sort of meaningful answer. I do not believe that the things that we typically label 'community' or 'public' art are of very much use in our situation, and I'll try to explain why. I think I could call the kind of engagement I advocate a 'dialectical' art - again, I'll explain this in some more depth.
That which is called 'community art' in Belfast is typically run along a couple of different models. First of all there are agencies and charities which employ artists to come into 'the community' (somehow always identified in this generalised way) and work on a particular short-term project, such as the painting of a mural, in collaboration with a specifically-targeted group, maybe a youth group, for example. These projects are not particularly concerned with producing art of any great aesthetic merit, nor even with the notion of what that could be, nor do they equip the participants with any really valuable skills that they could take into other areas of their lives. More importantly, the participants are usually engaged at a reasonably superficial level in dictating the form or nature of the project, this having already been decided on their behalf.
Another model for community art might revolve around giving a series of workshops in a certain area of art production: photography, video-making, craft work and so on. Whilst useful skills are passed on, again the question of how the end product constitutes 'art' is not often addressed. In both these approaches, then, it's as if the activity itself, rather than any end product, is the focus of the whole project. Art is being treated instrumentally in these examples, as a means by which to access extrinsic social / therapeutic benefits (what's more, the exact nature of these benefits is usually quite vague: 'social inclusion', for instance, or 'empowerment'), rather than something that can have any qualities of its own, any qualities in its own right. I would very much question how desirable it is for art to be used as second-rate social work by people without the qualifications to be engaging in such activity.
This absolutely does not mean that art cannot be a means through which to explore social, political or ideological problems or issues. However, it must be allowed to do that in a far more complex way, even in a self-conscious way: that's to say, in a way which questions its own working as a cultural product or process. It's not just a question of producing bad agit-prop or social realism. Or of using it for some ill-defined 'catharsis'. Art can address its subject matter and its form, in other words it can look outwards to the world and inwards to its own formal concerns and problems, and it can do both these things in the same piece of work. This is what I mean when I talk about a dialectic - but we're coming to that.
Public art, meanwhile, is often used by city planners, private developers, councils and so on as part of their urban regeneration schemes. Right now, both the physical, public space of Belfast, and the 'social space' of its 'public sphere', are being very rapidly privatised. There's a real belief amongst government agencies that 'trickle-down' economics provide the answer for all Belfast's problems: capital accumulation is the only way to achieve social cohesion. In a city so driven by division, not just along political or religious or cultural lines, but along class lines too, it seems grossly irresponsible to place so much faith in private capital. Public art, in this context, is often little more than a fig leaf, covering (somewhat inadequately) the privatisation of the city, its re-segregation along lines of ownership and dependence.
For example, an artist here recently defaced a series of posters that had been put up as 'public art', on hoardings around a prestigious new development. Whilst the artist who had drawn the original posters saw this as an act of vandalism, of philistinism, I interpreted it very much as a protest against a cynical use of culture in the name of private interests. There's a tradition of such protest; for me the most poignant example was provided by the artist David Hammons, who produced a series of photographs documenting a trip he made to midtown Manhattan, where he pissed on a large public sculpture by Richard Serra. The photographs also show Hammons being arrested. In a city of violent exclusions and multiple inequalities, particularly for its black inhabitants, Hammons saw the siting of the Serra sculpture as offensive, even somehow fundamentally dishonest. The use of art to make us feel better about the city, and the processes of gentrification and privatisation within it, and our place within those processes, is intensely ideological. Art is not (or should not be) intrinsically benign.
So we come to a real tension. How can artists comment on the processes that they see at work in a city like Belfast, how can they engage with those processes in a self-reflexive way? Firstly, I don't believe that one can sustain a simplistic distinction between art that exists in the public realm, and which is therefore 'engaged', and art which exists in the gallery, and is thus somehow 'elitist'. I don't believe that we have to abandon the gallery. Yes, we must be aware of its quite severe limitations, of its institutional 'emplacement', of the privileged and rarefied nature of its space. But is it not possible that, even given all these things, a gallery can be a site of critique? Similarly, it's patronising to presume that simply re-locating one's practice from the gallery to the street is going to suddenly engage an otherwise uninterested audience. I work in a variety of sites and spaces, both in Belfast and internationally. Some of these are gallery spaces, others are public sites - cinemas, the pages of newspapers, radio broadcasts and so on. I believe that any artist must attempt to understand how their work is positioned within the public sphere more broadly, wherever it is sited. I would always want to engage with the conditions of production of the art I make, and to some extent these conditions must become part of the subject matter of the work. The work must consider from whence it speaks, it must be self-conscious. This does not mean that every single piece of work must involve redefining its contexts. We don't need to continually re-invent the wheel. However, artists must arrive at methodologies that allow them to approach the dialectics of art-making for themselves.
And what are those dialectics? I have already identified a 'dialectical relationship' between form and content; I think that that old maxim about content dictating form is almost true - in a truly dialectical situation, each element informs the other, such that it becomes difficult to attach priority to one or the other (although I can't see that 'form' could ever really dictate 'content', unless one's subject matter is form itself). In a truly dialectical artwork, the artist is aware that they have not only asked a question or investigated a problem, but that they have done it in the manner, the form, most appropriate to the conditions of the question. The form has enabled them to address the work's concerns in a uniquely effective way, a way they would not have been able to find otherwise.
The other 'dialectical
relationship' that I would point to here is that between theory and practice.
Theory (ideas) cannot be subordinated to practice (objective reality).
Practice cannot take place without recourse to theory. 'Methodology' could
itself be described as the interplay between theory and practice, the
theory of practice and the practice of theory, if that's not too glib.
It certainly strikes me that there is an urgent need for self-consciousness
in art, when part of the 'problem' of urban redevelopment is the 'place'
(in all senses) of public art, and the uses to which art is put within
regeneration.
In the terms of the privatisation of the city I can notice a resemblance
with the situation here. Are there any connections between private capital
and artists from artist-run groups or does private capital give commissions
only to mainstream artists with an elitist background?
There is very little contact between private commissioning organisations
and artist run groups, with a few notable exceptions. The Sculptors' Society
of Ireland, which is part artists' union, part information resource and
part production facility, is artist-run. It is an all-Ireland membership
organisation, and all large public commissions are advertised through
it; it has been involved in the selection panels and so on for various
county councils' arts offices in the Republic. It also offers guidelines
to commissioning bodies on the whole commissioning process. Some private
commissioning bodies have gone through the SSI but in the North they would
tend to be more involved with local agencies (in Belfast that inevitably
means Laganside). There isn't actually a huge amount of private commissioning
going on here. All the public art that's gone up in the last few years
has been commissioned either by Laganside or Belfast City Council, except
for the Sustrans project that Flax Art have been involved in (this is
a network of cycle paths that extends across the whole UK, not just Northern
Ireland. Again, though, it's publicly funded).
Where do the decisions
as regards big new commissions take place?
Down a dark alleyway, at night, over a couple of brown envelopes full
of cash! Well, maybe not quite, but certainly they're nowhere near as
open up here as they now have to be in the Republic, where artists are
involved in selection boards and so on. Our public art is chosen by...
who? Planners? Civil servants? Bureaucrats? Private developers? I'm not
sure.
How would you,
as a theorist and artists at the same time respond to such a challenge?
Does potentially powerful and influential art have to be oppositional?
Maybe it doesn't have to be oppositional. That's too much to expect. It
has to seek to be honest about itself and where it's coming from, though.
If that leads to being oppositional, that's fine, but I wouldn't make
'opposition' my initial aim. I think what I said before about the dialectical
nature of art gives you some idea of what I think the links between art
and theory are. I would always like to be in a position to bring the audience
(viewer / listener) into the world of the artwork, and for them to reflect
for themselves on what this says to them about the world they're actually
engaged in. This seems to me to be an admirable aim of public art - to
bring to the public (whoever they are) the possibility of a renewed, reinvigorated
awareness of our own position, in the public sphere, in all the networks
of relationships, at so many different levels, which surround us and position
us in 'the city' - which we tend to think of as merely a collection of
buildings and open spaces, something external to us, but which deep down
we know is just the totality of all those relationships, of domination,
exclusion, belonging, unbelonging and so on - as I said in the talk itself.
The city is in us, we are here...
September 2004