A to Z of Artist Led Activity: Independent Group to PS1
I is for INDEPENDENT GROUP
The Independent Group grew out of informal discussions among a group of artists, critics and architects at the Slade School of Art, London, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and was formally launched at the ICA in 1952, with a committee consisting of artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, architects Alison & Peter Smithson, writers Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway and former Surrealist Tony del Renzio. The group is best known for its role in formulating the ideas that would crystallise British Pop Art - with collage works like Paolozzi’s I Was A Rich Man’s Plaything (1947) and Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) featuring early appearances of the word ‘Pop’ in an art context. The Independent Group was also hugely innovative in curatorial terms, staging exhibitions like Man Machine & Motion at the ICA and This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery, where works drawing on abstraction, photography and popular culture by fine artists like William Turnbull, Sarah Jackson and Nigel Henderson were set alongside images culled directly from mass media sources – most famously, the presiding spirit of This Is Tomorrow was a giant cut-out of Robbie The Robot from the science fiction film Forbidden Planet. By the early 1960s, the Independent Group’s ideas had become part of the British mainstream, and had proved key in establishing British Pop as a current distinct from its American counterpart. John Russell notes that British Pop was “a facet of a class struggle, real or imagined. It was a struggle fought by people who were for science against the humanities, for cybernetics against the revival of italic handwriting, for Elvis against pre-electric recordings of Battistini, for American Army surplus fatigues against waistcoats and watchchains, for the analytical study of General Motors advertising against an hour in the print room at Colnaghi’s...”. That the battle was decisively won on the cultural (if not political) front during the next few decades is perhaps indicated by the fact that Hamilton himself, and such protégés as Roxy Music, are widely remembered, while the ‘pre-electric recordings of Battistini’ seem largely forgotten, and ‘waistcoats and watchchains’ survive mainly as items worn by pop cultural icons as ciphers of a lost age.
J is for JUDY CHICAGO
Judy Chicago is best known for her large scale installation The Dinner Party (1974 – 9), in which she collaborated with around 130 craftswomen and artists to create a memorial to 99 female artists and pioneers, some mythical, others historical, ranging from Georgia O’Keefe to Mary Wollstonecraft, Sappho and Sojourner Truth. Now regarded as the single most important work produced by the Feminist Art Movement of the 1970s, Chicago’s The Dinner Party did not emerge from a vacuum, either politically or aesthetically. In early 1972, Chicago and Miriam Schapiro had already staged the site-specific Womanhouse exhibition in a large house in Hollywood under the banner of the CalArts Feminist Art Program, bringing together 17 women artists, mainly local practitioners and students, each given her own room in which to create an installation. The resulting works – often devised using ‘consciousness-raising’ techniques within the group – tended to reflect the idea that art’s purpose within a feminist context was (in Chicago’s own words) to “transform our circumstances into our subject matter [and] reveal the whole nature of the human condition.” At Womanhouse, this resulted in an array of rooms drawing on collective and private female experience, using techniques recognisable from the works of an earlier generation of Surrealist and neo-Dada artists like Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Ed Keinholz. Vicki Hodgetts and Robin Weltsch created a pink 1950s kitchen with breasts protruding from the walls, Robin Schiff built a ‘Nightmare Bathroom’ that drew on the methods deployed by George Segal, while Faith Wilding wove a ‘Crocheted Room’ whose spider’s web presence formally echoed works by Marcel Duchamp and Eva Hesse. Perhaps the most iconic piece at Womanhouse (certainly the most frequently reproduced) was Sandy Orgel’s ‘Linen Closet’, inside which a female mannequin merges with the shelves, seeming to step forward while remaining, for the moment, trapped. In the collaborative nature of both projects, Womanhouse and The Dinner Party mark significant points in the evolution of artist-led activity in the visual arts, equating collective creation with a realization political ideals, and paving the way for many subsequent endeavours. As Chicago noted in reference to the production of The Dinner Party,her studio “gradually became a structure of self-sufficient groups”, and in this respect the wider Feminist Art Movement can be seen as having played a key role in moving artists’ thinking away from notions of unique individual expression towards more utopian collaborative models. This ambition, however, always seems destined to remain in tension with a more traditional sense of the studio as a collective working in the service of a particular artist’s singular vision: it’s worth noting that Chicago’s acknowledgement panels, crediting her collaborators on The Dinner Party, are held in storage rather than made an integral part of the work’s permanent display at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn.
K is for KUNSTVEREIN
The Kunstverein is a model for the dissemination and exhibition of art rooted in public societies formed initially in Germany from around 1792. The Kunstverein, or public art association, would generally comprise a space for exhibitions, run by a board of members on a not for profit basis, and the early Kunstverein were linked closely to wider movements working towards emancipation and democracy, explicitly seeking to establish their own philosophy of ‘art for ordinary citizens’ against the older tendency for art to remain the preserve of aristocratic collectors and religious institutions. In the first phase of establishment, running to around 1840, the Kunstverein were largely a concern of the emerging middle classes of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and are in some respects comparable to similar developments in the provision of museums by public subscription, municipal authorities and wealthy benefactors in the UK and elsewhere during the same period. From the later nineteenth century onwards, some Kunstverein became focused on ‘art for the people’ in its more current sense, following wider political and social changes, and many operate in the present day as open access institutions, showing a wide range of contemporary arts to a broad public. This model’s democratic ideals underscored the decision of Patrick Brill (aka British artist Bob & Roberta Smith) to begin a process of establishing a series of makeshift Kunstverein in the UK, beginning with the construction of a large shed in the grounds of Coventry School of Art and Design as part of his 2009 Mead Gallery show at Warwick Arts Centre - Hijjack Reality, Let 100,000 Kunstverein Bloom! This exhibition reproduced his own Leytonstone studio – building, works, rubbish, equipment and all – before being given over to other artists to show work in on a first come, first served basis, ensuring the existence of a public platform for any artist or group wishing to exhibit, regardless of reputation or knowledge of the art world’s standard operating procedures.
L is for LE VILLAGE DES ARTS, DAKAR
The Village of the Arts, Dakar, is a district occupied by artists’ studios and exhibition spaces located on an airport road just outside the Sengalese capital city. While not an artist led project from the beginning – the Village was established by Senegal’s government in a way that echoes the formation of Cultural Industries Quarters and other regeneration projects in many British cities – the Village is now at least partially administered and managed by the artists living and working within it: Senegal’s Ministry of Culture manages the site in collaboration with a formally constituted Historical Heritage Committee of Artists and Residents from the Village itself. The history of support for art by Senegal’s government goes back to the current state’s origins, when the country’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (himself a leading poet and theorist influenced by Surrealism, and one of the founders – with Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas - of Négritude as a key Francophone political and artistic movement during the 1930s) marked his country’s Independence with a pan-African arts festival in 1960. The belief in art as a unifying tool has persisted ever since, with the Village as one of the latest manifestations of that early ideal of African Arts as a crucial factor in the maintenance of a healthy independent state in the aftermath of colonisation. Today, the Village has its own gallery spaces, a restaurant, facilities for hosting seminars, conferences, concerts and other events, and among its key artists are such internationally renowned figures as Amadou Dieng, Serge Mienandi, Ismaila Manga, Ibrahima Kebe and Idrissa Diallo. Informal systems of mentoring and cross-arts working are commonplace among the 50 or so artists in residence at any time, so that younger artists learn from and gain exposure through proximity with their elders and peers, keeping both traditional and contemporary modes in development. The Village has also hosted the prestigious Biennale des Arts Africains Contemporains (also known as Dak’art) since 1998, and this ensures that Village residents remain in close contact with activity elsewhere, both within Africa, and – through exhibition programmes of invited artists - on the wider international stage.
M is for MIDLAND GROUP *
The Midland Group was founded by Evelyn Gibbs in 1943, holding its first exhibition at Barker’s Furniture Store on Angel Row, Nottingham, the following year, and continued as one of the most important arts organisations in the city until 1987, almost 30 years on from Gibbs’ own departure in 1960. Gibbs had arrived in Nottingham as an evacuee from London in 1939, and had already established herself as a painter, printmaker and pioneer of art education in British schools – her book, The Teaching of Art, remained a standard reference for many years. She founded the Midland Group as a response to this ‘exile’ and its membership and range of activities grew rapidly, as exhibitions in local shops were followed by the establishment of a dedicated gallery at 20 St James’ Street, commissions for murals (notably Gibbs’ own Annunciation at St Martin’s Church, Bilborough) and touring exhibitions to factories and other host venues. By 1961, the Midland Group was bringing work by such internationally renowned figures as Henry Moore, John Piper and Elisabeth Frink to the city. The turning point for the organisation was a period at East Circus Street under the direction of Sylvia Cooper, and by the time the Midland Group moved to its final home (a fully fledged Arts Centre at 24 – 32 Carlton Street, now the Connexions agency) its focus had taken a more experimental turn, with artists such as Ian Breakwell, Raymond Moore, The John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, Robert Mapplethorpe, John Newling and Michael Horowitz all having shown and performed there. Despite the addition of a cinema and performance spaces during the early 1980s, financial difficulties and internal problems led to the closure of the centre in 1987, though not before its reputation for live art had put the venue – and Nottingham itself – firmly onto an international stage: the Midland Group’s Performance Platform events, organised by Steve Rogers, are generally agreed to have been the prototypes for what later became the National Review of Live Art, and Nottingham Contemporary itself might be seen as a belated successor – a point that the new gallery’s choice of David Hockney for its opening exhibition in 2009 (Hockney had previously shown at The Midland Group in 1979) may have been consciously intended to underline.
N is for NEK CHAND
Nek Chand is one of a number of untrained, unofficial and often eccentric artists whose work is dedicated to realising fantastic visions within real landscapes, following a lineage (of which practitioners are generally unaware, at least initially) that connects them to singular environments going back many centuries: the eccentric gardens and follies of Stowe and Snow’s Hill, the shell grottoes of the eighteenth century and the work of Ferdinand Cheval (a postman in the town of Hauterives, France, who spent 33 years constructing a Gaudi-esque palace made from chicken-wire, lime mortar and stones collected during his rounds in his own garden) all seem part of a single tradition of highly personal creation carried out with little reference to patrons or audiences. Cheval’s Palais Ideal was celebrated by the Surrealists after his death in 1924, and many followed Cheval’s example, some very consciously, like the wealthy English patron Edward James in the jungles of Mexico, others, like Simon Rodia, the architect of the iconic Watts Towers in Los Angeles, independently. Within this lineage, Chand is something of an emblematic figure. He was a roads inspector in the Indian city of Chandigarh when he began to construct his Rock Garden, populating a secluded area of landscape with mythical figures, animals and buildings constructed from cement, rags and mosaics of broken pottery. Initially working illegally, Chand’s garden was eventually discovered by officials after 18 years of work had been carried out, and a decision was made – following some uncertainty - to preserve and extend rather than demolish his endeavours. Since 1975, Chand has headed a team of labourers, and despite various setbacks with the authorities, created a site that is internationally renowned, and reportedly second only to the Taj Mahal in terms of annual visitor numbers within India. While often bracketed together as ‘Outsider Artists’, the motives driving the creation of such disparate environmental works as the Chandigarh Rock Garden, the Rev. Howard Finster’s Plant Farm Museum in Georgia and Helen Martin’s Owl House in South Africa’s Eastern Cape are extremely diverse, and not easily distinguishable from many more readily acknowledged projects by known artists, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay’s neo-Classical Little Sparta near Edinburgh, Derek Jarman’s makeshift garden in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station, or the elaborate and monumental Tarot Garden created by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely on a woodland site in rural Tuscany.
O is for OMEGA WORKSHOP
Founded in 1913 by the critic Roger Fry and his associates at Fitzroy Square, London, the Omega Workshop was a key bridging point between the Arts & Crafts movement of the Victorian era and the emergence of full-blooded Modernism in England. Set up by the artists themselves, working on a co-operative model, Omega was a commercial enterprise established with the intention of breaking down the division between fine and applied arts, yet differentiated itself from earlier attempts by being decisively indebted to visual styles rooted in Fauvism and Cubism rather than traditional vernacular crafts. The Omega name was taken from the symbol that marked all of the workshop’s output, in lieu of personal signatures by the artists involved, whose own personal styles were nominally submerged within a collective identity. Initially the workshop’s participants included Bloomsbury Group artists such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Fry himself working alongside Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth, but the latter group split away to form their own Rebel Art Workshop (and later launch Vorticism) within a year or two of the Omega Workshop’s foundation. Despite these early conflicts with Lewis (mainly centred on a disagreement with Fry about a commission to design a room at the 1914 Ideal Home Exhibition - though as was usually the case with Lewis, broader philosophical and aesthetic principles were invoked) Omega continued as a design company for the next six years, producing fabrics, furniture, stained glass, ceramics and books for general sale (outsourcing manufacturing work to companies like Dryad, based in Leicester) and bespoke, one-off commissions for murals and interiors. In its six years of actual existence Omega struggled to reach beyond a small circle of wealthy patrons, and was officially liquidated in July 1920, ironically, just at the dawning of the first decade its products and design ideas would go on to decisively influence; a further return of Omega Workshop style gained a significant foothold in the design mainstream during the 1980s, perhaps linked to a more general revival of interest in the Bloomsbury Group itself during those years.
P is for PS1
Although now affiliated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and therefore a fully institutional contemporary art-space, PS1 was initially founded as a response to a perceived lack of provision in the city for the creation and display of site-specific works. Set up by Alanna Heiss in 1976, PS1 was part of a programme whose origins lay in the wider activities of The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, an organization Heiss had established five years earlier with the architecture critic Brendan Gill to transform abandoned New York buildings into artists’ studios and exhibition spaces: its ventures also included The Coney Island Sculpture Museum, The Idea Warehouse in TriBeCa and Lower Manhattan’s Clocktower Gallery, which was inaugurated with shows by Joel Schapiro and Richard Tuttle in 1973. The creation of PS1 in Queens in 1976 marked the final phase of activity, and its programmes since its inception have consistently championed the new and experimental – offering work and exhibition space to such artists as David Hammons, Janet Cardiff, Dennis Oppenheim and Michaelangelo Pistoletto for the making of new exhibitions within the building. Since the turn of the millennium, PS1 has operated as an outpost of the Museum of Modern Art, and Heiss herself left in 2008 to focus attention on her Art International Radio (AIR) project, a not-for-profit online broadcaster based at the Clocktower Gallery. AIR is accessible internationally via its website (www.artonair.org) where music, spoken word, oral history projects, talks, interviews and sound-based material by artists like Tony Oursler, Carolee Schneemann and James Franco are archived.
