SEAS - Skegness Blog Part 3
Sunday 27th September
14.18
In true British holiday style, the last day of my trip was unexpectedly sunny and my only remaining clean clothes were my warmest. On the positive side, I had finally mastered the art of cramming a laptop and an SLR into one small bag without leaving it in a café or on the side of the pier!
At 11am, Nicola and John of Beacon Art Project picked me up for a drive to the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve where Michael Sanders’ work on bombing ranges awaited us. Without a car, I would have missed this spectacular piece of wilderness; a desolate haven from the illuminations and hoards of stag and hen parties in the centre of town. Michael’s textural photographs of “Salty Sam,’ a deliberately grounded ship used for target practice in the 1970s, highlight the contradictions of using areas of natural beauty such as this for military purposes. Only a small sample of his work, the photographs made me intrigued to see more of Michael’s responses to such strange, contradictory landscapes so I was excited to hear that Beacon are planning to commission a performance, bringing an audience to the isolated café to watch him through binoculars near a stack of old bombs. As we walked through the huge, flat landscape discussing Michael’s idea, a plane could be heard circling overhead in a chilling reminder of the nature reserve’s former wartime use.
With an hour left before my train home (one of only four running on a Sunday!) we drove to the pier for one final doughnut and a last look around the festival. Having previously only caught the end of Borderline, we sat under the pagoda and waited for the audio piece to begin. On the hour, a prayer started to resonate from the discreetly installed speakers and as if drawn by the call to prayer, people congregated in the garden. Although one of the less visually obvious pieces in the festival, this was one of the most effective for me. Positioned in a tiny island of calm in the middle of the commercial chaos of Skegness, this piece, although not strictly site-specific, was installed well in a fitting location. Where some pieces had been slightly engulfed by the surrounding distractions, this one commanded attention with its transformation and enhancement of the existing space.
15.32
Speeding through fields of cabbages on a train that smells distinctly like Butlin’s ineffective sewer system, I’m looking forward to a healthy dinner and an early night. A varied, full and quite often haunting programme, there are some pieces I have failed to mention as I have blogged at breakneck speed to capture as much of the weekend as possible. John Byford’s colourful photography exhibition, the backdrop to Café Cityscape discussions in the Embassy Theatre, deserves to be mentioned, providing a thorough investigation into the town that could only be conducted by a local artist constantly and avidly documenting, recording and fictionalising the town’s people, sites and events.
SEAS has been the most entertaining arts festival I have encountered so far, mostly because of the incredibly enthusiastic, open nature of everybody involved and the variety of art exhibited. It is one of the few festivals I have witnessed that has successfully integrated with local events and venues, dispelling a lot of people’s reservations about contemporary art and creating positive encounters between usually disparate groups. As an art tourist, its location in Skegness has been a minor challenge: I never thought I would find myself balancing a laptop on a highchair in a McDonald’s at 9am on a Saturday morning, cursing the lack of wi-fi and decent coffee, but it is the ironic charm of Skegness that has made my weekend at SEAS Skegness International unique. Skeggy is a strange, visually disorientating place shaped by an almost deliberate lack of high culture in favour of arcades and drinking holes so the decision to base SEAS here was a bold and experimental one. In comparison to festivals such as Münster Skulptur Projekte and Documenta, a more considered approach to placement was demanded of the art in order to compete with the crowded surroundings, increasing the challenge to curators of the work. As SEAS is a touring project, true site-specificity was rare but the most successful works were those that were sensitive to their location and understood the curious atmosphere, demographic and significance of the town.
I sincerely hope that this is the start of a Skegness Biennale; an event that initially may sound like a condescending joke but, through its knowing use of a deserving and difficult location and a slightly smirking nod to self-deprecating British humour, could form the perfect experimental antithesis to the usual high budget arts festival and expand the potential for other quirky and thought-provoking events to follow in more underused parts of Britain.
