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Abstract
A description is given of how Focal Point Gallery’s (FPG) new building (in Southend-on-Sea, Essex) was conceived in terms of its practical effectiveness in addressing tensions between local and global, utopian, social and political thought, through the commissioning of permanent and temporary artworks – by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Scott King, Mike Nelson, Elizabeth Price, Allen Rupperberg, Tris Vonna-Michell and Lawrence Weiner – via an ethical curatorial approach involving affirmative modes of criticality. This includes an account of distribution strategies used for FPG’s printed publicity as an artistic program in its own right, and the various platforms, channels and spaces of editorial circulation that informed this curatorial approach.
Notes
1 “New Institutionalism” was a term established in the early 2000s to describe the growing number of independent curators in the 1990s who moved into institutions and started to bring with them their often unorthodox ways of working. Examples include Palais de Tokyo in Paris, run by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans (1999–2006); Rooseum in Malmo, run by Charles Esche (2000–03); Kunstverein Munich, run by Maria Lind (2002–04); and Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, run by Vasif Kortun (2001–10). These art centers began to work less with exhibition-based practices and more with discourse-oriented curatorial strategies, where new forms of programming adopted hybrid participatory structures that were part art school, part community centre and part artistic laboratory. In the early 2010s, this form of programming had become a powerful global sign and a standard curatorial strategy. This is a form of working that now pervades institutions worldwide, and an e-flux bulletin from 16 July 2015 for the Centre for Contemporary Art’s (in Lagos) project “Àsìkò Maputo” in Mozambique provides a good example of the rhetoric connected to this tendency. Announcing the discursive model for its project, it states: “Using the format of part art laboratory, part residency and part informal art academy, over the course of 28 intensive days The History of Contemporary Art in Mozambique in 4 weeks will focus partially on technique and primarily on methodology, critical thinking, and the implementation of conceptual ideas as well as the development and role of curatorial practice.” Within the historical context of New Institutionalism, FPG’s intention was to construct a discourse around an experimental return to approaches towards exhibition-making, as well as innovative ways of approaching the commissioning of art in the public realm.
2 There is a difference in the use of the terms “organization” and “institution” within this text. “Organization” usually denotes the English system of regularly funded contemporary visual art organizations in direct reference to the government funding body Arts Council England (ACE) and its terminology of their network of “National Portfolio Organisations” (NPOs). I use “institution” to refer to these same organizations within a broader context of Institutional Critique or New Institutionalism.
3 Although this was the case, it is important to mention that FPG was given complete curatorial control to determine the selection process and decision-making behind all the commissions.
4 First-generation Conceptual artists emerged with a language-based art in the 1960s, during which time US artists such as Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and the English group Art & Language began a radical interrogation of art.
5 Scott King’s concept of “de-regeneration” was developed in his artwork THE TRIUMPH OF DE-REGENERATION – LEE BRILLEAUX 1952–1994 (2012), which was made for the exhibition “Thames Delta” at the original FPG in 2012. In it, the artist imagined erecting a 300-foot gold-plated statue of Lee Brilleaux, former lead singer of the pub-rock band Dr Feelgood, on the foreshore in Southend close to the legendary Kursaal Ballroom where the band played some of their most important gigs. A global figure in musical history and a local hero in Southend and Canvey Island nearby (where the band formed in 1971), King’s proposal for a public statue aimed at exploring an absurdist “democracy of regeneration” in opposition to the well-documented cronyism connected to commissioning processes for public art, demonstrated most clearly in the decision-making behind Anish Kapoor’s gigantic sculpture ArcelorMittal Orbit (2012) in the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.
6 At the time of writing (June 2015), Firstsite is in severe financial trouble as a direct result of cuts to funding and an unsustainable business plan. ACE put Firstsite into a special funding arrangement on 12 February and it was announced that it would not be admitted to ACE’s regularly funded National Portfolio for 2015–18. In April, Firstsite’s director of two-and-a-half years, Matthew Rowe, resigned and the organization is to be run by Colchester Arts Centre under the leadership of its director, Anthony Roberts, for the next year.
7 Hewison’s book starts from New Labour’s ceaseless promotion of the visual and performing arts, museums and galleries, “as a stimulus to national economic revival, a post-industrial revolution where spending on culture would solve everything, from national decline to crime”; Robert Hewison, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (London: Verso, 2014), outside back cover.
8 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012).
9 In addition, the gallery would open with an exhibition by Elizabeth Price. This was the artist’s first solo exhibition since winning the Turner Prize in 2012; called Sunlight (2013), this new multi-screen film installation dwelt on historical images of the Sun in negative form. FPG also commissioned a temporary project by graphic designer and artist Scott King called “Excerpts From a Better Britain” (Southend-on-Sea) (2013), which, in keeping with the permanent commissions, continued to comment on the politics of regeneration.
10 Foster’s discussion of the “preposterous” as a temporal phenomenon and anachronism is outlined in various texts, including “Preposterous Timing,” London Review of Books (8 November, 2012); “An Archival Impulse,” October, no. 110 (2004); and his essay in Jeremy Deller: English Magic (Venice Biennale, 2013).
11 Mike Nelson, An Invocation: Five Hundred and Thirty Books from Southend Central Library (Southend-on-Sea: Focal Point Gallery, 2013), interview booklet, 7.
12 Ibid., 7–8.
13 Ibid., 12–13.
14 Ibid., 13.
15 Ibid., 15.
16 Bishop’s Radical Museology (Koenig, 2013) examines three European contemporary art museums that have produced “compelling alternatives to the mantra of ‘bigger is better and richer’” in the face of increasing austerity cuts to funding. “Rather than denoting presentism, the contemporary comes to signal a dialectical method: scouring the past for the origins of our present historical moment, which in turn is the determining motivation for our interest in the past. It is an anachronic action [similar to Foster’s discussion of the “preposterous”] that seeks to reboot the future through the unexpected appearance of a relevant past”; see http://www.cornerhousepublications.org/wp-content/uploads/book-95317.pdf (accessed August 6, 2015).
17 Friedrich Schlegel, quoted by Simon Critchely, Very Little … Almost Nothing (Routledge, 2004), 100.
18 Much like the work of first-generation Conceptual artists such as Sol Lewitt, who famously stated in his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (June 1967), that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” in part my curatorial aim was to set up a system through FPG’s ongoing numbering of each piece of print that would continue to inform the narrative structure of the program after my departure from the institution.