engage International Conference
'Like Nothing Else: experiment, risk and
gallery education'
16 - 19 November 2005
Main Venue: Arnolfini, Bristol
Supporting Venues: At-Bristol, Bristol Old Vic, British Empire and
Commonwealth Museum, Creative Partnerships Bristol, Hareclive School, Plan 9,
Spike Island, SS Great Britain.
A full conference programme, speakers' biographies, presentations (where
available), Soapbox prcis and delegates' evaluation summary are included within
this page. If you need further information about any aspect of the conference,
please contact emma.prout@engage.org.
For further information on speakers and their presentations, click
here
For the conference programme, click here
For summaries of the Breakout Sessions, click
here
To download the Soapbox prcis, click
here
To download the delegates' evaluation summary,
click here.
Speakers' Biographies and Presentation Summaries
Where indicated, Speakers' presentations are available to download.
Felicity Allen
Head of Interpretation and Education, Tate Britain
Between 1978 and 1998, Felicity worked as an artist, exhibiting widely and
lecturing in colleges of art, undertaking residencies with schools, hospitals,
galleries, museums and at Durham Cathedral. She also undertook freelance
commissions both as an artist and as a consultant to art and education
organisations. She was the first Director of engage
between 1991 and 1995, and established and edited the engage
journal between 1995 and 1999. From 1999 until 2003 she was Head of Public
Programmes at the Hayward Gallery where, amongst other things, she established
new programmes working with disadvantaged young people, including those looked
after by social services. She has been at Tate Britain for two years.
Presentation
The Institution and the Experiment: intimacy in public
How can a culture of government targets and 'hard' learning outcomes be
compatible with play and experimentation? What is lost in the
professionalisation of gallery education? Felicity Allen explores how public
institutions can speak to private individuals through intimate encounters with
art. She chronicles a recent history of art education and the influence of the
Black Mountain ethos as it affects current artists, art educators and audiences
alike. The role of experiment is charted through examples of both collective
and individual experience, taking on issues on the way around policy, cultural
difference, citizenship as well as forms of language itself.
Click here to download a copy of the
presentation
Eva Diaz
Art historian and critic; Instructor for Curatorial Studies, Whitney Museum
Independent Study Program
Eva Diaz is a doctoral candidate in art history at Princeton University, where
she is preparing her dissertation titled 'Chance and Design: Experimental Art
at Black Mountain College', advised by Hal Foster. In 2005, she presented her
work on the history of experimental performance at Black Mountain at the Annual
Conference of the College Art Association in Atlanta. Her writings have
appeared in Art in America and Time Out New York, numerous
exhibition catalogues, a forthcoming book Curating Subjects x 21, edited
by Paul O'Neill, to be published by Open Editions and she has also written an
essay for the Arnolfini Black Mountain College exhibition catalogue. She is
currently curating the exhibition 'Mind the Gap', with the artist Beth Stryker,
examining artists' interventions in interstitial spaces in cities.
Presentation
Experiment and Experience: Black Mountain College
This paper focuses on rival methodologies of experimental art as elaborated and
practised by three key Black Mountain teachers: Josef Albers, John Cage, and
Buckminster Fuller. All three laid claim to a practice of experimental
production that stressed innovation, but simultaneously excluded competing
conceptions; all viewed their experimental procedure as interrelating art and
life and therefore imbuing art with crucial relevance. These three models of
experiment-the methodical testing of the appearance and construction of form in
the interest of designing new visual experiences (Albers); the organisation of
aleatory processes and the anarchical acceptance of accident (Cage); and
'comprehensive, anticipatory design science' that propels, teleologically,
current limited understanding towards a finite totality of universal experience
(Fuller)-represent important, incipient yet disparate, directions of post war
art practice, elements of which would be sampled, if not wholly adopted, by
Black Mountain students and subsequent practitioners.
Click here to download a copy of the
presentation
Cathy Haynes
Head of Interaction, Artangel
Cathy is responsible for Artangel Interaction, an ongoing series of artist-led
collaborative projects that often operate outside formal education or
institutional settings and take participants' own lifestyles, interests or
passions as a starting point. Past projects include the twisted pantomime Noel
Noir (2003) by artist Donald Urquhart and actors from the homeless
people's theatre company Cardboard Citizens, and Radio Nights (2005), a
documentary film on West London's rich music culture by artist David Blandy and
young people from the Avenues Youth Project, Westminster. Cathy previously
worked for Public Art Development Trust and the Hayward Gallery. She joined
Artangel in 2003.
Presentation
Nights of London: adventures in the dark
Artangel Interaction aims to develop opportunities for non-artists to get
involved in the creative process. Wherever possible, Artangel Interaction
operates outside of formal institutional structures and seeks to involve groups
of people whose voice is underrepresented in the mainstream and who may have
little access to education or the arts. Cathy will talk about the thinking
behind, and the early development of, 'Nights of London', a new series of
small-scale artist-led projects exploring the nocturnal city with the people
who wake, work or watch over it.
Howard Hollands
Principal Lecturer Art and Design Education; Programme Leader MA in Teaching;
Joint Co-ordinator REALL (Research in Arts, Language and Learning), Middlesex
University
With a base in both primary and secondary teacher-education, Howard also works
as part of an interdisciplinary research team on projects exploring playful
pedagogies, using art practice as both generative and transformative. A current
example is 'Field'-an arts and humanities module in the Primary BA Education
degree, which examines the relationships between space, environment, community
and citizenship through an interdisciplinary project-based framework. 'Field'
encourages an exploration of different points of view, by examining and
challenging insider/outsider perspectives within local communities, the student
cohort and the tutor group. It also provides a professional development
opportunity for tutors and technicians through peer observation, team teaching
and evaluation and through working with external practitioners.
Presentation
Drawing a Blank: picturing silence in the classroom and gallery
So, what 'this interpretation panel is intentionally blank', really means is,
'don't worry, this interpretation panel is intentionally blank', as a means of
allaying the anxiety generated by the visitor faced with what appears to be
nothing on the gallery wall. This throws us back on ourselves as a
reader-viewer of images. Art is what we make of it, and 'nothing' as
'something' remains a confrontational and challenging concept. The nature of
nothing means that it can never become an orthodoxy, but what we say about it
certainly can. In this (blank-blanc) paper with too many words and pictures,
Howard explores the empty space of the gallery and classroom as overflowing
with pedagogic possibility.
Click here to download a list of
bibliographical references
Herman Labro and Rika Colpaert
what>, a de Kunstbank project, is a meeting space for visual culture. It
explores the familiar yet bewildering surface world of visual culture, which
can encompass everything from classical art in the city museum, university or
private collection and pieces of cultural heritage from city archives, to
contemporary art, design, photography, video, comics, popular culture, fashion
and media. As a meeting space, what> is a place where people and things meet
and where intercultural dialogues take place with residents from culturally and
linguistically diverse backgrounds, t hrough an exchange of experiences and
ideas. what> encourages different ways of looking at, interpreting and
creating images.
Presentation
From Andy Warhol to what> crocheting ladies: finding new ways in gallery
education through experimental exhibition projects
Nobleandsilver
Artists
Kim Noble and Stuart Silver are London-based artists who began collaborating in
1995. On leaving art college, they turned their attention to the formal
structures of theatre, television, and radio, winning the Perrier Newcomers
comedy award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000. In Spring 2001 they made a
six-part series for Channel 4, (nobleandsilver):GET OFF ME, which
deconstructed and re-presented six television genres. In 2002, nobleandsilver
occupied Beaconsfield, a gallery in South London. This durational, evolving
event lasted four weeks seeing them create a series of static installations and
live, progressively interactive happenings. In 2003, nobleandsilver gave a
series of national performance lectures at art institutions and cinemas
playfully exploring the processes of information transference and the nature of
biography. They were commissioned by the Harris Museum in Preston in 2004 to
create a public performance where, unannounced, they regularly played a short
film before the main feature at Preston UCI cinema. Stooges interacted with the
film, and other stooges, in an intervention working to deconstruct cinematic
language, traditions and expectations. Nobleandsilver are currently working
towards a feature-length documentary and performing in London as well as in
conjunction with the Arnolfini, working at Bristol's Summerhill Junior School
as resident artists.
Dr Veronica Sekules
Head of Education and Research, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of
East Anglia, Norwich
Veronica is responsible for developing learning and research programmes,
educational events and conferences, artists' projects, outreach and training
with students, schools, teachers and the public. She was trained as an art
historian, specialising in the middle ages and 20th century art and is widely
published in these areas. She has an MA in education and is also an active
educational researcher and writer. She is on the Arts Council Task Group and is
a member of the board of trustees of engage. She
has been invited to work as a consultant, to lecture and run projects and
workshops for teachers and museum educators in the UK and Europe. She is
currently on secondment to Tate Britain as project manager for the DCMS funded
'Visual Dialogues' project, producing interpretive resources for a regional
partnership of museums including Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and
Birmingham.
Stephen Snoddy
Director, The New Art Gallery Walsall
Stephen trained as an artist at Belfast College of Art and graduated in 1983
with an MA in Fine Art. His first job was to run a small community arts centre
in Lisburn, NI. He graduated with a Postgraduate Diploma in Art Gallery &
Museum Studies from Manchester University and then moved to Bristol in 1987 to
become Exhibitions Organiser at Arnolfini Gallery. In 1991, he became
Exhibitions Director of Cornerhouse, Manchester, where he was responsible for
bringing The British Art Show 4 to Manchester. In 1996, he moved to become
Director of Southampton City Art Gallery, where he organised the 1998 Chris
Ofili solo exhibition, which won Ofili the 1998 Turner Prize. In the spring of
1998, he moved to Milton Keynes to direct the construction of a brand new
gallery as part of the 30 million Theatre and Gallery complex. In 2003, he was
appointed Director of BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art, Gateshead where he
made organisational and structural changes, refreshed the programme and engaged
with artists of the region. He joined The New Art Gallery Walsall as
Director this year.
Joshua Sofaer
Live artist, writer, educator and Research Fellow at ResCen, Centre for
Research into Creation in the Performing Arts, Middlesex University
Interested in the boundaries between the academy and professional practice,
Joshua makes work in a variety of different contexts, including traditional art
spaces, alternative galleries and nightclubs. Recent projects include 'Tate
Scavengers', a scavenger hunt and exhibition shown in the Turbine Hall, Tate
Modern in July 2005. His solo performance 'The Monologue Machine' premiered in
Geneva in spring 2005 before travelling to Kuopio in Finland. 'The Performance
Pack', produced in conjunction with Tate Education and the Live Art Development
Agency was launched in 2004 and is a limited edition artwork, a performance
enabler and an educational tool which explores performance in the context of
fine art. Recent writings include 'The Crystal Ball: From Page to Stage' in
Performance Research 9.2 and 'Yellow Potatoes' for Postcolonial Studies 8.1. He
is currently working on an edited volume, The Autobiographical Performance,
which explores the relationship between the autobiographical imperative and
contemporary theories of performativity and performance.
An online archive of recent works can be viewed at
www.joshuasofaer.com
Presentation
Scavengers: Risk, Performance & Learning
Tate Scavengers was an interactive scavenger hunt and exhibition, which showed
at Tate Modern in July 2005. Using this project as a case study, Joshua Sofaer
will talk about his experience of working as an artist with education, event
and interpretation departments of galleries and museums.
Click here to download a copy of the
presentation
David Toop
Musician, writer, sound curator
Visiting Research Fellow at the Sound Department of the London College of
Communication; Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, London; AHRC
(Arts and Humanities Research Council) Research Fellow in the Creative and
Performing Arts
David has written four books, Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Exotica
and Haunted Weather. His first album, New and Rediscovered Musical
Instruments, was released on Brian Eno's Obscure label in 1975; since
1995 he has released seven solo albums and curated five acclaimed CD
compilations for Virgin Records. In 1998, he composed the soundtrack for Acqua
Matrix, Lisbon Expo '98. He has appeared on Top Of The Pops with the Flying
Lizards, and collaborated with artists such as theatre director/actor Steven
Berkoff, Japanese Butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii, sound poet Bob Cobbing, visual
artist John Latham, and novelist Jeff Noon. As a critic and columnist, he has
written for many publications, including The Face, The Times, The
New York Times and The Village Voice. In 2000, he curated Sonic
Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London. In 2001-02 he was sound curator for
Radical Fashion, at the Victoria and Albert Museum featuring music by Bjrk,
Ryuichi Sakamoto, and others.
Presentation
Shells on a beach: John Cage, environmentalism, improvisation, education
This talk will explore the educative potential inherent in the work of composer
John Cage. More than any other 20th century composer, Cage taught us how to
listen to sound without prejudice, to separate sound from speech and music, and
to hear our environment as a dynamic source of riches. Two key strategies for
teaching emerged from Cage's ideas in the late 1960s and were transformed into
teaching tools by the Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer. In the UK, jazz
drummer John Stevens developed improvisation workshops, which enabled musicians
at all levels of ability to engage in group improvisation. Although emerging
out of free jazz and the new free improvisation movement then developing in
Europe, the US, and Japan, the John Stevens workshops also concentrated on
listening as the primary element of productive improvisation. As a player
member of the first John Stevens workshops in 1971-72, and a leader of
improvisation workshops in his current capacity as AHRC Research Fellow at the
London College of Communications, David Toop will explore the connections
between these closely related approaches.
Click here to download a copy of the
presentation
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