Hebemedia Makes The Indy 50 Best... Museums And Galleries

The Independent's Information supplement containing a guide to the Best 50 Galleries and Museums, 10 of which were picked by our very own Simon Zimmerman. Click the image to visit the online version of the guide.

On the 23rd of October 2010 the Independent published an "Indy Best" with a guide to the top 50 galleries and museums in Great Britain. When we say Hebe Media made the list, we mean it quite literally... Read on to find out more!

Whilst we here at Hebe Media frown on shameful self-publisicts, we couldn't overlook that fact that 10 of the "50 Best" were picked by our very own office mate, Simon Zimmerman. Simon was invited to join the panel to make a selection for the guide because of his long term commitment to the arts: working for Arts Council England for almost a decade, and helping artists and arts organisations around the country.

Simon was asked to select two venues in each of five categories. "It was incredibly difficult to make a choice", says Simon. "I've been extremely privileged in my work to be able to visit many of our national and regional galleries and museums, as well as many of the artist-led and temporary spaces that exist. There is just so much to be proud of in the country, and I wanted to celebrate all of it. However, the challenge was to pick out 10 of the best, and that is what I have attempted to do here."

We've included the full text submitted by Simon, for each of his 10 venues. For the full list of 50, please click the image above and you will be redirected to The Independent's own website...

Big-hitters

BALTIC, Gateshead

BALTIC attracts world-class exhibitions year-round, and has played host to the British Art Show and the Turner Prize. Recent exhibitions include major shows by Yoko Ono, Jenny Holzer, Malcolm McLaren, Martin Parr and Cornelia Parker. It is an international centre for contemporary art and one of the friendliest and most approachable museums in the country.

Whitechapel, London

The jewel in the crown of London’s East End, Whitechapel is recognised around the world as a touchstone of contemporary art. Its doors have been open for more than 100 years, and in that time it has shown work by modern masters, from Picasso to Pollock. In more recent times, a masterful expansion of its galleries has enabled the Whitechapel to host major shows by contemporaries, like last year’s ‘Talking to Strangers’ by Sophie Calle.

Family friendly

New Art Gallery Walsall

Britain is a world leader in gallery education, and New Art Gallery Walsall is an example of why. In the first ten years of being open to the public more than 48,000 school children visited its galleries, and 23,000 people of all ages participated in one of its many educational activities. For family explorers, young and old, there is a unique interactive gallery space called Disco, and there are multi sensory sessions for parents to spend time with babies too.

Nottingham Contemporary

The iconic Nottingham Contemporary is one of the most exciting gallery spaces in the UK, and has attracted more than 200,000 visitors since it opened at the end of last year. It already has a strong track record of offering well considered programmes for people of all ages, and over the Summer of 2010 it pushed the boat out with a programme of free activities for families, children and teenagers, including a 12 metre tall interactive photo booth inspired by the recent Diane Arbus exhibition.

Specialist

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield

Image from: http://hapsical.blogspot.com/2010/09/artist-david-nash.htmlYorkshire Sculpture Park’s spectacular landscape, and award winning gallery spaces each play their own part in making this one of the few places in the world able to host major, large-scale sculpture exhibitions like the current review of Welsh sculptor, David Nash’s 40-year career. With the stunning Hepworth Gallery (also in Wakefield) opening in 2011, and the Henry Moore Institute in the heart of Leeds’s cultural quarter, Yorkshire is celebrating its reputation as the birthplace of modern sculpture.

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool

The future is digital! The team at FACT know this and are dedicated to delivering outstanding and thought provoking exhibition programmes, for people of all ages who want to engage with the possibilities of tomorrow’s digital and interactive art, film and media landscape. 

Small but perfectly formed

Shandy Hall, Coxwold

Formerly the home of celebrated writer Laurence Sterne, and now a museum dedicated to his legacy and continuing contribution to the arts, Shandy Hall is nestled in the picturesque village of Coxwold, North Yorkshire. Through exhibitions and artists’ residencies, the museum seeks to explore how the experimental spirit of previous generations of artists, like Sterne, can help us to unlock the work of contemporaries and vice versa. The current exhibition, The Perverse Library, is the first of its kind in Britain, and contains works of ‘conceptual writing’ by Kathy Acker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Pavel Buchler and others, from a generation of artists who have sought a radical reconsideration of the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

Artsway, Sway

The South East is a rich hive of contemporary art activity and set in The New Forrest National Park, Artsway is one of the cornerstones. It began life as the vision of a group of local artists, working from self-made studios in an abandoned old coach house, for a high quality exhibition space. Now a purpose-built and architecturally important gallery, Artsway is best known for commissioning new work; hosting residencies that push the development of artistic practice; and showing work by well-known and emerging artists, including Richard Billingham, Anne Hardy, Jordan Baseman, Alex Frost and Gayle Chong Kwan. Since 2005, Artsway has been re-presenting commissioned work at the Venice Biennial, and has built an international reputation for artistic excellence.

Alternative

Grizedale Arts, Grizedale

Grizedale Arts is based in the central Lake District, just round the corner from John Ruskin’s final resting place, and is committed to exploring how contemporary art and artists (the Grizedale Arts alumni is a who’s who of contemporary art) can contribute to the social, cultural and economic context within which the organisation operates. Strictly speaking, this is not a gallery or a museum. However, its groundbreaking approach might just provide a model for the cultural institutions of tomorrow.

Simon asked us to include this short video made by Juneau Projects, and commissioned by Grizedale.

The Study Room, Live Art Development Agency, London

The protagonists of body centred performance and Live Art have been the producers of some of the most significant documents and artefacts of contemporary art. Indeed, the document has become a kind of site for performance. The Live Art Development Agency has been something of an expert hunter-gatherer in this field and the free, open access Study Room provides a gateway into this provocative and challenging world.

Click here to visit the Independent's online version of the guide...

Conceptual writing is "decidedly avant-garde" and the ICA is not, says the Independent. What do you think?

I know the Hebe Arts pages are getting top-heavy with information about the current exhibition of conceptual writing at Shandy Hall, and I promise to shift focus soon enough. But, whilst the air is filled with excitement about what is going on under Laurence Sterne's roof I thought I'd flag up an article in this week's Independent, which acknowledged The Perverse Library exhibition and recognised the immediacy of conceptual writing in art today.

The article, 'Trouble at Mall' was a critique of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London: an organisation founded in 1946 to provide a space for the artistic and intellectual avant-garde to meet, exchange and exhibit. In its heyday the ICA was a hot-bed for experimental, provocative and often controversial work. However, in recent years, the article suggests, contemporary art has lost the need for a gatekeeper and the ICA has been left struggling with it's identity and relevance. Kind of ironic, for an organisation whose outgoing leader, Ekow Eshun, said roughly the same about Live Art when he cut off the ICA's support for the artform?

Image from The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall: Carbonised book from The Black Library by Greville Worthington | Nick Hill © 2010

Have a read and post any thoughts in the comments below - is there still a place for the ICA?

Take special notice of the reference to 'conceptualism' towards the end (copied below) and if you haven't already, visit writingencounters.org today and book you place on the free bus tour from York train station to Shandy Hall.

"What is decidedly avant-garde is conceptualism in a quite different art form – literature. Visit Shandy Hall in Yorkshire, where Laurence Sterne wrote his experimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and one will encounter the first exhibition in Britain of conceptual writing. Conceptual writers sometimes steal from other writers, reordering their text and jumbling it up. Bringing together conceptual art and language, this movement has led to fierce attacks from conventional authors. Influenced by Sterne himself (who plagiarised and rearranged passages) and writers like James Joyce, one leading figure in the movement says conceptual writing “seeks to ask what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion.” Conceptual writing determinedly makes no claim on originality. It includes a transcription of a year’s weather reports and, in the case of one conceptual writer, the simple repetition of the sentence “I will not make anymore boring art.” It’s fitting that the house where one of the world’s most famous experimental novels was written is in the forefront of avant-garde literature." Read more...

Image from The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall: Bouvard et Pécuchet's Invented Desk for Copying by Gareth Long with Wilf Williams | Nick Hill © 2010

Save the Arts

We have been showing our support for the new 'Save the Arts' campaign by helping the team at Visual Arts London to set up their social media platforms and get this great video by David Shrigley out to the masses. Below is the official press release from the press-conference in London this morning:  

Over a hundred leading artists including David Hockney, Damien Hirst, Anthony Caro, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Antony Gormley and Tracey Emin have joined the campaign to make the case against the proposed 25% cuts in government funding of the arts.

The campaign is launched today with the release of a new video animation by artist David Shrigley highlighting the effect of the funding cuts and a new work by Jeremy Deller with Scott King.  Each week the work of a different artist, created in response to the campaign, will be released. Mark Wallinger will present the next project.

Supporters of the artists’ campaign will be asked to sign a petition which will be sent to the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. It points out that it has taken 50 years to create a vibrant arts culture in Britain that is the envy of the world and appeals to the government not to slash arts funding and risk destroying this long-term achievement and the social and economic benefits it brings to all.

The artists acknowledge that reasonable cuts and efficiencies are necessary but they fear that the 25% cuts being proposed will destroy much of what has been achieved and will have a particularly damaging impact on national and regional museums and their collections.

The campaign is being organised by the London branch of a national consortium of over 2,000 arts organisations and artists dedicated to working together and finding new ways to support the arts in the UK. 

The costs of David Shrigley’s animation have been covered with a grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Robert Dufton, Paul Hamlyn Foundation Director, said: “We are pleased to support this campaign and hope that its message is taken on board. As independent funder of the arts we are aware of the effect that cuts will have on many of the organisations we support. We stand to lose a great deal as a society if arts organisations are forced to stop the very valuable work they do.”

Make sure you sign the petition here: www.savethearts.org.uk 

A Perverse Library: a major exhibition of 'conceptual writing' comes to Yorkshire next month

“Writing is fifty years behind painting.” (Brion Gysin, 1959)

A major exhibition of ‘conceptual writing’ is coming to Yorkshire next month. A Perverse Library is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK and will - according to curator Simon Morris - “show work by a generation of artists who have sought a radical reconsideration of the relationship between literature and the visual arts”.

Image, Scott Myles: Full Stop 2006 © the artist. The last full stop in Tristram Shandy from the first edition, blown up using photomicography at the University of Glasgow

Appropriately, the exhibition will take place at Shandy Hall, Coxwold: the former home of the celebrated 18th-century English writer Laurence Sterne (author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), whose experimental spirit has had an astounding and continuing influence on the arts.

A Perverse Library draws from collections of work by internationally renowned artists and writers including: Kathy Acker, Ed Ruscha, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, James Joyce, On Kawara, Sherrie Levine and the recent Northern Art Prize winner, Pavel Büchler.

The exhibition starts on 04 September 2010, and will run right through to 31 October 2010. There are a number of free bus services running between York train station and Shandy Hall. Click here to find out more, and to book your place before they all go!

Étienne-Louis Boullée, Deuxieme projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi (1785), used on the cover of Craig Dworkin's new book 'The Perverse Library'. Dworkin's collection of more than 2,000 volumes forms the centre piece of the exhibition in Coxwold.

Questions about what and where writing is have always cut through and across the fields of philosophy, literary criticism and the arts. Whilst these questions are not new, nor specific to any one place, they have emerged as an essential concern for the Western European and American avant-garde.

Driven by 200 years of radical social change, ‘writing’ in the arts has continued to nourish an extremely rich field of praxis. Its discourses are irreducibly complex and beyond simple definition or catagorisation.

In part this is due to the breadth of work being progressed by individuals with wide ranging imperatives, working in equally diverse ways: Gertrude Stein to William James to Ezra Pound to James Joyce to Berthold Brecht to Samuel Beckett to Allen Ginsberg to John Cage to Roland Barthes to Jacques Derrida to Christian Bok to Steve McCaffery to Joanna Drucker to David Mamet to Caroline Bergvall to Jerome Bell to Craig Dworkin to Tim Etchells to Gillian Wearing to Mark Manders to Kenneth Goldsmith and on and on, and to name but a fraction of those who’s ideas continue to feed this nebulous and intangible ecology of ideas.

The complexity is owed also to the depth of critical thinking that questions about writing have fostered, couched in vocabularies that are often challenging, and often deliberately so: demanding the reader to renegotiate their relationship to the ‘text’.

Terms like conceptual writing, performance writing, writing with art, text based art, language art, l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry, artists’ publishing etc… are only some of the terms used to describe only some of the outlets for these practices. Historically these terms have sat in opposition to traditional literary modes, as well to notions of new or creative writing, which have been favored by the mainstream.

In recent years the output of artists working in what the writer, Claire MacDonald has called “an expanded field of writing practice” have occupied public spaces, galleries, theatres, studios, libraries etc., and become manifest as books, pages, journals, multiples, paintings, scores, computer applications, sculptures, audio recordings, films, videos, performances, actions, events and ephemera etc. 

Image, architectural drawings of the 'invisible shelves' designed by Canadian architect Michael Farion,

In A Perverse Library the output occupies writing, or the idea of writing itself. By adopting strategies of appropriation and/or rip-off “we are seeing whole texts moved around from one location to another. It is not just sampling language but moving entire texts from space to another”, as Simon Morris puts it. “I think there's something quite exciting about making new meaning whilst using exactly the same words as an other.”

If you are interested in knowing more about this field of art / writing practice then A Perverse Library is definitely an exhibition, even the exhibition not to be missed. If you do miss it though, we will be sure to get lots and lots of photos and video from the grand opening, which organisers have in the spirit of Sterne put the night before the exhibition closes.

Update on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 10:16AM by Hebe Media

The Live Art Development Agency just launched (W)reading Performance Writing, a study guide addressing some of the territory outlined in the above blog post, and in which our own Simon Zimmerman was involved:

In (W)reading Performance Writing (2010), Rachel Lois Clapham has assembled twenty practitioners from diverse fields of poetry, theatre, visual art and performance on the topic of Performance Writing.

This Guide comprises of syllabuses, manifestos, scores, personal testimonies and practical exercises, drawn from resources available in the Study Room. It also includes a detailed subject area index. This publication is highly speculative and encourages an active read. A note on its reading can be found in the section Invitation to (W)read.

Authors included are Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Mark Caffrey, Alex Eisenberg, John Hall, Claire Hind, Richard Kostelanetz, Johanna Linsley, Claire MacDonald, Rebecca May Marston, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Joshua Sofaer, Danae Theodoridou, Peter Walsh and Simon Zimmerman. Design by Marit Munzberg. 

Here is the link to the online PDF version: 

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/resources/Study_Room/guides/rachel_lois_clapham_guide.html