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Martin Vincent on a show about how
to change things
Futurology – The Black Country 2024
The New Art Gallery, Walsall
30 July – 12 September 2004
I’m not really sure if this is an art
exhibition. Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan set out to examine social,
economic and political conditions in the former industrial heartland
known as the Black Country, taking into account the government agenda
for art and ‘creativity’ as instruments of economic regeneration.
This starts in schools, where artists are brought in to develop
creative learning, with the aim of producing citizens who are better
able to adapt to changing economic conditions. Hewitt and Jordan
worked closely with the government agency Creative Partnerships,
though they hoped to maintain a critical position. To this end they
selected artists who they thought would be able to balance potential
conflicts of interest and sent them into schools in the region.
Hence, Dave Beech worked with pupils attending
Tividale High School in Sandwell. He asked them what they wanted
to change in their locality, and to think about how they could make
that happen. They came up with a mainly predictable list of facilities:
theme park, rehearsal space, crazy golf, plus a few more imaginative
science-fiction based projects (a hovering library) and worthy plans
to get rid of big supermarkets and big roads in favour of smaller
ones. These are plotted on a large map drawn on the gallery wall.
The claim made for this work is that the process
empowers the young people, that saying what you want is the vital
first step in making things happen. Barby Asante’s project
has a similar rationale. She took a video camera along to a school
and asked the kids to take her anywhere they wanted, to show her
somewhere that was important in their lives, to ‘take ownership’
of her.
The resulting short films are the most compelling material in the
exhibition. If you don’t spend much time around teenagers you
miss that pleasure in realising simple aspirations – here’s
the house where I live, I like it, here’s the road I cross,
here’s the youth club – and the directness in identifying
problems and proposing solutions.
In this respect Asante has made very good work.
But the video is hard to watch here, because it is on a monitor
in a garden shed, with some cushions on the floor. As an ersatz
kids’ den it is pretty unconvincing. For a start it is in an
art gallery.
Which brings us to my initial problem. As the
organisers disarmingly admit, translating this kind of work to a
gallery context can be the hardest part. We take it on trust that
what happened between Beech and the children was a valuable experience,
but the map on the wall is as prosaic as a school project. (And
I have seen this artist work the trick of turning base material
into art which is both critical and delightful.)
Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson’s The Landowners
sounds most like good old-fashioned conceptual art. The artists
bought some land and gave it to the kids. Twenty-four shares in
a Christmas tree plantation in Herefordshire are now owned by Wolverhampton
school children, and there are two dozen Christmas trees in the
gallery to prove it. This work shows the cold reality of what stake-holding
is really about, and its imposition of landowner status on the participants
underlines this. Again, though, the gallery presentation is less
powerful than the idea.
‘Futurology’ is framed as a research
project, but its gallery manifestation as five discrete works credited
to artists (the names of the children are harder to find) militates
against this reading. While the artists have, for the most part,
engaged with the kids’ world, they haven’t sufficiently
initiated the kids into the art world. Simon Poulter demonstrates
the clearest awareness of this, sensibly leaving his interaction
with the children undescribed. Instead he has made an animated video
using their drawings, Glitch Space (boy lost in), an entertaining
if uncomplex allegory of encounters with cultural institutions.
Becky Shaw addresses the concern by telling us about her project
in person, thereby bringing us closest to the participants, since
they come along to change the slides in her lecture, which wanders
discursively some distance from its title, Civics: the Science of
Citizenship.
The research brief is widely drawn, allowing
potential problems to be legitimate outcomes. A central question
for visitors is why art needs to end up in a gallery at all. Because
of the gap between the primary experience of the participants and
what we see, it is hard to judge those other issues about instrumentality,
government policy and social change. The success of ‘Futurology’
depends on the belief that what took place in the schools was art,
so that what happens in the gallery doesn’t have to be.
Martin Vincent is an artist and co-founder of The International
3, Manchester www.international3.co
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