A reflection on
last year's Outside exhibition at Cuckoo Farm – 'Outside 11: artist
as Outsider” - an exercise in both collaborative and curatorial
practices.
I came to this
project - a cross-mentoring experience between an artist and a
curator - as an artist interested in sharing my practice-based
skill-set and experience as an exhibitor, and gaining experience of
curatorial processes. However, from the very first meeting with
curator and collaborator Katia Denysova, I realised that the concept
she proposed - that we take the given title of the exhibition,
'Outside' and expand it to suggest the notion of being an outsider -
chimed very much with a process that I had been exploring in my own
practice: as with the protagonist of the book by Heinlein [1], I was
coming to terms with my experience of being a stranger in a country I
had previously considered my homeland.
There is a dialectic
concerning racial identity, which is that the colonising power
creates the native other: this dialectical conception suggests that
the white European coloniser does not actually exist before his
encounter with the native, and that this invention depends on its
negative Other because “only through negation of that Other can it
invent and maintain its own identity.”[2] I found this significant
because I am not only the product of an expatriate colonial
childhood, but the offspring of a mixed-race union between white
coloniser and native other. The import of this background only became
clear after repatriation to the UK: in retrospect, my early
experiences at school in Essex can be read as precisely the attempts
of my schoolmates to maintain their sense of self through assertion
of my otherness. Things change: as a child, I worked hard to
subscribe to what I considered the norm; as a young adult at art
school, I celebrated my difference. Now, as an artist, I consider the
implications of that enforced alterity, and what it might mean in
terms of my practice.
Being part of
Outside11:Artist as Outsider, I was intrigued by the idea that these
effects might differ depending on whether the artist in question was
an immigrant, or emigrant. In effect, the exhibition was one of
migration, physical movement - migration being the process during
which one becomes an outsider. To what extent does movement of
physical self impact on one's creative self? I imagine that, during
the process of coming to terms with one's new surroundings, a certain
amount of collusion, negotiation - collaboration, even - both within
one's self, and within one's new social ambit - is required.
Collaborations are common among artists: sometimes whole bodies of
work - a lifetime's practice - may be built around them. Familial
connections are well known - Jake and Dinos Chapman, the Brothers
Quay - and lifelong collaborations such as Gilbert and George, or
Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt & Stuart Bailey). Upon relocating
to Amsterdam in 1976, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic
began a collaborative partnership with another immigrant, a West
German artist known as Ulay. Both were interested in their individual
cultural backgrounds, while becoming a collective being called 'the
other'. After several years of collaborative work they decided to end
their relationship, and chose, aptly, to do so by means of a journey,
both spiritual and literal. Each walked the Great Wall of China,
starting from opposite ends. After a migration of approximately 2500
km each, they met in the middle, shook hands, and said goodbye.
At the time of
writing, Katia and I are some 2500 km apart, and communicating
electronically. It is interesting to note that the reasons for my
taking part in the cross-mentoring scheme – or at least, the
outcomes that I expected – changed significantly over the course of
a collaboration that extended much further than I expected. There was
a shift from the overt outcomes, namely a sharing of professional
skills, through the shared a common consensus of experience as
outsiders ourselves. Both other, as women - Kristeva [3] would posit
this merits an automatic cleaving from the invisible norm - both
foreigners, geopolitically at a remove from the society of our
fellows, be it studio group, university, or indeed continent.
As part of the
exhibition programme it was decided to initiate a number of workshops
led by participating artists working with marginalised members of the
community. This, also, is a collaboration of sorts: that a group
identifies itself as outsider enough to form bonds is a collaborative
process; also, that they decide as a group to cooperate within the
boundaries of a leader-participant dialectic. I went into HMP
Chelmsford, running a workshop using a photo transfer process. This
takes a fixed, static image – the photograph, which is a souvenir
but also a fixer of memory - and reverses the image: additionally, the process of
making it being variable, an element of entropy and
chance is introduced which affects the outcomes. The irony of working with these
inmates was not lost on me: I was there because they were, in the
societal terms that we had defined, outsiders, but of course their
status as such was defined by their being literally very much
'inside'.
Did the workshops go
any way to achieving our putative aims - to educate, to integrate, to
explore otherness? Probably not, no more than the exhibition as a
whole did. To my mind this is not important: art was not, in this
instance, intended as a tool for political or socio-cultural change.
Participation may be the key word here, and, to return to my opening
line, collaboration: between artist, curator, participant and
audience.
The sense of being a
stranger abroad was aptly summed up, in several different ways, by
the work on show at Cuckoo Farm; not least in the subjective
experience of the visitor. The site required that the viewer walk
around, attempt to locate the beginning or end of what was
effectively an illustrated story of a journey, to decide if these
small perambulations had indeed a beginning, or end, or narrative of
any kind beyond the simple experience of imagining it during the
process of experiencing the work. Hope and faith, optimism,
collaboration, and a shared interactive journey: not, perhaps, the
themes that one might expect from a show intended to explore
otherness and alienation. Rather, the work that emerged, alongside
the public engagement process, had a sense of integration:
cross-cultural education, without political didactism. In fact, the
exhibition reflected, in some measure, the tenets of the
cross-mentoring process - shared experiences across cultures,
generations, and practices: sameness, not difference.
1:Heinlein,
Robert Stranger in a Strange Land New York:Avon 1961
2:Hardt,
Michael
http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/mp3.htm
3:Kristeva,
Julia
Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982
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