Artistic leadership: the flâneur, the gardener and the physician

18 May, 2017 by Leave a Comment
dystopia1

Brewery Green, The Tetley, Leeds (photos: Jon Price)

In another of our occasional series of guest blogs on artistic leadership, Brussels based musician and philosopher Kathleen Coessens asks how we can think about leadership from the perspective of the artist, whether the artist can be a leader, and – if so – what kind of leader?

Kathleen, a participant in our Brussels seminar during On The Edge’s Cultural leadership and the place of the Artist project in 2016, looks back to that discussion through the lens of her own artistic identity and three productive metaphors.

As always we invite further responses to continue and connect our thinking.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Debate, Leadership Tagged With: ,

Art and influence: On The Edge at the ENCATC policy debate

17 June, 2016 by 1 Comment

ENCATC image

On The Edge’s Jon Price has been invited by the European network ENCATC to give a keynote address to its upcoming 6th Annual Policy Debate in Brussels on Wednesday 22nd June. The event addresses European Cultural Leadership and the Role of the Artist and is targeted at cultural professionals, researchers and policy makers from all over Europe. Jon will be talking about his recent work on the Discourse of Cultural Leadership as well as the wider trajectory of On The Edge research on related topics, from the Artist as Leader onwards. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Debate, Events, Leadership, News Tagged With: , , ,

Holding the paradox

28 May, 2016 by 2 Comments
hands by Chris

photo: Chris Fremantle

How can art respond to complex social and ethical problems? When should the demand for solutions be resisted? And how might this affect our understanding of cultural leadership?

These were among the questions keenly debated in the first of our series of full day seminars on Cultural leadership and the place of the Artist which took place in Edinburgh on Friday 20th May.  Our thanks go to the artists, researchers and cultural organisers who attended and contributed so fully.  The day brought together participants from various phases of On The Edge research alongside new friends and colleagues from our project partners Creative Scotland and ENCATC.

Discussion ranged across different understandings of what is meant by leadership and how it relates to artistic production.  This led on to questions about the role of art in public life.  Some compelling suggestions were made about the distinctive capacity of art to embrace contradiction, to find potent material in the midst of uncertainty.  In a world of ‘wicked’, irresolvable problems, there is a value to being able to hold conflicting ideas in creative tension. Can art therefore help us to live with our difficulties?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Activities, Debate, Events, Leadership, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Questioning cultural leadership

1 April, 2016 by 2 Comments

Who do you depend upon to make your role in the arts possible? Who looks to you for support? What form of change would you most like to see happen – and who can help you bring it about?

IMG_9476.jpg

Photos: Graeme MacDonald

On The Edge posed these questions to a diverse group of artists, researchers and organisers at the first event of its new AHRC investigation, Cultural leadership and the place of the artist, on 14th March at Woodend Barn, Banchory. Each question was approached through the viewpoints of a range of archetypal roles: artist, funder, teacher, policy maker, board member, parent, venue manager, volunteer.  We built a network in miniature of the relationships and forms of influence through which our actions are shaped in aesthetic, organisational and social contexts.  Opening up issues of leadership in culture beyond the operation of hierarchies, we tried to understand the interplay between policy and practice; artist and institution; individual and structure; action and influence. Among the discussions that followed we introduced the ten-year trajectory of On The Edge research from The Artist as Leader onwards and tested ideas for the new project. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Activities, Debate, Events, Leadership, News Tagged With: , , ,

John Newling: The Map Room of the Last Islands

14 August, 2015 by 1 Comment

Woodend Barn, Banchory, Aberdeenshire
22 August – 23 September 2015

This major exhibition of previously unseen work is a powerful, and visually beautiful, illustration of the ways in which artist John Newling explores the relationships between the natural world and systems of value within society.

Since 2009, Newling has been creating art works that are constructed, primarily, through the growing, observing and preserving of Moringa Oleifera trees.  Often referred to as the Miracle Tree or Famine Tree, gram for gram, the Moringa leaves contain: seven times the vitamin C in oranges, four times the calcium in milk, four times the vitamin A in carrots, two times the protein in milk and three times the potassium in bananas. It is for this and other extraordinary properties of this tree that it has been referred to as the world’s most generous tree.

The paintings are maps of a kind, into and through which Newling explores his relationship to the trees and to wider ecology. They are a truly beautiful cartography of language, colour and shape; islands that Newling hopes may never be lost.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Debate, Events Tagged With: ,

The Art of Valuing

4 March, 2015 by Leave a Comment
The Flemish-Dutch House deBuren (“the neighbors”) presents beauty and wisdom of the Low Countries, and offers a platform for debate about culture, science, politics and the society, not only in Flanders and The Netherlands but also in Europe and the world. It is a place where artists, journalists, academics and politicians get the opportunity to voice their thoughts through panel talks and debates, lectures, book launches, film screenings, concerts, and more.

deBuren, Leopoldstraat

Gate-crashing a Brussels event aimed at Arts Councils and Culture Ministries is to physically visit what is normally a virtual world. This is the land of European Cultural Policy: a place with its own language (policy-speak), its own currency (creativity), and – like much of Europe – a struggling economy. Its religion, naturally, is Culture, whose earthly embodiment is an uneasy trinity of Art, Audience and Sector. There is a great deal of debate as to whether Culture itself, the object of veneration, can be directly approached by the masses or only by initiates. Much time is spent unravelling a mystery called ‘engagement’, which seems to be much like transubstantiation but without the red wine. Finally, there is the sacred quest of ‘evaluation’, which is either a holy grail brimming with eternal funding, or an attempt to look on the face of God and doomed to end in madness (depending on your individual belief and/or job title).

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Debate, Events Tagged With: , , , , ,

On The Edge in Utrecht

8 July, 2014 by Leave a Comment

WP_20140622_006[1]

On The Edge researchers Anne Douglas, Caroline Gausden, Jon Price and Helen Smith collaborated on a panel session for the Participation & Engagement in the Arts conference at the University of Utrecht in June 2014. Challenging the idea that there is any single agenda of participation in the arts, the papers and debate explored some political and ethical contradictions emerging from practice which are too often hidden by common terminology. The event was co-organised by Leeds Metropolitan University and co-hosted by the Netherlands National Centre of Expertise for Cultural Engagement and Amateur Arts. It was good to see many old friends and to make a few new ones in the course of some wide-ranging, quality debate in magnificent settings.

Filed Under: Activities, Debate, News Tagged With: , ,

A response to ‘Are dialogic and relational aesthetics relevant to all participatory and co-creative practitioners?’

20 January, 2014 by 3 Comments

This excellent piece (Chris Fremantle’s blog 6.1.2014) frames the debate on participation and co-creation in art and design as a priviledging of process (over product) and social concerns (over artistic concerns). This presupposes in some way a radical break with what has gone before that might have particular relevance at this point in time to design, architecture and new media.

There is without question a perceived ‘Social Turn’ in art (Lind 2005/6, Bishop 2006/12, Jackson 2011) and this is frequently articulated as a concern with process and the social (Bishop 2004). However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment (as Claire Bishop herself suggests in 2012), how are these concerns not true of all art and any time? Have artists not always situated their practices within the social? In what sense is this set of concerns a new endeavour, a turn in direction from what went before?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Debate

Are dialogic and relational aesthetics relevant to all participatory and co-creative practitioners?

6 January, 2014 by 6 Comments

One of the questions we asked in the conclusions of the Practising Equality paper (2013), looking across art, design, architecture and new media at practices of co-creativity and participation, is whether the development of thinking about the aesthetics of participation in art has relevance to design, architecture and new media?

The emergence of a debate around the aesthetics of process and the social in art is one of the important developments of the past 25 years. Whether we are talking about Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ discussing participatory work in galleries, or Kester’s attention to ‘dialogic aesthetics’ in situated practices, or Bishop’s interest in the perversity of participation, all are concerned with an aesthetics of process and social relations.

Suzanne Lacy, who is both the subject of one of Kester’s case studies and also a contributor to the discourse herself, draws attention to Allan Kaprow’s concerns. Kaprow’s practice is fundamentally participatory and co-creative, though not in any utilitarian sense. His ‘scores’ and ‘happenings’ presage many of the concerns of Bourriaud, Kester and Bishop.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Debate, News