Enthusiasm York

From Capital to Enthusiasm: York
2 February 2007

Thanks to Jennifer Fisher for the kind invitation, and York for its hospitality

As artists we have been collaborating together since 1995
and we have, in turn, worked with many other artists, curators, academics, even historians, archivists, gallerists, people with technical expertise, enthusiasts, collectors, and many, many others.
During this time, we have moved away from the production of autonomous objects as art
–– and closer to a collaborative, or research driven way of practicing.
Perhaps, echoing wider cultural shifts, we have turned our attention from sites of art production – conventionally the studio –
to the spaces of distribution and consumption – the gallery and museum.
We have been interested in thinking about and working alongside many of the organisations that choreograph the exchange of values between art and its publics.
We have worked with various galleries (both public and private), museums, art schools, publishers and broadcasters.
And, when you work with these institutions and their technologies of display –
technologies which include the means of collection, installation and exhibition; the production of publications, catalogues and promotional material; educational projects;
the writing of wall texts, object-labels, audio tours and gallery guides, buying advertising, courting sponsors, and so on –
you become aware that these technologies can be turned upon any object, image, artist, maker, experience, city, country or nation .
Simply put, these powerful exhibitionary technologies are the means of producing, presenting and disseminating the work of the work of art.
It’s also clear to us, that
The technologies of art, are also diffusing into other, vast exhibitionary economies ;
economies animated by the movement of images, information, knowledge, money, people, goodwill, loyalty and trust.
These forces, which have traditionally been invested in the spaces of culture, are now central to our ‘new’ financial economies – of service, branding and user-driven content (web.2) - economies convened around the slippery exchanges of creativity, knowledge, intellectual property regimes and capital.
So we have also been interested in the spaces where art, dissolves into public policy and social management, into promotion, sponsorship and financial investment, into products, advertising, and lifestyle choices;
which has encouraged us to initiate projects with department stores, with advertising agencies, archives, with independent commissioning agencies and corporations.
In our collaborative practice, we have tried to engage and explore many of the technologies that produce, disseminate and ascribe value in art,
– as a consequence these conventions have become our media.
what we practice with…….rather than merely subject to

some examples

Collected
Curated and organized

Large multi-site exhibition organized with by The Photographers Gallery London,
and curated by Neil Cummings. April 26 to 21 June 1997

We were interested in how
The activity of collecting, perfectly plays out the tension between the drive for order and the
tendency towards excess and chaos implicit in our relationships.

The idea of the collection cuts across all categories of objects, from the worthless to the priceless, artwork to rubbish/trash
and illuminates the varied institutions, that collect, store and redistribute things……..

Its both intensely personal and yet helps to define nation states – national collections in National Museum

The activity of collecting, can sometimes give value to otherwise valueless things

Collected things hold the promise of a coherent space within the enormity of the material world,

Collected began at the Photographers Gallery with work by

Fred Wilson photographs of racial stereotypes from museum collections

and James Sillavan. Obsessively photographs typoplogies, car tyres, urinals, place settings and plants poking through office venetian blinds - photography was the means of collecting

Louise Lawler – a series of photographs that records what happens to works of art when they enter personal or corporate collections

Christian Boltanski, -photographed (an index) all the belongings of one man, from Oxford in 1974. Written to 62 museums world-wide, only Museum Modern Art Oxford replied

Lea Andrews- tape slide work, where his family recount their relationship to the objects in their house. A parody of the expert

Ming de Nasty, Mo Wilson – photographs of collectors, a collection of collectors
- photography documents the things collected

Collected then left the Gallery and dispersed through sites of cellection in central London
Commissioned projects were at specific places

Special tours of Sir John Soane’s Museum

Andrea Fraser, The Wallace Collection
At the death of Lady Wallace in 1897, bequesthed to the state.
The bequest separated all the personal and servants items. The only collected items re-enforce aristocratic taste, and then this becomes public culture.

Fred Wilson and Richard Wentworth at The British Museum. Discarded drinking vessels and the repressed history of black culture

Susan Hiller, The Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Her collection of the work of Alfie West, in the Guiness book of records for splitting the human hair more finely than anyone else.

Guillame Bijl, Habitat store. The chairs of famous English people. Churchil, Pankhurst, Oscar Wilde

Retailer Paul Smith displayed a selection of his own private collection in his stores windows
and Richard Lowe an `Egyptomania' collector will open his apartment during the exhibition.

As part of Collected we worked on Browse
a leaflet,

Designed by Stephen Coates, and available simultaneously at The British Museum and
Selfridges Department Store for the duration of the exhibition

mimicking the formal language of publicity
or educational aspects of information produced by public museums.

Browse feels like a visitor guide, although instead of leading you on a prepared tour, its layout invites you to reflect upon your relationship to objects stripped of their immediate context.

Liberated, you were encouraged -leisurely- to slide in and out of various types of classification,

Browse was readily available from dispensers in both the British Museum and Selfridge's Department store

A tiny thing became the meeting place of enormous institutional forces
Confused shoppers, and perplexed visitors

The ‘work’ was in this momentary reflection, inserted into the everyday flow of things

Browse was supported by Selfridges in an edition of 17 000, and was free

this whole project, some two years in the making, was merely an aperitif to

The Value of Things
Grew out of our interest to try and map the forces at work in our material of culture
We had already made a project called Lost Property

We were aware of the enormous amount of recent speculation about the cultural force of the Museum (art history, artists –Fred Wilson. Mark Dion, Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser- and museum studies)

And recent interest in cultural studies and an ethnography of shopping – artsist too, Jeff Koons, Silvie Fleury, Mathieu Laurette, etc - but there was little to conflate the two

To see how they might impact on one another, and how we as visitors, artists and contemporary citizens have in turn been shaped by the idea of the two institutions

The 19th C exhibitionary complex,
(Tony Bennet)

We were also aware of how academic research often engages with promotional culture or consumption, without regarding its own consumption

So again we worked with Stephen Coates
To collaborate on the look and structure of the book – a book within a book, a mixture of historical narrative and shards of more speculative reflection.

Crudely put

traditionally, the privileged sector of European cultures tended to value the Fine Arts,
paintings, sculptures and the bric-a-brac of a former aristocracy
and the taste of their advisers, dealers, market-makers and the galleries, academies and museums through which these goods circulated
as the principle vehicle of taste, education and power.

(think of Sir John Soane’s House, or the Wallace Collection)

These values and traditions (again crudely) tend to privilege history, singularity, authenticity, originality and academicism:
It would be easy to imagine a stable and restricted economy, grounded in the interpretation of old objects removed from the everyday circulation of things.
Connoisseurship

But clearly, as the nineteenth century progressed, the power associated with cultural competence. a sense of participating in the interpretation of the important objects within a culture could no longer be confined to this restricted economy of Fine Arts, and their related institutions.

Think of the Great Exhibition of 1851

adrift in an endless stream of commodities made available by new methods of production and distribution.
The rapidly emerging urban middle class could now participate in the creation of cultural values (in a way unimaginable before)

by discriminating amongst the new products of industry and commerce.
Suspended in the new ‘mass medias’ – cheap printing, radio, etc

Which brings me to the idea of the department store and public museum, the two great cultural inventions of the 19th C

The Value of Things pictures Selfridges, the first purpose built department store in London, and the British Museum, England’s earliest public museum, as examples of similar institutions worldwide.
(could be any european or North American city)

Their emergence seems to perfectly represent the awesome technologies for the sourcing, transportation, warehousing, accounting, stocking, display and redistribution of material things.

Of course differing systems of classification. Like the poles of a magnet: Joined yet repelling

Ours is clearly the museum age
The museum as the horizon of all objects and images
Design, science, natural history, furniture, shoes, contemporary art, whatever
Although clearly organised around different economic drives,

what the department store shares with the museum is the encyclopaedic desire to render the whole world knowable, classified and displayed for the visitor to consume.

Its not unsuprising, that the museum inherited its collection (literally) and core
practices from the previous aristocracy - to protect an image of singularity, authenticity, power and authority…………… like the conventions that surround contemporary art

In simple contrast, the store holds the promise of a kind of semiotic democracy, played out live amongst the real-time of the present.

What The Value of Things introduced into our practice, was the ides of research, or fieldwork, as a means of identifying, the location or ‘site’ of our ‘work’

And ‘research or fieldwork’ (in our practice and that of many other artists) was beginning to replace ‘site specificity’ or ‘institutional critique’ or ‘relational aesthetics’ as a means of designating engagement between an artist and a location.

The ‘site’ doesn’t simply pre-exist, or can simply be bounded as physical gallery space, or museum.

The site has come to encompass a network of related spaces and economies
- including the gallery; but also advertising, criticism, education, and marketing or development, sponsorship, funding, friendships, etc- (We mentioned earlier)

a system of practices that are not separate from other social, economic and political forces.
- from other distributive networks;

This reflection upon our practice, has heightened sensitivity to the idea of 'context' or ‘site’ or ‘field’ of the work, of the work of art.

Enabled us able to reflect upon the material and immaterial conditions through which our practice is engaged, and made legible.

Free Trade
What became known as Free Trade at the Manchester Art Gallery 2001-2, enabled us to explore some of these ides through an exhibitionary form

We were invited by the Manchester Art Gallery, to make a proposal to coincide with the relaunch of the Gallery. – Michael Craig Martin

They had closed for about 3years, after winning “the largest Lottery grant, outside of London’ for restoration, amalgamation and new build.

After a year of intense research,

Visiting all the sites of the museum, storage, archive, etc

And reading about the gallery history and inevitably something of the history of Manchester as it related to the Gallery

We proposed a project, that tried to imaginatively reconnect a major donnation to the collection -the Beatson Blair Bequest- to the circuits of trade and exchange from which it originated.

We identified in the Bequest
(one of many that make up the Galleries collection –and connected with our Tate/Bank project on the gift, and virtually all other cultural institutions)
a beautiful example of Manchester’s particular social, economic and art collecting history, as well as a device with which to explore the history and conventions of the MAG itself.

Principally,
How private taste – Soane, Wallace, etc - becomes public culture: and, how the Gallery (museum) reproduces itself

The project became known as Free Trade

The idea of Free trade is fundamental to the city of Manchester, and to wider European/world economic expansion. –the origin of our global economy-

In 1812 the anti-corn law league set out to break the restrictive practices of the aristocratic land owners, and their hold over parliament to impose import duty on grain.

The middle class merchants and manufacturers who advocated Free trade understood that cheap food would mean cheap labour, and cheap labour would speed up the the flow of goods

The triumph of Free trade enabled Manchester to become the largest import/export and distribution centre in England, and subsequently the British Empire.

Between 1830 and 1870 cotton equated to a third of all Britain's exports, the majority of which moved through Manchester. – Dickens called it ‘Cottonopolis’

But Manchester became much more than cotton.

With the expansion of the Royal Exchange, it became the second largest centre for commercial banking and joint stock trading, transforming itself into the hub of a global market place.

After London, Manchester was the 2nd city of the British Empire

With the advent of the Ship Canal in 1904, Manchester became Britain’s 4th largest port, even though it’s situated 38 miles from the sea.

Of course the explosion of wealth in Manchester, began to find expression (or at least to become translated into) in a different kind of ‘cultural’ capital.

A stunning example of the complex web of financial/cultural exchanges and a perfect vehicle by which to trace their movements is the Beatson Blair Bequest.

George Beatson Blair was one of three brothers -James, Alexander, and George- who were all partners in a cotton import/export and shipping company trading under the name of Barbour Brothers Exporting House.

They lived as bachelors in their house in Whalley Range,
and like other wealthy middle class Manchester merchants, James and George collected paintings, fine objects, furniture and bric-a-brac; - mimicked the former aristocracy

James left 142 works (including 24 Turners) to the Gallery in 1917.

On George’s death in 1941, the collection extended over the five entertaining rooms, twenty bedrooms, offices for staff, bathrooms, attics, halls, landings, staircases, workshops and the pig stys. Each room was overflowing, the result of sixty years of collecting during which time nothing was discarded.

Mimicked the former aristocracy and yet collecting had become hoarding, where and what was valuable?

We found minutes of a Committee meeting on the 16th January 1941 in the MAG archive, - where executors estimate, 30,000 objects, of which 5,000 were pictures.

perhaps 384 were eventually acquisitioned by the Gallery.

Everything else was sold at various auctions – although the Gallery had a vested interest
(the auction catalogues are in the archive)

There were issues of storage during the war, the house was hit by incendiary devices, the collection was moved for safe keeping or quickly sold.

So, what for us seemed after months of research a simple idea
‘lets bring all the bequest into the same room’
turned into an institutional nightmare.

The bequest had been broken into the collection strands established by the Gallery
Fine art, Decorative Art, Ceramics, Prints and Drawings, Furniture, Bygones, etc

And those departments used different cataloguing systems

Our intention is to emphasize the remaining bulk and diversity of the collection.

And to allow the characteristics of the bequest
- it’s interesting to see Blair’s taste in pictures for instance -and perhaps it represents a wider middle class longing- for pretty women, idyllic landscapes and saccharine children, all the things apparently missing from his life –
to become apparent to the visitor.

This was in sharp contrast with the collection divisions,
and display conventions in operation throughout the rest of the MAG.

DISPLAY
We did not want to use the very technical, glass and steel Museum grade vitrines
Although at huge expense these would have been ordered

We wanted to recreate the conditions of the house, the House in Whalley Range.
To get closer to a domestic/storage environment in which the objects tend to exist.

And in which they mostly exist in the museum environment.
Storage

And to create a tension, or uncertainty in the visitor as to the status of the objects
They were looking at.

We wanted appropriate period display cases, domestic/ish
And to pile up, the furniture, and decorative arts, to leave objects in their packing crates and cases

This was partly pragmatic -to avoid issues of conservation
(for us it often felt that conservation is used as a weapon. Its non-negotiable)
so some objects were left covered with ‘dust’ sheets,
(to avoid light damage, or avoid the visitor seeing something that would upset professional pride)

To make a ‘sculptural presence’ out of the display

Is this an exhibition? (if not why not)
Are these things in transit (to display, or to storage)
Is this a temporary state of affairs? – an anathema to the museum

The plinth was to deter the public from mixing with the display, and the plastic tape was an extra level of security/deterrence.

We avoided (as much as possible) making any aesthetic decision about the paintings. We wanted them all 32, packed onto one wall.

Again ,we wanted to emphasize their bulk, an object status

WALLPAPER

We also made spectacularly visible (never been made public before)
the most complete inventory of the Bequest -4894 objects.

this was turned into wallpaper and wrapped the whole room, mausoleum, a ghost of the missing
full of sale items, corrections and annotations

To make present the haunted missing from the collection.

It’s interesting, given what is ‘missing’ -sold at auction - from the original collection how the Bequest has been made in the image of the Gallery, and not of the Beatson Blair’s.

Labels

This would act as an inversion of conventional gallery labeling, we will supply no object information except the one piece of information that visitors are often curious about
“How much is it worth”.

Our intention was to constantly remind visitors that these objects were themselves -at one time- objects of trade, as well as the result of trade.

Hanging the prices on the paintings felt very transgressive, the shop reference was overwhelming

Now,
While researching in the store we came across this magnificent painting of the Royal Exchange (from 1879). A gift from the Exchange in the 1920’s

Portraits of all the traders, the more you paid the closer to the front you were.
Not very well thought of by the curators,
Not art but social history.

We loved it
It was in a terrible state, and very expensive to restore
(the power of conservation)
At this moment the Gallery Development Team had found a corporate sponsor for the project
Axa Insurance

We some of this money to restore the painting (never been exhibited before)
And I suspect went straight back into storage after the project was over.

But the painting allowed us to suggest the power of the exchange in generating the wealth necessary to build the collection (see speeches)

EVERYTHING ELSE

We intend to make the bequest and its imaginative redisplay one strand of our exhibition/project,
embedded in a range of interpretive devices.

(and as we mentioned earlier, these are devices that art institutions already use to orchestrate the exchange between visitor and artwork)

FILMS
Two film-loops run continuously in the exhibition, edited from amateur films from 1912-41.
The films (un-edited clips, found out-takes, etc) were stored at the North West Film Archive at the Metropolitan University. (remember this)

We took theses disparate scraps an edited them into coherence

One is called Goods and depicts raw, and other materials pouring into Manchester, and then being distributed via the markets.

And the other A City Speaks
Manufacturing, loops through the endless production of commodities.

They constantly remind the visitor (we hope) of the themes of import, manufacture and trading. Which the objects on exhibition were (at one time) part of (free trade), or the result of

LECTURES

The MAG continued the long tradition –begun by the Royal Manchester Institute 1830’s- of staging lectures addressing the introduction and interpretation of art to its public.

In the spirit of exchange we curated a series of formal lectures that mix contemporary scholars with historical lectures previously delivered at MAG

The lectures explore the themes of the project, because inevitably when people visited Manchester they tried to address the political economy of art.

'Art, Wealth and Riches'

A lecture by writer and critic William Morris (Steve Whitehouse), was first delivered at a joint conversazione of Manchester Societies at the Royal Institution, Manchester 6th March 1883.'

'Art and globalisation'

Writer and critic Julian Stallabrass will upgrade the themes of the William Morris lecture.

'A Joy For Ever'

A lecture by writer and critic John Ruskin (Paul O'Keefe), to coincide with the Art Treasures Exhibition was first delivered at the Manchester Athenaeum, July 10th 1857.

All the lectures are reprinted in the catalogue

WALKS

A series of gentle walks –lead by Steve Little a local architectural historian - around and through the Free Trade exhibition, the Gallery and then out into the city.
We tried to bind the exhibition and the gallery to the social and architectural present of the city

The legacy of Free trade still dominates the architectural of the city.

The walks will visit the Free Trade Hall (1840) now a hotel,
The Royal, Coal, Corn and Produce Exchanges, all shopping mini-malls
the bridgewater canal, various magnificent wholesale warehouses –now home to internet startups- and the fashion quarter
and a suite of beautiful 19th century Banks –now extravagant bars.

Free Trade it was up for a year and visited by 700, 000 visitors.

Enthusiasm – a version of which is soon to be installed in Montreal
Exhausted after a series of projects , including Capital Tate Modern and the Bank of England Museum (2001), Use Value Victoria and Albert Museum – Serpentine (2001), and Free Trade Manchester Art Gallery (2003), projects that required endless negotiation with institutions of collection and exhibition,
In 2002 we had a chance encounter with Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s first popular feature film, Amator (Film Buff), made in 1979.
The main character in the film is a leading member of a factory-based amateur film club. Intrigued as to whether such clubs and film-makers still existed , we made a few speculative research trips in the summer of 2002, enquiring into the existence and remnants of amateur film clubs of socialist Poland.
There has been a spectacular transfiguration of Polish political and cultural life since the introduction of the market economy in 1989.
It is as if Poland has played out in a time-lapsed film style, the economic and cultural changes of ‘western’ Europe.
Fifty years of social evolution – from a manufacturing to a service economy – has been compressed into just over ten years.
In many ways, Poland is a crystallization of the forces at play in the rest of Europe; it projects a service-driven, consumer-led future, while content to forget its industrial past and hide its manufacturing present.
And yet, all the former state-owned industries – for example those generating power, refining steel or producing chemicals – play a central role in contemporary economic and cultural life. Clearly industry manufactures the goods and energy necessary to generate our material lives, and yet has simultaneously structured our experiences into ‘productive’ labour and un-productive ‘leisure’ time:
traditionally the space of culture.
Although before the economic changes in Poland, even ‘leisure’ was organized through factory-sponsored clubs, various associations, sports facilities and even state holiday schemes.
Out of this regulated network, perhaps the most popular clubs were those that encouraged the production of amateur film.
With 16mm film stock, cameras and editing tables supplied by the factory/state, a large number of clubs were created throughout Poland from the 1950s onwards. By the late 1960s there were almost 300 clubs in existence.
Out of this growing network, and in a mirror reflection of the professional media, film competitions evolved, prizes awarded, and festivals were organized on a local, regional, and eventually national and international level.
The passions of the amateur, enthusiast or hobbyist often reveal a range of interests and experiences generally invisible amongst the breathless flow of the state-sponsored, or professionally-mediated.
The enthusiast is often working outside ‘official’ culture and its encouragements, frequently adopting a counter-cultural tone of tactical resistance and criticism.
During our trips to Poland we became aware that most of the factories that housed film clubs had closed, or the clubs themselves disbanded.
With help, however, we found a few former club members who were still active, and they, in turn, gave us addresses and telephone numbers of other members and clubs.
We began to criss-cross the country, visiting people’s houses, extant clubs and community centres, and with the aid of a portable editing device we watched hundreds of films.
It became apparent to us that the film club enthusiasts were inverting the familiar logic of work and leisure - through becoming truly productive when pursuing their film-making passion,
and using work for their own, rather than the factory’s or state’s, intentions.
Perhaps the enthusiast has the same relationship to official cultural production as the gift to financial economies?
Work-leisure
These grey areas between work and leisure are clearly blurring in our contemporary economies,
We mentioned earlier, driven by exchanges of signs, information, experiences and capital .
Cultural production, either luxurious to the strictly financial
(as in the traditional example of Fine Art Beatson Blair Bequest in Manchester Free Trade )
or outside the reach of profit – (as in the practices of the enthusiast or amateur),
that which was once marginal to the refreshment of capital, has now become central to the ‘creative industries’ and the ‘new’ economies.
In these ‘new’ economies the artist or enthusiast is an ideal employee; astonishingly self-motivated, endlessly creative, flexibile, enthusiastic, resourceful and, financially, poorly rewarded.
So these are some of the themes we began to develop, using the culture of amateur film-making to think through and explore a shift from enthusiasm being a site of resistance, to a ‘central driver’ of ‘official culture’, and the very source of the refreshment of contemporary capital .
As we tracked down the films and their makers we were astonished by their ambition. These were not standard ‘amateur’ films of family landmarks such as births, weddings and holidays,
but were an aspiration to cinema.
We saw extraordinary films that ranged from two-minute animations and wicked political satires, to short ‘experimental’ and ‘abstract’ films, from documentaries on family, village, city or factory life; to historical dramas and ambitious features with great emotional gravity.
There is an astonishing range of material, beautifully crafted and largely forgotten – or, more accurately, ‘doubly-repressed’. Doubly-repressed because the films are tinged with an ideological past incompatible with the ideological present, and because of their ‘amateur’ status they exist below the consciousness of ‘official’ cultural institutions of display and spectacle – museums and archives.
As a result of our research into these films, their makers and clubs, we found a huge selection of forgotten footage, usually in people’s houses, and sometimes literally under their beds.
In 2003, joined by curator Lukasz Ronduda of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, we embarked on cleaning, restoring and digitizing as much of the material as we could find money to support. – I could go on a lot, about chasing sponsorship
The Exhibition
As we worked on restoration and digitization, we began to develop ideas for exploring enthusiasm through exhibition.
We were aware of, and wanted to avoid the legacy of, artists’ use of found film footage, where the film material is habitually stripped of its context and appropriated as the artists’ property.
Through discussion, we realized our need to construct a social, material and conceptual context in which the films could be situated, while all the time being wary of falling into nostalgia.
Almost two years after the research began, the project was first made public in an exhibition entitled Enthusiasts curated by Lukasz Ronduda at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in June 2004.
–reworked as Enthusiasm, Whitechapel London; Kunst Werke Berlin; Tapies Foundation Barcelona.
The first exhibitionary encounter
for the visitor is a screen of Polska Kronika Filmowa.
These are short, official state-sponsored films which previewed in cinemas before the main feature, and later on television. The films glorify the productivity of the former communist state; its factories, their workers, material output, state festivals, shopping, cultural events, etc. These films create an introductory ground against which the enthusiasts’ films themselves could be appreciated.
Logo’s
The second exhibitionary encounter
a re-construction of a fictional film club.
Many of the film clubs we visited during our research trips were marvelously evocative; they caught and held the traces of the social and creative history of the members and the films they made. The clubs were usually stuffed with framed photographs, printed film stills, caricatures, posters, certificates, medals, prizes and trophies from film festivals, cupboards stacked with of unwanted film reels and video cassettes, redundant projectors, old cameras and recording equipment, film editing desks and chemicals, homemade developing tanks and film dryers, tea and coffee making equipment, a fridge, a coat-stand, odd chairs, salvaged furniture, junk and even rubbish.
Our installation of a ‘club-house’ – created from materials borrowed from club-members, scavenged, or bought at flea markets in Warsaw – was inspired by ethnographic museum room tableau.
A monitor and VHS deck in the club-house replayed films by club-members documenting club ‘trips’ and holidays, special events, the process of filmmaking, meetings and festivals.
By inserting loops of self-representation within the fictional ‘club’, we tried to ensure the collaborative and social nature of the filmmaking process remained to the fore. While at the same time enabling the ‘club’ to be an actual social space for the exhibition visitor; the club-house became the hub of the exhibition, mirroring its status in the culture of amateur film-making.
The third exhibitionary encounter
On our research trips we watched hundreds of films, in many extraordinary circumstances, often with former club members present.
We became wary of imposing our own preferences and taste on the richness of the films themselves, and thus tried to become sensitive to their makers’ enthusiasms and hopes.
What eventually evolved from screenings and discussions were three porous themes: themes of Love, Longing and Labour. This enabled us to select the films for exhibition into three film programmes, although in contrast to the conventions of artists’ use of ‘found-footage’ (I mentioned earlier) the compiled films were left complete, with their original music and fully credited.
Our emergent themes seemed better able to curate the films into comprehension than the arbitrary violence performed by sorting the films into the genres usually deployed
(feature, documentary, animation and so forth).
We had found a means of giving an exhibitionary context to the films and their production, but how should a cinema of enthusiasm be displayed in a gallery?
Too often we have seen films and the culture of cinema lazily installed for exhibition.
Films are routinely digitalized, and projected onto a wall in a black box installed inside the gallery with nowhere to sit, no programme, no running time, nothing.
the Whitechapel
We were determined to complement the film-makers’ own cinematic aspirations, and thus we worked with architects Peter Thomas and Cathy de Toit of 51% Studios for Architecture to find a form of exhibition that could simultaneously express the gap between the humble club and the cinematic desires of the members.
What evolved were three beautiful, lush, sensuously curved, vibrantly coloured, five-meter tall, velvet-curtained cinema spaces.
Each cinema had appropriate chairs where visitors would feel comfortable, a screen, soft low-level lighting and a printed programme with film-notes and running times.
Through the programme we wanted to hand control of the routes through the elements and spaces of the exhibition back to the visitors themselves.
They could sit back and luxuriate in a particular cinema watching the whole programme, or wander from screen to screen mixing their own film selection.
The space of the Enthusiasts exhibition, (and this is important)
became a space of creative production for visitors, mirroring the collaborative practices employed by the amateur film-makers themselves.
In the cinema entitled Longing’
we screened films of personal, political and sexual love, loss and longing; we explored themes of alienation, ecological anxieties, a fear of war and violence, and a terrible longing to be elsewhere.
In Love
the films reflected on the joy, banality and celebration of an ‘everyday’ love of life; they dealt with themes of humor and camaraderie, of families, parties, passion and sex as a radical transgression of the expected.
In Labour
the films traced the beauty, routine, discipline and horror of work in all its forms; themes of celebration, futility, boredom and exhaustion are acutely depicted through films made by people caught within the processes of production.
The last exhibitionary encounter
The last major exhibitionary encounter within Enthusiasts was with the ‘Archive Lounge’. We were conscious that there were many films that could not be accommodated through our emergent taxonomies.
An Archive Lounge would enabled visitors to watch, via searchable DVDs, all the films found, collected and digitalized but not screened as part of our cinema installations.
Our intention was to make available as many films as possible, to enable visitors to curate their own programmes and recognize that our selection – Love, Longing and Labour – was part of an interpretive process and not final or in any way authorial.
The archive grew as the exhibition evolved
Enthusiasts: archive
From the seed of the idea of the Archive Lounge developed for the Enthusiasts exhibition, we are currently growing a huge and permanent archival extension of the project.
Through watching visitors using the Archive Lounge, we realized the possibility for a new kind of exhibitionary space: a space partly opened by new technology, partly through our practice, and partly by a new suite of licenses.
There is an astonishing growth in museums, and in archives and data-banks of images, sounds and information.
Indeed, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1996) has diagnosed a virulent ‘archive fever’ at work.
These new, emergent forms of archival capital have an increasingly powerful grip upon culture and its reproduction.
The problem with most existing public archives is that all creative work is born into copyright; every image, text, film or sound is automatically designated as the property of its apparent author – until death plus seventy years in the UK.
Through the fixed-term of the exclusion, copyright removes creative works from the public domain and denies the legal possibility of the creative re-use of the work by others – except with prior written permission.
Now, while there is logic at work between relationships of owners or authors and physical artworks or artifacts (the logic encapsulated in the idea of the museum)– a logic of scarcity and a bounded relationship between people and things,
This logic dissolves when applied to media made for reproduction, like film, or immaterial goods, like ideas, or information, or previously distinct media translated into a digital code, which is endlessly replicable at negligible cost with no appreciable loss of quality.
Most public film and media archives are built from donated material from public broadcasters or film agencies, or comprise of gifts from amateur film-makers. These gifts are usually accepted with an agreement that the copyright, or its management, is assigned to the archive.
Some media archives then attempt to turn limited reproduction rights into a revenue stream, they on-sell rights to broadcast media conglomerates for extraordinary fees.
Hence the logo’s and permissions wrangle with the Polish archives.
These fees are often well beyond the reach of the publics who fund the archive and donate its holdings. Effectively, our moving-image cultural history, our film and broadcast culture, is being expropriated from the very people who paid for its production – it is like charging thousands of pounds to visit a museum exhibition.
Archives, like collections displayed in museums and galleries are built with the property of multiple authors and previous owners. But, unlike the displayed collection, there is no imperative within the conventional logic of the archive to exhibit, display or interpret its holdings.
An archive designates a territory and not a particular narrative, but perhaps the archive, too, may be constituted as a creative space for engagement.
The material connections contained are not already authored as someone’s – for example, a curator’s or artist’s – interpretation, exhibition or property; rather, it is a discursive terrain where interpretations are invited.
Our experience of working with and struggling to release material from Polish state film archives, or from many public film and television archives in Britain (Manchester film archive and the films within Free Trade), encouraged us to think about creating a ‘critical’ creative archive of amateur film, which would – to use a term from recent software development – be ‘free’ or ‘open source’. - wikipedia
With the permission of the film-makers we are currently compressing the films and uploading them on to http://www.archive.org, an internet public domain resource, from which they can be accessed via the Enthusiasts: archive website.
Uploaded films can be either streamed or downloaded, and therefore displayed or exhibited anywhere, at any time.
Some films also enable you to re-edit their material or integrate them into a new creative works.
All of this is made possible as the Enthusiasts: archive and all it contains is licensed under Creative Commons Licenses . These licenses work as an extension to copyright and grant you the right to use, copy, sometimes modify and redistribute any film, text or image that carries the CC license.
The most important operational clause within the each license is that these rights – to copy, modify and redistribute – must be extended through your work to others.
Through on-licensing, the ‘viral’ heart of the Creative Commons ensures that the source film material and all derivative works will become a legally protected creative resource in perpetuity.
Artists and others will be able to watch, screen, download, use and re-use the material for future creative exchange, enriching rather than depleting the public domain.
Enabled through technology and licensing, the conventional archive of inert documentation can be vividly re-imagined as a creative space of exhibition, the evolving archive can be found at http://www.enthusiastsarchive.net.

And lastly
British Art Show: six

This is a prestigious five yearly exhibition intended to be a ‘survey’ of most recent British contemporary art;

we were commissioned to make a new work

the exhibition is coordinated by the Hayward Gallery, London and will be hosted by public galleries in Newcastle, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol from September 2005 till December 2006.

We researched the locations of the shows and realized that each city houses
A regional film and television

As you have seen we have a longstanding interest in public collections and archives.

For the British Art Show 6, we are interested to find film material in the archives whose copyright protection has expired – so called ‘orphaned films’

No such film exists, and even if it does, the substrate, the nitrates and celluloid that the images are stuck to belong to the archive. You are in the gift of the generosity of the archivist or curator…..

We intend to edit a new film from the film material –one for each location
We are working with the artists Ben White and Eileen Simpson

and return our film and the source material into the Public Domain.

under a Creative Commons License.

We are also doing the same with –out of copyright - music in the British Library sound archive
A new soundtrack

We applied for public money from the Arts Council, were successful, and were able to distribute the work as a freely available DVD
Available at each location

The new work and its constituent parts [source] would then become [and remain in perpetuity] legally protected creative resources for artists and others to use and re-use again as source material.

Many of us have already used things from the public domain, its how culture evolves and how we communicate, maybe it’s time we put something back.

And revisit how art is made and remade – as already configured as property

particularly given the aggressive use of Intelectual Property - to turn knowledge into a commodity
The film Screen Tests is all material filmed at the Manchester School of Art, from 1929-32
END
Through our founding of the Enthusiasts: archive as an artwork, and by freely giving away the publically funded Screen Tests DVD we intend to challenge creative practices
– to replace exchanges facilitated by frustration and restriction with those of collaboration and generosity.
We want to re-animate the public function of archives, the display of collections and exhibitions in an age characterized by relentless privatization, and initiate new practices of exhibition.
Practices where, as artists, our ‘creativity’ is not founded on the dominance of the visitor,
or where the ‘studio’ is no longer privileged as a space of creative production to the detriment of the exhibition, which is too often imagined as a space of passive display, spectacle and consumption .
Instead, we attempt to collapse those spaces and participants down, so that exhibition is reconfigured as a conscious site of creative exchange for the collaborative negotiation over the ‘making’ and re-making of the work of the work of art.
We recognize the need to locate our work within exhibitionary institutions, to utilize their authority and resources, and to work with the audiences for contemporary art that they convene.
And yet our aspirations for Collected, Browse, Enthusiasm and Screen Tests is to test and exceed the institutional grip upon culture and its reproduction.

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