- Venue
- Broadway Media Centre
- Location
- East Midlands
Call me naïve, this was my very first conference, but to put it plainly, there wasn’t much conferring going on at engage this year. Engage is the national association for gallery education, and this year the conference was organized to address the changing times and how we should embrace these new challenges. While I was there, on the Thursday, the whole thing felt too much like a series of artist lectures with no debate/discussion element.
For starters, the keynote speaker (Phylida Hancock from Contender Charlie) didn’t mention the three buzzwords of the day, (technology, environment and finance). The presentation stood out like a saw thumb from the moment I looked at the programme (the art of influencing change by example of Shakespeare’s Henry V).
I can see exactly why it was designed to open the conference, the presentation was very theatrical and full of energy, clearly meant to start the day with a bang and unite the room. However, in the context of the arts practitioners being presented to, it fell flat and became quite patronizing, giving tips on leading a project such as: allocating resources and visioning the future.
Arts education on a base level is about sharing, as was articulated throughout the rest of the day, whereas in this presentation everything seemed a bit outdated and hierarchical.
Throughout the rest of the day however, the key topics of the conference were touched on. The general consensus being that the Internet is a great place to consolidate different projects and to create networks before directing people back into galleries and that we need to think in the long term and to touch on all the different realms of society in order to encourage sustainable environmental change, simple advice- actioning it is the struggle.
Jane Trowell and Rebecca Beinart who were speaking on behalf of PLATFORM articulated the importance of art as activism, saying ‘trespassing is a prerequisite to advance.’ However, as arts educators, is it enough to enable these discussions? As an educator it is immoral to promote your own motives, (and in this sense, a gallery is an arts educator) but within that you have to support the ethics of the shows that you commission and the agenda’s of the artists. Most of the people I’ve met that work in galleries are also artists in some shape or form, and this whole debate begs the question- are art galleries allowed to have a political opinion or are they just houses for debate?
Another interesting bite from the conference was “don’t just DIY, DIWO (do it with others) from Ruth Catlow of furtherfield.com. Jim Shorthose from Nottingham Trent University pointed out that the cultural world is auto-poesis (self-made) and therefore quite insular, but change and progress means creating links between the different sectors in order to enrich the whole culture of a community. Similar to these points, there were interesting nuggets embedded in the case studies of the artists own practices but the whole day needed the fat trimmed off the edges.
There was one debate that really captured me, which was started by Sam Bower of greenmuseum.org’s ‘gift economy model.’ The argument being that if the project is run without looking for funding then everyone has to volunteer and therefore everyone is ‘the owner’ of the project- a horizontal business model.
Volunteering is an important aspect within the arts, without volunteers many things wouldn’t happen, but my concern (as a volunteer) is this; the time, effort and quality of writing that goes into this article will be the same as an article I might write in a years time upon graduation (and theoretically get paid for) the only variable being a jot of experience. I think it is unfair to expect people to work for nothing, doing it out of love is great but never getting anything back is torturous.
The speakers were talking about re-assessing yourself as a consumer (or a non-consumer) so as to live within your means. I love the idea of leading a streamlined existence but the work the arts do is important enough that people within it don’t intrinsically have to make personal sacrifices to survive. I’d love to know what Jonnet Middleton from Unitypanda meant when she said she’s vowed not to consume anymore clothes in her lifetime, and I’d love nothing more than too see these non-consumerist ideas explored (preferably artistically), but it should never be presumed that people should have to choose these lifestyles in order to survive. Working for the good of society and out of the kindness of your own heart is great, but it all sounded a bit forced, and dare I say it, a bit ‘Big Society’ for my liking.