Publications

Through devising Research Paper: Biennials and city-wide events, editors Steve Dutton and Jeanine Griffin have sought to articulate some of the creative constraints and opportunities that such events invoke.

Their intention is to suggest a halt to the seemingly endless declaration of opposition between so called global and parochial practices with the suggestion of an articulation of something approaching ‘glocality’.

A fusion of individual and collective issues are raised and explored in the commissioned essays including the practical and conceptual value of local “buy-in”; the need to test assumptions about “hosting”; post fixed ideas of nation-hood, what collective subject could be said to experience an “international” art project?; as Jan Vorwoert argues for a new form of qualitative evaluation, can notions of audience in visual art ever really be more than an audience of one (and one and one)?

Does as John Byrne suggest, organisers’ subscription to the paradigm of a market fed by and nurturing what he calls “airport art”, serve or gloss over artists’ civic roles in developing alternative socioeconomic strategies for change? Or, is the proliferation of such events more closely aligned with the growth of art collecting globally? From a creative practitioner’s perspective, the collective legacy of such events enables a form of “reputational transfer” that attaches greater recognition to already existing informal networks of artists and cultural workers in a given location, enabling greater leverage of their stakeholders into a more challenging position for individual practice.

As Neil Mulholland so aptly puts it in his essay: “Globalisation is the same process that helped spread the ‘gothic style’ and net art alike... Artists in demand have always travelled... As they circulate they initiate new networks of knowledge, triggering global transformation”. Did Holbein know he was acting as a cultural agent of change as well as an artist in his own right when painting the portraits of wealthy merchants in Basel long before the art-route between Venice and Basel was so regularly trodden?

Louise Wirz, Director of Development and Publisher,
a-n The Artists Information Company.

First published: Research papers December 2007