Publications

Shifting practice

By: Paul Stone, John Beagles

Shifting practice is the second in the a-n Collections series, published to coincide with our 25-year anniversary. Guest edited by John Beagles and Paul Stone, it takes the artist-led initiative as its starting point.

It would be impossible – and was never our intention – to represent a comprehensive overview of the many different kinds of organisational structures that fall under the banner of ‘artist-led’. Rather, the aim was to offer instead a range of subjective, geographically and artistically distinct viewpoints, which highlight some of the key, recurring challenges for artists involved. One of the important decisions for us as commissioning editors was to try to direct discussion away from the ‘how’ to the ‘why’ of what artist-led initiatives aspire to achieve. There is an increasing sense that the historical perception of the artist-led initiative as being motivated by altruistic intentions and for mutual benefit is rather too routinely, and inappropriately, applied to a divergent range of practices. The combination of this rather nostalgic, idealised representation, with the often unquestioning and celebratory endorsement of the artist-led initiative per se creates precisely the kind of misrepresentations that Susannah Thompson argues it is essential to resist and contest. Further to such questioning of this ‘received wisdom’ on the...

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