Pawn and Rook
Tommorow I hope to work on my Red Indians. I shall be a Rook for a day. Setting my own agenda and I guess leading up to what will eventually be a game of cowboys and indians, or prehaps just a game of Indians?
On Friday I will be a pawn. A free one though! Starting on a journey to find meaning in history. This will be a very visable journey provided as if through a social service. I think the target is the same on both days, just that which bit of history and the methods of delivery are completly different.
Every now and then something happens that acts as a wake up call , makes you think that……actually I’ve been in cotton wool world and the padding has gone now and you feel the chill winds of………. ‘this is how it is now’.
I have come away from a briefing kind of meeting involving a team of artists delivering a complex project with several organisations and stake holders involved.
Ihave:
a 4 page instruction manual on how to process and share my outputs
a 4 page participant consent form to be filled in by participants I engage on the project
I have to submit a practitioner update report 4 times during the course of the project
a session monitering form to be filled in after every workshop
a practioner web material proforma which acts as a check list to make sure I have carried out the correct procedures for creating out puts
and I also have a chart which shows me the expected numbers and instances of participation and website visits. There is also a project evaluator just been appointed.
I feel like a Crimean War General fighting in a war against smart bombs, guided missile systems, satalite intelligence, stealth bombers and nuclear submarines. This is not the art world I knew. I took comfort as I looked around the table of people involved (I know many of them) and thought there is a lot of skill and experience here covering a very broad church of artistic and cultural knowledge. This is project delivery on a large scale where arts administators, curators and project managers have raised considerable funds and have already set the agendas to create high cultural impact.
A definate shift in the role of the artist, no longer creator in a universe of their making, rather a chess piece in a wider game. Which made my plywood cut outs of red Indians that I started making today feel rather self indulgent.
