East End Review

Tag: whitechapel gallery

Guerrilla Girl power! Feminist ‘masked avengers’ come to East London to take on art world

Going ape: the Guerrilla Girls. Photograph: Andrew Hindraker. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

Massively influential feminist art pioneers the Guerrilla Girls once stated that “the world of artists is great, but the art world sucks”.

This conviction has shaped their project since their formation in 1980s New York, with the group challenging those in control of major museums and galleries to present and champion more work made by women and by people of colour. Their art names and shames with statistics, graphs and appeals to equality, plastered on galleries, projected onto buildings and splashed across cities on advertising billboards.

This month a new exhibition from the group opens at the Whitechapel Gallery. I sat down with two members of the group, Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz (the members use the names of deceased female artists), to discuss the new show, their recent work and the current state of the art world.

Your new work which opens at the Whitechapel Gallery is in part a revisiting of the 1986 poster ‘It’s Even Worse in Europe’. Is representation in the art world still worse in Europe than in America?

Frida Kahlo (Guerrilla Girl): Let’s just say that it’s different in Europe. Visitors to the exhibition need to come and make up their mind about that. We wanted to gather some statistical information from the mouths of the museums themselves, and then show how these European museums present themselves.

Revisited for Whitechapel Gallery exhibition: the Guerrilla Girls’ 1986 poster ‘It’s Even Worse in Europe’. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

On the difference between America and Europe, I was wondering if New York in the 1980s influenced the way the group started to make work?

Kathe Kollwitz (Guerrilla Girl): We are both founding members of the Guerrilla Girls, and what we saw in the beginning was that it was almost impossible for women or artists of colour to have their work shown in commercial galleries. There was a very vibrant alternative scene, which was fantastic, but there was so much other discrimination. If you look at a poster we made in 1985 poster that lists how many museums had shows by a woman, it was one at best. Usually it was nothing. We thought that was completely ridiculous. We knew so many great artists who were women, women-identified or people of colour, and it was total discrimination.

There were demonstrations where people would walk around with picket signs, but nobody cared. The art world wants to pretend that everything is perfect, that art is a meritocracy and that the institutions and the galleries know best. We knew that wasn’t the case, and we realised that there had to be a way to talk about this that would change people’s minds and get their attention. So we started blaming one institution after another. When our posters hit the streets in May 1985, all hell broke loose. The powers that be were really pissed off.

FK: We also noticed that whilst women and people of colour were making some advances in the larger world, they were not making them in the art world. Even though it always wants to think of itself as avant-garde and ahead of it all. It even took the form of theory, because gallery owners and curators would say that women artists and artists of colour just didn’t make work that’s good enough. What that revealed was that they had a very narrow view of history. They were still dealing with a history of the art of white men, not realising that you can’t tell the history of a culture without all the voices included in the story. It was embarrassing that the art world was that far behind.

Several of the institutions that you protested against early on have now shown or acquired the work of the Guerrilla Girls. Were you ever concerned that by including your work they’re trying to dodge some of the critique within it?

KK: Absolutely. When this first started happening about ten years ago it really was a moment of truth for us. We had to sit and talk about it and think about how we were being used by these institutions. Does getting our message out to big audiences mitigate the fact that we are definitely being used by them? Our goal from the beginning was to get our message out to as many people as possible, and so we realised that we had be in the museums as well. We still love the street best though, we started on the street and still do things there.

FK: And we’re back on the street here in Whitechapel!

KK: That’s our favourite place to be. But whenever a work appears in a museum we get tons of comments and emails from people saying that they didn’t know this stuff before. So the message we’re talking about, our institutional critique and attack on the system of art (which is more and more billionaire-controlled) really needs to be there.

FK: And it’s not as though we’ve accepted every one of these invitations. We have never accepted any form of censorship from an institution. There is always a moment of truth when we present the work to the institution and they gasp! That is an important moment in itself.

Do institutions ever try to explain themselves to you?

KK: Not really. If they’ve invited us they’ve opened themselves up. They’ve invited us to critique them, and they are well-meaning people. Many people working in institutions are trying to change them. Although lot of museums think they’re doing better than they really are. In our exhibition here at the Whitechapel we have one whole section asking whether US museum practices are polluting Europe. And the answer to that was pretty much a resounding yes!

FK: In the US most of our museums are private with non-profit status, but they’re still run by art collectors. That tendency to let galleries and museums be manipulated by wealthy collectors starts in the United States. And of course, in some parts of the world, the only places you can go and see contemporary art is in an institution wholly owned, run and controlled by oligarchs.

To what extent is humour an integral part of what the Guerrilla Girls do?

KK: I think it’s a really important part. From the beginning we never wanted to do political art that says ‘this is terrible!’. We wanted to twist it around and present it in a completely different way. Humour is really great for that, because it’s disarming. You sneak into people’s minds when they laugh at something. We’ve always thought that if you laugh at something it means there’s a better chance to convert you.

Anonymity is obviously also important to the identity of the group, but what I’ve always liked is that you are present whilst anonymous, that you appear in person wearing your masks. It’s not like an internet anonymity completely removed from a physical reality.Is the face to face aspect as important as the visuals?

FK: It is, but it is tiresome. It would be fun to appear as ourselves, but I’m sure that you’re more interested in us because we’re wearing these masks. It does say something important about the world that to be taken seriously as a feminist in the art world you have to wear a gorilla mask. It’s problematic in many ways but it’s something that worked for us early on and we’re kind of stuck with it. We’re not speaking as individuals, we’re speaking as members of a subclass of angry guerrillas!

KK: It’s interesting, because people think we’re performance artists, but we’re really not. We do a very particular kind of political art that is sometimes spoken, sometimes graphic, sometime video or outdoor banners. But our masks make us performative.

FK: There’s a long American tradition of masked avengers. They’re anonymous but they have a public presence. We’re in that tradition.

During my research for this interview I came across a member of the group saying that progress is always two steps forward and one step back. Do you think that accounts for the wider climate of political regression we’re living through, with Trump, Brexit and everything else?

FK: Absolutely. The patriarchy is not going down quietly. The patriarchy is going down angry, and I think you can see that everywhere.

And having now been making such influential work over such a long period, do you see your influence in other groups or activist collectives? Are there any specific groups that you’ve noticed carrying on your work, or work like it?

KK: We do hear from a lot of people who say that we influenced them. We get all kinds of letters every year from all kinds of people, all over the world, every gender and from many, many different countries saying that they are using our work as a model for their own.

FK: I tend to think that we’re all riding on the same wave. We’re running a complaints department at Tate Modern every day from the 3–9 October, for example, and we’re inviting everyone to come complain about all kinds of issues. We’ve invited a lot of groups to come and bring all of their incredible work. It isn’t just about art, come complain about politics, social issues, economic issues, personal venting, whatever people want to come and do.

Influential: Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? poster. Courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls

What have been your biggest victories?

FK: To get other people to count for us. All of a sudden we see people in the press commenting about the representation of women and artists of colour in exhibitions. It’s great when someone else does your dirty work for you.

KK: Certainly our most influential work, the poster that asked whether women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum, really changed a lot of things. It’s a perfect example of what we do. After seeing that poster, if you really read it and it gets inside your brain, then you can’t go to a museum and look at things the same way ever again. We try every time to do something that is unforgettable in some way, and that one works.

Could you imagine a time when the Guerrilla Girls will stop making work? Perhaps because you felt the art world had changed enough so that you weren’t needed anymore?

KK: Well that’s never going to happen. There’s the whole world of culture that needs to change, including film and television, which we’ve done some work in. Firstly, I want to say that you’re talking to us today but we’re not the entire Guerrilla Girls. We’ve always been multi-generational and diverse in a lot of other ways, and we are now as well. I guess it really depends on how it goes on. It’s amazing that through incredible passion and steadfastness of argument we’ve lasted this long.

FK: I really doubt that millennia of patriarchy will be wiped by 150 years of feminism. I think we need a little bit more time to figure it all out.

Guerrilla Girls: Is it Worse in Europe? is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX until 5 March.

whitechapelgallery.org

October 5, 2016
Get the Picture: Harun Farocki – Parallel I-IV (2012-2014)

Parallel IV by Harun Farocki

J.R.R. Tolkien observed it was mankind’s right and nature to create worlds, seeing in us a ‘divine spark’ that impels us to make myths and languages.

Harun Farocki closely studies the phenomenology of computer game-generated worlds in his large-scale video installation Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), on display at the Whitechapel Gallery.

The installation successfully communicates the rapid evolution in visual innovation, technological and conceptual limits and leaps over 30 years of computer game graphics.

Parallel I by Harun Farocki

Early forms of trees, water or fire are cropped and shown in succession, with nostalgia playing a powerful role in providing visual pleasure for the viewer.
The first set of parallel films compare games to cinema and film. There’s a real sense here that the detail and information in games could eventually replace film as the main source of mediating and recording the world, particularly as they offer a greater degree of choice and design.

In Parallel II, a game set in the Wild West, the voiceover asks the question ‘how far can a rider ride?’ as an infinite horizon in a world with no natural borders opens up. We are then shown in a programming mode how the invisible borders of this ‘infinite world’ are defined and how your cowboy figure can fall off the edge of the world, like an astronaut catapulted into space.

Each game world needs to be explored to elicit its rules. This happens in part through loops of interactive dialogue that are impressive in their textural authenticity to human speech.

Farocki observes the different rules and qualities of these infinite worlds, the logic traps, glitches and redundancies. Philosophical observations are made, curious accidental traits pulled out and phenomena pondered and enjoyed.

Harun Farocki: Parallel I-IV (2012-14) is at Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX until 12 June
whitechapelgallery.org

Parallel I by Harun Farocki

January 20, 2016
Jem Cohen: ‘By some standards I’m kind of invisible’

Portrait of Jem Cohen

In a small screen at the back of the Whitechapel Gallery, a group of keen cinephiles awaits the address of Jem Cohen, a veteran New York-based filmmaker who has made more than 70 idiosyncratic works over three fruitful decades on the job. It’s an early part of a two-month retrospective entitled Compass and Magnet, with events also taking place at the Barbican and Hackney Picturehouse.

Cohen has produced diary films, city portraits, essay films and collaborated with an extraordinary list of musicians – crossing and blending disciplines with pioneering spirit. On this occasion he’s introducing Museum Hours, perhaps his most accessible and well-known work to date.

“You can walk into a museum and in its way it can miss,” he tells us. “Something has to come together, things have to meet…”

And they do. The film is a subtle and moving expression of enormous ambition. Ideas about time, image, memory, art, artefact, displacement, friendship, experience, history and much more, are hung on a sweet narrative thread that runs through the corridors of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and out into the streets of Vienna.

The following evening, Cohen takes leave of an East End pub to chat for an hour. He tells me more about the film: “It refuses to follow certain rules about what a narrative is and how a narrative is supposed to function, and it insists that the environment, the locations, the ideas and the characters are all equally important.”

This kind of approach is indicative of Cohen’s dedication to making films that don’t lock into one specific form; Museum Hours is particularly interesting in this regard.

Arriving in an unfamiliar city to tend the bedside of a dying cousin, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) is comforted by a chance meeting with a kind museum attendant (Bobby Sommer). One would be forgiven for expecting a romance, but as the lure of familiar storytelling takes hold, Cohen quickly pulls it away and the piece shatters into something far more interesting: a strange hybrid of documentary and fiction that’s both affecting and real.

Those familiar with Cohen’s wider body of work will recognise the importance of music, which is heavily hinted at in the casting of musician O’Hara, whose character sings quietly but crucially.

Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours in Vienna. Photograph: Mark

“Music has always been absolutely vital to me since I was a little kid, but I’m not a musician so I had to find other ways to get at musical experience,” he says. “I’m often inspired as much by music, painting or poetry as I am by other cinema, but I also think it’s something that film can aspire to – it can be a kind of music.”

He goes on: “It’s something that’s woven into our lives – it doesn’t have to be something that only celebrities get to do. There are a lot of people who sing in their kitchens and might sing very beautifully, but we’ll never get to hear them. It’s the act of doing it that might help them to be in the world, and I think that’s very much what’s happening with Mary’s character in the film.”

This elevation of the finer details permeates much of Cohen’s work and is a particularly key element of his observations of the city – whichever city that may be.

“I just feel strongly that there is always a city that is entirely separate from the one tourists are led to, and that goes for any city,” he says. “In terms of Vienna, I was just reflecting my experience, going on random walks and tube rides, or opening the door of an unknown bar and stumbling onto one of the film’s most important locations.”

Raised first in Kabul and then Washington DC, Cohen moved to New York in the mid-80s, “when it was just at the tail end of a very rough period”, he explains. “It’s problematic to romanticise a city that is in rough shape in terms of crime and infrastructure falling apart. But there was a sense of mystery and possibility that had to do with people of all kinds going to New York to be able to have some freedom.”

He continues: “It’s kind of a great dark magnet throughout history where people could get away from parochial, predictable circumstances and enter into this sort of wild place.”

He then draws a comparison between the rise of real estate in New York and the current property crisis in London. But he is quick to stress the resilience of cities like these – both of which he is very fond.

Jem Cohen filming Museum Hours. Photograph: Paolo

“New York, when I ride the subway, is still an incredible mix of people and that’s what makes it an interesting place above all. And I feel the same way about London. I don’t see that they are really going to able to scrub New York and London entirely clean, but god damn they will try.”

There is passion and sensitivity in almost everything Cohen says, and he delivers his thoughts with care and precision. With this in mind, it seemed strange that the Guardian should describe him as somebody who categorically “hates indie films”.

“I don’t hate indie films,” he says. “‘Indie’ is just one of those words that has become sort of meaningless – it’s not about something that one needs to hate, it’s more about it not meaning anything. It’s like using the word ‘alternative’ in regard to music – it just doesn’t have any particular concrete value anymore to say that.”

And what if people want to call his films indie? “My filmmaking is done as far from commercial Hollywood as possible, but I haven’t been part of the Sundance world either. So by some standards I’m kind of invisible. But if you keep at it for 25, 30 years and make 70 films, sooner or later people realise you’re there. I don’t really care that much what people call it – if they need to call it indie then that’s not a big deal.”

And finally, I ask, why call the season Compass and Magnet?

“The main reason is that it amused me because I’m lost all the time,” he says. “For someone who travels a lot and films all the time, it’s just kind of funny and absurd that I am so poor with directions. And magnet of course is just because the basic premise of doing one’s work is to find out what things in the world call out and what things one is attracted to – what things stick.”

Jem Cohen: Compass and Magnet is at the Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican and Hackney Picturehouse until 28 May.

barbican.org.uk
whitechapelgallery.org
picturehouses.com/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse

May 12, 2015
Major exhibition about abstract art opens this week at Whitechapel Gallery

Theo Van Doesburg, Colour Design for ceiling and three walls 1926-1927. Courtesy Galerie Gmurzynska AG. Copyright the artist. All rights reserved

You can argue all you want about abstract art – what it means, when it came about or whether it’s good or not – but there’s no denying it was the single most potent movement in modern art. Now, a new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is looking to put some of these arguments to rest. Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 uses Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square as its starting point. It aims to show how art relates to society and politics, and includes the work of over 100 modern and contemporary artists, including Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, David Batchelor and Aleksandr Rodchenko.

What’s the significance of holding the exhibition now, in 2015?

The reason we wanted to do it in 2015 is that we really feel that the starting point for abstraction is 1915, with Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square painting. It was shown in St Petersburg in 1915 at an exhibition called The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings: 0.10, which symbolised a utopian vision that artists wanted to achieve. For artists at the beginning of the 20th century this empty void of a black square represented a break with the hierarchical conventions of academic subject matter and the beginning of a really progressive art and egalitarian society. So it was really ambitious and it was imbued with a lot of hope. We look at it now and see a black square but at the time it was such an important gesture and really quite a radical one for the period.

What’s the rest of the exhibition like?

We’ve got 103 artists and more than 250 works. The title is Adventures of the Black Square, which sort of belies the colour and excitement that visitors will experience. It’s quite an explosion of colour and shape and form, from photographs to sculpture to painting. It should be quite a sensory and overwhelming experience.

‘Abstract’ is a fairly loosely applied term. Are there strict rules to what makes a work of art abstract?

No, and I think that is the key to the exhibition. The rules may have been strict in 1915, but the ways and the different paths artists have taken abstraction in are really interesting. What joins them all together is that they have abstracted notions of the world and have made them visual. You can look at a painting, an installation or sculpture and understand that at first glance it may not be apparent what the work is about. But the more you look, the more it gives you a completely different optic, allowing you to view the world in a completely different way.

Kazimir Malevich – Black and White Suprematist Composition 1915. Image courtesy of Moderna Museet Stockholm

Did the sheer volume and variety of abstract art make the exhibition difficult to put together?

Not really. I think if we’d just chosen to do an exhibition on abstract art there could have been hundreds and hundreds of works that could have been included. But we wanted to focus on artists that had used the language of abstract art to articulate ideas about politics and society. And so that’s the key that anchors the exhibition and runs throughout the show.

How does the exhibition view the links between art, society and politics?

I think as you go through the exhibition there are examples at every turn of artists who have used abstraction to articulate ideas about the world. There’s a work by Keith Coventry, who is a British artist, from a series of paintings called the Estate Series in the 1990s, based on the large plans of London housing estates. He chose to paint an aerial view of these housing estates, and the paintings as you see them could have been done in 1915 by Malevich in that he uses that same language and abstracts the notion of a housing estate. You really feel that it should belong at the beginning of the exhibition because of the form that it takes but it’s actually making quite an important statement about the world we live in.

Why do you think many people find abstract art difficult to relate to?

I think that to the vast majority abstract art is quite confusing and difficult but we’re offering a way in really, a way of understanding how, by using a very clear visual language, artists can make a real valid comment on both the world that surrounds us and its politics. We’ve also tried to make it as global as possible, so there are artists from virtually every part of the world, to show how it wasn’t just in a cornerstone of Russia that people were producing these extraordinary works.

What part of the exhibition are you particularly drawn to?

We’ve been working on it for quite a while now so I feel full immersion, but we’ve been lucky enough to work with David Batchelor, a British artist who has made a new presentation for the Whitechapel in which he uses a camera to take pictures of what he calls ‘found monochromes’, which are white squares he sees all around the city. Whether it’s a blank billboard, a note stuck on a shop window or blank screen, he will take a photo to show how abstraction is all around us and an integral part of the city we live in. We’ve done a big installation in one of the galleries which is an explosion of white squares and rectangles, which acts as a nice counterpoint to the black square.

Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 – 2015 is at Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX from 15 January – 6 April

www.whitechapelgallery.org

January 14, 2015
Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat review

Still from La Jetee (1962) by Chris Marker

Blending fiction and reality with a punch of politics and a twist of time travel, Chris Marker’s images, be they filmed, frozen, multiplied or computer-generated, are as rich and potent as they are disorientating.

A pioneer of the documentary essay and one of those rare visual artists revered as a poet, philosopher and filmmaker in equal measure, Marker was a figure synonymous with mystery and provocation. But even in the darkest, most obscure corner of his remarkable portfolio there lies clarity.

An extensive collection assembled from his kaleidoscopic body of work is currently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat offers a nourishing journey through the latter half of the twentieth century via the mind of a true multi-media visionary.

Before his death in 2012, aged 91, the wildly creative Jack-of-all-trades had turned his probing lens to a plethora of subjects, including war, revolution,travel, artefact and history. Here, all are laid bare and dissected with clinical precision behind Marker’s signature veil of ambiguity.

On entering through the gallery’s heavy double doors, the trail leads past a wall of introductory prints, down a thin corridor and into a dark room ablaze with a fizzing myriad of television screens – “memory boxes” as Marker once called them.

The surreal images vary from the mundane to the deeply unsettling, flickering below the noise of an intriguing interview in nightmarish fashion. It’s a captivating start.

Central to the exhibition is the selection of Marker’s classic films projected onto screens that hang from the ceilings, including: the beautiful Statues Also Die; a mesmerising sequence from San Soleil; Le Joli Mai; and, if you have the time, a stripped-back, 180-minute showing of the epic title feature, A Grin Without a Cat.

Of particular note is La Jetée, a spiralling sci-fi photo-roman addressing themes of time and memory,birth verses death, the mobile and immobile image,and the history of place and cinema. Just as complex as it sounds, it’s a quiet masterpiece that rocks to a gentle rhythm before descending gradually towards a turbulent finale.

That Terry Gilliam found inspiration for 12 Monkeys in the 27-minute gem, with Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder of no distant relation, speaks volumes of Marker’s sprawling influence.

Walking through the ground floor space, it’s hard to miss the overlapping quality of the work on show. It’s somehow appropriate that the sound of one installation momentarily eclipses that of another. The pieces feed off their neighbours, producing a shambolic harmony akin to Marker’s own fragmented style.

The deft arrangement evokes a loose line from one of his many seminal works of experimental cinema: “Don’t patch up a broken crystal,” someone – perhaps from the future – warns.

While the extended films are the highlight of the show, the clusters of still images that pepper the walls are of no small interest; they are complimented significantly by the words pasted beside them: “In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.”

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat tears right through Marker’s time, driven by his will to locate and relocate the boundaries of artistic endeavour. The exhibition revolves around two ever-pressing questions: where have we come from and where are we going? It is, dare I say, a memorable experience.

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX until 22 June

May 7, 2014
Stephen Willats – conceptual art that is socially and politically relevant

Display Boards from Stephen Willats’ project work Inside An Ocean during the 1979 exhibition Concerning Our Present Way of Living. Photograph courtesy of Stephen Willats

Since the French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ to describe an artistic practice centred on human interaction and experience in the late 1990s, a great deal of traction has been given to the idea of artworks as models for living and action.

In many ways London-born conceptual artist Stephen Willats was way ahead of the game. He studied at the Ealing School of Art in the early 1960s and, influenced by cybernetics and the science of communication, became a pioneer of collaborative, socially-engaged art created in site-specific contexts.

Commissioned to produce a solo show for the Whitechapel Gallery in 1979, Willats involved people from the local area, initiating projects with leather and textile workers from in and around Brick Lane, labourers at the West India Dock and residents from the Ocean housing estate in Tower Hamlets.

Twenty-five years on, Willats’ exhibition is being revisited in a new archive display at the Whitechapel featuring works on loan from the Tate, the Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art and the Museum of London alongside documentary material from the artist’s personal archive.

“Willats always imagined the artist’s role as a social and political one and the archive display is a chance to reflect on an early example of an artist engaging with the local community,” says exhibition curator Nayia Yiakoumaki.

Part of the new archive display is dedicated to Willats’ work with residents on the Ocean housing estate, including a series of tape recordings and diagrams produced by Willats reflecting how people felt about their living conditions, from damp-ridden walls to the lack of facilities for children.

Now the subject of a £200m programme of regeneration works carried out by the East Thames Consortium, the archive display at the Whitechapel Gallery opens a window on the history of the community on the Ocean Estate, one of the oldest, largest and most impoverished in the country.

“In one sense there’s the art historical element to the archive exhibition, the chance reexamining of an early example of community engaged artistic practice pioneered by Willats in the more recent context of relational aesthetics,” Yiakoumaki says.

“On the other hand it presents a slice of history contrasting the very different reality of the East End amid financial crisis in the seventies with the here and now, something which I think newer residents to the area forget.”

Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living is at Whitechapel Gallery until 14 September. 77-82 Whitechapel High St, E1 7QX

March 10, 2014
Supporting Artists – Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982

Acme studios: The first ten years

It’s hard to imagine now just how different a landscape the decaying industrial wasteland of London’s East End presented in the early 1970s through the murky veil of economic recession.

Here, among dormant factories, rotting riverside warehouses and boarded-up houses, a group of art school grads led by Jonathan Harvey and David Panton found their future.

“When we approached the Greater London Council for property they said you can squat, because there was a huge amount of squatting going on then, in which case we’ll get you out, or go away and form yourself into a housing association that will give you the legal structure to have a conversation with us,” Harvey recalls at his top-floor office in Mile End.

So in November 1972 seven founder members scraped together £10 apiece to form the artist-led charitable Acme Housing Association Ltd.

The GLC initially transferred two derelict shops on Devons Road in Bow. By December 1974, Acme was managing 76 houses, providing living and studio space for 90 artists and had established a relationship with the Arts Council to provide funding for the conversion of the artists’ studios.

“It’s quite extraordinary, we never planned to do it, it was always about self-help but then given the opportunity that these houses presented we thought well we must make them available to other artists,” Harvey says, evidently still somewhat surprised.

After four pioneering decades, Acme is now the subject of a special show at the Whitechapel Gallery exploring its radical history through archive material including posters, catalogues, photographs and films.

Radical experiment

Part of what makes the Acme story so compelling is the five-and-a-half years the group spent from 1976-81 turning a derelict banana warehouse in Covent Garden into a cutting-edge exhibition space for an incredible array of (literally) ground-breaking performance and installation artists.

“Being a short-life property that was due to for demolition, there was an attitude to the building that saw the space as sacrificial, so we quickly established a reputation for being uncompromising in terms of accommodating how an artist needed to present their work – even if it the space was being structurally challenged,” Harvey says.

One of those artists was Kerry Trengove, who in 1977 famously sealed himself into a bunker inside the gallery, tunnelling his way down through the basement only to emerge from a pile of rubble and dust on Shelton Street eight days later.

Then there was pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps who performed several times at the gallery, filling the space with a volatile mix of fire and explosives.

When it closed in 1981, critics mourned the loss of such an experimental, rebellious fixture on the gallery circuit, with Waldemar Januszczak declaring the 1970s “officially over.”

Despite his obvious affection for those experimental, unselfconscious years full of energy and zeal, Harvey maintains it was right for the gallery to close when it did.

“We’re talking about a period when that kind of 60s notion that an alternative to both commercial and public galleries could exist,” he says.

“Now it’s very difficult to be a public museum or a public gallery without being part of the market. I think the market is actually totally dominant now, so there’s a big question about where the alternative is or indeed where the radical is.”

Supporting artists

Acme recognised long ago that its future depended on property ownership and, with aid of capital lottery funding from the Arts Council and planning partnerships with house builders, it has managed to secure a substantial property portfolio unlike any other studio organisation in the country.

It’s a phenomenal though quiet success story of an organisation that Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, herself a former Acme studio holder (like roughly a third of all Turner Prize nominees, including eight winners), has called “silently one of the supportive bodies in operation.”

It may have taken 40 years but by April 2015 Acme will be entirely independent and self-sustaining, slowly generating increasing amounts of income to invest back into the arts at a time when local authorities are highly unlikely to be able, or indeed willing, to ring-fence funding to subsidise affordable studio space.

“Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a huge amount of loss of affordable studio space in the Eats End over the next few years. The rise in property prices in Hackney is absolutely extraordinary and how any artist can afford to live or work there in the future is really questionable,” Harvey says.

“Our buildings are not going to be regenerated out.”

Supporting Artists: Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982 runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 23 February 2014

December 10, 2013
Supporting Artists – Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982

Acme studios: The first ten years

It’s hard to imagine now just how different a landscape the decaying industrial wasteland of London’s East End presented in the early 1970s through the murky veil of economic recession.

Here, among dormant factories, rotting riverside warehouses and boarded-up houses, a group of art school grads led by Jonathan Harvey and David Panton found their future.

“When we approached the Greater London Council for property they said you can squat, because there was a huge amount of squatting going on then, in which case we’ll get you out, or go away and form yourself into a housing association that will give you the legal structure to have a conversation with us,” Harvey recalls at his top-floor office in Mile End.

So in November 1972 seven founder members scraped together £10 apiece to form the artist-led charitable Acme Housing Association Ltd.

The GLC initially transferred two derelict shops on Devons Road in Bow. By December 1974, Acme was managing 76 houses, providing living and studio space for 90 artists and had established a relationship with the Arts Council to provide funding for the conversion of the artists’ studios.

“It’s quite extraordinary, we never planned to do it, it was always about self-help but then given the opportunity that these houses presented we thought well we must make them available to other artists,” Harvey says, evidently still somewhat surprised.

After four pioneering decades, Acme is now the subject of a special show at the Whitechapel Gallery exploring its radical history through archive material including posters, catalogues, photographs and films.

Radical experiment

Part of what makes the Acme story so compelling is the five-and-a-half years the group spent from 1976-81 turning a derelict banana warehouse in Covent Garden into a cutting-edge exhibition space for an incredible array of (literally) ground-breaking performance and installation artists.

“Being a short-life property that was due to for demolition, there was an attitude to the building that saw the space as sacrificial, so we quickly established a reputation for being uncompromising in terms of accommodating how an artist needed to present their work – even if it the space was being structurally challenged,” Harvey says.

One of those artists was Kerry Trengove, who in 1977 famously sealed himself into a bunker inside the gallery, tunnelling his way down through the basement only to emerge from a pile of rubble and dust on Shelton Street eight days later.

Then there was pyrotechnic sculptor Stephen Cripps who performed several times at the gallery, filling the space with a volatile mix of fire and explosives.

When it closed in 1981, critics mourned the loss of such an experimental, rebellious fixture on the gallery circuit, with Waldemar Januszczak declaring the 1970s “officially over.”

Despite his obvious affection for those experimental, unselfconscious years full of energy and zeal, Harvey maintains it was right for the gallery to close when it did.

“We’re talking about a period when that kind of 60s notion that an alternative to both commercial and public galleries could exist,” he says.

“Now it’s very difficult to be a public museum or a public gallery without being part of the market. I think the market is actually totally dominant now, so there’s a big question about where the alternative is or indeed where the radical is.”

Supporting artists

Acme recognised long ago that its future depended on property ownership and, with aid of capital lottery funding from the Arts Council and planning partnerships with house builders, it has managed to secure a substantial property portfolio unlike any other studio organisation in the country.

It’s a phenomenal though quiet success story of an organisation that Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread, herself a former Acme studio holder (like roughly a third of all Turner Prize nominees, including eight winners), has called “silently one of the supportive bodies in operation.”

It may have taken 40 years but by April 2015 Acme will be entirely independent and self-sustaining, slowly generating increasing amounts of income to invest back into the arts at a time when local authorities are highly unlikely to be able, or indeed willing, to ring-fence funding to subsidise affordable studio space.

“Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a huge amount of loss of affordable studio space in the Eats End over the next few years. The rise in property prices in Hackney is absolutely extraordinary and how any artist can afford to live or work there in the future is really questionable,” Harvey says.

“Our buildings are not going to be regenerated out.”

Supporting Artists: Acme’s First Decade 1972-1982 runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 23 February 2014

December 10, 2013