Tuesday 5 July '11
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Can Art be Useful?

During the recent ‘Terminal Convention’ Symposium in Cork, our erstwhile Ruskinite-Reformer and keen Big J R blogger Alistair Hudson began his own presentation by showing David Shrigley’s animation ‘An Important Message About the Arts’. Intended as a useful propaganda tool for yet another UK institution threatened by massive government cuts – in this case the Arts Council UK – Shrigley’s animation used the characters of a farmer and his son to make a case for Art’s economic viability (as a key driver in both the Creative and Tourism/Leisure Industries) and, perhaps more predictably, for Art’s assumed cultural and civilising values. As Alistair pointed out though, the twin towers of economy and truth tend to overlook the question of art’s use-value.

In the light of this, Alistair went on to pose a series of key questions which tend to loosely underpin the Grizedale way - what kind of thing would artist’s do if they decided to make themselves useful? What can artists begin to do as citizens? What would art look like if it wasn’t reduced to monetary imperatives on one hand or the need to ‘inform’ the masses from the dizzying heights of culture on the other? What would happen if artists didn’t necessarily commit to producing luxury consumer goods for London centric art market? In other words, what happens if we began to re-look at the possible use-value of art?

As it turns out, these are also questions that big J R had begun to ask in the latter part of his career – the bit where he moved to asking questions about the morality of aesthetics (and also the bit where people began to think he was barking mad started to ignore him). It seems these questions also drove some of big J R’s thinking behind his support for Mechanics Institutes: as educational centers for the working class, as places where art, science, theatre and music would all combine to provide a rounded education.

These questions of art’s use value, and the role they can play in education, are perhaps more pertinent today than they were in Ruskin’s time. As Universities are now asking students to take up 9K loans per year to cover their Higher Education fees, and as the UK government is proposing ‘employability’ league tables for every HE course in the country (to help prospective students and their parents chose the courses of study most likely to get them a job), it’s maybe time to give this all a little more thought? Being involved in Higher Education myself (running the both the Fine Art and History of Art Degree Programmes at Liverpool School of Art and Design – part of Liverpool John Moores University which, incidentally, can trace its roots back to an Arts and Mechanics Institute that was set up in Liverpool in 1823) I’m really interested in continuing a critical Ruskinian re-invention by beginning to pose two key post-Ruskinian questions myself – Just what kind of job is to be done by artists in today’s increasingly instrumentalised and economically driven society? And, in the light of this, what kind of work does making art become?

So, over the next months I’m proposing to ask these questions, Flip camera in hand, of anybody who is willing to attempt an answer (admittedly this may not be many). I’ll also try to link this to some of the goings on down Coniston Institute way and, of course, attempt to seek some help and guidance from the legacy of Big J R as I go. I also have a feeling that cheese, vegetables and soup may figure prominently in this analysis.

Posted by John Byrne on 05/07/11 at 11:16 0 Comments

Monday 21 March '11
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Locked in a room to get some perspective

The problem with working in the country is that it’s so easy to lose perspective. There is less resistance and the world around you becomes the world. Before you know it you’re showing all the signs: shuffling around in a dirty fleece, complaining a lot about how busy everywhere is and thinking what you do is really important, international, high quality, significant, great and all those other words that provincial arts organisations love to use.

I’ve been on the road for the last week, but on a trip that entailed me being locked in rooms with artlike people for days on end. Tuesday through to Wednesday was spent in London with the Plus Tate group of directors and Thursday to Saturday locked in to the disused terminal at Cork International Airport to speak at Terminal Convention. I didn’t see any of these cities (in that ill-conceived sense of place way) but it was certainly more rewarding than standard travel usually is, in terms of clarifying what we do and don’t do when back home and, well, getting some perspective.

Both events entailed full days and evenings of sitting in a room talking about or listening to people talking about the value of art.

At Plus Tate I disagreed with a curator from the Whitworth Art Gallery about this, quite fundamentally. My point was that what art missed greatly, particularly in this time of economic tailspin, was getting the point, or having a point; that it should be useful. She couldn’t disagree more, based principally on an outdated Kantian position – arguing that art’s greatest asset was that it is useless and that was its use – the Kantian Paradox. (Interestingly our Ruskin show for the Whitworth was cancelled, we suspect, for this very reason; that the curators  refuted this post-Romantic,  post-market, post-subjective, post-historical approach to art and its history.) We agreed to differ.

At times like this you do have self doubt, that maybe you are just a deluded country bumpkin going mad. John Ruskin probably had this thought at least twice, surely. Most people outside the 604 people who are The Art World would, I suggest, have the view that art is useless. From a non-Kantian perspective.

So I was grateful for the excellent Terminal Convention (see what they’re doing there?) organised by the sharp and spikey Static Gallery in the disused airport terminal at Cork. It’s a weird thing to land at an airport and not leave it – although we did change buildings to sleep at the Cork International Airport which is the most incredible frou-frou of postmodernity and indeed worth flying there just for the hotel. They could do with a better strapline though, like We make Terry Farrell look like John Pawson.

I arrived with powerpoint in pocket, slightly unsure to be honest, concerned that the idea of the use value of art would be received with equal dismissal. But as the symposium unfolded it became clear that that it had been orchestrated to make this very point, with each speaker progressively re-enforcing this very idea as the next paradigm shift in the venerable history of what we understand as art. Which is reassuring.

Rather than regurgitate the proceedings (you can go to the website and I do have other things to do) I shall merely point you in the direction of the key interlocutors, as they say at art symposia:

Team Van Abbe Museum – Annie Fletcher, Steven ten Thije and Charles Esche

Look out. We are witnessing the end of history and modernity in all its forms and we better come up with an art solution that can handle this and give the economies of money and truth and run for their money. Charles says that we don’t particularly need artists any more and they’ve stopped doing temporary artist shows and maybe don’t need a museum (Steven looks worried). This also however opens up new possibilities for a performative idea of the archive. Oh and sooner or later we gonna have to kill the super-rich.

George Yudice, University of Miami

In order to operate beyond the entrapment of the market art must look at the established mechanisms of distribution. His book the Expediency of Culture looks a must read.

Stephen Wright, European School of Visual Arts, Paris

Not the DJ, comedian or ex-Derby County defender but a very interesting academic promoting the usership of art, art as double ontology, art as non-discipline, art without artworks, new coefficients of visibility - this guy should be run the Arts Council for a day just for the hell of it. Might make the world a better place too.  His web project Plausible Artworlds is an access point to projects that actually do something. Note: Would like to make cheese too.

Aislinn O’Donnel, GRADcam

Making philosophy useful in society. Good Job (read in a US accent).

These and all the other speakers confirmed all my doubts over the Whitworthian position and was a good excuse the show the funny but wrong David Shrigley campaigning film for the Save the Arts campaign as an introduction to my talk on what and why we do it. What the film says is that we should support the arts because of their economic and, effectively, spiritual value. What it misses is that if people could use the arts rather than look at them or buy them, they might just have a future.

Now back to the farm.....

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 21/03/11 at 13:18 0 Comments

Sunday 31 October '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Haunted by Ruskin

Hi All,

The long lost John Byrne here.

Sorry it been quite a while since my last blog entry but, amongst other things, I blame the recession inspired cuts to the arts - and the coalition hell released upon Higher Education.

Like most people in the arts I've had to try extra hard over the last few months to make anything like a positive move. Then again, like most people involved in the arts, that hasn't stopped my trying.

One thing that has stuck with me over the past few months, I'm more than mildly surprised say, is how badly I've been bitten by the big JR bug. So far, the conversations I've been having with people, and those that I've recorded for this blog, are really pointing towards a re-thinking of my relationship to art (and to art's relationship to me). The video I've popped up today is a case of this. As I grabbed a few JR interviews at the end of Grizedale's 're-Coefficients Club' event in sunny Sheffield last April, I couldn't help thinking of Alistair Hudson's prophetic flight of metaphoric fancy - that if big JR were to be around today he'd be wearing a hoodie and getting straight up the noses of the current art industry glitterati (and not, me thinks, in a necessarily neo-conservative way either). After all, just because much of today's off-the-shelf avant-gardism seems dull, vacuous and fascicle, doesn't mean we have to 'return' to traditional norms - unless, of course, those traditional norms are those long lost values of radicalism, activism and a will to coherently re-evaluate the present worth of our artistic and political efforts.

I guess some things just keep cropping up, re big JR, which I want to find out more about. Craft is one of them. Maybe not the usual idea of craft (as the pseudo hand whittled mass production of tourist tattle and middle class Sunday supplement escapist fodder), but the idea of Craft as a hands on approach to trying to do something different, something against the grain. After meeting up for a Jonathan Meese event at Grizedale almost a year ago, I had a really exciting conversation with about this with Charlie Gere. It's really stuck in my mind. I need to follow this up with Charlie and spend some more time reading Richard Sennett.

I've also become fascinated with Grizedale's idea of re-inventing the 'Mechanics Institute" as roving art and education intervention. It's not just that this idea appeals to me on the level of something I'd quite like to help out with (after all, tagging along with an itinerant bunch of art bedeviled educators may be my only option if cuts to Higher Education bite much harder), it's that John Ruskin's ideas seem to allow for a very contemporary re-appraisal of what education actually is and can do. Also, the Art and Design School that I currently work for at Liverpool John Moores University can, apparently, trace itself back to a nineteenth century mechanics institute… more of this when I check it out.

However, I have to admit that the biggest 'big JR' haunting has happened when I've been looking at contemporary (and historical) issues of how artists can simply find a way to do something different, worthwhile, against the grain. Alistair kindly joined us for the Autonomy Summer School at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in July and it was both surprising and exciting to find out how many Ruskinian strands of thought kept re-emerging. And, as well as this, 1848 has taken on more of a significance than I thought it would! Hmmmm…....

So, I have the big JR inspired bit firmly between my teeth now. Expect more interviews, musings, idling, rambling and surreptitious attempts at fitting square pegs into round holes as winter draws in and the long nights await. But what better way to spend nights beside the fire than with a laptop and the continuing ghost story of big JR?

Posted by John Byrne on 31/10/10 at 17:48

Topics: 'Autonomy Mechanics Institute 1848'

Wednesday 21 April '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

The Ashcloud of the 21st Century

An edible tribute to Jim Lambie

So having made it back, without any volcanic hindrance, from Galsgow at the weekend (thank you Mr Webster for a lovely do) we now embark upon our next feat of mass catering.....it's the....

Re-Coefficients Dining Club

Millennium Galleries Sheffield

Arundel Gate

Sheffield

S1 2PP

St George's Day

Friday 23 April 2010

7.00 - 9.00 pm

Admission £4/£3.60

Booking details: please call the Millenium Galleries Bookings Administrator on 0114 278 2655 or email learning@museums-sheffield.org.uk to reserve your place.

Book early to avoid disappointing us on the day.

Helpful hint of the day:

St. Georges Day is formally recognised by wearing a red rose in the buttonhole.

"Making John Ruskin Dull" Quote:

(John Ruskin used St George to brand his vision for a micro utopia/escape from modernity.)

"We will try to take some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful and fruitful. We will have no steam-engines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the dead."

John Ruskin

(None dead but the idle, none sick but the wretched - almost everything Ruskin wanted came to pass but backwards. John Ruskin was surely the world's most disappointed man.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THIS IS WHAT THIS EVENT IS ABOUT

This entire event is an artwork - for want of a better description; you are part of it, we are all implicated in everything.

We (Grizedale Arts) want to create several short films that make us think about the systems under which we have tried to live and think about some systems we have yet to try. We want to construct systems for living that suit us as community animals, systems that help us for a time, in this next moment; accepting there are no ultimate solutions. What is certain is that the idea of freedom of the individual is unnatural, unhealthy and fantastically destructive to the species.

There is at hand a reappraisal of John Ruskin, how and why he's been forgotten since he stopped talking (and stopped breathing), whilst the world got on with absorbing so much of what he opposed. He now seems to be emerging again as a complex thinker with a strangely contemporary mindset, contradictory, nascent, tangential.

Let us set up clubs, societies, make up stuff and force some ideas on others - they'll love it once they get going.

What was the Coefficients Dining Club?

In 1902, in the shadow of John Ruskin's death, the leaders of the Fabian Society, founded the Coefficients Club to bring together the most powerful figures in the British Establishment with social critics and idealists to discuss and make plans for social reform and a new, unified liberal new world order. And eat.

Just over 100 years later we plan to re-form the Dining Club format, using this forum for discussion, to bring together six new voices to give speeches on social and cultural reform over a socially pointed menu.

The Coefficients' principle aim was to ensure the continued growth of imperially driven, liberal capitalism in the 20th century. As this idea has seemingly run its course, this event asks what are options and ideas for this century?

Members you will have heard of include H G Wells (the experience inspired The Shape of Things to Come), Bertrand Russell (who left in a bate), Alfred Milner (one of Ruskin's Road Builders) and many militarists, politicians and economists who's names will have largely slipped from public consciousness. The whole endeavour lasted seven years.

Grizedale Arts will continue to use this format until it breaks.

WHAT IS GRIZEDALE ARTS?

A residency organisation based on a farm in the centre of the Lake District. It tries to develop the way art thinking and art practice impact on society, through projects exhibitions and events developed through an extended community of artists and creative people associated with it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What might be annoying

We are filming the dinner and making short films of each of the six speeches that can be downloaded from Grizedale's website, these speeches will be used to explain and support aspects of the Grizedale programme and we will be encouraging schools and colleges to use them as propaganda in their own education process.

The point of this dinner is to provoke action. We all talk too much about what we feel and think - who cares - just bloody get on with it.

The evening will be punctuated by interruptions, starts and stops, for the filming and audio recording, the performance will be dominated and controlled by the gathering of material for dissemination: this is part of the point.

There will be 24 invited diners at an elaborately dressed dinner table partaking of five courses of soup. The audience will sit around, cabaret/"Later with Jools Holland' style, with soup and bread and drink.

SCHEDULE (WHICH MIGHT ALSO BE ANNOYING)

Each of the speakers will give a 10 minute presentation at the head of the table. Subjects will centre on visions for ways of living. Between each speaker there will be a musical interlude provided by a Rock Orchestra (a 19^th century slate harmonium) and a barbershop quartet - both tributes to John Ruskin's musical taste.

The Rock Orchestra will play the instrumental bridge from James Brown's early 60's stage show between the speeches and finish with a composition by the musicians.

The Barber Shop group will sing from the Polecat, a series of songs known to all Barber Shoppers of all races, creeds and colours - hence a common language that can be dropped into at the drop of a hat.

Writer, individualist and pike fishing hedonist Simon Crump will write a critical text about the evening, available on the blog shortly after the event. He likes to be provocative and doesn't take kindly to criticism. Try not to sit next to him.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speakers

Cristina Cerulli - School of Architecture, Sheffield University

John Atkinson - Cumbrian hill farmer and commons campaigner

John Byrne - Head of Fine Art at Liverpool School of Art, John Moores University

Alexandre Singh - New York based artist

Inderjit Bhogal - Methodist minister and CEO of the Yorkshire and Humber Faiths Forum

John Ruskin - Polymath with a dodgy reputation (played by an actor)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Music

The Musical Stones of Skiddaw is a very large tuned percussion instrument made of a type of rare hornfels rock found near Skiddaw in Cumbria, England. Constructed between 1827 and 1840, the instrument was played all over Britain including Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria in 1848 and generated a fortune for the family that built and played it. The instrument has been housed at the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria from 1917 to the present day. Ruskin had his own stone xylophone made, now housed in the Ruskin Museum, Coniston.

Musicians

Jamie Barnes works as a freelance Curator, artist and musician. Jamie was the Curator of Keswick Museum and Art Gallery between 2004 and 2009. In this time he helped Grizedale Arts in the revival of playing the Musical Stones and has continued to perform concerts throughout the country.

Gavin Bradshaw is a composer and musician. The majority of his output is made through his alias QXTC, and is predominantly electronic sequenced and synthesized music.

Chris Stones (no really)

Musician and coordinator of SoundWaves music programme. Chris was inspired to work with the stones by his interest in the Indonesian Gamelan tradition.

The musicians will be dressed - by their own volition - as your old school Geography teacher.

Barber Shop is a revival movement established in the 1930's to save the rapidly disappearing Minstrel Music - a black phenomena centred on the church - as it transformed into the much harsher and emotional black gospel style. Barber shop is a white American phenomena that revels in the accappella chord and is itself the base for white gospel quartet singing.

Ruskin is reported to have particularly enjoyed the touring Minstrel shows (the Georgia Minstrels amongst others toured England) performing the standards at home. Yes he was in effect a gangster rapper, eschewing the high-minded for the popular.

Bandwagon Barbershop Quartet - Bob, Andrew, Jim and Glenn, formed in April 2009 and as well as competing in the national quartet championships, provide entertainment in the form of close harmony singing in the barbershop style, through shows, at weddings and other private gatherings and at public events. All four singers also pursue their love of the genre through membership of and active involvement in the Sheffield Barbershop Harmony Club and its six times national championship winning chorus 'Hallmark of Harmony'. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bandwagon-Barbershop-Quartet/131752356536

T 0114 2630945 and Mob 07899 808479

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Table settings

Each of the speakers has a set of bowls and flatware made by contemporary crafts people working in Sheffield - all based at Persistence Works.

Contact - Persistence Works, 21 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS

Ruskin saw Sheffield as being like Rome (with its seven hills), he was also keen on the idea that it was a hot bed of old-school craft skills - i.e. medieval - hence the collection for the Working Man, now housed in the Millennium Galleries as "The Ruskin Collection".

Craftspeople:

Stefan Tooke, (silversmith) - soup spoons and ladles.

Stefan has a passion for food and focuses his work around the theme of dining; he is particularly interested in spoons. The work references labour and craftsmanship by retaining the making marks. Each of the spoons has a specific eating function as well as fitting the contours of the hand.

Charlotte Tollyfield, (silversmith) - hand spun bowls.

Charlotte's work focuses on the process of forming; destroying and re-creating three-dimensionally shaped vessels.

Hanne Westergaard, (ceramicist) - Porcelain bowls

Hanne will be creating a set of ceramic bowls that will incorporate the influence of Rockingham Porcelain- a 19th century high-end manufacturer of porcelain based in Rotherham between 1826 and 1842. Hanne will incorporate the decorative style of Rockingham into the Danish Modernist aesthetic that informs her work.

Emilie Taylor, (ceramicist) - slip and scraffitto decorated bowls

Referencing the Arts and Crafts period consistently featured in her work, overlaid scraffitto drawings depict scenes from the 'Soup Summit' of 2008. The end of a three year period of wrangling between Westminster Council, the Church and London Voluntary Sector Organistaions as Westminster Council tried to amend byelaws that would mean soup runs would be illegal. The Soup Summit met at Tate Britain in 2008.

Penny Withers, (ceramicist) - Thrown ceramic wood fired bowls

The work references The Arts and Crafts in the making processes and the pattern used to decorate the bowls, overlaid with Penny's fluid style.

The rest of the diners will be using ceramics designed by the Marquis of Queensbury and Jessie Tate for Midwinter with further crockery by Kathie Winkle for Broadhurst.

Queensbury was a descendant of 'Bosie', Oscar Wilde's lover. Oscar Wilde claimed to be a member of Ruskin's Road builders, 'The Diggers', several of whom were members of the Coefficients Dining Club.

The audience will use and enjoy the complexity of Ryan Gander's 'Love Cups'; a rustic Japanese interpretation of Josef and Anni Albers' Bauhaus glass, silver and ebony 'Lover's Teaglass', itself based on the designs of Christopher Dresser for James Dixon and Sons, which in turn were copies of Japanese sake vessels collected on Dresser's 1876 tour of Japan. See what he's done there? But why?

Cutlery:

Bread knives, butter knives and table tea lights made by the students of the Freeman College, Ruskin Mill Charitable Trust

http://www.rmet.org.uk/

Other cutlery:

'Shape' by Gerald Benney for Viners of Sheffield

Benney trained under Dunstan Pruden - of the Eric Gill Ditchling utopian Arts and Crafts community (Gill being a Ruskin disciple). He worked as a designer for Viners throughout the 60's, creating commercially successful designs of which the 'Studio' range of cutlery is the most famous, utilising his trademark 'Benney Bark Finish', now an industry standard.

Benney's legacy lives on under the unfortunately-named brand 'Benney' (Crossroads, ABBA, Hill, Jets,)

Flowers

Roadside flowers - 'there is as much beauty in the planarium worm as in the neck of a swan'

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Film

Projected as a background/context for the event

Our Daily Bread - Nikolaus Geyrhalter - 92 minutes (no dialogue)

"It's not the easiest film to digest-but it's intensely important, and impossible to look away from or forget." -Andy Aaron, Very Short List

A true vision of utopia, a brave new world reality where it is the animals and plants that have been automated. The occasional visceral moments act as reminders of humanity - having a religious feel akin to the martyrdom images of the Catholic Church. People will look back on this film and wonder at the intimate nature of the relationship between people and animals it portrays.

This is the reality of what we all depend on to survive whether we eat it or not, the genius of man's supremacy over nature, in many ways a thing of great sophistication and beauty. What many have in the past strived for, buying us the time to develop so much and do so little with it.

Food

Soup is the basic staple of any rural community and an 'al deskco' staple, John Ruskin in his blog Flors Clavigera (which means, roughly, a jolly good clubbing) repeatedly promised the ultimate soup recipe, one that would afford all a good healthy diet. He never delivered it.

A meal of five courses in five soups (entirely vegetarian) will be served to the 24 invited diners. The audience will be served Soup of Theseus from a soup kitchen, with bread and drink.

Here we will offer five possibilities on what he might have had in mind:

Antipasti

Gaspacho - cold tomatoes, garlic and wet bread - maybe not exactly what Ruskin was thinking.

Primi

Toge Soup - a mixed vegetable soup from the village of Toge in Northern Japan. Eaten three times a day by the rice farmers of the village and unique to their village - seaweed is the stock base.

Secondi

The Soup of Theseus - Ministrone/Fassoulada - the most famous of farm soups, probably close to what Ruskin had in mind, Ruskin's reference was to the soup that Theseus prepared for Hercules before his labours.

Formaggi

Stilton and cauliflower - some hideous 80's invention still popular in Edinburgh and Bristol.

Dolci

Ile Flottante - sweet soup with the floating island of Jonathan Swift's Lauputa in the middle, a satirical observation on an effective form of state control - sit that state on my face, calm me down a bit.

Bread hand made by the students of the Freeman College, Ruskin Mill Charitable Trust

http://www.rmet.org.uk/

There are a lot of men involved in this event - there does seem to be a gender disparity in the urge to create systems for living, the gender with the least experience of the actual systems taking the lead. Could be a clue in there somewhere?

Graphics by Karen Guthrie

Filmed by Maria Zeb Benjamin

Technical management and web by Dorian Moore

Edited by Alistair Hudson - the arbiter of the reasonable

Concept by Grizedale Arts Commune

Detail by Adam Sutherland

Helpers: Lucy Livingstone and Ed Bailey

Cooks, servers and cleaners - all the above

Thanks to Richard Greer, The Millennium Galleries Sheffield, John Moores University and Media Arts Northwest for supporting the event.

This is a Media Arts Northwest Action Research Project

To comment, criticise, commend or discus use the blog on http://www.grizedale.org

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes:

1. Ruskin's Roadbuilders

In 1874 Ruskin proposed to a select group of Oxford undergraduates that they endeavour to build a flower bordered road between South and North Hinksey - to assist the two communities. The group we lampooned in the press and on campus, being nicknamed the 'Diggers'. Notable members of this group included, Arnold Toynbee (social reformer), Hardewick Rawnsley (co-founder of the National Trust - lifelong Ruskin interpreter), Alfred Milner (economist and member of the Coefficents) William Powell (Whitefriars glassworks and model village) and Oscar Wilde (a lifelong Ruskin fan - but possibly just for the day). The road was not completed as the work was interrupted by the holidays, the villages of North and South Hinksey remain unconnected but an allegory exists.

2. Oscar Wilde's possibly rather embroidered version

We were coming down the street-a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or cricket-field-when Ruskin going up to lecture in cap and gown met us. He seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat. He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all labour there was something noble. Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he wished. So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us to help him to make a road across this morass for these village people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank-a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked away for two months at our road. And what became of the road? Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly-in the middle of the swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for the next term there was no leader, and the 'diggers', as they called us, fell asunder.

3. Ruskin takes the piss out of those that worship the 'Goddess of Getting-on':

Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere under it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately-sized park; a large garden and hot-houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; he always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with one steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language.

"All movements go too far."

Bertrand Russell

blog ends here

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 21/04/10 at 12:22 1 Comment

Thursday 25 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Ruskin and Beauty at the Van Abbe.

After the first meeting of 'The Autonomy Project' at the Van Abbe Museu in Eindhoven (www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en), I caught up with Van Abbe Director, Manchester City supporter (and all round good egg) Charels Eshe and asked him for some thoughts on Big JR. Being from Manchester (or a 'Manc' as we call those of the Manchester persuasion here in the UK - Alistair Hudson is one too) Charles' first memories of Ruskin were associated with his influence on 'News from Nowhere' and other 19^th Century radical free press. It is also interesting that Charles also saw some parallels between Ruskin's struggle with the aesthetics/ethics question and the difficulties of making a meaningful socially engaged practice in today's neo-liberal economy. Charels also has some very interesting things to say on the show he would work on with Ruskin - should the big man himself come back to work with us today.

Posted by John Byrne on 25/03/10 at 09:48 0 Comments

Topics: 'Autonomy' 'Beauty' 'Ruskin'

Sunday 21 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Autonomy and Ruskin @ The Van Abbe

Today's blog entry is a video diary as I sit in an Eindhoven Hotel waiting for a meeting at the Van Abbe Museum (www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en) about the coming launch of 'The Autonomy Project' which I've been working on for nearly two years with Charles Esche, Annie Fletcher, Steven Ten Thije and Clare Butcher.

I've been thinking a lot about what Alistair has been saying in this Sao Paulo blog entries about the difficulty of meaningfully engaging as an artists without collapsing innovative work back into the pre-requisite formulae of international Biennial Land (or Airport Art as I call it). It's a tough one and no doubt!

But it also strikes me that any questions over the possibility of autonomy today are no longer circumscribed by bankrupt Modernist debates about 'self-referentiality', or 'art for art's sake. Nor can they be sustained in the aftermath of an equally bankrupt postmodernism without some radical re-negotiation. What does remain is the question of how to be an artist, thinker, writer, curator, teacher or whatever meaningfully? How to develop a practice within the existing globalized neo-liberal economy that can still function in an oppositional sense? How to negotiate new perspectives on better ways of living? All of these seem questions that were (and still are) rooted in the problematic of John Ruskin's complex relationship between art, aesthetics and ethics?

Posted by John Byrne on 21/03/10 at 09:46 0 Comments

Sunday 21 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Ruskin at the Restaurant

I recently caught up with Alistair Hudson in Manchester after we'd given a presentation on 'Creative Partnerships' at Manchester Museum. In a state of some despair, brought on mainly by experiencing an update on the turf wars in UK Arts and Education Funding (which seem to be increasingly blighting the possibility of cultural experiment) Alistair took us to his family's favourite Chinese Restaurant. After eating the hottest food I have ever had in my life - a really funky Szechwan Black Pudding and various forms of Offal Soup - debate turned, as always to Big JR. Alistair went on to elucidate on the complex relationship between Grizedale and Ruskin, between Grizedale and the world and the possibility of Ruskin Returning as a Cultural Hoody stalking the self-satisfied debates over art, ethics and social engagement (Oh, and the X Factor too).

Posted by John Byrne on 21/03/10 at 09:23 0 Comments

Tuesday 16 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Dutch Landscape and Simon Cowell.

Grizedale regular Wapke Feenstra (www.wapke.nl) reads out her favorite Ruskin quotation from 'The Lamp of Beauty: Writings on Art'. According to Wapke, Ruskin reads the paintings he is talking about from a peculiarly British viewpoint and, in doing so, completely misses their point (form a Dutch perspective of course). Was this just another case of a Victorian Englander attempting to apply his world view to everything? - no change there then I hear you say!

However, whilst I was listening to Wapke read her quote (and it is her favorite Big John quote) there does seem to be a sweeping confidence in Ruskin's assertions - kinda hard not side with him on some levels. He talks of the Landscape containing a human element that can't be denied - and that would weaken art by its absence. I can't help beginning to thinking of him as some kind of Victorian moralist crossed with Simon Cowell, an ethical critic running his informed but detached eye over the runners and riders in the new business of art. In view of Alistair's recent adventures in Sao Paulo, there seems a crucial importance here. How could one even begin to conceive of a contemporary global landscape without the immediate necessity to confront the ethical as well as the aesthetic? Despite all this, It's hard not to agree with Wapke's conclusions though....

Posted by John Byrne on 16/03/10 at 17:43 0 Comments

Tuesday 16 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Fight Club

Jesus and his wife

Popular titles include Descartes and Hume

Hit me...

In the evening we go to see the boxer Jesus Carlos. Jesus Carlos runs a gym, boxing school and library under a flyover. He too has a mission. In Sao Paulo the spaces under the numerous concrete flyovers are a honey pot of vice, drugs and violence. Jesus Carlos has taken on the task himself of changing the society that surrounds him by establishing open air gymnasia where once there was pile of trash - in every sense.

He wants to get the wasted souls off the streets and through physical exercise and education, turn the drug addicts and gang members into citizens of healthy mind and body. Jesus prides himself on the fact that he has done this himself, without aid from the government, just with good will and determination. He calls his mission Human Recycling.

He has now established two gyms and we go to see the latest first. Sandwiched between two roads, it is transparent and open to the elements on all sides, save for a fence and the roof above provided by the freeway. There is a boxing ring, homemade exercise equipment and punch bags made from gas canisters and fridges and of course the library. This started when the kids started to bring their homework along and grew into a library to expand the minds of all its members.

Opposite the gym is a small park where the drug dealers and prostitutes make their trade. He wants to turn this area into a communal allotment, but this may take some time. Recently one of the dealers came over to kill Carlos for taking away his clients, but he didn't succeed of course; Carlos, with the looks of a Tarrantino star, is hard as nails and doesn't give up.

Whilst we talk to him there is a commotion going on over at the park; flashing lights, police, a child in handcuffs. This is the first meeting I've had in the middle of a drugs bust.

Afterwards we go to the first Gym, which is much bigger, under a bigger fly-over. It is now dark and cinematic in the sodium glow of the lighting. At the entrance, a a gap in the chain link fence, there is a reception desk made from junk furniture. The whole thing is like ghetto Edward Acland, nothing wasted and piles of spare, saved materials stacked up in neat piles. Here there are two boxing rings, extensive gym (with gas bottles and rocks for weights) a skate park, another library with lounge area and even a few tents for the eager. Now, evening the place is busy, maybe 50 or more people working out, reading, watching TV or doing spectacular stunts on BMX on the skate ramps. It looks like it's doing it's job.

Calos wants to go on. He wants a gym and library under every flyover in Brazil. He wants it to become a free university for the underclass. That's a long way off, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.

The parallels with the Mechanics Institute (both here and at UNAS) are direct and startling, inspirational. But the real question is how we work with all this stuff. What do we make for the Bienal that doesn't just fall into the trap of Bienality and just pointing at all this stuff, like the first colonists drawing and measuring every plant and animal and native they clapped their eyes on.

Jesus Carlos is already well known - even the AA are coming to see him for a summer school fro crying out loud.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 16/03/10 at 14:15 0 Comments

Saturday 13 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

An Education Part 2

Outside the arts building

If you are reasonably comfortable in Brazil you go to private school, if not you go to the state schools, which by all accounts are a lost cause - or you will be if you go to one.

Around town you can spot the private school kids - all white in freshly pressed coloured t-shirt and shorts, in an orderly line in a park, museum or cultural centre. The rest are hanging out, playing football in the street or at least not so visible.

The school in Heliopolis is the culmination of the self helping, self organising spirit that pervades the shanty town. The head is relaxed and casual but a man on a mission. In 1999 a 16 year old girl pupil was murdered on her way home, shot five times. He tells how, on his way out of the morgue, he decided that things had to change, that the school should take responsibility and take a leadership role in the community. In effect that that the moral reconstruction of the favella should start with the children and they in turn would lead Heliopolis in a new direction.

The first statement back then was to hold a Peace March through the streets, to lay down their intent. This now happens every year, but it is in the day to teaching that the work is really done.

We are taken on a tour of the school which now has an attached cultural and science centre - a communal place for the development of the mechanical arts - science, art, theatre and so on. In the main classroom there are over 100 children, a giant of a class. But they are seated in clusters of six each around a table and serviced by about 4 or so teachers. The tables break off into smaller rooms to work on a project and then come back to the main class to feed back and teach the others what they have learned. In this Q & A the children are sharp and witty, but also quiet and all well behaved. It is impressive to see a school working well, not just as a place of education, but also as a social model.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 13/03/10 at 14:59 0 Comments

Saturday 13 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Brought to you in association with Lego

Social solutions through craft

Another facet of the UNAS project is a kind of school house for children out of school that prioritises kids from difficult backgrounds, abusive or violent homes or learning difficulties. This schoolhouse/poorhouse works to equip the children of Heliopolis with the skills to operate in society and instill an ethical framework in the community.

One example we are shown is a project for the children to create and design machines that make for better living in the favella, such as litter collecting machines. This project is heavily sponsored by Lego. If you were of a cynical bent you would think this is part of an extensive global marketing strategy, but I'd like to believe that there is an interesting reworking of Victorian industrial altruism at play here.

In a Q and A session with the children it is clear what the real value of Britsh Culture is, when the first question is "Do you know Beckham".

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 13/03/10 at 13:34 1 Comment

Saturday 13 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Heliopolis FM

Big shout out to Jezzer and Big Al in Londin

Strictly zoo format

Next stop to the fevella's own community radio station, run by volunteers and broadcasting 6.00 am to midnight every day. The station is run on a shoestring budget, often earning an income through advertising or exchange. They recently aquired a sofa for the studio in exchange for 3 months of free advertising for the sofa shop.

The most popular music is of course a hybrid of tradtional and R&B and everything else. Sao Paulo is basically a city created by immigration, feeding its voracious growth. Music, along with football, is their greatest mode of expression.

Jeremy and I are interviewed on air and we are inreasingly feeling like Prince Charles on tour.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 13/03/10 at 13:20 0 Comments

Friday 12 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

UNAS Library

Jeremy and Carlos in the library

Have you got any Dick Francis in large print?

First stop in Heliopolis is to vist the UNAS library, this was the beginning of the project. The library is run for the community with all the books donated by the public. The books are lent on a trust basis, with no membership scheme. The library also hosts book clubs, poetry and rap nights.

The most popular books are from the philosophy section.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 12/03/10 at 22:34 0 Comments

Thursday 11 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Heliopolis

A sneaked photo of the street from my phone

Tuesday, day two, and in at the deep end. Jeremy and I are taken to Heliopolis, Sao Paulo's largest and poorest favella; a jerry built shanty town of 125,000 people with a badass reputation to match. We are warned not to take photographs in the street as the whole district is run by the drug barons who might object to any pictures that might reveal the mechanics of their trade. And we don't want to look like stupid tourists.

We are here to meet the people who run UNAS a social project to educate and improve the outlook of the citizens of Heliopolis.

Interestingly the favella is doesn't come across as the murderous midden heap one is lead to believe but an amazing example of a self organising society. Throughout it's rambling, crumbling streets are all the shops, restaurants and services you would hope to have in a town, albeit self governed by the druglords.

UNAS is exactly what we needed to see, a contemporary version of a Victorian Mechanics Institute, spread throughout a number of ramshackle buildings across the town - library, sports hall, radio station, schoolhouse and so on. UNAS emerged from the vision of one man and has spread to become the ethical backbone of the community.

In what is perhaps the equivalent of the poorhouse the children work on projects (with Lego Technical) to provide electronic/robotic solutions to communal problems, like litter collection or hygiene. John Ruskin would be most enthused.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 11/03/10 at 18:35 1 Comment

Wednesday 10 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

An Education

Carlos the educator gives Jeremy a lesson in numbers

Niemeyer art hangout

Monday afternoon after a good lunch in the park we meet the education team. Carlo shows us a map of the city and explains that education is the make or break of the 2010 Bienal. In 2008 it got a bad name for being closed off and disconnected from the city folk. Not helped by the fact that as a concept a whole floor of the Bienal was left empty, which was subsequently raided by graffiti aritsts.

To answer this they have set a target for 2010 to have 400,000 to take part in the education programme (the overall headcount for each Bienal is 1 million. For this they are recruiting somewhere in the region of 300 education staff.

School children from across the ciy will be bussed in and out, class rooms built and the army of art teachers put to work to shape the Paulinos of the future.

In the evening we go for a quick drink in a residency programme set up by Helmut from Rio in another Niemeyer apartment block, meeting other artists and checking out the cool blue bathroom.

Then onto a Japanese restaurant to do some top drawer sushi. Sao Paulo has the oldest and largest Japanese community (ever) with over 2 million resident.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/03/10 at 21:57 0 Comments

Wednesday 10 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Waving a straw in the Albert Hall

Welcome to the pleasure box

Going for a tiring expedition around the Bienal with the curatorial team and architect

Check the ramps on that

The task of making a meaningful statement in a city you don't know is bad enough. Making a meaningful statement in a city you don't know and has a population of around 16 million is a bit worse. And seeing as it has an exhibition venue to match adds a little icing on the top of that problem too.

We are shown around the empty Bienal exhibition building which is like three Turbine Halls together. And that's just one floor of three. All beautifully done by Mr Niemeyer of course.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/03/10 at 21:47 0 Comments

Wednesday 10 March '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Ruskin goes to Sao Paulo

One of Oscar Niemeyer's Bienal Park Fruit Fancies

Sao Paulo at night through a Niemeyer brise soleil

This is the first of a number of dispatches from Sao Paulo, Brazil.
I'm here with Jeremy Deller to develop a project with him for the Sao Paulo Bienal this coming September. It came out the project we were working on for the Whitworth Ruskin show, a film by Jeremy on the wrestler Adrian Street, which has a lot to say on the Ruskinian themes of education, social development, craft, labour, industry, ethics, aesthetics and self improvement.

Adrian was born into a coal mining family in south wales, but escaped this life through bodybuilding, costume making and wrestling, transforming himself in to The Queen Bitch of Pro Wrestling. He now lives (aged 68 and still wrestlng) in LA, running a cottage industry in wrestling costume production.

The plan is to combine this with a rethinking and reworking of the victorian Mechanics Institute and make it work in the context of the Bienal and Sao Paulo.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 10/03/10 at 13:11 0 Comments

Tuesday 2 February '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Ruskin's Relational Aesthetics

Turn your screen to view in its original orientation

I gave a lecture recently to some of the sudents at Chelsea School of Art. One of their number, the young master Robert Mead, was most enthused therein by such talk of Mr Ruskin's forebearance of all things discursive, relational and altermodern. He has since written in haste to share his essay Ruskin's Idea of Relation and it's Connection to Post Modern Painting, which I attach for any reader wishing to pursue this line of enquiry.

I would be tempted to say one might take his arguments as applicable to Tintorett as to Salle, but this is for another occasion and we must, in the first instance, take delight in this exhumation by youth so that that these thoughts may be possessed of the minds of the masses.

Posted by Alistair Hudson on 02/02/10 at 16:27 0 Comments

Sunday 17 January '10
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Ruskin Soup

Ruskin Soup

Now we've established that big John Ruskin is worth saving from the dreaded Heritage Vampires, how do we sustain and nourish ourselves on his memory? Ruskin Soup of course!

According to Adam Sutherland, Ruskin was always a man with a plan - and this went as far as having an idea that the working man should always have the recipe for a perfect soup on hand. Cue the ruthless pursuit of a food metaphor by yours truly while Adam cooks. What was Ruskin Soup? Did Ruskin have the ingredients? Could soup - or art for that matter - really sustain and nourish the Ruskinian working woman or man? And how about their fractured and fissured twenty first century counterparts? Can Ruskin's recipes really help us find the way out of the post-postmordern stew were slowly simmering in? All - or more likely none - of these questions will be answered in our culinary homage to the late, great Big John Ruskin (and Keith Floyd).

Posted by John Byrne on 17/01/10 at 16:52 0 Comments

Monday 9 November '09
(from The John Ruskin Memorial Blog)

Zombie Ruskin Takes On The Heritage Vampires.

Charlie Gere wants to do wonderful things to the corps of John Ruskin and, to my surprise, I don't just want to watch, I want to join in!

Charlie, like myself, thinks that the heritage vampires have tried their hardest to reduce Ruskin to nothing more than an anachronistic token of neo-conservative Victorian Chic. In thier eyes, nothing remins of Big JR and his legacy besides a sign-post to a lost past and dreams of medieval craft-based evangelism.

In this interview, shot in the heartland of the academic Ruskinian heritage industry - Charlie outlines his conviction that Big JR may still be able to influence us positively from beyond the grave of museology. Tipping a wink and a nod to Derrida's book 'Spectres of Marx' (in my hazy left-wing mind his finest work), Mr Gere asserts that Big JR haunts us still, like a spectre of the undead, reminding us that ethics is at the heart of any re-assessment of what art actually is and can do.

Posted by John Byrne on 09/11/09 at 06:25 0 Comments

Topics: 'Ruskin' 'the undead and art'