A SPLENDID THING INDEED
posted by: Rebecca Conroy 08th October 2009What do you get when you cross a textiles artist and an architect? Fabritecture, of course. Okay, what if you select ten of the country’s brightest young artists, shack them up in a regional NSW town, bombard them with ten provocateurs for three weeks and then bus them all to Splendour in the Grass music festival? A very Splendid Arts Lab, indeed.
Splendid Arts Lab took place for the first time this year in Lismore from the July 20 to the 7 August involving ten artists and a team of artist provocateurs. The lab was conceived as an experiment in bringing together young and emerging artists interested in transcending their disciplines and working collaboratively to generate new work for mass audiences on a music festival site. The Splendid Arts Lab is a joint funding partnership between Australia Council and Splendour in the Grass through the Opportunities for Young and Emerging initiative, anchored by local partners, Lismore Regional Gallery, NORPA, and Arts Northern Rivers, and aims to build on the culture of experimentation and interdisciplinary arts practice in Australia.
WANDERING OUT LOUD
The three week lab was a challenging and critical environment which provided a context for thinking out loud, for instigating possible collaborations, and for the ten artists to be provoked by several leading arts practitioners from a broad range of disciplines.
For artists in this country to be able to reflect critically on their own practice, to respond to a new site and generate dialogue with others for such an extended period of time, is a profound luxury - a fact that did not go unappreciated by these ten splendid artists.
The location of the lab worked well to physically disassociate them from the usual pressures of being immersed in their home cities and the pace of working on a project by project basis, and all the frantic and fractured concentrations of time it entails. This thinking space allowed the artists to stretch their creative legs and wander without intention. Tasks and exercises in the lab required the artists to approach things from different sides, to self interrogate, and to wonder out loud.
CROSS BOW ART FORMS
Cross art form collaborations characterise a distinct but fluctuating segment of the Australian contemporary art scene. A mongrel beast, the practice resists easy categorisation, slipping in and out of more stable genres/disciplines/practices. With so much dense time for reflection at the lab, of course we were bound to invent new words for newly thought about occasions and “(sub)em/merging practices”. An intersection of art forms and ideas, described by one of the splendid artists as suggesting the strength of a cross bow and arrow where the contributing points and ideas come together to form a powerful launching point.
Collaboration is inextricably bound up in process; the sum of its parts being greater than the whole. It is this component that heralds the tricky and slippery terrain, making it a difficult beast to slot into neat categories. For all its concrete manifestations and creations, it belies a messy human form, contingent on relationships with no guarantee of success nor prefabricated formula to chart the way.
It is important to understand the distinction between multi art form and cross art form and inter-art form. Whilst this may seem like a semantic miasma, the lab revealed itself as a significant point of articulation for these artists, some of whom cross easily across disciplines and have a solid grasp of their practice along this spectrum, while others are merely curious and interested to expand along these lines. Cross art form collaboration is NOT a textiles artist working alongside an architect; it is not a colour palate mixed according to a desired composition. Cross art form is bound up in process; it is process that is driving the cross art form practice as a known amalgamated entity. It became apparent therefore for us to comprehensively understand this and to design the lab around this sensitivity to the tangible and intangible traces of cross art form collaboration.
OPEN ART SURGERY
The first week gently led the artists on a pleasant albeit at times awkward introductory week of grounding them in their skins and the site - the superbly situated Italo-Australia Club run by Jeff. Here was the perfect hybrid space declared with large hyphenated lettering on the front of the building – just ripe for the setting of a mongrel art camp. Jeff himself personified the perfect blend of Australian larrikinism and Italian charm. And Lismore blessed us with 21 days of 21 degree weather. Did I mention the $3 schooners at the bar?
In week two the lab shifted ground into a dissection of one’s own practice and the interrogation of ideas during formal one on one surgeries with the provocateurs. Micro-surgeries also slipped in through dinner table conversations, on your bike riding to the lab site, late at night on the verandah with a full moon serenaded by Domenico de Clario’s blindfold piano improvisations, or inside a sand nest as the sun climbed over Byron bay, crowning the second day of Splendour in the Grass.
By the final week, already time was running out the door, as the Splendid Ten scrambled to push out an ‘itch’, a downgraded Pitch presentation to the partners and peers on the project. More than a dozen handsome ideas emerged, criss-crossing through site and across disciplines, with varying degrees of artist combos. Now the hard work begins in the refining. Over the next few months the artists embark on a mentoring process, long distance for some, and self-initiated get togethers to further develop their collaborative proposals which they will pitch in early January to be considered for commission by Splendour in the Grass.
A lot can happen in that time. In the meantime, there is time to imagine bracing yourself for 17500 hedonistic festival-goers, and scrambling to find a patch where your ‘art’ may grow, (and be noticed). Realising the Splendour of it all (and the complete absence of grass). Discovering regional heart beats in a rainbow country. Knowing you will return, and drag everyone else back with you.
Submit a Comment
Splendid reserves the right to restrict comments that do not contribute constructively to the conversation at hand, contain profanity, personal attacks or seek to promote a personal or unrelated business.