Lecture at Havering College, Harrow Lodge, Romford, Essex.
Wednesday 15/03/06
Transcript.
Panel:
Chris Bird (CB) - The Hut Project
Ian Evans (IE) - The Hut Project
Alec Steadman (AS) - The Hut Project
Nick Willats (NW) - Artist in residence, Havering College
Sue Withers (SW) - Fine Art foundation tutor
Members of the audience are denoted by (AM)
SW - I'm going to start by giving a brief introduction as to how the last three days came about. Nick was a foundation student here when I first started teaching and so I went to see his degree show in the summer, which he collaborated with The Hut Project on for his final piece. I thought that was very interesting and as we'd started this residency programme I suggested Nick apply to do that. And from there you know about because he's been involved since the first six weeks so you've seen him on a regular basis. And so Nick arranged with The Hut Project to do this this week. So I'm going to hand over to Nick and he can explain more about his relationship with them.
NW - I invited The Hut Project in, as an extension of my role here as artist in residence. I started to think about what it was I wanted to do here, it wasn't about simply having a show of my own work, that wouldn't have been interesting enough. I used to come here and so felt an affiliation to the site and felt my mission to some degree was to expose different approaches to making art works and approaches to artistic practice that could extend beyond the making of objects, along with other aspects that I think are important to any contemporary artist, notions of collaboration and collaborative practice. And so the best way to talk about these would be to have these guys come in and do some kind of talk for you. But they thought it would be more interesting to enact the process of a practice that comes into a situation and forms itself around that context and so this site specifically. Which is where I guess I bring you guys in.
AS - So we were invited in to do a lecture today, but rather than just give an hour long speech about our practice we decided to enact what it is we do, I guess to make it more viable and interesting for us.
IE - But also to gather material based on what we found on the site and from the students, to use not in a traditional lecture format but to start a discussion through the work.
AS - At the moment we're going through a series of invitations to give lectures at various sites. Part of our practice is about always engaging in the sites we are in so the three days here is part of a real development of our own practice. So we came in on Monday, we previously knew a few things from talking to Nick about the fact that the gallery space used to be the staff room and the space had been split in two and so there was a series of things around that that we found interesting. So we undertook a series of practical interventions, we took the wood down that was covering the windows...
CB - partly because this was just a horrible space and as we were more or less moving in for three days it was about how to make the space bearable for ourselves. Which I suppose is the pre-cursor to an explanation of what we did. We tried to adapt the space so that it works for us as a group and so, in turn, for a viewer coming to the work that we do. The space has to function in some way that doesn't necessitate placing objects in space for contemplation but it's an actual physical thing that's happening, that's attempting to engage directly with an audience.
IE - But of course we did put an object in the space, we took the wood panelling we had taken down and made a barrier to disrupt the flow of staff who kind of scurry through and tend to ignore what is going on in here.
CB - One of the first things we noticed when we came to the space was the speed the distance from that door to that door was taken...
AS - and how many times a day...
CB - its this constant flow, you know there's a thing on the door to stop it from banging which suggests the frequency of how often that door gets used and so the number of people passing through this space. So we wanted to slow that down in some way to make this space become a functioning space again, people actually have to move around the barrier, so just in that simple action they're engaging with this space much more than they would normally. By having to move around the barrier the space becomes really physical and you become more aware of it.
AS - So, through disrupting a standard daily act of moving from that door to that door which people would generally not think about, try and begin a process of introspection, getting people to analyse the site and use that as a starting point to look further.
CB - There's been a number of times when people have walked through and walked straight into the barrier, they've been doing that journey for so long, ten years in some cases, they couldn't negotiate this thing being in front of them. So a really simple mechanism to start people thinking about this site, which is going to be a dead site from June onwards, there's no potential future use for this building so it just becomes abandoned, and there's a real history to this site, you can actually see it in the building with all the stuff on the walls and how the site is used by the students with all the stickers, very unorthodox uses of a building...
NW - like the drawing on the walls which is never going to happen at the new site...
IE - and you know that's something we made use of with the fly posting of the responses from the interviews we conducted.
AS - Yes, but to come back to the physicality within the space, we also drew a line between the two spaces. We removed the tiles running across the ceiling and into the staff room, again partly to create some sort of difference, to get people to start looking at the space, and again talking about the fact that this used to be one room, in a sense highlighting its history. Also there's a slight audibleness to it in that staff conversations could then be heard in a space that is opened to students...
IE - what was interesting though is that actually you couldn't make out what anyone was saying but there was a real fear of that happening, so it really activated something in the staff, this inner sanctum and the conversations that go on in there, what would happen if people heard it? We don't know, but again it's symptomatic of doing something that's active, it does something and has a function which I think is important for everything we do.
CB - And also, that is a very recognisable art trope; you can look at Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Long...
AS - I think these small actions are actually... historically there's been a lineage of people doing these as a core focus of their practice but I think we use them with a certain flippancy, using them as tools to generate something else that is actually our practice. So we're kind of using what other artists do as their sole work as a mechanism for something else.
IE - Yes, so the people approaching us and saying, 'Can you hear that? Are the students going to be able to hear what's going on in there? Are you broadcasting it?' for us that's the interesting thing not the actual drawing of a line as you could call it.
Audience member ( AM ) - So were you hoping that things that shouldn't be heard would be heard?
CB - No, I'm sure that for the three days that we've been here the operation that takes place in that room and the way the dynamic works will have changed because of actions that we have taken and that's what we wanted it to do, change the dynamic, its about effecting some kind of shift out of a norm.
AM - Do you reckon its impacting more on the staff than the students?
AS - I think these physical things have and then I think there's a second line of the project, which is really the core of the project, which was a series of interviews we conducted with students.
IE - Just to talk for a moment about movement. We were interested in the idea that the foundation course is really transient, the HNC and the HND have a space but the foundation people don't and so move around. So in a similar way in which we put that barrier to the flow of the staff moving in and out of the staff room, we wanted to interrupt the students flow as they moved around by sending Nick out to pluck people and bring them in. So that was the mechanism for starting the interviews.
AS - And so what we did with the interviews was ask...I mean really we were trying to get students to project around their future. There's a whole set of things that we are talking about, transience, the movement around the space, the transience of this site. A foundation course is a very rapid moment in an art education, in a progression, so we talked to students in an attempt to get them to think about their position within the broader scheme of art education and find out where they think they're going and what they hope to get from it.
NW - But also to question the value of foundation courses as well. We'd had talks about how foundation courses are diminishing and being closed down...
IE - one of the people we interviewed said that if this course wasn't here he'd be cutting hair, which for that person wasn't a negative thing, he would have been happy cutting hair but it highlighted for us the importance of courses like this as a steppingstone...
NW - and for someone else who wasn't sure what avenue to go down, foundation was a good point to try different things out to inform their choice.
AM - Were you impressed or shocked by the answers you got?
AS - I guess we knew already, we got what we thought we'd get.
AM - Is that disappointing?
NW - The point of the interviews was to employ a mechanism to engage with the students, it wasn't a means to study and find something out was just a point of engagement.
AM - Are your questions over determined, are you telling people what to think?
CB - I think that's quite possible.
AM - Maybe you should rephrase your questions.
IE - Well I don't know, lets ask someone we interviewed (acknowledging student in the audience who had been interviewed) did you find that our questions were over determined and we were trying to lead you?
AM - They were kind of leading.
AS - Yes, I think they were in different interviews as well but again I think the point is that we weren't particularly trying to get at anything, it was simply another mechanism to generate an engagement and recognition of our presence.
AM - Did you explain that before the interviews?
IE - I think we explained who we were and why we were here and we asked them general questions about their experience of the foundation course.
CB - It's important to state here that there's no ambivalence in our approach, we do have a position and we're not attempting to get a really broad overall analysis of students passing through the foundation system and how that reflects on art education. It's very much about what we think that (foundation) is.
AM - So obviously you all did foundation and loved it?
AS - You didn't do one did you?
CB - No.
AS - I did and thought it was alright.
IE - Yes, I did and had a mixed experience.
AS - Actually I had a positive experience.
CB - But again coming back to this idea of mechanisms in the production of art, the interviews were part of a bigger mechanism which required getting some quotes. We wanted to create a presence for the students that are here at this moment to fix around the building. All the art seen around this site in some way represents the institution, in that it's been selected by tutors from various courses and put on the walls, so there's a value judgment being placed on this work...
AS - or because it's big...
IE - but it represents students from the past and doesn't reflect the transience of the course and the people who are on the course now. And so we thought it would be more relevant to have people who are here now, to have there thoughts up on the wall.
CB - So around the site we've taken works off the walls and replaced them with fly posted quotes from the interviews. There's a real sense of permanence there now with the quotes being glued to the fabric of the building, there isn't going to be another flow of students through this site so they are there for good...
IE - although were not trying to illustrate that it's simply one of the conditions for making the work.
AM - Why did you repeat the quotes so many times, is that an important part of it?
CB - We wanted to replicate the size of the work that was there...
AM - but that affects the message if you're seeing something repeated, I don't know if that makes something stronger or actually weakens it.
CB - I think it makes it stronger because I'm sure these are constant themes that come up.
AM - It kind of starts to look like wallpaper.
AS - But I think that adds to it, it's quite a mundane engagement about something that's not extraordinary in any way and so through the repetition they provoke more of an analysis.
IE - I think because the site is heavily graffitied and stencilled we thought just a single thing would kind of be lost which may actually have been really nice.
AS - Often what we do is engage within our means. So we came to the site with nothing and used the facilities that were available to us, rather than use any other wood we pulled down the wall to build what we needed and printed using the printers that the students would.
SW - How did you select the part of the interviews you would use for the quotes?
IE - In haste!
AM - Any consultation with the student?
AS - No, again it was very much about us and what we thought was interesting to pull out.
IE - We did acknowledge before each interview that that is what we would do. We didn't offer the choice to select that with us. I think that's one way we differ from a lot of 90's socially engaged collaborative practice in that were not about giving anything as such, in that, there's a particular type of work that I don't think we are and that would be a symptom of that.
AS - So I think we took quotes that were significant for the types of things that we were trying to find out.
CB - Working like this involves a constant dialogue and the quotes that we pulled out were influenced by the conversations we were having around these three days. We identified things within the interviews that were part of our dialogue.
AM - Have you been surprised by anything?
AS - We've had this kind of stealth presence, we came in as non students and non staff, generally people weren't aware of who we were and what we were doing and so we just went around and did it, that was a surprise.
CB - We could have robbed the place blind!
AM - So what do you think you'll take away from this?
CB - It seems that everything we do helps us to focus on what we're doing as a whole. Even though we're a collective that works collaboratively we don't have a manifesto, so everything we do helps us to figure out what it is we're doing and where we're positioning ourselves and what that's about. We're always attempting not to conclude so that it's a constant process...
IE - I suppose the only tag line we have is that we're conducting a real time investigation into the mechanisms that distribute art as we go through them.
AS - I don't think we've come here to run a 'Hut Project' project. We're here to give a lecture which is part of a series of art world systems that we're going through at the moment in various institutions. So we're investigating the lecture format and how you do that through three days of generating material which goes towards the talk we were invited to do.
AM - So do you see that within an educational structure - teaching and learning - you've come here to provide a lecture that's not necessarily instruction but based on the ideas of teaching whilst primarily learning.
IE - Isn't that an interesting model for education?
AM - It's a model that exists but it's a model that's not necessarily promoted.
AS - So do you feel through your teaching you learn?
AM - You have to. In your general everyday life you don't have more than a hundred friends so the idea that you deal with a hundred people in a week, you know their names, their brothers and sisters, their jobs and you get them through by finding out what they're interested in so they actually achieve...
IE - so it's essentially a social act...
AM - Its not altruistic...
SW - but it is definitely social, without a doubt.
IE - But I think it's important to say that it's not altruistic.
AM - Isn't it?
CB - No, this isn't for the greater good.
AM - Then why am I here?
CB - Because your interested?
AM - No actually I'm thinking 'so what'. You've failed to convince me you're doing anything, are we the work?
CB - No.
AM - Is this a lecture?
IE - Of sorts.
CB - We're talking about our practice via what we've done over the last three days.
AM - You're talking to yourselves and then justifying yourselves against what we say.
IE - I would hope that we've set this up so people can get involved, and you are getting involved.
AM - I can't see any art here, I can't see any form.
AS - And do you think art has to have a form?
AM -Yes, name one that's formless? Even if its ideas it still has a form.
IE - Are the structures that we set up to make things happen not a form?
AM - It seems to me the more difficult this becomes the more art it becomes, because up until now its not been difficult at all.
AS - The harder it is to understand?
AM - No, the more difficult it becomes for all the people in here the more like art it becomes, if it's just a pleasant tea party then its nothing.
The Hut Project - Erm...
AM - so now you're all performing for me.
AS - Yes
AM - So what am I now?
AS - I'm sorry I keep saying yes here but what is it you're asking, where does the art lie?
AM - I'm asking awkward questions so what have I just become?
IE - You're an audience member and you're a participant.
CB and AS - Yes.
AS - Are you trying to find out what the core of the project is and what we're calling art?
AM - I'm trying to find out what the hell your doing, because I'm absolutely uncertain what your doing, which is probably a good thing, but I'm not sure how far it goes.
AM - How far would you like it to go?
AM - Me, all the tiles off... I mean if your going to disrupt this wall, do something with it.
CB - Well we could run in there with a big bat and hit people over the head, but what would that do?
AM - But the only thing that was there (in the staff room) was a radio going and I was thinking, oh, there's something going on next door, but I could stay in there and listen to what you were doing.
CB - Of course you could but then that makes you a passive viewer now you're an active one.
SW - To some people who've been on the site for years and years the physical disruption was massive. You're (acknowledging audience member) more likely to absorb that anyway because you are possibly more interested and aware of what is going on in the gallery space because its somewhere you've exhibited and used and made your own, whereas the majority of members of staff don't use it for themselves, they might facilitate an exhibition of student work, but it's one of those really weird spaces because it doesn't really belong to the students either, which is something I started to think about because of what you were doing, the fact that the impact was so much more on the staff than the students made me think - well how can the students own any of this space at all.
CB - That's the point in terms of your question (acknowledging audience member) as to what are you in this, part of what this is about is to provoke you to question your relationship to this space.
AM - I don't mind having a status that's unclear, but I want that to be exciting if I'm going to give up my time for this.
AS - Well I think we do have an awkward relationship with our audience because we try and not be a type of relational practice that's about creating an exciting experience for an audience, but then what do we provide instead?...
CB - I'm not sure it's our role to provide anything.
AM - So if I can walk away from this thinking so what, you've failed right?
CB - Not necessarily.
AM - Maybe the work should be called, 'So What'.
CB - I don't agree, I think everything we've done over the last three days has been really interesting and has really affected the building and how people negotiate it. To say 'so what', firstly I just don't understand and more importantly I think it's a pointless thing to say.
AM - I think it's the hardest question to answer.
(...)
AM - Do you think your practice is exclusive?
IE - I think it defines its audience quite specifically, but I think it's quite open about that.
AS - And I think there's often a two tier audience, there's people on the ground who contribute material for the production of the work and then there's an audience who look at the project as a whole. So I think we engage with people at different levels but a very select group each time.
CB - Our audience is certainly getting smaller and smaller.
AS - Well you know while we're talking about this, that wall and the line to me are amazingly funny, not for their practical intervention, but for their art world jokiness. The fact that people would do these things in isolation and pose it as the basis for a meaningful practice is ridiculous, but I'm sure that that's not funny to anyone else.
IE - But I think strategies like using radio try to address that exclusivity, it's wquite superficial, we don't know if people listen, but it is an act of making public.
CB - You know, the audience for this is very small, we've treated this as an artwork that we've produced but to a very particular public.
AS - We haven't produced an artwork over three days, we've engaged in a process of 'arting', I think we 'arted' for three days now we're talking.
AM - Its called mutual masturbation I think.
IE - But with cleaner hands.
SW - On that note, perhaps its time to finish, thank you very much indeed.
The Hut Project - Thank you.