Can you tell us a little about the methodologies you employed in the Open Studios research project?

Well, in the first instance we wanted to refuse to indulge the expectations of the audience by not providing singular works of art to be viewed in the standard mode of 'detached opticality' - so that was the initial reason to engage in a live process, which turned out to be an ethnographic survey. But before we even got to the surveying stage there was the opening night to contend with. So initially there was a refusal of the standard 'private view' model as well - less out of belligerence than an understanding that this particular mode of distribution wasn't suited to the kind of production that we were engaged in. The private view, for the artist, serves primarily as an opportunity to finally detach themselves from a finished piece of work, and begin a discussion as to its relative failures or successes within the context of that particular exhibition. Since our actual work hadn't begun at this stage it seemed misleading to enter fully into the private view jamboree. Insofar as we have always aimed to implicate ourselves 'inside' and 'outside' institutional structures, it seemed logical to engage the audience in a piece of work that had the appearance (at least to us) of 'looking like art' yet was essentially unrelated to the process that we considered to be the actual art-making. To this end we prepared an explanatory text to cover the door of the studio, which would remain closed on the opening evening. In this way we intended to simultaneously give and refuse to give a work of art to the audience, in the singular fashion that we presumed them to expect. A decision was taken at this stage that to open our doors and begin the surveying process on the opening evening would jeopardise the results of our research, since such events tend to be attended by participating artists' friends and families or other artists and art students after a free beer, rather than a more genuine 'open studios audience' that we thought might attend over the rest of the weekend. In retrospect it seems clear that this factor would not have harmed our analysis, merely added another element to it, but the decision to remain closed for the private view had some kind of symbolic importance for us. Also the actual text we placed on the door provided a convenient way of explaining what we would be doing over the weekend itself - sparing us around seventy regurgitations of the same introduction to every participant - and set the tone for our encounter with the public.

So what was the initial aim of conducting an ethnographic survey - of course it was a live process rather than a singular work, but why did you choose that particular kind of live process rather than another?

On the one hand it reflected a genuine bemusement, if not concerning the function of events such as the Open Studios, then certainly as to the kinds of people that attended them, and why. If such events exist to promote the visibility of artists who might otherwise have little or none, then what good would it do for those artists to be exposed to this particular audience - what could this audience offer them? If the aim of such events is to reveal to a general public the 'secret mechanisms' of artistic production, then it seemed only to reinforce a long redundant mythology of the status of the artist as lone producer. If the role of such events is to provide an opportunity for collectors, gallerists and curators to pick up new artists, then this seemed to us to be somewhat optimistic - it has been our experience that such relationships tend to be formed through an informal network of friendships, introductions, and academic or professional engagements. The notion of the young artist being 'discovered' by an important collector at showcase events such as degree shows is an unhelpful mythology that pervades not just art schools but young artists working in the real world as well. In this respect the Open Studios event seemed to us to reflect and affirm a wider culture of aspiration cum delusion cum disappointment, which should by now be being eroded rather than promulgated.

The whole enterprise of the event seemed to us to be a typical example of lazy thinking on the part of the people with the purse strings; a rather easy, if ineffective, way to kill two oft-cited birds with one stone - access to art for a general public, and the uncritical promotion of so-called 'young artists'. Could the (not insignificant) sums of money that had been spent on the promotion of the event have been better used elsewhere - perhaps in the commissioning of new works by 'young artists' rather than simply trying to boost access to art of an unknown kind and quality? Again, this approach reflects broader cultural tendencies: a focus on quantity over quality that in turn reflects a dependence on quantitative performance indicators and statistics; volume of access to education over standards in schools and universities; promoting access to IT skills without the providing the broader social skills required to take advantage of them and the like. It was for this reason that we took advantage of the free taxi shuttle service that Arts Unwrapped had provided between the various participating studios to make a video. There were two taxis doing the rounds between the studios that weekend, and every other weekend that the event ran at different studios, for six hours a day. How much does it cost to have twelve hours of taxi-time in London, for three weekends of Open Studios? Which equates to how many commissioned artworks? We weren't trying to suggest that a shuttle service is a bad idea per se (no doubt there are disability access requirements to cover, even though the building we operated from doesn't have a lift), but on the round trip on which we came along for the ride, nobody used the service! Not one! And to generalise further from particularities, the taxi driver who kindly let us join him with our camera wasn't aware of the nature of the event he was providing a service for, had no idea of the Open Studios event. Is it too much to extrapolate from this detail that money spent raising awareness of cultural events in general only does so among an already informed audience? The audience that already has the privilege of cultural capital and leisure time? Again, this is not to suggest that all art events should be seeking a generalised extended audience, in fact I think the opposite is often true, but we suspected that it was just such an audience that was targeted by Arts Unwrapped in its promotion of the Open Studios event, for reasons well known to anyone who has ever had to apply for funding for the arts.

Sure, but to get back to the reasons that you chose surveying as a methodology - can you talk a bit more about that, and how that surveying process unfolded over the weekend after the initial act of refusal at the private view?

The decision to undertake the survey did arise from an element of genuine curiosity, on the one hand, but also as a way of ensuring a direct, and quite specific kind of engagement with that audience. Our audience, provided they had crossed the threshold of the studio and agreed to fill out a questionnaire, were being asked to take part in an act that involves some kind of reflection on their own reasons for being involved in the open studios event, and hopefully, later on, on their complicity in the process of producing our artwork as well. We wanted to ask, what are the reasons for them being here? What do they intend to do here? Can we make connections between the other social indicators that we are asking them to provide for us, and the kind of work they expect to find at this event? More broadly, if the consumption of art is a form of cultural capital then what kind of capital is there to be gained for the audience in attending such an event?

Also, through the live surveying process, the act of producing any work of art really no longer belongs to us as artists in any traditional sense. It's an over-used phrase by now, to be sure, but we facilitated the production of the artwork, rather than genuinely undertaking it ourselves. But there's a more important point to be made here regarding such a method of working. We wanted to make sure that the resonance of such an event, and we do have a general methodology that is event-based, could continue in some form beyond the timescale of the event itself, and beyond the limitations of standard photographic documentation of art. I think there were several methods we could have employed to engage the audience in some way beyond just detached opticality, but undertaking a survey leaves a concrete residue from that encounter, that then becomes the material for further production - this publication gives you one example, a lecture might be another, or on a website. And of course through these outlets we can then make the raw data available to a new audience in order to implicate their own inferences as to the nature of the audience and the participating artists. I think that's just as beneficial as writing a formal analysis ourselves, because any really full dissection of the data set that we could conduct ourselves would involve dredging up our own presuppositions and prejudices about the audience and participants, when I think its more interesting to pass that possibility back out to another public. For example, what do you make of the fact that the most read publication by the Open Studios audience (cited almost twice as many times as any other) is The Guardian? For some people that is a meaningless statistic, possibly because they read the same newspaper themselves, or maybe because they take it as given that its readers are in thrall a particular kind of liberal democratic pluralism that that publication upholds, and of which art events such as the Open Studios are a natural consequence? I think it's interesting to let those secondary inferences come out in yet another audience, more than it is to see photographs of an audience 'engaging' in an 'interactive artwork' that ends at a definite time and place. Hence the choice of the survey as a process that facilitates future resonances, rather than other methods that would have died with the end of the event. This was also why we attempted to make an ad-hoc exhibition with the data we had gathered, at the closing of the Open Studios weekend. This worked as a neat conclusion, a conceptual conceit that seemed to fit the rationale of the project, and also showed us how we might make the material we had gathered work best for us.

And is this reasoning related to your decision to broadcast on FM radio from the studio, or to give cameras to the audience?

Yes and no. The FM broadcast was designed as a further stage of resonance, a kind of real-time publication - but in a way that dealt with space rather than duration, and that made the project potentially public in a way that the restricted nature of the Open Studios event could not. I mentioned earlier that art shouldn't always try to cater to a more generalised audience, so I'm happy to contradict myself and say that that's exactly how the radio broadcast was designed to operate - or at least it offered the event to the surrounding streets, even if it didn't tailor the event to that audience specifically. And of course it was hoped it would entice the artists in the block to fill out their questionnaires - only fifteen out of around sixty in the block did so in the end. So no, the radio broadcast didn't extend the resonance of the project in time, but did do in terms of physical space. As for the cameras, the chief purpose of that was to activate and make visible the internal selection processes that inevitably go on in any kind of viewing of art - because we'd hope that even detached opticality implies some kind of mental process! And of course those mental acts of selection do go on. But what's perhaps most interesting in the results of that procedure is how far people engaged in general with our request - to photograph their favourite work at the event - rather than finding out which particular paintings or drawings they liked best. As a body of photographs all together you notice how few people actually photographed artworks. Instead there are loads of pictures of fire extinguishers, exit signs, smiling friends. And while you could argue that that reflects the quality of the work on show, I don't think that's the case, in fact its got more to do with the level of engagement of the audience with our project particularly, but more generally with the whole Open Studios enterprise - and even more generally with art itself. I think what that shows is that the event was seen as part of a leisurely Saturday or Sunday's activity, like walking the dog, or taking the kids down Hackney City Farm, or supping a cappuccino on Broadway Market. I don't mean to suggest that we'd prefer the hushed corridors of the museum, its simply a question of engagement and being realistic about the kind of audiences you can expect to reach when you approach the organisation of such an event. Perhaps if we'd asked people to photograph the work they hated most they'd have got more involved! And of course the results of the photographic part of the project have a resonance beyond the day in the way that the survey results do - in fact we're going to use the prints as mailouts inviting people to a launch of this publication! But they can exist in the way they were intended to - as stimuli to a secondary audience - either in the report or on the website, so that's OK.

 

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