The Dead Artists Estate Archive

Installing the work of my friend Matthew Miller in a gallery in Lille was a strange affair. The last time that I had done so, it was with Matthew; but now he is absent, only present through his work. The responsibility of making sure that the work was presented to a standard that Matthew would have insisted upon was palpable, it was a sad occasion but I felt strangely re-connected with him through the simple expediencies of choosing glue, aligning the video projector and paying attention to the minute detail that a white cube forces on you.

During the trip I became aware that the mass of Matthews work, carefully archived and stored at his home, was in a sense still very much alive, and that it needs some consideration for the future. Clearly the weight of such a responsibility is an issue for Claire, Matthews partner, on one hand being left with the task of keeping the work active is in a real sense something that she can do for him, a way of keeping him alive; on the other hand the task of curating, publicising and touring an artists work is a very difficult task, that many artists themselves aren't up to.

I wondered then how many other spouses and families have found themselves in a similar situation, and wether anybody has formed a group or charity or archive of the work of deceased artists.
I am aware of a few lone individuals that have had trust funds set up in order to tour a retrospective, and there are many well known endowments for high profile artists that have made use of charities to save paying tax on the estate. But what about those mid career artists, with a massive archive of work and papers, who haven't made enough from their work to ensure a care home for their lifes work.
Is there a place that relatives (who may know nothing about the art world) can go to get advice about how to deal with the vital remnant of their loved one, perhaps an archive to donate to, a collection of collections that would have the critical mass to be able to arrange touring exhibitions or loan specific works, a resource for students and other artists alike.
It seemed to me worth looking into whether such a body could make sense, it would have to be financially self supporting, honour the terms of estates (copyright, sales issues, etc) and most importantly have enough space to accomodate an ever growing collection.

Perhaps such a thing could be funded by legacy from those who would wish to be included in it when they die, or by donation from larger artist funded endowmments (of which there are many.
I imagine that such an organisation would very quickly become an extraordinarily well stocked collection, a national collection of work not based on what single items could be purchased but on entire careers in context. the more i think about it the more I am amazed that such a thing doesn't exist.
I am aware that work can be donated to local galleries and museums, but from personal experience I also know how such donations are often viewed as an annoyance, and are usually consigned to offsite storage for long enough for them to be forgotten about.

I will revisit this idea: in the meantime this article in the art newspaper  provides some background

whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller

Whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller is an algorithmic narrative film By Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation

Control is granted to a computer software that edits the film in real time, live as you are sitting in the screening room. The machine culls scenes from a server loaded with 2637 video clips, creating suspense through unexpected juxtapositions. The implied narrative is communicated through voiceovers, wire tapped telephone conversations and snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his prospective employer, Mr. White. It becomes evident that the character is controlled by a city and the code he is working on, as the course of the story is controlled by the code that edits the film.

whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller a review at we make money not art

Watch  Whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller at Rufus Corporation

Finding impossible paths

When we move through a city, we each find different significances, a shopper sees through windows, a driver notices signs, while plumbers, groundsmen and electricians see networks of systems that most people are oblivious to. In this video the significance of attainable routes, of trackways, supports and trajectories is almost tangible.

Of course Danny McCatskill is a real specialist - and has a great folowing amongst bmx enthusiasts, but he has also made a profession out of an intimate understanding and knowledge of cityscape terrain. He scrutinises every corner, bump and post with an almost visceral sense. Those that would complain about his activities should consider how much more involved in the fabric of the city he is than most pedestrians could ever be, in his mind every space becomes a leap and every rail a balanced track.
I would love to see the out-takes from this video, to see exactly how planned and surveyed each of these complex set-pieces is.

Funny that you get a real sense of enjoyment of the built environment from him, that he seems to delight in exactly the same elements that urban planners and cityscape designers find exciting too. Having seen some designers get excited about a sequence of revetments, or the intersecting falls of paving combined with flights of steps, it is good to know that the bmx'ers are perhaps their most appreciative audience.

Corridors anon

Images of corridors - 1 hospital, 1 childrens home, 2 prisons, 2 schools.


This Spartan approach to the interiors of schools appears to have come about by default, rather than through any considered strategy, as if a puritan rejection of all things decorative will in some way lead to an improvement in the learning environment.
Today most enlightened workplaces realise that the surroundings have a marked effect on the quality of experience in the workplace. Bearing in mind that school is where life skills are gained and attitudes are first formed, it seems even more crucial that an awareness of the effects of environment and context are considered, and acted upon. Not only for the benefit of students and staff in the short term, but for society in general in the longer term.

Noticing the problem
The students themselves identified the issue of the dismal environment in schools almost by accident,  A new year 11 canteen had been built, it was furnished with modern well designed and interesting furniture and fittings, the walls were painted in colours and there were several posters framed upon the walls.
Without exception the students recognised this room as one that confirmed their maturity, aesthetic intelligence and more realistically portrayed the world they occupied outside of school.

Even those who were not yet old enough to enter the canteen recognised the enlightening effect it had on the school just by its presence. One student even noticed that the time seemed less oppressive on a blue faced clock, than on the standard uniform white ones.
But the factor that was to give us most food for thought were the posters, these where A0 art prints that you might find in a print gallery, and were carefully chosen to have broad appeal, yet without referring directly to anything that smacked of curriculum.
These prints triggered a student led critique of the rest of the schools imagery and displays, one that was eye-opening, if a little brutal at times.
Briefly, the key observations on the school as a whole were:

• Existing display is limited to a variety of  large soft-board panels fixed to the walls around the corridors.
• Display panels are shoddy and untidy – some are decorated with church fete like signage and frills.
• Staff attempts to ‘brighten up’ display boards are reminiscent of kindergarten (primary colours, clipart cartoons etc).
• Only schoolwork is ever displayed on them – often for so long no-one remembers who did the work.
• Students work, unless of an exceptional standard, never sets as high aspirational goals as professional images/displays would.
• Other students work is more often annoying or embarrassing than interesting.
• Essays make appallingly dull display (text in general too).
• Staff seem to feel obliged to represent curriculum subjects on display boards, but are seldom creative about it (portraits of great men).
• Some staff cannot produce displays that match the visual literacy of the majority of students.

Some students felt the display boards were actually aimed at parents and visitors – to demonstrate the standard of work expected by staff, rather than to inspire and stimulate students on a daily basis.
There was minimal need for active notice boards, for timetabling notices etc, what space remained was generally dealt with poorly.
Corridors were often treated as a sort of no-mans-land of un-adopted passageways between subjects, yet these are the spaces students inhabit between subjects.

Corridors

A 'love letter to an unloved place', broadcast in BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves, 22 June 2004.

What do you do in a corridor? Well, we know there is one thing you categorically must not do, for generations of schoolchildren have had the prohibition barked at them: ‘Don’t run in the corridor!’ It’s odd that this should be so, since the word corridor actually comes from Latin currere to run, the corridor being that part of a building which runs. There is something of the wind-tunnel in the corridor, which seems to promise the shortcut, the unswerving dash. It is surprising how often corridors are scenes of violence. It is very hard for makers of gangster films or thrillers to resist the temptation of shoot-outs in corridors. In how many films does the heroine flee down a corridor from her assailant, hair flying and strappy shoes clacking? How many times have we seen the shotgun barrel appear round the corner at the end of the corridor, turning it into a shooting range, turning it into the barrel of a gun. Computer games take their users down labyrinths of corridors and turnings.

It remains true, nevertheless, that corridors are retarders rather than accelerators of movement. In this lies much of their strangeness. Corridors are dilatory, displacing, and distempering. They are for dallying, lingering, hovering, and, most of all, for waiting. As one moves through or along a corridor, which in theory is there to provide quick and direct access to different locations on one floor of a building, the persons one meets in the corridor are usually waiting. I wonder that nobody has ever thought of setting Waiting for Godot in a corridor.

Of all built spaces, the corridor is the most temporal, the aptest to suggest both the inevitable running on of time, and its suspension. The passage of the years is often thought of as a long corridor, which also makes it possible to imagine the rooms off the corridor as stopping places. But T.S. Eliot uses the corridor to suggest a more sinisterly stalled, or snarled-up view of historical time in his poem ‘Gerontion’, which begins with the view that ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues’. The corridor returns in Eliot’s work to suggest the nightmarish suspended animation of modern life, as for example in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, with its evocations of

Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

That corridors are places of dangerous irresolution, and uncertain purpose is suggested by the fact that Macbeth conducts his agonised reflections on how to effect ‘the be-all and end-all’ of Duncan’s murder in what the stage-directions specify as the corridor outside his guest’s room. Macbeth feels himself to be poised 'upon the bank and shoal of time', his corridor temporisings contrasting in his mind with the thought of ‘heaven’s cherubim hors’d/Upon the sightless couriers of the air'. That the corridor is a purgatorial place is also suggested by Robert Graves’s admonition in his poem written as a solider in the First World War:  

So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.

via bbk.ac.uk

Why are we designing factory schools? | Sarah Wigglesworth | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Why are we designing factory schools?

Michael Gove's rejection of decent architecture shows he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing

Sarah Wigglesworth - guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 February 2011 12.34 GMT

Michael Gove insists he won't be making architects richer. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

At the recent free schools conference, Michael Gove said: "We won't be getting Richard Rogers to design your school. We won't be getting any 'award-winning architects' to design it, because no one … is here to make architects richer." The Con-Dems don't mind bankers getting richer, but demonise architects as freeloaders. They say the government supports localism, yet head teachers have been encouraged to choose standardised school designs. Once again, localism is exposed as a meaningless term that allows the Tories to attack Labour's record and pick on an easily vilified group.

 

Design is often thought of as a commodity produced only by a celebrity designer. In fact, it touches every aspect of our lives. Just like good management systems, good design helps processes run more smoothly and encourages participation and engagement by shaping space, light and sensations. Good architecture creates buildings that are loved by their occupants, simple to use and economical to run and maintain. In schools, pupils feel valued, more alert and more willing to learn. Staff feel energised, inspired and respected. The run-down Hackney Downs School used to be a sink school. Its replacement, Richard Rogers' Mossbourne Academy, is now home to astonishing results in terms of educational achievement and pupil behaviour. That's no coincidence.

 

Sadly, the government doesn't seem to regard the built environment as affecting our wellbeing. It is well documented that people who live in substandard housing suffer more illness and die earlier than the privileged. People recover faster in well-designed hospitals, tourists flock to attractive places and City firms' sleek, well-designed offices function more efficiently and attract talent to the Square Mile. If these are factsare true, then how can schools defy this obvious logic?

 

Having attended elite schools with superb facilities, our free school advocates seem unable to accept that school buildings have any effect on those that teach and learn in them. With little experience of state schools and scant knowledge of how buildings are actually produced, they are hasty in their judgments of the architect's role.

In the architect-free Con-Dem future, we can use catalogue designs to build cheap, under-sized state schools occupied on a rotational basis. People will care less about quality and more about profit margins and "shareholder value". But the factory schools of the future will have little regard for the appropriateness of the design to the school's educational aspirations – why should they? We are told that this is the teachers' responsibility. But the question remains: why would a teacher want to teach in such an environment? What message does it send to our kids? Both would soon know their place: they don't matter. How can this possibly aid learning?

In pursuing the current policy we could easily see another generation of disastrous school buildings destined to be rebuilt in 20 years' time. Professional expertise helps, and Gove should be seeking good design in any form, especially now that people are free to set up their own schools with no prior knowledge of how to do it.

There is nothing inherently more expensive about good design: buildings are complex and need experts to design them, and design fees are a tiny proportion of construction budgets. Building Schools for the Future was poor value for money not because architects' fees were high, but because of wasteful, cumbersome and bureaucratic procedures. It did create work for architects, but they are only the most visible part of a raft of consultants, contractors and managers. The focus should be on cutting that bureaucracy and focusing on what brings real value and innovation – an equation that has architectural design at its centre.

In the hands of talented architects and good clients, design can make places more pleasant to be in, improve absenteeism and ill-health and most importantly, make communities proud. These things are hard to quantify, but Gove, the zealot of localist ideology seeking a soft target to blame, counts the cost of everything yet understands the value of nothing. He should remember that design is at the heart of the problems he attempts to address.

New Ways of Curating

via youtube.com