Lamentation

This was going to be a post about the London Mayoral elections. Shakespearean I thought. ‘For god’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings,’ I thought some more. The scene takes place, ‘on the coast of the Thames, City Hall in view.’
“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow in the bosom of the Earth.
Let’s chose executors, and talk of wills:
And yet not so,- for what can we bequeath,
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our land, our lives, and all are Boris-bloke’s,…”
Thus laments King Ken of Livingstone, Thrice Lord of City Hall,
Who by the vile treachery of the Witney Laird
And his suburban hoards from Henley
With their London pads,
Is once again deposed
To plot anew…..
But who comes here?

(enter: unknown ragged hoards, urban foxes - not from Henley, tousled swans, assorted water foul and swarm of flies.)

Fox, grinning broadly:
Good my Liege, fear not,
The red-coat hunters will never breach the bounds of our fair city!

Much ruffling of feathers among water foul. Ducks muttering darkly to one another and keeping a distance from red-coated hunter already in their midst.
Swan steps forward, clears throat:

Earl Fox, your gracious forbearance has been noted in this matter, and is gratefully acknowledged by my ladies in waiting, however, (voice begins to tremble slightly), we cannot be certain of the intentions of the urban hunter, not all of whom wear red coats. The Eastern Allies of the Henley Hoards have already plucked (she gulps, tears in her eyes), have already plucked my own good cuz, her Grace the Baroneess Swan of Tottenham from her nesting place in the Lea Valley, and, they say, made of her a banquet. This Boris-Bloke will never put a stop to such foul-treachery, indeed his views on hunting are well known and talked of in the coffee houses of suburbia.
We must repair to the rebel lands of Haringey and there take refuge and prepare to restore Fair City Hall to all who love the Thames and tributaries of London.

Fox, bowing deeply and avoiding eye-contact with ducks:

And so to Haringey, Good Swan, lead on.

Exeunt.

So, it has turned into a post about the treachery of the Henley Hoards
I’ll save the rest for another time. Meanwhile Earl Fox of Tottenham is on my shed roof in the right hand column and a hopeful looking rainbow over The Angel of Tottenham Green, near the den of Seven Sisters in the rebel lands of Haringey.

Swan Song

The telling of the Swan story began, oh who knows, years ago probably. It began for me, as a migration story, about those ‘other’ Romanians. The ones who aren’t us. Who aren’t ‘real’ Romanians. We always argued about that, if we had the energy. Anyway, let’s go back to January. I’m feeling desolate because some kind soul just kicked me in the teeth over a funding application. My new Romanian friend, Vali,’s feeling the same because he’s been abandoned by his housemate and is now homeless. So he turns up at 1.00am, direct from Budapest, with a 2 litre lemonade bottle of plum brandy, and some truly gross-looking sausages. I supplied the bread and the spring onion, and somehow, the depths of self-pity and despair were transformed into a pretty good-natured swapping of scurrilous tales. The next day and at least 150 pictures of his girl-friend later, still in the first week of January, the sun shone warmly, no sign yet of the late snows or frosts that would soon annihilate my jasmine buds, we went for a walk in Finsbury Park. Vali was captivated: ‘We just don’t have places like this in Romania, we don’t have “parks”.’ ‘These birds, just look at all these birds,’ he repeated, endlessly, genuinely amazed. ‘What do you call those ones, those white one?’ ‘Swans’ I said, ‘with a double-u, suuaans.’ I didn’t know if Romanian had a ‘w’ sound. ‘Swans,’ he repeated, faultlessly, as though he’d been discussing them with the queen all his life.
‘You know when Romanians first started going to other countries, Austria was the first we went to, in large numbers. Well, some Romanians went to Vienna, and they have these big parks there, full of birds like here. Well, those Romanians, they started hunting the birds. One day, they hunted, and caught and ATE a Swan.’
‘No’ I shrieked, peels of laughter,
‘Yes, well, you can imagine how famous we were after that. Oh my GOD.’
‘But they taste disgusting,’ I say, still laughing, ‘they taste fishy.’
Vali looks at me, quizzically, frowning, ‘You’re laughing, Claudia. You think it’s funny?’
‘Well, yes,’ I say, feeling slightly guilty now, ‘ok, so it’s hard luck on the Swan, but… yes…’
Pause. ‘The Austrians they did not find it so.’
With utmost confidence I assured him that English people would find this story uproariously funny and would be impressed with the enterprising Romanians bringing their rural skills to the city.
I hadn’t, of course, reckoned with the Haringey Independent, The London Evening Standard, or the Daily Mail, all of whom suddenly developed not only a sense of humour by-pass but also, in the case of the latter, an unusual lapse of memory concerning the ‘right’ of people to hunt. A week or so ago, I found a copy of a Romanian free newspaper, its front page graced with a picture of a swan, and inside, the full story reprinted not only from the Haringey independent, complete with RSPCA phone number, but also the Austrian story. Whether there has ever been any verification that Romanian migrant workers really did eat the Viennese Swan, I have no idea, but the idea has certainly caught on to the extent that most Romanians believe it, but with one important caveat.
We were contemplating the reasons why the Austrians didn’t find the swan-eating saga funny, and I was cheerfully explaining that the English secretly admired a good hunter, when a teenage boyfriend-girlfriend couple with a dog walked past. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ I muttered, ‘But what the hell is she doing with HIM?’
‘That’s EXACTLY what I was thinking’ gasps Vali, ‘EXACTLY.’ We’re looking at the beautiful young woman, with her scrawny, seriously unappealing boyfriend. ‘He looks like a gypssssy,’ hisses Vali, ‘Bloody swan-eaters.’


‘

Patriarchal Plumbing: Diana Raw’s Patriarchal Nightmares

Diana sent these pictures of her work a couple of weeks ago; this seems to be a good moment to post them. Patriarchal Nightmares was the title of an exhibition which formed part of her MA at Sunderland University. She chose plumbing systems as the image of her patriarchal nightmare pictured here in dodgy, unreliable and extremely leaky looking form. The image is particularly apt because of what she describes as its ‘pervasiveness’: it is so commonplace that we often don’t notice it. She considers patriarchy to be a ‘framework of our society’ associated with ‘control’, ‘supply’ and ‘testosterone,’ for which the plumbing is a metaphor. Diana’s taps look unconvinced about their usefulness. The water supply may be an essential service but she clearly doesn’t rate the testosterone.
Your homework this week: Will they be emblematic of Boris Johnson's forthcoming reign as Mayor of London? Discuss.

Feedback from Emma Shaw and Linda Bloomfield.

Big thanks to Emma for being vastly more on the ball than I am. She supplies the link to the relevant page on the Jerwood Foundation website here which informs us of the new and improved ‘non medium-specific’ Jerwood Contemporary Makers which replaces the former Jerwood Prize for the Applied Arts. All the information you need is there, but I couldn’t resist copying the following sentence from their press release:

'They approached a range of makers to apply to take part in the exhibition, asking them to consider the theme of touch.'

Hmmmm. So will the application process always be closed, or were they just overly concerned to keep out the riff raff this year? As to ‘the theme of touch’, am I alone in thinking this sounds like something out of a GCSE coursework project?
The press release is downloadable in full as a pdf from the linked page as is the list of this year's selected makers.

From Linda Bloomfield:

Why should innovation be so important? The Crafts Council are now supporting artists who make finely- crafted art, rather than crafts people who make finely-crafted craft which ordinary people (as opposed to collectors or museums) actually want to buy. I have never had any help from the Crafts Council. I have, however, found Crafts Central (formerly Clerkenwell Green Association) very helpful with business training and opportunities.

Interview with Rosy Greenlees, Director of the Crafts Council, Part 1

‘So, c’mon,’ says Sophie, drawing herself up to her full height at the head of the table where she’s waxing some pots in readiness for their next layer of slip, ‘what ARE they going to do for Crafts people?’ ‘They’ in this instance, were the Crafts Council.
I’d been to see Rosy Greenlees, Director of the Crafts Council, to ask that very question. What follows is an account of the interview and my reflections on the whole.

‘What is the Crafts Council for?’
Greenlees supplies a well-rehearsed answer: ‘it’s-a-national-agency-which-represents craft-across-all-disciplines-and-across-all-nations-of-the-UK.’ She rattles off the opening volley of words with fluency and a touch of force. There’s much talk of relationships, partnerships, craft in the wider agenda and so on. It’s government speak and turbo-charged. ‘The sector needs an advocate,’ she declares, almost with a flourish… ‘Sector’. This means we’re constituted politically, we’ve become part of political discourse which suggests we need to become active within that discourse. Not to everyone’s taste, I know, but I’ll come back to that.

Translating government-speak
An example of ‘advocacy’ in this context was the Crafts Council’s involvement in drafting a government document, ‘Creative Britain’, about creative industries in the UK. You can download and read – all 81 pages – here.
It’s compulsory reading for anyone concerned with funding – especially what gets funded and why. The point is that the Craft Council was involved in drafting this beast, which is in effect a policy doc from the Dept. of Culture Media and Sport, and means that concerns of ‘the sector’, that’s us remember, what we need to function, be creative and THRIVE, are represented in the document
The partnerships amount to the various Crafts Council projects, funding and support schemes. Most of these can be found on the website under ‘learning and support' here, but those with the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Architecture Centre Network are easy to miss: go to ‘about us’ then go to ‘partnerships and initiatives.’ The focus of the EFF projects is on ‘development of a business plan; workshops and craft fellowships for mid-career makers; research and creation of a market development strategy and other initiatives.’ So far they’re based in the North East, South West and West Midlands. Hidden Art, in Cornwall, was also one of these projects. It has a fantastic website with much information about going digital and various training and development schemes in partnership with University College Falmouth which has an excellent research cluster related to all matters digital.


Funding Schemes and Projects
It is now the task of the Arts Council to fund craft. The CC has some specific projects, such as those outlined above; it still has the ‘Setting up Grant’, now ‘the Development Grant’, for people setting up full time in their own studio space. It has other projects such as ‘Next Move’, also aimed at new makers but concentrating on residencies and it has ‘Spark Plug’, which is for curatorial projects and which might include makers, but must involve at least one experienced curator. Projects tailored specifically at mid career makers are few: there are two fellowships, one at the V&A, one in the South West, and they are VERY specific, and intending to showcase the CCs idea of ‘the gold standard.’ I’ll return to this ‘gold standard’ business later. All the information you need about the schemes, meanwhile, is on the website.

Shop, Gallery, Building, Magazine, Website.
The new, and vastly improved, Crafts Council website is part of their strategy to be a resource and information centre. It aims to be ‘about the sector, not just the Crafts Council’. This is a significant difference. I would suggest that some degree of interactivity would help to keep communication channels open with makers and other members of ‘the sector’.
The Crafts Council building in London is still there but has no gallery or shop. For the exhibitions programmes, for example, the aim is to make connections with galleries and museums nationally and curate shows with them, with an emphasis on touring. The purpose is to spread funding, resources and overall visibility for craft outwards from London to ‘the regions’. The London gallery space is, to some extent, replaced by working and producing shows with the V&A. Out of the Ordinary is said to have had audience figures of over 100,000 at the V&A alone and is now touring. Although there will undoubtedly be fewer shows, they will have, according to Greenlees, a far greater impact. So the exhibition programme becomes national, and to some extent international. The website and Crafts Magazine are also part of this get-it-away-from-a-single-building-in-London strategy. However, ‘impact’ is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, it also presupposes we know what it is we are measuring in the first place.

Education
Craft in education seems to be an important part of the Crafts Council’s strategy. They’ve been talking to OFSTED, the schools inspectorate; NSEAD, which promotes art, craft and design in schools and CHEAD, which represents art and design in higher education. There is a plan to extend apprenticeship schemes to include postgraduates. This would certainly help to ameliorate some the problems of skills-loss which will come from the reduction of dedicated ceramics courses for example. The results of all this talking and partnership-ing remains to be seen, but at least there’s someone trying to ensure a presence for craft skills and processes at all levels of education. I asked for a comment on the situation in Scotland, which now has no ceramics course at degree level, and will shortly be losing the glass course in Edinburgh, by all accounts. Greenlees was sympathetic, but was concerned not to ‘appear as though we’re living in the past.’ Craft is ‘dynamic, innovative, and moves,’ she said, while acknowledging that a rationale that claims that this can’t include ceramics would, necessarily, be flawed.


The Public Face of Craft
‘So, five years from now, what do you want the Crafts Council to have achieved?’
‘I want people to “get” craft.’
It’s a big ambition, but there are some outstanding questions. How is craft to be mediated? Along with the exhibitions programme, Origin and Collect are the mainstays. These are Crafts’ public face.
How does the Crafts Council define craft?
‘We don’t,’ but ‘innovative use of materials and processes’ was a much repeated phrase. ‘Innovative’ is probably the main buzz word I’m encountering at the moment. It’s endlessly repeated in Creative Britain, also in Seona Reid’s paper, ‘Unleashing the Potential of the Scottish Creative Sector,’ (Reid is head of Glasgow School of Art where the last ceramics degree course is closing), in Greenlees’s commentary and almost to the point of self parody in NESTA’s latest policy statement but as with ‘gold standard’ there is no indication of how this is defined or by whom. ‘Innovative’ is particularly tricky, because it has such a strong speculative element to it anyway. How do you measure innovation?
I remarked that, in my travels in Tottenham, I had encountered a group of Kurdish women from Turkey who are exemplary sewers, knitters, embroiderers and makers of many wondrous fine things in fabric and fibre. They make to sell. They need the money. Would the Crafts Council support them, for example? Pause…..mmmmm, not sure. Bla Bla innovative. Well maybe they could demonstrate appropriate signs of innovation but, somehow, I had a feeling that my Kurdish ladies were not what the Ministry of Craft were looking for. One has to ask why not, they are part of ‘the sector’, surely?
The Jerwood prize for the applied arts appears to have departed for the time being. Greenlees said it would continue but only with the Jerwood, not in conjunction with the Crafts Council. It provided some much needed, if not very good quality, media coverage, so how is it to be replaced or expanded? The Jerwood website is not very revealing at the moment.
By constituting craft as primarily about skills and process, and locating it squarely in education, training, and professional development and support, the Crafts Council ensures a presence and a plausible way of craft being ‘got’. Whether it’s craft as you know it or want it, and quite who is included and who is not, is another matter entirely. The C Word will deal with that question, ‘the gold standard’, ‘innovation’ and other matters in part 2.

Interview with Rosy Greenlees, Part 2: The C Word’s comments

The Gold Standard
‘All the big names have been recipients of those grants,’ asserts Greenlees, defending the good name of development grants. She appears certain that the brightest and best are nurtured by through Crafts Council selection procedures. I don’t share her optimism. I can’t speak for other craft disciplines, but on Planet Ceramics, ‘the best’ has not been nurtured, only the safest. You only have to look at the pillars of the ceramics establishment, Barrett Marsden and Galerie Besson, and to a lesser extent, the CAA and you’ll see what I mean. Meretricious Modernism meets Kitchen Sink, and most of it, in the case of the first two anyway, stupefyingly dull. We can hardly be surprised that those in receipt of all the financial and practical support at the Crafts Council’s disposal, to say nothing of the networking among social peers, have had relatively unobstructed career paths. This has nothing whatever to do with quality or interest inherent in the work. It has, however, had a devastatingly negative effect on the development of the discipline. You could argue that this is more about ceramics’ own persistent and destructive hegemonic practices than it is about the Crafts Council; the relevant question here perhaps is: how do you influence the way these ‘standards’ are constituted?

Dispersal and Dilution
It’s entirely possible that the Crafts Council’s ‘dispersal programme’, if we can call it that, will in fact make its influence on the lives of makers much more dilute and this may turn out to be a great relief. Do we really want to have our creative lives dominated by what, at worst, could turn out to be the propaganda machines of the Ministry of Craft, our very own Politburo? If their assessments of the ‘gold standard’ and ‘innovation’ turn out to be as suffocatingly tedious and reactionary as they have been in the past, then dispersal and dilution would amount to no great loss.

And finally….
Geting involved in Spark Plug is undoubtedly the best way to influence craft discourses in the wider exhibitions world and is an important part of how craft is mediated, and ‘got’, not least by curators who, in the main, don’t ‘get’ craft at all. For all makers, mid or early career, if your practice isn’t recognised as ‘gold’ or ‘innovative’, or if it’s just too experimental or interdisciplinary, the Arts Council, your local authority (if you’re very lucky indeed), sundry other obscure charities, foundations and trusts that can be persuaded to fund individuals, and possibly academia, if you can inveigle your way into it somehow, are the sources of funding and support we need to turn to.
The new Crafts Council feels different from the old, but I don’t know that it has really changed its attitudes. And I have a horrible feeling it may not have done, not least because those who curate and select grant recipients and so forth are likely to be the same old dinosaurs. I still have some reservations about the endless parade demands and exclusion-clauses which infest the Development Grant application procedure. It looks like a mine field to me and must put a great many people off applying. It is inescapable that if you close down your entry pool so much at such an early stage, you will end up with a compromised final selection simply because the process has filtered out some of the best applicants who didn’t conform precisely to all the demands.
With Greenlees at the helm, I am pretty confident that goals with be achieved. The problem for makers to solve is whether or not those goals are really what we want. When there’s a ministry, one needs a union, or similar. That’ll be the Craft Potters Association then! No seriously, we do need to organise, a little bit, if we are going to ensure those goals aren’t just ministerial flatulence trying to imitate the ‘white heat of technology’, which is what relentless thud of government-approved‘innovation’ sounds like sometimes.

Tottenham Icons

“All Iranians have pictures of the Shah,” says Reza, shuffling through a collection of black and white images on one of his numerous phones. Reza’s a Christian convert, and along with the Iranian royal family, has a couple of particularly florid Jesus Christs, one rising up to Heaven, one on the cross. He’s the only one of my Iranian friends that has religious iconography, although most of their mums have a picture of Emam Ali somewhere about the house.
As to the Shah, I’m certain that none my hard-core-Marxist Iranian buddies has any such thing. Quite the contrary. Ali has a fetching selection of iconography carefully placed on his book shelf, just above eye-height for a tallish man. Two images arranged in classic diptych formation, on the left, Emam Karl Marx, on the right Emam Che Guevara. The latter it seems is the safe bet for all disenfranchised, and disenchanted lefties with awkward cultural and political affiliations. Bilgun, who’s Kurdish, saunters past on his way to the shop, sporting, yep that’s right, a Che tea shirt, pretty new-looking I’d say. He’s virulently anti PKK, equally virulently anti Turkish army, well they did torture him, so hardly surprising, and vitriolic in his condemnation of the AK which he considers a threat to the secular state. So what’s to be done? He’s another one waiting in the Gulag for god knows when. Immensely inconvenient when Kurds have real politics and the Home Office cant just tick the PKK box and hand him the visa, which is what they usually do. The shop in question also displays a fine iconographic selection. Above the counter, again just above tall-man-eye-height, are three images: Emam Ali, all feminised and surrounded by pink flowers and cute children to the left, in the centre, baby Jesus, pink and pudgy, and on the right, Diana Princess of Wales. “You know, people just don’t care,” mutters Hussein, carefully polishing Diana’s face. He’s the seriously unpleasant gangster-heavy who owns and runs the shop: “You call the police and they’re back on the street in three hours.” This apparent non sequitur turns out to be a reference to our lovely local pimps, a particularly choice set of crepuscular vermin who clutter up main drag at dusk and duck in and out of the ‘pound shop’ which has no discernible icons unless you count the skunk, whose image might as well be hanging over the door, for all the effort they make to hide the fact that this is in fact the neighbourhood dealing den. They don’t even bother trying to sell anything else, pound or five pounds.

I’m starting to feel a bit left out of this Icon business. But who would I place in Icon position in my hallway? There was a shop in Green lanes for a year or two which had its icons hanging in the window, one on either side of the door. These were an adaptation of the form being fashioned from acrylic tufted carpets. They too went for the transcultural pairing of Emam Ali on the left, and Emam Princess Diana on the right. So it seems you can choose from religion, royalty or bandana’d freedom fighters. I might just go for Phoolan Devi then. She’d certainly make short work of the pimps and, you never know, even the Loathsome Byrne might finally dematerialise under her steely glare. Article on Phoolan Devi by Arundhati Roy part 1 here part 2 here, more comments and pictures here and here. Beautiful blog here with picture of Phoolan under 'women's lives' section, link here.