The unfortunate truth is that the fallout from the vote has already happened. The fall in Sterling has had a direct impact on organisations such as ours that receive funding from Northern Ireland. Around 19% of our funding comes from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and through our membership in Northern Ireland. With the collapse of the Sterling against the Euro this has now been reduced to around 13%.

Although we have always operated our NI work programme in a very lean manner so as to take full advantage of our funding, we now face the reality that the percentage of work covered by our administrative staff in the Republic to support our work in the North is in real danger. We are faced with the serious choice of whether to split the organisation and reduce our level of administration, therein reducing the services that we can offer to our members, or to find ways to ensure that these costs are covered in order to fully support Northern Ireland’s visual artists. This is happening against a background of potential in-year cuts and serious pressure on the arts in Northern Ireland. Both jobs and key services are in danger.

We also have serious concerns about the mobility of artists and of artworks post Brexit. If we go back to having border controls with Northern Ireland then we face increased costs and bureaucracy in moving art across the border. The introduction of costly administrative processes may prevent organisations from touring and sharing artworks and arts initiatives. The same applies to cultural exchange with the rest of the UK. A case has to be made for free movement of culture.

According to a report by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Ireland is the UK’s third largest market for culture after the US and Switzerland, with a value of £631,000,000. In the short term a weakened Pound may seem appealing but in the long term our cultural relationship will be diminished as it becomes less viable for arts organisations in the UK to work in the Eurozone.

Due to its open border with the UK, Ireland is not a member of the Schengen Travel Area. This means that we already work in a complex system and that future EU cross border collaborations may require up to three visas. None of these visas are guaranteed and failure to comply with all three jurisdictions has seen individuals deported. In a recent case, a leading Turkish academic was required to provide so much information for both his Irish and UK visas that he decided to avoid coming to the Republic and Northern Ireland to speak at a conference. This is clear evidence of what the future will look like for more and more people. If the UK moves towards even more stringent controls on freedom of movement and closes its borders to yet more countries, collaborations between the North, the Republic and the rest of the UK will be curtailed.

If the UK broadens its visa limitations then organisations in Ireland may have to rethink who they work with – which is a form of censorship – or reconsider their relationship with UK organisations and audiences. Comments on the BBC Radio 4 Front Row special: ‘Brexit: The Cultural Response’ (Tuesday 26 July 2016), which outlined that the benefit of Brexit is that ‘English’ audiences could now enjoy ‘English’ culture, were particularly unhelpful. This attitude would damage ongoing projects that have previously been funded by public money to bring culture across the border and into communities where it has had a transformative effect.

We should also take into consideration that London is a transit point for culture coming from around the world into Ireland. Organisations ship their work through London and artists from further afield transit through London. It becomes more costly and less attractive to travel here if it means shipping through a non-EU country. Already arts organisations are looking to change their transit point to places within the EU such as Paris. This will have cost implications and will again increase administrative burdens on arts organisations across Ireland. Increased financial pressure is something that we in the arts are hardly able to consider as we try to maintain ourselves after so many years of cuts.

Lastly, we shouldn’t forget that London is also one of the great art centres of the world. Many Irish artists have moved there to pursue their education and to find work. They depend on various EU supports for education as well as being able to fall back on social welfare and the National Health Service during times of need. In this respect the future is very unclear, as we don’t yet know exactly how Brexit will be implemented. Will we see a trail of artists returning or will they travel even further away as they look to expand their careers and gain experience?

There are many more areas that need to be considered when discussing ‘cultural Brexit’ and unfortunately the concerns of the arts community are very far down the list of priorities. But, as stated, Brexit is already impacting us. It would be reassuring to know that our voice is being heard and that there is active engagement with arts organisations so that we can navigate through this growing morass of uncertainty.

Noel Kelly, Director/CEO, Visual Artists Ireland.

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RAYNE BOOTH INTERVIEWS BARBARA WAGNER AND BENJAMIN DE BURCA ABOUT THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE 2016 SAO PAOLO BIENNIAL.

The 32nd São Paulo Biennial took place in Parque Ibirapuera, a rare green space in the centre of the vast and expansive city of São Paulo. The collaborative practice of Irish artist Benjamin De Búrca and Brazilian artist Bárbara Wagner featured among the biennial’s 81 participating artists. The title of the biennial, ‘Incerteza Viva’ or ‘Live Uncertainty’, echoed recent remarks by Brazil’s new president Michel Temer, who stated recently that the years of uncertainty experienced under a Socialist Party government had come to an end. The biennial strongly emphasised ecological and social issues, while a huge educational programme of school visits, tours and special events attempted to bridge the distance between the concerns of the art world and those who inhabit the city’s boundless favelas and low income suburbs.

Under Brazil’s socialist government, led by the much-loved President ‘Lula’ (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), millions of people were lifted out of extreme poverty and into the middle classes. The recent political coup – which saw Lula’s successor, the socialist president Dilma Rousseff, impeached from her position and her former vice president Michel Temer take her place – has been compared to the plot of the popular TV show House of Cards because of the intrigue and political corruption involved. Brazilians are concerned at the prospect of a return to the old days of military dictatorship where employment, education and other basic needs were beyond the reach of many families. Equally, a large proportion of the population supports the conservative Temer and believes that he can lift the country out of its current economic slump. In this context, the Sao Paulo Biennial set out its stall. The opening event was marked by protesters wearing “Fora Temer” (Temer Out) t-shirts, with the biennial as a whole seeming to offer an ideal forum for Brazilians to reflect on the social, political and ecological uncertainties of the current era.

Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Búrca’s work Estás Vendo Coisas/You Are Seeing Things is an ebullient, noisy, colourful and poignant work – part video documentation, part sci-fi fantasy – which focuses on the ‘Brega’ scene. Brega is a style of Brazilian music, popular in the north-eastern city of Recife where the artists are based. In Brega culture, the participants are preoccupied with their own image and maintaining their appearance is paramount. I spoke with the artists just after the biennial opening in São Paulo*.

Rayne Booth: Can you give me some background to ‘Estás Vendo Coisas’? When did you come across the Brega scene and how did the project come about?

Benjamin De Búrca: In 2012 Bárbara undertook funded photographic research with the aim of documenting the social and economic shifts that were taking place under President Lula’s governance. His leftwing Workers Party (PT) had introduced a series of reform programmes to better the lives of the poorest in Brazil. These measures were largely successful and Brazil witnessed a moment of unprecedented prosperity. The middle classes ballooned and for the first time many people had access to basics such as running water, employment, technology, the internet, television, cars and further education.

Bárbara’s background in journalism and her ongoing practice in social documentary photography led us to the places where this new sense of possibility and hope was most palpable – in city centres and high streets where people shopped and ate, and in the late-night bars of downtown Recife. During the day we developed the work Edifice Recife (which was shown during EVA International 2014) and at night we were in the nightclubs. Bárbara entitled this photographic series Jogo de Classe/Class Games, but during this period we realised that photographs alone would not suffice. The need to make a film, and the potential of the burgeoning Brega music scene, seemed to offer points of convergence in addressing these enormous social shifts.

RB: Bárbara, you have worked in the Recife area for 10 years. Can you tell me more about your earlier work there and how things have changed?

Bárbara Wagner: All my life I have been observing people in the northeast, exploring the idea of progress there and looking at how they are adapting their traditions into this new form of work as spectacle. As artists, our research is around the body: we perceive this generation as having knowledge in their bodies. It is also about managing an economy of material images.

Lula’s first programme in Recife in 2005 was to vacate Boa Viagem, an area of slum housing on the beach. He replaced the beach dwellings with a kilometre-long strip of asphalt – a gesture that changed the whole dynamic of the city. People from the city’s peripheries started going to the beach at weekends and every Sunday for two years I documented what was going on there. In the end, I didn’t even photograph the new buildings or the avenue itself; I was interested in the people and how they were assuming a form of civility: living, participating, existing.

At the time, mobile phones were expensive, so people didn’t have access to cameras and were not used to digital images. I had just bought a digital camera and every picture I took could be previewed by the performers. Often they would perform again in order to look better in my photograph. My first work, Brasil Teimosa/Stubborn Brazil, became emblematic of that era of photography. This series is not too distant from the work of photographers like Rene Djikstra and Martin Parr, and touched a lot of people because they had so far been completely underrepresented. However, with the government at the time I was sensing a powerful shift. Obviously there’s kind of a regression with the current government – it’s not a bright future – but Lula managed to lift a whole section of the population to a slightly higher level of existence.

RB: How did your collaboration emerge and how has it evolved?

BDB: Our work comes from different backgrounds. I studied painting in Glasgow but my practice encompassed many disciplines including video, photography, painting and collage. I was doing a lot of collage when I met Barbara and the principles of collage permeate my work, including the films that we now make together. In 2015 we made a work called Faz Que Vai (Set to Go), which is very much a film collage. With my background in fine art and Bárbara’s in journalism and documentary photography, we essentially see the world in very different ways and create collaborative work that neither of us would produce on our own. There is some arguing of course, as we each endeavour to have our visions understood by the other; however, it is this tension that ensures mutually agreeable end results. Another influencing factor is that Bárbara is dealing with subject matter that is familiar to her, whereas I am coming from a different background and often experiencing things for the first time, which can bring a degree of objectiveness to her subjectiveness and vice versa.

RB: How does your work sit within the wider themes of the biennial?

BW: I didn’t think that my practice as a documentarist would fit with this biennial, but the assistant curator Julia Rebouças (whom I had worked with in the past) invited me, based on the recent film myself and Benjamin had developed. Julia told us that they were visiting indigenous communities in Amazonia and Africa to learn about their understanding of death and how their rituals are connected to nature, which made me realise that the themes of the biennial are quite relevant to our work. We address other forms of nature, that of image, as well as the younger generation’s constant negotiation of who you were, who you are and what you want to be.

BDB: When we were invited to take part in the biennial, we were not really given a brief or told what the biennial was ‘about’ in curatorial terms. When installation began, both Bárbara and I felt a little alienated, especially considering the prominence of ecologically-themed works across the show. However, the more I learned about the other artworks, the more I realised that our film was well-placed among works by artists such as Cecilia Bengolea and Jeremy Deller, Luiz Roque and Vivian Caccuri. Collectively the works in the biennial convey anthropological concerns linked to how we as a species choose to organise our environment, deal with the natural world and maintain spiritual harmony amidst the ‘live uncertainty’ of global climactic realities.

*This is an edited version of a conversation that took place between Rayne Booth, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Búrca in September 2016.

Rayne Booth is a curator, arts manager and Director of Dublin Gallery Weekend. She is currently on a one year career break from her role as Programme Curator at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, and is living and working in São Paulo, Brazil.

Bárbara Wagner is a Brazilian photographer and Benjamin De Búrca is a visual artist who works across several disciplines including painting, collage, video and installation. Their collaborative practice uses photographic and filmmaking processes to examine class relations in contemporary Brazil.

Image: Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin De Búrca, still from Estás Vendo Coisas/You Are Seeing Things (featuring MC Porck).

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Benedict Drew/Miguel Martin, CCA Derry-Londonderry, 15 October – 11 December

I recently took a ‘How Millennial Are You?’ personality quiz while I should have been searching for a job, if you can digest the irony. “You are asleep. Where’s your phone?” was one memorable question. There could only be one answer: “On the pillow next to me”.

Benedict Drew and Miguel Martin dig into this field where the human-machine hybrid grows. Miguel Martin’s sculpture Put to the Sword is a bronze-cast of a head mask sourced from the internet. It is set alone on the floor of a bare space partitioned off by a copper lattice curtain and lit by a light bulb suspended at waist height just above the sculpture. The suggestion is that this has some relation to the archaeological phenomenon of beheaded ‘bog bodies’, and it’s true that the sculpture evokes a sensation of burial. The coppery partition and warmth of the light bulb match the hue of the sculpture, subtly implicating the space in the destruction and preservation of this person.

In ‘The Saw Tooth Wave’, Benedict Drew presents dioramas of images and objects observing each other. Four hanging paintings of faces are arranged in a circle, watching an abstract film of shifting colours and patterns; in another space, a video projection displays an un-interpretable film, with a large tree-like structure situated at the other side of the room where we imagine an audience would sit. Its branches hold tambourines that rattle in response to the audio track of the film.

‘Saw Tooth Wave’ refers to a waveform of the same name characterised by repetitive peaks and troughs, climbing to a sharp peak of frequency then abruptly dropping back down to a base line and so on, illustrating a jagged line of teeth that gives the wave its name. It is most commonly encountered in digitally produced music, but the sawtooth wave is also the type of signal used to produce visual images on CRT-based televisions and computer monitors. On CRT screens, the ‘refresh rate’ may be understood as the frequency with which the signals are repeated, and the more frequent the repetition, the more stable the image. In effect, the sawtooth wave is the DNA of the contemporary digital image, even if it is no longer dominant with the development of LCD screens. Drew digs symbolically into this foundational metaphor of digital media: it is literally produced through reproduction; there is no original.

This vacillation between originality and reproduction is the most salient quality of Put to the Sword. As a viewer, I don’t trust the provenance of this object. Ostensibly it is a casting made from an archaeological artefact, but how many times removed? Did the artist cast the actual mask or a reproduction of it? Did he buy it from a dodgy eBay seller with suspiciously favourable ratings generated by click farms? There is a scarcity of information that would make this sculpture opaque and unapproachable, yet from this knowledgeless chasm emerges the idea of the bog bodies. Whether this is part of the object’s origin – once belonging to a beheaded bog body – or simply aimed at setting the work in context, is besides the point: this is an object of layered, multifoliate versions.

In her film Is The Museum A Battlefield?, Hito Steyerl uses an iPhone as a symbolic device to transport an image through its versions on screen, from the sight of a battlefield in Turkey through to a Berlin museum, the Art Institute Of Chicago, then herself. “I tried to follow the bullet backwards, to its origin … and I found a picture of myself actually shooting video on an iPhone with a caption ‘This Is A Shot’.” Steyerl takes a starting point similar to Miguel Martin by critically mining the history of a single incident – the death of her friend Andrea Wolf – as Martin does with the ambiguous provenance of this mask and whomever it represents. Put to the Sword approaches the archaeological with a scarcity of information, rather than a glut, preferring the speculative voice to the authorial.

‘The Saw Tooth Wave’ is not given to any voice at all: rather it obfuscates the authorial, not through speculation, but through an indulgence in the logic of the subject. A screen can only conduct an image by constantly refreshing it in sequence, and it is impossible to pick one millisecond and say “This – this is it!” Thus, we are complicit in constructing the things we view. The meaning – if that is the correct term – of ‘The Saw Tooth Wave’ is not delivered; it is absorbed as an ambient sensation.

The CCA presents two differently textured exhibitions that fluctuate between sparsity and density. They observe and circulate through each other, jointly imagining futures where creation gives way to experience. A future where this thing presently sleeping next to me, quietly producing images, telemetry and ad profiles, may one day work for me – as me – while I sleep. I don’t know how I feel about that, but at least I could stop job hunting.

Kevin Burns is a Derry-based artist and critical writer.

Images: Benedict Drew, ‘The Saw Tooth Wave’, installation view; Miguel Martin, Put to the Sword, 2016; photos courtesy of the artists and CCA Derry-Londonderry.

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Mary Patterson, Ballina Arts Centre, 10 November – 31 December 2016

Arriving at Ballina Arts Centre on a wild November morning and seeing the River Moy in flood, the logic of Mary Patterson’s exhibition seems very clear: to try to find responses to nature through art. The appropriately named ‘Paper Trails’ features a series of works on paper created through a formidable range of drawing and printmaking processes. Patterson’s use of diverse techniques forms part of her quest to identify a medium and a language that can convey the beauty and complexity of nature. The artworks that feature in the exhibition are displayed in the open-plan landing space that curves out towards the adjacent River Moy. This light, airy space provides an ideal setting for the works in close proximity to nature.

‘Paper Trails’ encompasses a range of methodologies evident in collographs, charcoal drawings, drypoint intaglios, monoprints and a series of finely-detailed pen and ink works. Patterson depicts a broad selection of imagery, from small natural forms like lichen and stones to sweeping landscapes. There are animals too – hares, goats, frogs and fish – depicted in various contexts.

The collograph High Summer is a visually rich work that features intense yet naturalistic colours, with an unconventional ‘all overness’ to its composition. A sense of imposed order on the chaos of nature is also prevalent in two groupings of highly-detailed pen and ink drawings that form the most persuasive and eloquent subsets within the broader collection of artworks. The drawings are small in scale and use circular compositions to move away from the conventional pictorial structure of landscapes

The drawings are presented in two sets, and centre around the artist’s locale of Foxford, County Mayo. The first group of four images contains two distinct representational approaches. Two images, entitled Game of Thrones 1 and 2 depict the earth from above and show mysterious earth works and boundaries barely visible at ground level but clear and graphically fascinating when seen from above. By contrast, the two images displayed alongside are of things seen in extreme close up. Ripples on the Shore and Lichenform are akin to magnified studies of nature or laboratory samples seen under a microscope. They share the patterns and rhythms of the macro images and the same fine detailed pen and ink work.

In the second set of images, Contornare, Lough Cullin, Patterson combines two distinct types of drawing. The central motif is a mineral-like structure composed of parallel lines reminiscent of those indicating terrain on a map. Countless minuscule circles bound this island or rock-like form. The formal simplicity of black and white enables Patterson to play with layers of associations in the imagery while still retaining a sense of continuity. Rivas: the Windings of the Moy seems to channel art historical references: a river snaking off into the distance recalls the idealised landscape of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

In the statement accompanying the exhibition, Patterson quotes French painter and printmaker Pierre Bonnard: “Art will never do without nature”. The choice of Bonnard is an interesting one. He was an artist whose work was predicated on a restless search for visual responses to the complexity of the natural world and on overcoming the difficulty of transcribing his observations into a form that could communicate eloquently to the viewer. Making precise patterns and rhythms from the complex forms of nature is a way of communicating their poetry, layers of history and meaning.

Bonnard also made art about what he saw around him. His work is characterised by the use of flurry of small marks, which come together to form dense and nuanced surfaces. He used the small rooms of his house and the rhythms of everyday life as his subject matter, as though the whole universe could be viewed through the lens of his immediate surroundings. In a similar vein, Patterson has used the land, its outward appearance and the layers of history just below the surface, to make a series of works that have, for her, the same immediacy and seriousness. In her exhibition notes, the artist outlines her interest in the traditional ways of harnessing the land as well as man’s impact on the natural world. Patterson’s mark making reflects multiplicity of ways in which the land can be represented, as terrain, as a series of boundaries, as mineral and botanical forms and as geological phenomena. Using the marks made on the landscape by man’s interventions over centuries, Patterson charts the effects of colonialism, changing societal structures and the tensions in our relationship with nature.

Andy Parsons is an artist based in Sligo. He is the founder of Floating World Artists’ Books.

Image: Mary Patterson, Ripples on the Shore.

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National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 26 November 2016 – 26 March 2017

There are 14 portraits in this exhibition of shortlisted works. Surrounding the viewer on all sides, in each one a lone figure is presented (why no couples or groups?) and this singular focus contributes to the sense we’re in the company of deities. There are also a lot of big heads, their presence dominating the small room at the top of the Millennium Wing’s forbidding stairs. Of course the figure of the artist is also present, directly in the self-portraits, or otherwise implicated. Open to artists in all disciplines, the shortlist consists mostly of paintings, nine in total, along with two photographs, a graphite drawing, a digital drawing and a video projection onto a terracotta bust.

Those eligible include artists from or living in Ireland. With a first prize of €15,000 and a €5000 commission to boot, the relative absence of better-known names is surprising. Is portraiture innately conservative, and so less appealing to the cutting edge? There is certainly a well-meaning moralism about some of these works (back stories are available in the exhibition catalogue) and the resulting lack of ambiguity can have a flattening effect. Perhaps because she has only herself to consider, Vera Ryklova’s photographic self-portrait Untitled #5001 operates at a remove from such niceties. The artist exposes herself, literally in the open gesture of her body, and more affectingly in how she combines sexual assertiveness and vulnerability in the same self-image.

Looking closely at the exhibition’s only other photograph, Kim Haughton’s picture of the actor Gabriel Byrne (the sole celebrity here), a couple began discussing the work over my shoulder. “It’s a photograph?” – “No, it’s a painting” – “Really, wow, look at the book shelf, imagine having to paint all of those titles”. Verisimilitude creates the wow factor, even when the wow in question is not quite what they think it is. Capturing the famous actor in a reflective mood, Gabriel Byrne is a good photograph. We have the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing inside his New York apartment, while access to his inner world is hinted at (at the time he was playing James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night) but denied.

Returning to the giant heads. Jennifer is an oil painting on canvas by Stephen Johnston. A bravura act of painstaking detail, you sense the artist has worried away at his task, careful lest his idol-like subject smite him for any hair out of place. Part of an ongoing community project, the ‘ordinary’ subject of the painting is rendered extraordinary by the artist’s monumental treatment. Similarly oversized and finely detailed, the male sitter in Catherine Creaney’s This Too Will Pass is more pensive. The large head is expertly rendered, but it’s a sort of high-fidelity gone hyper, the surfeit of detail leaving little room for the imagination. The artist mentions the “almost brutal honesty” of Lucien Freud as an influence, many of whose portraits, coincidentally, are on show across town at IMMA. While both of these paintings are closely observed, they lack Freud’s domineering ruthlessness; it is the subject here who is king.

Freud’s intensity had a lot to do with time. Over hundreds of hours, the painter and the sitter were locked together in an equal mortification. For many artists and their subjects the camera has done away with such intimacy. Used to capture likeness, photographs often stand in for the model, an image substituting for the presence of flesh and blood. An exception to this could be the large oil on canvas Imran by Gavan McCullough. Another outsized head, we’re told the painting is one of a series of portraits of asylum seekers. ‘Imran’ is rendered in muted tones of brown and grey, his expression relaxed but vaguely troubled, in a kind of jigsaw of painted facets. I was reminded of the English painter Euan Uglow, whose precisely articulated figure studies bear the marks of their measured construction. On the other hand, the distinctive structure of the painting might have its origins in a Photoshop filter, bringing us back to photography, so it’s hard to say.

I have a soft spot for Harold, an egg tempera painting on true gesso panel by Fergus A. Ryan. While every thread of ‘Harold’s’ tweed and corduroy ensemble appears individually executed, we never lose sight of it as a painting, a handmade response to the subject’s living presence. ‘Harold’ himself conveys a self-assured jouissance, his calm gaze contemplating you, contemplating him. And speaking of jouissance, making some notes in the gallery café, I wrote that Seán, a small oil painting by Gerry Davis, had the most ‘juice of life’. Swift seeming and faintly bruised, the vividly painted head has an ideal scale, the proportions of the work coinciding with the human subject. For its modesty and liveliness, I was glad to hear it named the eventual winner.

John Graham is an artist based in Dublin.

Images: Gerry Davis, Seán; Vera Ryklova, Untitled #5001, 2016; photos courtesy of Hennessy Portrait Prize.

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PÁDRAIC E. MOORE DISCUSSES ‘ECTOPLASM’, AN EVENT HE INITIATED AT 1646 PROJECT SPACE LOCATED IN THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS.

‘Ectoplasm’ was a one-off, nocturnal event hosted by 1646, a project space in the centre of The Hague. The event, which comprised performances, screenings, participatory actions, readings and physical objects, was the culmination of a curatorial residency I undertook at 1646 in 2015. In addition to a programme of exhibitions, 1646 hosts artists talks, screenings, lectures and events, providing a platform for experimental art practices as well as short-term residencies for foreign artists and curators. The residency provides participants with both a working studio and living space. I was delighted to spend time in The Hague, the administrative capital of the Netherlands. As well as the appeal of the city’s ever-expanding arts scene, the Gemeentemuseum also houses several key works by one of my favourite artists, Piet Mondrian. While one isn’t obliged to present a public project at 1646, I was eager to share some of my recent research with new audiences. ‘Ectoplasm’ brought to fruition the dialogues I had developed with practitioners from the Netherlands and further afield.

The term ‘ectoplasm’ was first used in late-nineteenth-century occult circles to describe the supernatural substance that allegedly emerged from the bodies of psychic mediums. Descriptions of the substance vary widely, from “vaporous” to a “plastic paste; bundle of fine threads; membrane with swellings or fringes” or a “fine fabric-like tissue”. [1] Some claimed that ectoplasm possessed electrical properties, emanated a luminous glow and was capable of forming into hands, faces and other body parts. Many spiritualists, scientists and artists viewed ectoplasm as a phantasmagoric fluid that could bridge material and immaterial worlds and provide a means of communicating with other dimensions. Some parapsychologists believed ectoplasm might even hold the key to revealing the deeper underlying structures of the universe, beneath and beyond matter.

A key document in the history of ectoplasm is Phenomena of Materialisation by German physician and psychic researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing (1862 – 1929), which was first published in English in 1923. The book, which features extensive photo documentation of ectoplasm emerging from the orifices of mediums in a state of trance, is a fascinating testament to the eroticised dynamics of séance rooms in the early twentieth century. Moreover, these images underscore the fundamental duality of the concept of ectoplasm, which is on one hand portrayed as ethereal, even divine, and on the other as an all too tangible matter and abject bodily emission.

In the early twentieth century, investigations led by the Society for Psychical Research exposed cases in which materialisations of ectoplasm had been fraudulently staged. Combined with a growing mistrust in the reliability of photography as scientific evidence and the ongoing advancement of the rational scientific viewpoint at the expense of the spiritual, this led to a general scepticism towards physical mediumship in the popular imagination. Since then, the notion of ectoplasm has been revived episodically in the realms of popular culture and film, most notably in Ivan Reitman’s 1984 film Ghostbusters, in which the substance is depicted for comic effect as viscous goo, denoting the residue of a haunting. However, the original notion of ‘psychic matter’ (as a material of infinite possibility, capable of connecting dimensions) has come to be viewed as an aberration and the result of a temporary loss of reason during a less-enlightened age.

The artworks presented in ‘Ectoplasm’ were distinguished by their volatility, liquidity, malleability and temporality. These physical works were activated, destroyed, conversed with and worn as clothing over the duration of the happening. While diverse in character, collectively they resisted a finished or static state in favour of an explosive materialisation of energy – something that was set in motion by the artists but existed beyond them. Made from plaster, metal, wood and various resins, Bert Jacob’s nine-metre-long sculpture Many and One (2016) closely resembled an ectoplasmic protrusion which obstructed movement within the exhibition space. Half way through the event, audience members were requested to smash this structure, a process which revealed seven smaller sculptures that they were invited to take with them. Lucy Andrews’s work Proximity (2016) comprised an automated hand-soap dispenser – the sort designed to reduce contamination through contact – which ‘sensed’ the presence of a humanoid rubber finger that was periodically activated via a rotating clock hand. This delicate assemblage gradually produced a viscous substance strongly redolent of bodily fluids, which oozed from a glass shelf onto the floor, forming a pool that expanded as the night wore on.

These two sculptural pieces were accompanied by Adham Faramawy’s video SXC N00DZ (2015) which depicts a nude male in a psychedelic shower scene involving neon-coloured slime. Faramawy’s distinctive visuals are at once seductive and repugnant, combining the fluidity of the digital age aesthetic with something primal and gestational. Female Sensibility, a video produced by Lynda Benglis in 1973, depicts, in explicit close-up, a sexual encounter between the artist and her colleague Marilyn Lenkowsky. Female Sensibility interrogates the boundaries between erotic visual material and prurient sexual commodification. This threshold was also interrogated in the photograph by Peter Hujar entitled Paul Thek Masturbating (1967) which became an important touchstone in my research and was widely circulated in the event’s promotional material. Ultimately, Female Sensibility engages feminist sexual politics through methods of self representation. In the context of ‘Ectoplasm’ the screening of this significant work confronts the highly sexualised nature of much spirit photography in which animated substances issue from (somewhat passive) female bodies [2].

Live performances were provided by Sam Keogh, Daniel Vorthuys, Jessica Worden and Big Hare. Keogh began by holding a one-way conversation with one of his artworks: a mixed media sculpture with the appearance of bleached, dead coral. His performance, which drew on the fields of marine biology and haute couture, among other things, was punctuated by impromptu forays into the assembled audience, creating temporary catwalks for his eclectic costumes. The slide show and spoken word performance from Vorthuys drew on classical literature, 1990s cinema and rock music to produce a narrative delivered in a raucous, grandiose style reminiscent of 1960s beat poetry. Jessica Worden’s equally dynamic Echo/plasm (2016) was ectoplasmic in both content and form. She performed her text (a compilation of medical examinations, pseudo-scientific studies and accounts of material phenomena) with great variations in her vocal expression, alluding to the corporeality of language.

The night climaxed with a live musical performance of experimental electronica and theatrical special effects provided by Utrecht-based band Big Hare. This transformed the performance space into a dance floor upon which participants and audience were unified. Ultimately, this experimental event acknowledged the dynamic that an audience brings to an artwork while also emphasising the subjectivity of an individual’s physical encounter, underscoring the fact that there is no substitute for experiencing smell, sound and sensoria for oneself.

Pádraic E. Moore is a writer, curator, and art historian currently based in Brussels and Dublin (padraicmoore.com).

Images: Peter Hujar, Paul Thek Masturbating, 1967, courtesy of Pace/McGill Gallery and Fraenkel; Bert Jacobs, Many and One, 2016; Adham Faramawy, SXCNOODZ, 2015, photo by Marian Kramer.

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JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS ALISTAIR HUSDON, DIRECTOR OF MIMA AND CO-DIRECTOR OF ARTE ÚTIL.

In 2014, Alistair Hudson was appointed director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), part of Teesside University. From 2004 to 2014, Alistair was deputy director of Grizedale Arts – a contemporary arts residency and commissioning agency in the central Lake District in rural Northern England. In keeping with the principles of Arte Útil, mima describes itself as a ‘useful’ museum, established through ‘usership’ rather than spectatorship.

Joanne Laws: Can you give some details on your background at Grizedale Arts?

Alistair Hudson: The impetus behind Grizedale Arts was to evolve an anti-romantic version of art outside metropolitan centres. The ‘long story of art’ is one of art being useful and operating as part of ordinary life. From the Arts and Crafts movement to the Bauhaus, the history of modernism is laced with people’s ambitions to escape autonomy, and for art to have social or political agency in the world. The art market emerged alongside the rise of the affluent bourgeoisie during the Industrial Revolution and arguably came to its logical conclusion with the economic crash of 2007. At Grizedale Arts we wanted to reconnect with the longer history of art as social tool, in a similar way to what social reformer John Ruskin (also a native of Coniston village) attempted to do in the nineteenth century.

JL: Perhaps you could provide a working definition of the term ‘Arte Útil’. What does it mean and where did it come from?

AH: Arte Útil roughly translates from Spanish as ‘Useful Art’. Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera created the Arte Útil Association in January 2011 as a discursive, knowledge-sharing platform focusing on art as a device for social change across the world. The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven began working with Bruguera on a strand of research, while collaborating with other like minded artists and institutions, including Grizedale Arts, who were interested in similar ideas. All of these voices started to converge around the idea of useful art and in 2012 Tania came to Grizedale where together we wrote the ‘criteria’ for Arte Útil. In 2013 we collaborated on the Museum of Arte Útil exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum. From there we began to build partnerships with other institutions and artists to develop the Association, a website and the Arte Útil Archive which showcases practical examples from around the world that work in this way, outside the performative frame of art. The archive is intended as a toolbox to help other artists and communities initiate projects elsewhere.

JL: Can you give an example of a project you’ve been involved in (at mima or elsewhere) that, for you, best embodies or celebrates the principles of useful art?

AH: A good example is one we did at Grizedale, in the village of Coniston, called ‘The Honest Shop’. It is a community shop with a cash desk but no staff that sells a range of products made by locals, such as food, cakes, vegetables and crafts. The project evolved into a sustainable shop for the community which still runs, but it also has a kind of political agency. It raises money for the community hall (the Coniston Institute) and offers people a human connection in a place where relationships are often strained by the day-to-day practicalities of tourism. In a way, the shop is the true face of the village because local people come together to make and contribute things that represent them. For me, the shop highlights a really fundamental idea of usership. Rather than the work of art being authored by a single person, it has what I call a ‘redistributed authorship’. The shop manifests a double ontological status: it is both a work of art and the thing itself. It’s not a picture or a representation of an idea of a shop – it is a shop. It has artistic currency in a very broad and connected way, and demonstrates the important role art-thinking has in economics and politics, even in a small village.

JL: Can you say something about the range of projects included in the Arte Útil Archive?

AH: The Arte Útil Archive contains a broad range of over 500 projects, both historical and contemporary, that have taken place across the world. Overtly political projects include Judi Werthein’s Brinco (2005): specially-designed trainers for immigrants crossing the US/Mexican border, with a survival kit built into the heel. Also featuring in the archive is Ahmet Ögüt’s ongoing project The Silent University, which offers a platform for immigrants to share their skills and knowledge, because their ‘illegal’ status prevents them from partaking in formal education. Tania Bruguera recently crowd-sourced over $100,000 to establish her Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt in Cuba, which has allowed her to develop an educational curriculum based on the principles of arts activism. Bruguera’s long-term project Immigrant Movement International (2011) examined growing concerns about the political representation, status and conditions facing immigrants.

JL: Do you think that the concept of ‘useful art’ is beginning to filter into the realm of contemporary art, given that Assemble won the 2015 Turner Prize?

AH: This was a fairly controversial decision within the art word. Many people within the conventions of contemporary art perceived it as an assault on the canon of the individual artist and on the art market as well. It stretched the tolerance of inherited ideas of what art is. Some argued that projects like Granby Four Streets are enabling the neoliberal agenda by filling the holes left by inadequate state services, which is quite a misreading of the Granby project. This conservative response is rooted in the belief that art really shouldn’t be political – it’s ok to be political, but within the confines of the art world. Once art starts to be genuinely political, or become politics, social change, economics or the thing itself, somehow it is no longer seen as art. It has escaped the control of who decides what art is or isn’t. Once something is solving a problem, it isn’t allowed to be called art anymore, and I find this enormously restricting on the potential of what art can do when working within a spectrum of activities. This is one of the fundamental arguments that we are trying to dismantle.

JL: You hosted the Arte Útil Summit 2016 at mima last July. Can you give us insights into any updated thinking in the field?

AH: When a summit travels to somewhere it doesn’t necessarily have a meta-discourse. In the spirit of Arte Útil, which examines the specific urgencies of place, the summit at mima was conceived as a discursive platform which sought to address the impact of the recent EU referendum and the ongoing issues of migration specific to the context of Middlesbrough. Bringing all this energy from elsewhere – from museums, academic institutions, local charities and so on – we held a series of workshops around the town with the aim of developing solutions that would have currency going forward. We set an agenda and we’re already seeing an impact on the ground, with the initiation of a housing project and one of our local artists Emily Hesse deciding to run for mayor!

The Arte Útil Summit 2017 will be held in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and will take the form of the first Arte Útil Summer School. We are currently developing a curriculum that will offer a transferable model of how to work in this way. I think the future is really in promoting this way of working and offering resources to initiate further projects around the world.

JL: As Director of mima, can you share any details of the upcoming programme or future aspirations you may have for the institution?

AH: We describe mima as a ‘useful’ museum established through ‘usership’ rather than spectatorship. A lot of our work operates outside the institution. We considered what might happen if we actually made this our central focus, and we effectively programmed mima according to this agenda. Infiltrating the museum from the ‘outside in’ offers an awareness of urgency, community and context. Conventionally, arts intuitions like this show exhibitions in pristine galleries and they run a public programme comprising education and outreach strands. Even book shops and cafés revolve around the agenda of promoting and supporting the ‘great art’. But what we are beginning to do at mima is reverse that polarity, so that our principle activity is our public programme – education, community outreach, socially-driven projects etc. These in turn are supported by the exhibitions and collections which are thought through as a tool in support of this wider agenda of social change.

One of our current projects is ‘New Linthorpe’ by artist Emily Hesse and curator James Beighton. The duo are investigating ways to reflect the character of modern day Middlesbrough whilst also capturing the spirit of the nineteenth century Linthorpe Art Pottery – an innovative form of Victorian pottery made from the red brick clay underlying Middlesbrough. Emily took over the Office of Arte Útil here in the museum for the past few months, to talk about politics and the post-Brexit situation. It was then that she decided to run for mayor. So the key issue is for the museum to act, with its constituents, as a civic agency that applies art processes and thinking to ordinary life across the region.

JL: I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the role of critical language in tracking and mediating these developments. Can you see any evidence of new platforms or forms of language that might be evolving to try to engage with these practices?

AH: We’ve had lots of discussions around the importance of language because it so directly influences the ways in which people understand the concept. Theorist and independent researcher Stephen Wright developed a publication for Arte Útil called Toward a Lexicon of Usership. The book represents the beginnings of a terminology, categorised into three strands namely: Emerging Concepts (including ‘narratorship’ and ‘1:1 scale’); Modes of Usership (such as ‘use it together’); Concepts to be Retired (terms perceived as outmoded or superfluous such as ‘spectatorship’ and ‘authorship’).

In keeping with the concept itself, lexicons, glossaries and user-guides are very functional. Language is also important when presenting outcomes to audiences. When the archive becomes an exhibition, it has failed, because you are exhibiting the terminology rather than the thing itself. The Community Land Trust (who manage Granby Four Streets in Liverpool) recently opened their own Office of Useful Art. They realised that this type of activity isn’t something that should be exhibited in a traditional sense, so they found ways to offer insights into similar projects from communities around the world that can be learned from. All this material and these emerging networks of connectivity demonstrate an understanding of what art can do, rather than what it is. Shaping the world outside your front door in this way has a lot of currency.

Alistair Hudson was appointed director of mima in 2014 and was deputy director of Grizedale Arts (2004 – 2014).

Images: ‘New Linthorpe’ coffee house project; Arte Útil Summit 2016, photo by Michelle Madison; ‘New Linthorpe’ coffee house project.

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