NE W FOREST PAVILION 52ND INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION LA BI ENNALE DI VENEZIA ESSAYS MARTIN COOMER on SIMON FAITHFULL ANNA-CATHARINA GEBBERS on BEATE GÜTSCHOW JOHN SLYCE on ANNE HARDY COLM LALLY & CECILIA WEE on IGLOO DAVID THORP on MELANIE MANCHOT CHARLOTTE FROST on STANZA New Forest Pavilion published by ArtSway and The Arts Institute at Bournemouth on the occasion of the exhibitions: NEW FOREST PAVILION 52nd International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia Palazzo Zenobio 10 June - 1 July 2007 and NEW FOREST PAVILION - LOCAL ArtSway 26 May - 15 July 2007 ArtSway, Station Road, Sway, Hampshire, SO41 6BA The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, Wallisdown, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5HH Editors: Peter Bonnell, Laura McLean-Ferris and Josepha Sanna English Translation from German: R. Jay Magill & Tanja Maka (text by Anna-Catharina Gebbers) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Set in Nilland and Soho. Printed by Printwise, Lymington, England © the artists and the authors ISBN: 0-9543930-9-0 [ArtSway] ISBN: 978-0-901196-20-0 [The Arts Institute at Bournemouth] Introduction New Forest Pavilion is an ArtSway international project that presents the work of six artists to a global audience within the framework of ArtSway’s innovative artist support scheme and residency programme. Five of the exhibiting artists are former ArtSway artists-in-residence, with Stanza being curated by SCAN (Southern Collaborative Arts Network). The overarching theme that unites all six within the context of New Forest Pavilion is their treatment of how one experiences transformation, modi!cation and change. A partnership project, New Forest Pavilion exempli!es a collaborative approach to presenting and discussing artists’ work. It weaves together ArtSway’s curatorial methodology with the Arts Institute at Bournemouth’s text + work programme, SCAN’s support and curating of new media, and also meets the interests of funding organisations such as Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Hampshire County Council. Situated in the bucolic village of Sway in England’s ancient New Forest, ArtSway is a contemporary visual arts centre that identi!es itself closely with its rural surroundings. In recent years, however, the gallery has developed an increasingly national presence throughout the UK before reaching out to an international audience in 2005 with the ambitious, but uno"cial, New Forest Pavilion at the 51st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. A residency programme was established at ArtSway in 2001, initially under the title ‘NavvyGate’, and later as ‘Production’ – the latter a term that succinctly encapsulates ArtSway’s aim to support artists to make and then later exhibit their work in its galleries. Although close to the metropolitan areas of Bournemouth and Southampton, artists who undertake a two- month Production residency often !nd the quietude provides an opportunity to re#ect upon and develop their practice. Since 2001 ArtSway has hosted at least three artists-in-residence per year, supporting twenty-two artists of great promise and skill from around the world. However, once a residency and subsequent exhibition at ArtSway has been completed the artist returns to their normal practice, to continue to develop their careers and to search for new opportunities – often in isolation. The pressing question then is: how best to provide continuing support for artists associated with ArtSway? In 2004 an initiative to support a small selection of artists who had completed an ArtSway residency was begun. This scheme was titled ‘Art, Artists, Audiences and Intimacy’ (AAA&I) and as the title suggests was intended to provide curatorial and professional support to the selected artists, and to engage them with a global audience. This scheme took a signi!cant leap in 2005 when those involved in the AAA&I progamme, as well as other previous artists-in-residence, were included in the !rst New Forest Pavilion. Since this !rst Venice venture, a more comprehensive artist support programme entitled ‘ArtSway Associates’ is currently being introduced, focusing particularly on former artists-in-residence unattached to a commercial gallery, but also continuing links with those that do bene!t from commercial representation. Sustainability is both a catchall and the key to the continuing development of ArtSway’s legacy support of artists, as is the sharing of this process with audiences via a new scheme entitled ‘ArtSway Xtra’. By employing an innovative approach, and supporting its most precious reserve (the artist and the work they produce), ArtSway aims to grow and develop: a rural arts centre in constant #ux, with an enduring local and global approach to supporting artists and engaging audiences. Peter Bonnell and Mark Segal - ArtSway text + work Talking a Visual Language: The objective of the New Forest Pavilion catalogue, produced on the occasion of the 52nd International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, is to bring critical discursive writing to each of the exhibited works. Enabled by text + work – a programme of the Arts Institute at Bournemouth and the core concept of its Gallery - in conjunction with ArtSway, it is the result of a collaborative process between individuals, groups of individuals, and a number of enterprises. The partnership between text + work and ArtSway consolidates the enterprise of the academic and professional institution and commits itself to raising the quality of critical engagement. text + work explores the role of text and its relationship to contemporary art practice, and seeks to provide a forum for producing dialogue between the two practices. Using language to discuss visual art is a way of representing one medium through another; it is a be!tting tool for interpretation but how to best make use of this tool is what text + work aims to explore. It seeks ways with which to successfully translate art’s primarily sensory experience into another sensory and, arguably, linear and orderly one: the written word. In doing so, it delves into what the role of text is, or could be, in relation to practice; we can probably agree that it need not be the systematic unravelling of meanings, or a mere description, but we might agree that it is something to take away, a portable reminder of that primarily sensory experience. As text plays an increasingly important role in its engagement with art, this intertwining becomes the cause for debate. Questions surrounding the responsibility of the writer to the potential, present, and absent audience arise. Just as the artist has a responsibility to the artwork, the writer has a duty to the text. We must consider whether the written word can be an e$ective substitute for the experience of the artwork, and, if so, how we can ensure that text, already charged with the pre-presentation of the work, as accompaniment, and as interpretation, does not obstruct this experience or become the cause of its disappearance. By providing a platform for practitioners, writers, and curators who wish to examine these matters and extend the boundaries between contemporary practice and commentary, text + work seeks appropriate methods and forms of language with which to preserve the integrity of both text and work, and to ensure that the work continues to exist outside of, and after, the exhibition. Within the New Forest Pavilion catalogue, text + work in partnership with ArtSway provides a meeting place of sorts for the two distinct practices of writing and that of making art. The contributing writers were each invited by the exhibiting artists themselves, thus honouring the ethos of the intertwining of text and work. Stephanie James & Josepha Sanna - the Arts Institute at Bournemouth Simon Faithfull Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ is said to have inspired books as diverse as Betty Ford’s ‘Healing and Hope’ and L. Frank Baum’s ‘Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz’ in addition to countless works of art and music by Botticelli, Liszt and others, so its reference by Simon Faithfull in his 2002 video Orbital No1 is not in itself unusual. That Faithfull should employ the circular structure of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ while taking us on a spin round three of London’s most unloved commuter routes, however, draws attention to an enmeshing of the mythical and the mundane that has been the highly idiosyncratic preserve of the British artist for a number of years. These views of three apparently in!nite journeys are spliced and projected in concentric circles: at the centre we look through the windscreen of a train as it makes its way around the Circle Line; providing imagery for the annuli, are the views of a car-bound traveller on the North and South Circulars and the M25. This could be a contemporary vision of hell – indeed if the title suggests that this is the !rst video in a series, the nine circles of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ point to an obvious expansion of the Simon Faithfull, 30km (2004), video still, DVD, 32min, project. Yet this interpretation is too neat to capture the many subtleties at play. commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, courtesy Arratia Beer, Berlin Those familiar with Faithfull’s work will be attuned to moments of apparent and Parkers Box, New York. ordinariness gradually spiralling into signi!cance. Denoted in this instance by #ashes of headlights re#ected on a rain-spattered windscreen or in the passage of an oncoming train, a multitude of journeys and individual narratives pulse with orchestral intensity. Similarly, in PalmPilot drawings made in a variety of locations, detail often registers as miraculously as a heartbeat on an oscilloscope. There’s economy and humility here, not to mention humour in the case of ‘landmarks’ such as a bingo hall or electricity pylons that punctuate records of walks along the A13 (2004) or the course of the River Lee (2000), and it’s these qualities that ensure our continued attraction to Faithfull as a guide as his peregrinations become more epic.