Chop, Chop, Chop – more arts cuts

This has been a disturbing week for the visual arts in Wales and the wider museums sector: We heard that National Museums  Wales will be shedding around 35 jobs and that after six years Mermaid & Monster will stop their work of promoting artists at art fairs.

The M&M website has already vanished but you can read the statement here  or send messages of support here. However there was something else that almost slipped under my radar. In his email to tell me about the end of M&M, Gordon Dalton told me what the future holds for M&M, “There’ll be a couple of M&M shows this year, but we had been working on our largest show to date at Newport Museum – which has now been cancelled due to closure – this has left a big gap in our work.”

Did you spot that bombshell? If the rumour mill is to be believed (and I have several very reliable sources for this information), the temporary exhibitions programme (TEP) seems to be succumbing to the swingeing cuts that local authorities are making to save money. Try as I might (and this blog follows many hours of scouring through council minutes on the Newport Council website) I can find no publicly available resolution to axe this really important programme, previously featured in my other blog posts (Andrew Cooper here and Simon Fenoulhet here), but The South Wales Argus picked it up before Christmas in this story.

Since the Arts Council of Wales Investment Review, 2010, whose outcome was announced just before the depth and severity of the economic crisis had really been computed, local authorities have come under increasing pressure to trim what they might term “non essential” services, i.e. those that they have no statutory obligation to deliver and the arts were always going to be an easy target. The recent furore around the 100% arts funding cuts in Newcastle  might make the cutting of the programme at NMAG look modest in comparison, but then in Newport there’s little else to cut, no other public galleries in a city sandwiched between Cardiff and Bristol that should/could be attracting audiences from both catchments to help revive its failing fortunes in the wake of the withdrawal of some of the major High St chains and the downsizing (though thankfully not now the closure) of the Passport Office in Newport. As the new city centre development gets back on track after a long hiatus, the museum and art gallery will be right next to a big part of the development.

But contemporary gallery programmes are not just about leisure/pleasure. Along with creating destinations for cultural tourists (who spend lots of money as a result of their visits – see here if you like statistics), they are also a way of engaging communities with ideas and with the notion of continuing their education and thinking beyond the classroom, and this is how entrepreneurship can be encouraged, along with the first steps into further education opportunities. So losing jobs at the National Museum or at Newport Museum & Art Gallery seems to be counter-productive as Wales struggles to roll with the financial punches.And, of course, gallery visitors, interested in contemporary art, are also interested in contemporary theatre, so what impact would the closure of the NM&AG temporary exhibitions programme have on audiences for The Riverfront, which also has a series of gallery spaces (albeit more community focussed than NM&AG’s)?

Later today Rosemary Butler AM, Assembly Member for Newport West since 1999 and Presiding Officer of the National Assembly will be opening 56:56 an exhibition that celebrates 56 years of 56 Group Wales. It opens at 11.30am and all are welcome to get along to show support. As far as I can gather, this will be the penultimate show in the Temporary Exhibitions Programme, which has been running for over 40 years. I sincerely hope that she will lend her support to the programme in any public consultation that must surely follow a decision to close the TEP.

If lost, we will also be saying goodbye to an important new strand of work to create a showcase for recent graduates – Fresh Paint in 2012, brought together emerging artists from art schools across South Wales. Visual Arts Officer, Shaun Featherstone, planned  to expand the reach across Wales and over the border. This is particularly sad as NM&AG was really beginning to connect with the Fine Art Course at University of Wales, Newport.

But of course, the Fine Art course is coming to an end and I’ll be giving what I can only imagine will be last talk to Fine Art Students at UWN as part of Creative Futures 2013. What can I tell them? That the opportunities for them to continue their practice in Newport and contribute to it’s creative and economic future have now shrunk further? When I look at the buzz created by artists in Cardiff and Swansea, supported by the hubs of the council funded galleries I can see that there is so much that Newport could be achieving, so much new additional funding that can be drawn into the city, stimulating activity for the benefit of the wider community.

I hope the rumours are wrong – please use the comments posts to let me know if you can confirm or deny them or to add your voice. Local Authority budgets for the next year will be set soon so if action is needed it will have to be quick. I’ll be following up on this as the picture becomes clearer.

Update #1 there’s now an online petition to save the exhibition programme at NMAG you can sign it here

Update #2 NMAG has approximately 28,000 visitors per year, or 90 per day. If they each spend a modest £2.50 (and most cultural tourism multipliers are many times higher) that’s £70,000 that goes into the local community, not to mention rail and bus fares.

Before the Arts Council of Wales’ Investment Review, NMAG had an ACW revenue grant of £42,374. The programme costs Newport £40,000 to run, including salaries, on-costs and the programme budget, the latter is supplemented by a current Arts Council of Wales Lottery grant of £13,314. This would have delivered fourteen exhibitions, but the programme will be curtailed if the cuts are approved. The TEP also enables exhibiting artists to apply for funding to create new works for their exhibition at NMAG (and many of the exhibitions are of new work not seen anywhere else), supporting the wider arts economy in Wales and helping to retain talent.

If you want to register your concern about the proposed cut to the Temporary Exhibitions Programme at NMAG you can write to the Leader of Newport Council, Councillor Bob Bright (contact details here) and if you live in Newport you can contact the Councillor for your ward here and/or take part in the public consultation about budget cuts here, but be quick, all responses must be in by Feb 13 in advance of the council meeting on Feb 26. NB there is no reference in the consultation documents to the closure of NMAG’s TEP nor of other culture cuts so it’s difficult to see how the public are supposed to make an informed decision.

 

On Collecting – How to build a commercial arts sector for Wales

On Friday 04 December, at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff, a group of artists, curators, funders, arts administrators, art lovers and collectors gathered for On Collecting: Transactions in Contemporary Art. The event, pulled together by NMW and g39, with backing from The Contemporary Arts Society, was chaired by Gordon Dalton of Mermaid & Monster and was intended to explore the necessary conditions for stimulating the commercial arts economy in Wales and for looking at the current picture.

So far, so good and extremely timely. It has long been recognised that there is a hole in the arts ecology in Wales that can only be filled by proactive engagement with the international art market.

What followed, though fascinating in terms of what others have done elsewhere, left me with a Welsh arts equivalent of penis envy.

Sorcha Dallas, of the eponymous Glasgow gallery, provided the first pangs of this envy by stating that her enterprise had grown out of the buzz created by the reputation of Glasgow School of Art, who have been feeding a steady flow of new life blood into the local scene, with many graduates (Dallas included) choosing to stay in Glasgow, set things up and create a critical mass of interest and activity. On the day that the astonishing news that Cardiff School of Art and Design (CSAD) were going to axe the Sculpture department ( Media and Performance having fallen earlier this year), leaving Painting and Printmaking to make up the Fine Art course, these observations really hit home.

As Dallas continued to talk us through the evolution of her gallery and her commitment to representing Scottish artists on an international stage, I remembered a conversation with Amanda Catto, of what was the Scottish Arts council, now Creative Scotland. She had described to me SAC’s strategic decision to prime the pumps of the nascent commercial arts sector and offer support to attend art fairs and promote the work of Scottish artists to international collectors and institutions.

Dallas was clear that her initiative had grown out of a strong local arts scene, with Transmission in Glasgow, a place for artists to meet and discuss work as much as a platform for work (in Cardiff Chapter Arts Centre is a valid equivalent) at its heart. While she takes the work of the 13 artists she now represents to key art fairs: Art Basel, Frieze, Art Miami, New York, Cologne, Turin etc, to build up a collectors’ base for them, Dallas is equally committed to ensuring that the shop front gallery is part of the local community too, and works in partnership with public and private galleries, managing exhibitions, publications and residencies.

Karsten Schultz, who was next up with Ute Volz, had come to talk about a project that had grown out of Schultz’s collection of contemporary art – Halle 14 in Leipzig.  A former cotton spinning mill, theLiepzig Spinnerei had been abandoned for some time. It’s a massive site and, in 2001, Schultz, having seen its potential, pulled together a symposium of architects, artists and curators to talk about potential ways to develop the site into a creative force. Now Schultz hadn’t come from nowhere. He was an established collector, largely of German contemporary art, and had run out of space for his collection, especially the larger installations and sculptural works. He had already formed the Federkiel Foundation (I’m afraid that some of the translation is a bit bonkers on the english version of the site) and was proactively supporting emerging artists, alongside more established ones, with grants and other means of support.

Long story short. The Spinnerei is five floors of approximately 4,000m² each (that’s 20,000m²!), housing exhibitions, a library and an art education programme, and has been slowly building relationships with the art school and other creative organisations and businesses. Ute Volz is the managing director of the centre. It has the capacity to support presentation, experimentation and production. Hold that thought (and see point 5 below for what might have been).

The final panel speaker was Ellen Mara de Wachter, exhibitions curator at the Zabludowicz Collection in North London. Founded in 1994 by Poju Zabludowicz and  his wife Anita , the Zabludowicz Collection brings art to new audiences and supports arts organisations and artists. (But follow the last link to find out where the money comes from). As she spoke I found myself nodding my head at the supportive approach to artists and to allowing projects to develop, while helping them to build their careers and profiles.

At the end of the session Nicholas Thornton, Head of Modern & Contemporary Art at NMW,  talked about recent contemporary acquistions and the support of the Derek Williams Trust in purchasing work by living artists in Wales (or, in the case of acqusitions from Artes Mundi, shown in Wales). But I’m afraid at this point my blood began to simmer.

I know that the National Museum is building a new 800m² gallery space for contemporary art, due to open next July (2011), but am equally aware that they’ve been sitting on some significant works by Welsh artists (see opening image by Anthony Shapland – the last work to make me cry) for many years without proactively getting them out to other institutions or doing anything much to help raise the profile (and, let’s face it, the commercial standing) of those artists. I am also aware that they have made purchases from exhibitions, curated by publicly funded galleries in Wales but, rather than pay those galleries (who paid for production and promotion of the exhibitions), chose to negotiate with the artists direct, or with their London galleries (in the case of Bedwyr Williams’ Bard Attitude, made as a result of the Art Share Cymru partnership this was particularly galling).

There was no panel representation from the Contemporary Art Society for Wales, who are important collectors of Welsh art (although their policy of only showing their collection every five years is baffling), nor any input from other collectors or independent galleries in Wales.

So I left the day feeling frustrated and aware that there are still many dots to join up before Wales can have a viable commercial art market, or replicate any of the projects outlined by the guest speakers. Here’s the checklist for growing a successful commercial arts economy for Cardiff and Wales:

1. Lively and engaged art school with an international reputation
2. An arts council/government prepared to give fledgling commercial art galleries some pump priming funds
3. Rich patrons
4. Rich collectors
5. A space with capacity for production and presentation, capable of having an international profile
6. An arts ecology that is properly interrelated and each element equally respected
7. A critically engaged and supportive press and media

While we’re waiting for those dots to emerge and be joined I’d recommend that everyone supports their local gallery and Welsh artists by buying art this Christmas. That’s my plan. And if you need some financial breathing space then check out the galleries with the Collectorplan logo.

Kathryn Campbell Dodd, in her Bird-in-the-House blog has given a really faithful description of the day, so please follow this link for a less ranty perspective. Meanwhile, having put the word penis in this blog, I’m looking forward to lots of interesting e-offers that will help me address my envy issues.