MashingUp: Art+Labour, 9th November

CCA 5
Tue 9th Nov 2010
12.30-6pm

Art+Labour is a public conversation exploring the conditions and experiences of creative labour in the cultural industries – working conditions, pay, working hours; freedom and autonomy, pleasure and obligation; insecurity and uncertainty; social reproduction, networking and isolation – and artists’ organising within it – unions, artists’ associations, or self-organised studio/exhibition spaces.

What diverse forms of employment do artists undertake? Who are their employees? How secure and how flexible are these forms of employment? What are the conditions of employment and how are these changing? What can we say of artists’ autonomy in relation to contemporary labour practices? How do cultural workers effectively organise around labour issues? What would it mean for artists to withdraw their labour in defence of conditions in one’s primary or secondary employment? With successive governments’ emphasis on arts’ social function, how does communality express itself in competitive Creative Industries? What is industrial about the Creative Industries; where do ‘Cultural’ producers sit within the policy frame of the ‘Creative’ Industries? How do we as cultural producers recognise our own positions and dependency on/within/alongside the public sector? With the entrepreneurial restructuring of the arts in Scotland and in the face of selective public sector cuts throughout the UK, how constructive are artists’ isolated appeals for a state of exception? What is so unique about artists in the social factory?

These are some of the questions to be addressed during this public conversation. The discussion is open to anyone – cultural workers, artists, students, interns, precarious and self-organised labour affiliated to academia – concerned with issues of art, labour and economics. The event will begin with a series of short position statements from invited speakers followed by discussion among panelists and audience.

Panelists include:

Angela McRobbie
Professor of Communications, Dept. of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths

Scottish Artists Union
The representative voice for artists in Scotland

Graham Jeffery
Reader: Music and Performance, The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, UWS

Katarzyna Kosmala
Reader, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, UWS

Gesa Helms
Researcher & artist

Brett Bloom
Member of Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services who recently produced ‘Art Work : A national conversation about art, labour, and economics’

Owen Logan
Researcher, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen

Facilitated by Gordon Asher
Effective Learning Tutor, UWS Centre for Academic & Professional Development

Event is free but ticketed, tickets available from CCA Box Office:
CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD
tel : +44 (0)141 352 4900

http://www.cca-glasgow.com

“MASHING UP” : Art+Labour is organised by Leigh French, co-editor of Variant, and Sophie Hope, member of Making A Living, in co-operation with Graham Jeffery of The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of the West of Scotland, and supported by CCA, Glasgow.

“MASHING-UP…”

A Public Lecture Series presented by UWS and CCA
This ongoing lecture series stimulates critical, transdisciplinary research communities to discuss advanced knowledge and to build networks of excellence among producer communities.

‘Mashing up’ [definition]
“a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration…to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data” (Wikipedia, 2009).

The lecture series
exhibits the values of new media culture to explore synergies between institutions, ideas and disciplines. This aspiration originates with the UWS and CCA partnership, which extends to the specific areas of inquiry that we pursue. It advances the core mission of each organization to initiate applied, international research opportunities through experimental, local dialogue to foster collaborative, bottom-up, sustainable practices of development.

#mashingup
We want attendees to blog, photograph, film, tweet and do all they can to share the content of these talks to democratize access to knowledge.

LINKS

http://uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com

http://www.sau.org.uk

http://www.temporaryservices.org

http://www.artandwork.us

Talks by Graham given in 2009 - 10

NE Scotland Visual Arts Research Network Summer School, Grays School of Art, Aberdeen, August 10th 2010

MashingUp: Practice+Research, CCA Glasgow, May 19th 2010

Claiming Creativity, Columbia College, Chicago, April 21st - 24th, 2010 (abandoned due to volcanic activity...!)

Scottish Creative Economy Conference, UWS Paisley, March 9th 2010

Imagine a Spectacle, Bloomsbury Theatre London Oct 22nd 2009

CapeUK Conference: Creativity: Luxury or Lifeline? Bradford. 30 September 2009

Practice/Research:debates and dialogues

Here's the slideshow from the presentation that Graham gave at the MashingUp:Practice+Research event at CCA Glasgow on 19th May.

Practice/Research: debates and dialogues

View more presentations from generalpraxis.

Mashing Up: Practice + Research

Afternoon symposium on 19th May at CCA Glasgow, with many UWS staff and students, plus artist Chris Dooks, TV director/producer turned academic Nic Jeune (Bath Spa University), Jackie Sands, and Graeme Harper (University of Bangor).

Summary of what we're talking about below, with full details here. 

At UWS, we pride ourselves on the vocational and practitioner-led focus of our curriculum. Many of our academic staff have spent years working as cultural producers, artists and entrepreneurs outside of the university sector, and bring their knowledge of practice in the arts and cultural industries to bear on their teaching and research. At the same time, universities strive to build meaningful relationships between their research and teaching activites and wider communities, in order to justify their position as ‘places of learning’ and to maximise the social, cultural and economic ‘impact’ of academic work.

As the learning landscape becomes more convergent, with collaborations of all kinds characterising modern higher education research and teaching, it is important to consider the implications of these forms of academic practice. In this symposium we bring together practitioner-academics, artists, and researchers to consider such questions.

Knowledge-based communities often seem to divide themselves into distinct tribes of either theory or practice. But whether explicitly articulated or tacit, theory is always informed by forms of practice, and practice is always informed by theory. Within the disciplines that make up the creative and cultural industries, practice-based research has become increasingly prominent, but the place of such work within higher education can be contested, because it communicates knowledge in ways that are not necessarily written traditionally or ‘theoretically’ but expressed otherwise, for example through the production of artefacts in visual art, design, performance, music or moving image. At the same time, higher education must develop critical awareness and theoretical and analytical capabilities, to produce more competent and skilled practitioners and researchers.

Creativity, invention and discovery depend upon challenging disciplinary boundaries, playing with orthodoxies, and making new connections. Creativity may also involve leaps into the unknown or experimental and unorthodox approaches. However, funding and policy imperatives often mean that researchers are under pressure to justify the’ impact’ of their work in economic and practical terms; and artists involved in research, particularly in higher education, are expected to account for their methods and approaches in externally verifiable ‘research’ terms. So terminological confusion abounds.

What can researchers learn from artistic methods?  Practitioners and theorists may have more common methodologies than they think; the media theorist and the journalist often utilize similar methods of inquiry.  Artists and scientists conduct controlled experiments which depend on deep expertise, specialised knowledge, highly skilled technical facility, and intuition. Can cultural and artistic research reveal common ground between theory and practice? And in this context, how does theory help to illuminate practice?

Events, happenings, consultations

A few events, publications and bits and pieces forthcoming:

With CapeUK we have launched a consultation on the resource pack for TAPP (Teacher Artist Partnership Programme), which provides template exercises, pedagogical models and literature for those involved in joint professional development programmes for teachers and artists. Get in touch if you would like a copy to be emailed to you. We are seeking responses and will publish the full version later in the year once we have got some feedback.

The 5th Arts and Medical Humanities conference, organised by the Association for Medical Humanities, is at Glasgow University between 8th and 9th of July. Jackie will be presenting a plenary session on architecture and design for new healthcare spaces in Glasgow.

Void International has been resurrected for a conference in Manchester between 19th and 21st June. The Void blog has more details.

making it visible

Here's an interesting conference coming up, on November 22nd, in Glasgow which Jackie has been heavily involved in organising:

Artfull, the Scottish Arts Council and Glasgow Arts and Health Learning Network present making it visible: exploring the role of creativity and imagination in health and wellbeing.

The event will be chaired by Gregor Henderson, Director, National Programme for Improving Mental Health and Wellbeing, Scottish Government.