You could say that Grizedale Arts is in the middle of a forest in the Lake District, and that all you need to get there from London is a train ticket and a lift from Windermere station. But, in fact, to get to Grizedale in any meaningful way you have to take it stage by stage: one step at a time. What follows is how I got there or, rather, how far I’ve got to date.
September 2001. In conjunction with their
annual show – which that year was called The Great Escape and promised to
combine contemporary art with traditional forest skills – Grizedale
showcased work that had been made by Marcus Coates and Jordan Baseman. In
between several courses of fine food and wine, videos were shown in the
converted barn at Lawson Park, home of director Adam Sutherland. I was lured
further by being asked to write a book which Grizedale would publish. Yet I
was happy to make my own escape back to London before The Great Escape
culminated at the weekend because it looked like all hell was going to break
loose in the forest. A dozen or so artists were doing or organising odd
things, including a The Dukes of Hazard-style car chase, tree weevil races
and a ‘gang’ show compered by Don Estelle (‘Lofty’ from that other strange
seventies TV programme It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). No, I thought in my
ignorance, I was better off out of it.
By the time my monograph, The Strangled Cry of the Writer-in-Residence, was
ready for publication it was June 2002 and Grizedale Live was ready to roll.
This event celebrated a Silver Jubilee (25 years of sculpture at Grizedale)
and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. So I agreed to a reading of my new book at
Satterthwaite village hall. Ten people turned up, most of them
artists-in-residence themselves. But that is all part of the Grizedale
experience. After staggering out of the village hall I found I was more
prepared to take on the challenge of whatever else was going on in the
vicinity. In particular I felt drawn to the work of the hermit Graeme Roger,
who was living in a hut designed by FAT. His humble abode was painted so
that one side of it read ‘FUCK’ and the other ‘OFF’. He had taken a vow of
silence, part of the sophisticated contract drawn up between him and
Grizedale Arts, but was friendly enough and would write notes in response to
any question he was asked. He wrote some advice to me on the day of my
visit: ‘Take a day off. Sit on your throne.’
So I did just that, metaphorically speaking. Wandering through the forest I came across the ashen remains of a billboard screen. Grizedale had asked the local population what they’d wanted done with the site and the response had been ‘burn it down’. And, give the locals their due, they turned out in their hundreds to witness the burning. What they also saw, before the flames had their say, was the final billboard poster, designed by Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson. The text was effectively the last words of a man condemned for being urban in an inappropriate place. It accused the countryside of exploiting the unwary visitor with a fictional idyll dedicated to financial gain (Ruskin, Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter – the Lakes are full of such blue-chip heritage sites). The doomed work also attacked the culture of ‘art in the environment’, and artists that perpetuate that moribund strand of activity. A single work, then, that epitomised the gulf in values between an Arts Council funded art centre and the population it ultimately serves; work that reminds you just how much potential there is in the ambitious meta-communication that is constantly being attempted in this north-west neck of the woods.
I was sent the poster advertising Car Boot Sale, the September event for 2002. It was enough to give me the idea that this time around the emphasis wasn’t on forest culture, but on mundane rural activities and making one’s own entertainment. How do you get things done in the middle of nowhere? You need to DIY like mad in the country, because nobody else will do it for you. Although the list of participating artists included just a few that I was by then familiar with, I admired them all, because I’d learnt that participating was more to do with helping to pull something off collectively, and perhaps failing in the process, than it was about artists furthering their own individual careers. So I regretted not being able to attend Car Boot Sale, which featured Lowe and Thomson’s 24-hour heel bar and key-cutting service. I considered sending them a pair of my shoes, worn as they had been by relentlessly pacing the hard pavements connecting London’s East End galleries, but I knew that such a gesture was no substitute for being there.
My next chance to visit came in March this year, when I accompanied Louise K Wilson to Spadeadam, site of Britain’s Blue Streak rocket programme from the 1960s and now used by the RAF as an Electronic Warfare Tactics Range. Wilson’s project is a typical Grizedale residency in that it is effectively long term, the process is seen as more important than the product, and the process is made as transparent as possible. This is achieved by involving the public directly (Wilson organised a bus trip around Spadeadam), through publications and the Internet. The aim is to reach an audience before it disembarks at Windermere station. And I suppose that’s exactly what I’m trying to do in this feature.
Wilson and I stayed at Grizedale ostensibly
to save paying for a hotel, although the extra driving to and from Spadeadam
meant that no money was actually saved. The real advantage was to be back at
Summerhill, the ex-B&B where Grizedale’s resident artists stay when they are
on-site. Over dinner, Adam Sutherland and Ceri Hand, curator at Grizedale,
talked about this year’s forthcoming projects. In May/June 2003 there was to
be Road Show, the idea being to get together a group of artists, curators,
musicians, the 24-hour heel bar, and the hermit to confront the local
audience with an entity that is a composite of rock tour, circus, traveller
culture, and contemporary art. As Sutherland put it, ‘For a lot of the
artists and myself it is an attempt to provide the door to Otherness that we
all happened across in the various wastelands of our upbringings.’ My door
to Otherness was not provided by contemporary art, but it’s good that as old
doors close, new ones open.
We also talked about what would be happening in September 2003. For Let’s
Get Married, three couples have agreed to tie the knot in Grizedale, with
artists trying to organise a day that the newlyweds would remember for the
rest of their lives.
S Mark Gubb will make a church. Welfare State Int. will conduct one marriage ceremony, Gelatin are doing another. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane will be in charge of the stag night for all three couples, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie will manage the hens. Miranda Whall is working with Sam from FlatPack 001 and local lace-makers to make the wedding dresses. Jess Malloch and Polly Braden will be doing photos and documentation, otherwise known as wedding albums. So many names, so many sub-projects. Welfare State Int. has been invited to take part as a way of including what was considered contemporary art 20 years ago. Sutherland thinks that, in juxtaposing various cultures, Grizedale can examine by contrast the ideas and beliefs within each of them in ‘the hothouse of conflict and empathy that is the Lake District’. The wedding event will investigate whether these disparate ideologies can co-exist, and in so doing may explore a blueprint for the wider community, increasingly made up of a complex of alternative cultures rather than the single dominant culture currently reflected by international high art.
While I was researching this article, Philip Duckworth of juneau/projects, which has contributed to most of Grizedales’s biannual events in recent years, told me about an individual who has been invited to the Lake District by the Wordsworth Trust. Apparently, he started out as a regular guy, doing a 15-month residency with no car. But he slowly became less sociable and finally wouldn’t even acknowledge other people when they said hello. Now this is the opposite of what happens at Grizedale, where I know from personal experience that it is possible to start off obsessed with one’s own agenda, and end up only too pleased to be involved in some way, however peripheral, in Let’s Get Married.
As far as I’m concerned, Grizedale is twinned with that other great door to Otherness beginning with G that is made entirely from vivid imagination and robust social engineering skills: Gormenghast. And you won’t find that special place by simply looking at a map or getting on a train either.
Let’s Get Married is at Grizedale on 13 September 2003.
For further information see
www.grizedale.org
Duncan McLaren’s The Strangled Cry of the Writer-in-Residence is available from Grizedale Books www.info@grizedale.org