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Towards the Festival
Format
Jason E. Bowman
Co-programmed by Hull Time Based Arts and the Ferens Art Gallery, the
forth annual Root (Running Out of Time) Festival - Skint - took
place in Hull between October the 5th and 20th, 1996, and was reviewed
by David Briars in Live Art magazine's December issue. In his review
of Skint, Briars opens by stating that "Hull's European dimension
is actual, not virtual..." This statement would appear to infer that
Hull has a particular relationship to the notion of boundaries, which
would initially appear to be appropriate owing to the fact that historically
the city's economic base was established on its ports as sites of
import and export.
Briars then continues to state that: "One wonders why festivals such
as this have a theme at all, as so few of the invited artists applied
themselves assiduously to the festival theme, if at all." He then
further criticises artists and co-programmers for having omitted to address
one particular issue. Last year the boundaries of the district councils
in Yorkshire, Humberside and Lincolnshire were restructured and Hull City
Council introduced entrance charges to their municipal museums and galleries
for non-residents. The Ferens Art Gallery which was a co-programmer and
commissioner of works for Skint, was one of the venues affected and was
also where I was hosted as live artist in residence throughout the festival.
In his review Briars appears to be unable to accept the diversity of the
ways in which the festival format establishes a pleonastic framework within
which contexts themselves become shifting boundaries of purposeful investigation.
The necessity of how artists establish criteria by which to address contexts,
as opposed to becoming obligated by them via the commodification of their
sensibilities and individual identities, is a question the invited festival
artist must recognise. Root has established a commissioning policy which,
whilst supporting the development of new work, also clearly invites artists
to examine their commodification by the organisations who commission them.
In order to deal with the potential obligations and restrictions which
commissions outline, it is a necessity for the festival commissioned artist
to then address the relationship between their own product and those of
the other artists. In addressing these issues the artist may then recognise
that their work is situated in an extremely discursive programming format.
Briars' review and its criticism of the artists for not addressing
one particular issue within a context would appear ripe, for such assiduousness
also posits serious questions in relation to how the function of festivals
are critically assessed and represented. One of a series of issues, which
must be addressed when examining any cross-media festival, is their ability
to engage with specific contextual issues whilst simultaneously ensuring
that they successfully employ modes of agency which will protect the ensuing
discourse from becoming limited by obligation to the most moderate elements
of such structures.
Briars intones that the festival format should be employed in a prepossessed
relationship with the umbrella title within which the inherent issues
are explored, in this case identified by the programmers as poverty, wealth
and power. His belief that the artists chose not to allow the festival
theme to control their practices to the point where their individual products
may be recognised as significantly appropriate, offers the opportunity
to reconsider the role of the festival format and their relationships
to artists. Festival environments frequently offer contextual frameworks
for artists but also position major questions in relation to how the artist
will then deal with the inherent issues.
In establishing a schema within which to site discursive debates the co-programmers - particularly
with a festival which searches to examine issues such as those in Skint - are
also inviting artists to become responsible for establishing a series
of criteria by which to assess their involvement and representation. These
assessments demand that the artist examine their own commodification within
that environment. However, in the recognition that the involvement in
a festival is largely not an opportunity to showcase work and ego or to
develop careerist tactics, but to enter into a framed discourse, the artist
may rather discover that they are forced to address a wider series of
contextual issues.
In clearly demonstrating his vision of the festival format as being generic
("festivals such as this"), and in his choice to ignore many
other works which were site or context specific - as opposed to the
single omission he identifies - Briars offers a piece of writing which
clearly represents the crisis in the ways in which festivals are critically
represented. In his reductivist selection of individual works he establishes
the means by which he is able to examine the works stripped of the contextual
discourse which the festival provided. This results in a selective commodification
which the very format of the festival seeks to refute.
This means of selective representation provides the critic with a way
in which to reject the significance of the festival format, and to further
provide themselves with a means by which to ignore any responsibility
to discover relevant forms of criticism. Ultimately the festival critic
must become responsible for discovering a form of criticism which can
actively parallel the means by which festivals establish internal discourse.
Festivals use a whole series of means by which to create overload: intense
programming in a short period of time, clashing time schedules in the
presentation of work, representations of diversities of practices and
art forms and sites for exhibiting. The supposed function of this overload
is to escape the reductivist tactics by which commodification of the inherent
debates can take place.
Should festivals, whose aims and functions are to actively create complex
sites for the development of critical debates (by structures awash with
internalised confusion, contradictions and comparisons resulting in open
questioning of how discourse is constructed) continue to be critically
represented by value structures which appear to be dependant on the commodification
of individual elements, then the potential for major misrecognition of
their intrinsic value may be allowed to continue.
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