Tim Dunbar & Karen Lyons
Director of Studies
Manchester Metropolitan University of Salford University
Urban Design – Towards a Working Strategy
To introduce this project – for the purpose of this event we have called it a “Working Strategy” – we have invited a.r.r.r.t.s to write some introductory notes on the way it has developed over the past year.
We have always maintained a close connection with the discourse that has framed this project as it has developed over the year. Looking back we’d like to highlight a number of issues that have emerged through the discussion, the reflective annotations in notebooks and the various forms of creative practice. These issues seem to have remained relatively consistent over the year although they have not always been acknowledged – often deliberately.
First of all there has always been the feeling that the concept of a strategy is inappropriate. You get the impression that none of the artists involved are completely convinced by the use of the phrase a Working Strategy. There is no doubt that it is a working method – maybe that should be the working out of a method of working – but this does not seem to hold up as a strategy. Clearly this does not concern the artists involved. And, going on from this, we have often heard them admit to a mistrust of attempts to define this working method through the rigour of analytical exposition. There is a sense that this would inevitably disturb their intentions (although we’re sure that the notion of intentionality would also be problematic to them). There is a consistent sense that any attempt to concretise the process as some kind of finite model or presentational form would interrupt and disrupt the implicit dynamic of any emerging process. It has never appeared, however, that this was in any way a defensive or even a quasi-mystical stance, but more a genuine anxiety about the inappropriateness of any attempts to be prescriptive about activities that were naturally fluid, transient and absolutely context-specific.
The work that has focussed their attention over the last year (referred to here as Urban Design) has been FN. FN stands for Farmer Norton which is a derelict, industrial site near to the University in Salford. It is a location that is rich in memories for all of the artists involved. There used to be a factory that produced machinery used in the cleaning of textiles on the site until it was demolished about ten years ago. The assumption is that the ground had been heavily polluted. The site is now surrounded by a variety of urban regeneration projects both private, domestic developments and public initiatives especially those stemming from the University. The School of Art is nearby and there are many remnants of student intervention across the site. The intention was originally to develop a number of engagements in a number of similar locations in the North West of England and indeed across Europe. Some initiatives have been started but at the moment it is this FN work that acts as a demonstration of this method of working. The best way to describe it, therefore, might be to consider this a case study of a “possible” method. So although there is still this more expansive ambition to become involved with the creative opportunities to be found in post-industrial, derelict and overlooked spaces that make up our urban environment, what we have here is a more speculative demonstration of the possibilities of an investigative engagement as it has been derived from a single location. So, we are presented with an outline of a more generic process of intervention that has the potential to be used on any site.
We have observed, more often from a distance, the evolution of this strategy. It was clear at the outset that their primary motivating force was to find a way of working together that wasn’t simply a collaborative arts project or a group exhibition of work, and one that would in someway enable them to attract practitioners from other disciplines directly into the collaborative exchange. Initially we listened to an aspirational rhetoric about the desire to work with planners, local politicians and community groups. This proved impossible to achieve in the context of this strategic framework and the anticipated direct engagement with other disciplines has not been fulfilled in any explicit way at the time of writing. But the impact of the artist’s involvement with FN work has clearly inflected their personal practices so as to extend the nature and extent of the collaborative dimension of their work.
It is important to emphasise here the significance of the fact that all of the artists involved have maintained their commitment to their discrete personal practice throughout their work on FN. Each of the artists involved is better known for their other practice – one is a sculptor, one a painter and the other makes performance-interventions (there have also been close working relationships set up through FN with a sound artist, fashion designer and web-site designer). In many ways it is this tension between the singularity of their position as practitioners – maintained and often celebrated through FN – and the activity of sharing thoughts and positions that is integral to this notion of collaboration. What they have been able to do is to make it possible to share reflective discourses through a collectivisation of critical thinking and making that draws together creative practice(s) from both a political and aesthetic dimension.
We have always been reluctant to categorise this strategy as a research method as are the artists involved with FN. But, it is interesting to note the ways in which ideas and approaches have been informed by reference to an eclectic mixture of research methodologies.
One that particularly intrigued them (and us) was the fifth moment of research [1.]defined as
- a messy moment, multiple voices, experimental texts, breaks, ruptures, crises of legitimation and representation, self-critique,
- new moral discourses and technologies.(Lincoln and Denzin, 1998)
There have also been numerous debates, throughout FN, around the relationships between art-making and research. In fact, we have often commented that the origins of FN were revealed in the discussions, both formal and informal, that have occurred between these artists reviewing many of these debates over the last ten years. All of them are academics in higher education and the debates around practice-based research has inevitably impacted on their thinking about their practices (and their role as a practitioners – creative and academic) over the last few years. [2.]
There’s even a sense that working through this project has enabled them to somehow free themselves from the burden of some of the more pedantic and methodologically driven aspects of these debates. Not so as to simply ignore them or create a cynical distance from them, but to absorb them where relevant, into what they consider to be an authentic arts practice.
In fact, the FN artists often refer to themselves as artist-researchers who are engaged in a process of critically reflexive observation (3). This reveals their sense of exploiting / applying a practice that retains its subjectivity but attempts to position itself within a quasi-functional or externally defined context (visual-material, historical and social). As a consequence they do not explicitly engage with the production of art-works in any conventional sense, but see their practice more as a form of a descriptive or metaphorical process that only seems to make sense through a reference or connection (direct or indirect) to the site that is under investigation. But they seem concerned about the materiality of production and often express concerns about the explicit tangibility of what they produce. It seems as if the work they make exists in a persistent state of flux – a sort of refusal to be pinned down by definition or by closure. For them it seems as if production should be re-defined as a process that might remain in a reflexive domain, or result in a conceptual re-configuration, or even, a manipulation of materials leading to the making of something that is recognisable as art – or maybe all of these drawn together in single entity/process.
We think it is important to emphasise that there has never been a search for a group sensibility. What has emerged is a set of individualised creative practices that are connected only through the ways in which they have been exploited to investigate the particularities of the site – particularities that have, in themselves been generated by the chemistry of this union of discrete creative sensibilities.
The following texts are selected from notes produced during the course of FN. They highlight the questioning attitude and reflective approach that has emerged over the last year. We are certain that the form of the presentation of FN (as a working strategy) will certainly illuminate these questions and issues, but will certainly not answer or in any way resolve them.
Then to discuss:
- how to actively absorb the space-site?
- representing how the space-site operates as dimension and/or duration
- possibility of absorption through focalisation (subjectification of experiential moments)
- ultimate possibility of space-site being absorbed into place (as transformation)
- maybe a dialectical process of transformation and absorption
- but again, maybe a focalising imperative of a subjectively driven, narrativising effect of a transformational/absorption process
We are / are we (?) now in a position to propose the following procedural structure:
critically reflexive observations
- as mapping
- as measurement
- as contextualisation
interpretative tools and/or instruments
- as emergent processes
- as interactive methodologies
developmental strategies
- as proposals
- as plans
- as speculations
