On the 27th January 2023 the exhibition ‘Horizon Garden’ opened at Ty Pawb in Wrexham, North Wales
According to Jo March, Creative Director of Ty Pawb, “the intention of ‘Horizon Garden’ was to provide a working and constituent example of how exhibitions don’t need to be ‘end points’ – resolved presentations where we share what we, the institution, have concluded”. Instead, for Marsh, “the exhibition can be one moment for dialogue, sharing, dreaming, planning and reflecting, within a long trajectory….in this instance around community growing as a response to shared urgencies of climate emergency, social isolation, loneliness and food poverty.”
In November 2023 Sven Lütticken emailed me to say that, after several years of hard work the ‘Art and Autonomy Reader’ had finally been published by Afterall
My article ‘Social Autonomy and the Use Value of Art’, originally published in ‘Afterall’, Autumn/Winter 2016 (and available as a pdf on the Writing tab of this website) is reprinted in Part Two of the book ‘Useful Art’, alongside articles and writings by John Ruskin, Karl Marx, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Upton Sinclair, Nul Group, Gustav Metzger, Gullaume Bijl and Jean Baudrillard.
As well as this republication I also have a credit for drafting portions of part two (many thanks Sven).
On 17th November 2022 I took part in the final Drawing Workshop for Economics the Blockbuster took place at The Whitworth Art Gallery. Over the last two years, a series of these workshops have been run by Kathrine Böhm and Kuba Szreder as a means to help think through the key themes and issues that Economics the Blockbuster will engage with. They have also provided a means by which staff and constituents of the Whitworth Art Gallery can work more directly with the development and production of the exhibition itself.
From September 4th to 14th Alistair Hudson and I were invited by Barto Bartolomeus to take part in a series of workshops/talks/seminars and idea exchanges with Yamaguchi Centre for Media Art (YCAM) in Japan.
The purpose of the Research Visit was to work with Staff at YCAM around issues of Constituency and to develop strategies for making the Museum a place in which local, national and international publics can interact effectively in the co-production of content, commissioning and impactful project development. Key to this was to hear from and work with a range of local constituents, as well as a range of more community focused arts agencies, and to begin developing plans for the development of ground up and local initiatives that would enable local people to work with YCAM in addressing local issues of housing, education, economy and health.
After a series of visits, consultations and seminars, the Research Exchange concluded with a series of public presentations and discussions – YCAM OpenLab 2022 Programme 1
Amongst the Arts Agencies we were able to visit and consult with were:
contribution to Documenta 15. Both Seminars took place in the INSTAR Square in the Documenta Halle. https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/
On Saturday 20th August the Seminar ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Usological Turn’, chaired by The Van Abbemuseum’s Nick Aikens, looked at the concept of usership as a means of practicing by artists who set out to make work that is to be activated rather than looked at. Seminar participants, including Muhannad Al Ulaby; Tania Bruguera; Fernando Garcia Dory (who attended online), Annie Fletcher and Stephen Wright were asked to consider how such practices welcome use, misuse, transformation and repurposing and, also, how such practice might challenge old categories such as ownership, authorship, spectatorship, and intellectual property rights.
On Sunday 21st August I chaired the second session ‘Towards an Archaeology of Art Útil’ which allowed Tania Bruguera, Alistair Hudson, Alessandra Saviotti and myself to unpack how the online archive of the Association of Arte Útil has become an expanding and collective resource, or tool – one that can be freely used and activated by anybody who is interested in the increasingly complex intersections that are opening up between and across art and social change.
As such the Seminar also offered a space to discuss and consider how the Archive of the Association of Arte Útil (which now numbers more than 300 case studies) might provide tactics, historical perspectives – and way of rethinking relationships between theory and practice – for those who might wish to use art as a means of counter-neoliberal change. The Seminar also considered how this archive functions as a means to connect/reconnect diverse geographical and transdisciplinary ‘users’ in ways that might help the process of re-mapping our uses of art as a tool for social change.
As reported in The Art Newspaper Alistair Hudson, currently the Director of both The Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery will be moving to ZKM in April 2023.
On one hand, this is sad news. What Hudson has achieved at both The Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery has been outstanding. A highlight of this for me was the opening of the major Suzanne Lacey Exhibition ‘What Kind of City’ which opened across both venues in 2022.
As both a long-time colleague, collaborator and friend of Hudson’s, the opening of this exhibition was significant on many levels. For me, it was the simply the fact that, alongside the outstanding work of Lacey, the result of carefully cultivated long-term projects, there was a palpable feel of excitement, co-ownership and enthusiasm which buzzed around the venue. Compared to most exhibition openings (usual termed ‘private views’) this was a scene of bubbling discussion, exchange and ‘what next’ discussions about how museums could be used by constituents as tools for social change. Those who had participated in the production of the work exhibited by Lacey were clearly aware that they weren’t simply being represented in a civic museum space, but they had co-used the museum space as a tool of rethinking, remaking and as an open-source channel for speaking to power.
For me, this was represented most clearly on the night by the sound of the exhibition halls and spaces being filled with song and human voice.
Shapes of Water Sounds of Hope – Suzanne Lacey ‘What Kind of City: A Manual for Social Change’- The Whitworth Art Gallery –
Before Hudson leaves for ZKM though, we have a collaboration to participate in with Whitworth Art Gallery for their forthcoming exhibition ‘Economics The Blockbuster’ (ETB), which is currently set to open at the Whitworth in July 2023. Via my role as lead researcher of the Decentralising Political Economies online platform (www.dpe.tools), as well as in my current role as Researcher and Writer in Residence at The Whitworth Art Gallery, I’m really looking forward to working with staff and constituents in the development of this exhibition.
Decentralising Political Economies: Roaming Symposium is a research event with art professionals (artists, curators, and directors of cultural organisations), academics, researchers, constituencies and practitioners who apply art as a tool to be used as a resource for social, economic and political change.
According to the recent usological turn, more and more art practitioners create works that welcome use, misuse, transformation, and repurpose in concert with constituencies. The sessions, unfolding over a month, will explore how usership manifests within museums and institutions of education in particular looking at pedagogical models and toolkits as part of DPE.tools platform, which use the principle of Arte Útil and socially engaged art to rethink the composition of the curriculum by producing projects-as-tools.
Focusing on urgent questions animating the debate around radical education and the recent disruptions caused by the pandemic, the roaming symposium would be a moment to look closely at the proliferation of both online and offline platforms and methods which aim to facilitate the documentation, activation of case studies, and the application of toolkits.
Invited guests include artist Daniel Godínez-Nivón (MX), curator and art historian Gemma Medina (ES/NL), educator and curator Gabriela Saenger Silva (BR/UK), curator Lisa Heinis (BE/NL), artist Owen Griffiths (UK), Tŷ Pawb’s artistic director Jo Marsh (UK), the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy – Manolo Callahan and Annie Paradise (USA), curator and researcher Kuba Szreder (PL), Lead officer and cultural coordinator at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority Sarah Lovell, art collective The Alternative School of Economics – Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck (UK), the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery’s director Alistair Hudson(UK), artist Suzanne Lacy (USA), artist Tania Bruguera (CU), and others to be confirmed.
The event is organised by John Byrne (Reader at LJMU and Director of The City Lab), Poppy Bowers (Curator of Exhibitions at The Whitworth), and Alessandra Saviotti (PhD researcher at LJMU).
An abridged .pdf version of the book The Constituent Museum: Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation is now available online here via the L’Internationale ‘Bookshelf’.
Edited by John Byrne, Elinor Morgan, November Paynter, Aida Sánchez de Serdio and Adela Železnik, the edited online .pdf version of the book includes
Table of contents
Editors’ Introduction byJohn Byrne, Elinor Morgan, November Paynter, Aida Sánchez de Serdio, Adela Železnik
The Rainbow Wrasse byFrancis McKee
Negotiating Jeopardy byJohn Byrne
‘Give her the tools, she will know what to do with them!’ byNora Sternfeld
Revisiting and Reconstituting Networks from Japan to Beirut to Chile byKristine Khouri and Rasha Salti
From the 10th to the 12th of June 2019 the Association of Arte Útilwww.arte-util.org Summit took place at The Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester. This was an opportunity for members of the Association to catch-up, think through and begin planning the next steps of the Association’s progress for 2019/2020. As part of the Summit Alistair Hudson (Director of The Whitworth and Manchester Art Galleries and Co-Director of the Association of Arte Útil) was able to show us the space at the Whitworth Art Gallery that will become a permanent ‘Office of Useful Art’ and which will house an activated iteration of the Association of Arte Útil’s Archive. Tania Bruguera, instigator and Director of the AAÚ, talked through some of her aspirations for the development of the Association and Stephen Wright updated us with further thoughts about 1:1 Scale, Double-Ontology and the difficulties with writing a plausible contract of the AAÚ archive.
On 23rd of May I was invited by Owen Griffiths to represent The Association of Arte Útil at ‘Assembly Swansea’ which was organised by a-n (Artist Network). Owen Griffiths asked me to outline the work of The Association of Arte Útil and to also participate in a discussion about Constituencies and alternative ways of developing socially engaged art practices around use and use value. Griffiths, who has worked on The Trebanog Project, and who is also collaborating with HMP Prisons, Social Services and the edible land and community workshop space Graft (a soilbased syllabus) also gave a talk about his work and a tour of the garden school that he has been developing as part of the National Waterfront Museum. During the visit I was also introduced to Karen Mackinnon, who worked with Griffiths on the Trebanog Project, and who has recently taken over as Director of the Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea. As a result of this The Association of Arte Útil invited Griffiths to participate in the forthcoming AAU Summit at Whitworth Gallery Manchester and we also agreed to explore the idea of possible collaborations between the cities of Swansea, Liverpool and Manchester.
Use Value and Art 
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