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| Trade, 2005; courtesy the author |
There has been a lot spoken and written about in the recent past regarding the nomadic artist, networks, the transnationality of production and the return to the periphery. Leitrim, Carrick on Shannon to be more exact, doesn’t even figure on this roadmap but it has now opened its cultural borders. It has put down its roots and forged ahead, bypassed the Pale and other regional centres and launched itself onto the international Art Market for consumption. Carrick on Shannon, once a small market town where the lakes were more productive than the land, now has a leading art centre, the Dock (a renovated courthouse), with grand ambitions above its station. Confidence brought on, no doubt, by the economic whirlwind that imports foreign multinationals to pay the average wage, confidence that has turned the farmers’ market into a craftsy tourist trap, confidence that has exchanged clothes shops for boutiques, pubs for bars, introduced a leisureplex, and of course the ubiquitous Tesco has just opened a significant new store. Prosperity indeed.
Economically, the Law of Diminishing Returns tells us that building a few roads in a poor country can cause considerable development while in a rich country they may only relieve a little congestion; a greater education in a poor economy can open many new possibilities while in a wealthy one people with degrees often cannot even find jobs. On the other hand telephones are useful if people have phones, roads are good if everybody has cars and technology is easier to invent if you have done it before; increasing returns. Neither of these explain why China and India are the fastest growing economies and why countries like Cameroon and North Korea linger miles behind, but according to economist Tim Hartford the reason is simple: Trade. Open, International, Global, Trans-national, Free, Trade. The true balance of imports and exports – Perfect Markets.
Trade is a concurrent communal project between the arts officers from both Leitrim and neighbouring Roscommon combined with Visual Leitrim and overseen, directed and curated by Cliodhna Shaffery, while on a curatorial residency. It is a stepping stone, born out of an integrated strategy, shaped by the aforementioned individuals with a very precise vision and development plan, combining serious constructive dialogue, practice and opportunities for the young and ever-increasing numbers of artistic refugees, hiding from our over-inflated urban centres, gathering to escape financial servitude and to continue their creative endeavours. Trunk show1, held in Boyle, Roscommon, is the antecedent to Trade, a cocktail mixed by the same crew of cultural investors. This year, a new spin: the introduction to wider international networks with a twist of educative models for collectivity, weapons for survival on the fringes. The approach was simple. Conversation. Networks. And conversation again. Applied in two distinct forms. Firstly, through One to one sessions, a space for exchange, where one could caucus around the group stalls secreted throughout the gallery, manned by each invited art group or agency. The thematic structure, described loosely in the press material as that of a ‘trade fair’, a misnomer maybe, with possibly derogatory connotations, more closely resembled an age-old farmers’ market. (Ironic considering that the actual farmers’ market, just outside the door, has been globalised – traded up – obliterated.) From here each agency could ply their stock and trade, to illustrate their consciousness of practice, context, locality and approach. The second form was shaped through a series of brief introductions by each agency followed by minor debate and carried out intermittently throughout the weekend in the Dock’s adjoining mini-theater. One such forum was chaired by willful Brian Hand on the Sunday, which transformed into an outdoor intervention.
Each stall and what was offered here differed greatly. 16 Beaver Group who have created a platform for socio-political debate, activism and practice from on the fifth-floor space in the financial district of lower Manhattan, used a collection of books, articles and maps, to articulate themselves, while myvillages.org, generated by three artists from three different countries, used the unfolding of their Bibliobox, a well crafted valise containing their books, posters, photographs, audio CDs, films and even a portable DVD player for personal viewing. Their presentations and projects redressed the balance away from the Urban Artistic Centres and back to the diversity of the village and that of rural cultural development. The only for-profit organization in attendance, G.P.A. (General Public Agency), set themselves apart instantly from the rest through their terminological language: “consultancy,” “policy,” “place making” and “broad approach to what counts as culture and as environment.” (Hmm!) While their stall resembled a well designed wall-based art installation, as an illustrative map-cum-matrix of recent clients and collaborators from the English Arts Council to the Wellcome Trust and including architects, city planners, and artists alike, my distrust and dis-ease grew not from the notion that MONEY could be earned through “best practice,” an alien concept in my impoverished world, but to the establishment of more bureaucracy, a further agency to bureaucratize art and art practice, less a path of resistance and more the party line in disguise. The inclusion of the local artists in the exhibition, while being well intentioned, left them in the precarious position of neither being an artist group nor directly connected to the cultural issues of these organizations. Sally Maidment’s encyclopedic Resource room exemplifies the standard of educative and illustrative information that can be gathered to profit the existence here on the peripheries.
The nature of the Art Group is no doubt born from a resistance to a certain climate or environment, out of a reaction or rebellion to certain norms within a social setting, whether urban or rural, and from varying differences in ideological approaches and practices. None of this was borne out in depth during formal discussions. The non-vicarious strategy adopted by Trade was profitable, but it relied completely on the possessiveness of its participants that could often have been smothered by hospitality alone. A surface reading of the groups’ ideologies and approaches was as close as the debates got. And an occasion missed. A greater understanding of the particularity of each group, based on their location, politics, forms, interventions and techniques for opposition would have been most welcomed. A constructed weighing up of, say, the activities of Puerto Rican M&M Proyectos (a sleeping group of activists, antagonists and policitically oriented artists and curators) with that of the Copenhagen-based N55, the well renowned Danish arts group that allowed its self-consumption into the fabric of their city, could have contributed greatly to our understanding of their particular relationships and existence with their own direct situation. How does N55’s direct approach to social politics, the redesigning of personal and public spaces, environments, urban and rural, mix with the ideological path taken by myvillages.org? How does Catalyst Arts survive now, under-funded and possibly no longer fulfilling the role it once did in Belfast? Some of these questions may be related directly back to characteristics of world economic trade. Distance, time and place have all changed radically. Speed of travel, internet access, learning and experience, and greatly reduced cost are a factor too. Even Leitrim is not untouched by the world.
The high aspirations for the weekend were reached through Rene Gabri’s simple but effective Walk with 16 beaver, a walk with thirty to thirty-five participants throughout Carrick on Shannon. From a homeless shelter to our ubiquitous housing estate to the Asian Antique Store, up the main street, visiting a fashionable boutique, to a family-owned fruit-and-veg shop (which was ironically closing the very next day due to rise in competition). Along the way proprietors and staff were openly challenged on the changing face of Carrick on Shannon and Ireland, the pros and cons of our voracious economy, the fear of and spread of European immigrants with foreign languages and appearances, and finally to what defines progress. The dichotomous struggle between the urban and the rural were not in evidence here.
Ultimately Trade worked, its openness and fluidity and its desire never to demand an outcome kept it moving at its own natural pace. Here it’s worth remembering Tim Hartford’s words, that in the search for ‘Perfect Markets’ there needs to be an equivalence between exports and imports, and for this to happen Trade and its organizers need to find their comparative advantage, to stay focused and to progress in their own deliberate manner.
1 Reviewed in Circa 111, spring 2005
David Dobz O’Brien is anartist and founding member of art/ not art.
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