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Modus Operandi – Globe Gallery LifeWorkArt is delivered mainly through live projects. Modus Operandi was an optional project for final year students who were able to make use of the opportunity offered by Globe Gallery throughout 2003/4 for artists to programme and manage one of their gallery spaces. Students formed a collective – Normalife – which managed the whole project: communicating with the gallery director, selecting work from student proposals, hanging/installing work, marketing (mailout, press releases, two weblogs), documentation, organising an opening and closing event etc. Some focused on organisation but some also chose to make proposals for the show. The key factor for a project like this is that it is not something students go away and do, find very interesting but is separate to the ‘normalife’ of being an art student. It is also important for a partner organisation like Globe Gallery that the project stands up within their own frame of reference. In debriefing the project what came through most strongly is the value of a fluid dynamic within teaching and learning between the academic strictures of a degree course and the pragmatic pressures of a live project. One student said that Modus Operandi, “Lifted some kind of veil and helped my thinking patterns change”. Other students agreed and that consensus was around both how you think about/make work and where – in relation to others (ie public and artistic networks) – you place your work and yourself as an artist. The exhibition had an opening and a closing event. The opening took a traditional preview format. The closing was an evening of live art – a performance from a train relayed by mobile phone, karaoke viewed from the street, a sound piece and a film piece in the gallery, DIY pancakes throughout the evening. The differing dynamics of the two, and the experience of invigilating a gallery show, have had an enormous impact on students’ perceptions of developing a relationship with the audience through the work and the space (ie rather than as straightforward marketing). A major problem was not designing a long enough run-in time into the project. This could have allowed better consideration of how the space was used, increased the possibilities of making new work specifically for the space and – maybe most importantly – developing better strategies for dialogue with audiences (eg using the gallery as a base for developing a range of work: exhibitions, one-off events, off-site projects, participatory formats etc). However, it is easy to make such judgements in retrospect and sometimes a shortlife project (this was six weeks) has an energy that would be dissipated by more time. Importantly students were very able to critique the project and identify what could be learned for the future – and they saw that as a positive outcome rather than thinking “I wish I'd done this differently’. Normalife will continue as
a collective. Currently there is a debate about how that is described
to others but there seems a clear agreement
as to how it will function – as a network that will provide the
logistics to realise ideas (both their own and those of others). This
is based around seeing what happens when you work together sharing ideas,
skills and tasks. Most importantly they want to assert that making art
is a normal thing to do. |