tank.tv December 2008 / Straight to Video
Grizedale Arts on film 2000 – 2008

Kerry Stewart / Swan Night

Grizedale Arts is a complex network of projects and activity that is orchestrated from its headquarters on the historic hill farm of Lawson Park in the English Lake District. This programme of residencies, commissions, exhibitions, events and activity connects local society, politics and culture with the cultures of the wider world. The network exists in local villages, exhibition spaces, in villages from Germany to China and Japan and, more recently, online.

The organisation started life as a residency and environmental sculpture programme in Grizedale Forest in 1977, but by the 1990’s this had lost touch with developments in the visual arts. In 2000 it was reconstituted and a new programme was formulated that bought a new agenda for making art in rural places; one that embraced the contradictions and difficulties of the Lake District; a place as screwed up, complicated and contemporary as any urban landscape. Through the residencies a new generation of artists were fostered to produce work that got under the skin of this ‘Tom Cruise of landscapes’ and, ultimately, gave a true reflection of its people and its multiplicity of voices.

Cut free from the shackles of gallery exhibition programmes and the need to make art for art audiences, the residency programme started, through both confrontation and co-operation, to evolve new and more integrated platforms for artists’ ideas that allowed for all the high and low of rural Cumbria: country shows, weddings, car boot sales, village halls; off-roading, William Wordsworth and tourist tat.

Over the last eight years this ‘new’ Grizedale has evolved a way of working that doesn’t just aim to make contemporary art more interesting, with new and pertinent material, but also strives to make real social and political impact on the local communities through a long and deeply engaged relationship with its residents. Such a participatory approach is now common in the world of art, but what distinguishes Grizedale Arts is its ambition to move away from the Romantic model that has dominated international art style for so long and make artists more useful. As the farmers of the Cumbria diversify and turn to a version of landscape curator, Grizedale, is now seeking to diversify art into include agriculture, social development and politics: agriculture to culture culture.

The films commissioned by Grizedale Arts over this period give an taste of this evolution, from Marcus Coates and Juneau Projects’ early work that crosses urban and rural sensibilities, footage of early experiments in event based projects such as The Great Escape, through the ambition of large scale projects such as Romantic Detachment at PS1/MoMA that tackled larger cultural questions and onto to more recent work from artists like Pablo Bronstein who have produced films for Grizedale’s own brand of TV that promotes the idea of a post rural culture that plays an active role in the world.

With the process and activity based nature of the organisation and the fact that it works with very specific and targeted groups of people, video and film have played a central role in allowing access to the work of Grizedale and demonstrating the extant reality of rural Britain.

The country folk just got gobby.


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