Network Member Focus – Reading International

We spoke to Susanne Clausen, Director of Reading International:

“We are a contemporary art organisation run by artists, curators and writers at the Reading School of Art at the University of Reading. As neither the town nor the university has a contemporary art gallery, we benefit from a rich mixture of partner organisations, who support our work and take turns to host our projects. We produce several major projects each year, in which artists and curators are given a platform to make new work in response to the social and historical context of Reading and wider Berkshire. We promote and commission major solo exhibitions, group and thematic shows, a programme of events including performances, film screenings, workshops and talks as well as offsite projects and temporary public artworks.

“Students are involved throughout the programme. They support the artists and the RI team as artist assistants, as performers, technicians or exhibition guides. They run educational workshops with local schools alongside our exhibitions via our ArtLab. They can experience the projects at all levels of the production, commissioning, mediation, marketing or educational programming and additionally we try to pay them whenever we can.

“Over the last few years our students have really benefitted from the Platform Graduate Award. Firstly the selection process has always created a bit of a buzz and then those students who were selected had a fantastic experience showing at Modern Art Oxford, presenting work developed from their degree shows. We also know that this experience has helped them gain MA places and to significantly move on with their work. I think it is a really important feature to support young artists in the regions. I only wish that the programme could support more than one artist per university.

“At this point we are in the process of setting up Reading International Studios, as a new infrastructure for residencies and studio spaces to support our graduating students in the local area. For this we will work in collaboration with existing and new partners and to create new opportunities to exhibit and showcase work. We thereby hope to invite our next graduates to build on models that have successfully worked in other towns and cities, where a culture of artist run spaces is perhaps more developed than in Reading.

“As an artist and educator based in a university context over the last few years I have had many discussions with my colleagues about the role of the art school and the university. Many of us are or have been in engaged in collaborative and curatorial work, setting up groups and spaces or publishing platforms – for example Alun Rowlands with NOVEL or my work as Szuper Gallery – and this has always been a strong narrative in the way that we teach. As a team we have constantly questioned our approach to teaching. We have been looking for what new emancipatory teaching and self-empowering learning might look like for artists in the university context. We have sought for ways in which the university could be imagined as a public arena, one which opens its life beyond the academic community.

“As the so-called educational turn has become more pronounced, we have seen numerous self-organized art schools and free talks and workshop programmes spring up in the UK and around the world. The reasons for these are complex but in the UK they can certainly be attributed to the escalating student fees, overall cuts to arts funding and university budgets, the neoliberalisation of education and students frustration with overstretched tutors. What is obvious from this trend is that many are eager for an art school to be more self-determined, flexible, small-scale and site-specific and responsive to the local context.

“As Luis Camnitzer has pointed out, the art system still differentiates between those who make art and those who appreciate it. Those who make art are subject to the criteria of meritocracy, and the educational system aims to select and distill those who rise to the top. The work of those few is meant to attract as many viewers as possible to sustain the market. As a sector we need to find ways to counter the neoliberal narrative as much as possible and widen those opportunities.

“The biggest challenges for art schools is to develop our willingness and ability to challenge ourselves to open new spaces for re-thinking our values, judgments and systems for educating artists. As an institution this means that we need to a re-assessment what the university is for, how we teach and for whom. Our common aims in the sector must be to continue to advocate for free education at every level, and since this is a long shot, see that we keep the system more open with more scholarships for anyone who needs it. At the same time we must fight the slow degradation of art education in the school system. We should try to explore how we can make the art school a more open and innovative place for production, co-operation and partnership working.

“I see my work with Reading International and my role as an educator in art schools as a practice in line with my work as an artist or my curatorial work. Reading International is a means to create a public, open and communicative space within a higher education institution. It allows me to extend this within the university framework and to develop new collaborations with artists and curators. It is also an opportunity to perhaps ‘steal back’ a little from the institution and to explore ways to be in the university/institution but not of it and to open up a horizon to support divergent narratives.

“Reading is probably quite typical for a regional art context as it is fundamentally based on a large community of volunteers who are willing and/or able to give their time for free to organise cultural events and activities in the town. When we held our big partner summit at Tate Exchange earlier this year, one of our partners put a question to the room of about 60 people, asking who was paid to be at the event. We only counted 5 people. This is indicative of the situation. There is big enthusiasm in Reading to create an exciting cultural offer, but resources and professional structures are slim.

“Although this is no news for artists generally, in the regional context it not only limits participation on a more professional level to those people who are either hugely enthusiastic or who can afford to give their time for free to organize things but it also limits the scope and scale of activities and sometimes it makes it harder for those volunteering to look outside and embrace more ambitious programming. And so whereas the art system has become a large operating machine in London, which is continually in need of need of skilled and educated labour to create and deliver content, this has yet to develop in our region.

“The volunteer culture also puts even more pressure of the community of art graduates, who have already accumulated enormous debts throughout their studies, but are also encouraged seek as many internship and volunteering opportunities possible to increase their employability prospects. In response to this we are looking to carve out more opportunities and spaces for younger artists to enable them to stay in Reading after finishing their degree so they can contribute to the local arts community and hopefully establish some of their own structures.

“Our current project A reproduction of three weeks in May 1970 is inspired by artist Rita Donagh and a group of students occupying a studio at the University of Reading in 1970. Staging events, performances and collective actions they wrote and discussed circumstances within and beyond the confines of the university. Didactic conventions and context were replaced in an attempt to diagram a charged collective knowledge. Activated against a backdrop of student protest, in particular the Kent State massacre in the US, the group sounded political images, registered distance and invested in a politics of time, place and bodies. Donagh’s own response, the painting Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 uses a social-political cartography to plot distinct events, between image and experience.

This historical scenario acts as a catalyst for the year-long publishing and curatorial project organized by NOVEL, the curatorial and publishing platform devised by Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams. The programme includes a series of events and commissions with contributions from Patricia L Boyd, Helen Cammock, Renée Green, Studio for Propositional Cinema, and Steven Warwick.

The first project is a series of billboards under the headings of Public Notices designed by Studio for Propositional Cinema, who have used the public sites at OHOS, one of our partners venues, and at large hoardings in town to present hypothetical laws which determine the legal conditions taken from the dissembled opera project Redundant as eyelids in absence of light. These public notices will later be performed as part of an organ recital at the university’s great hall. The other artists will develop projects for local shops, screenings and workshops.”

Image: Public Notice, Studio for Propositional Cinema, 2018.