Every arts organisation deserves a historian – or at least, somebody thinking historically – in order to help restructure how it thinks about itself in the present, to allow engagement with its future in a way that remembers but isn’t hindered by its past. Enter Dr Jonathan Orlek, currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Liverpool John Moores University but for several years embedded in the activities of Leeds-based East Street Arts [ESA] as he completed a collaborative PhD with Huddersfield University. The results of this expanded research residency include the book Artist-Led Housing: Histories, Residencies, Spaces, a beautifully layered and polyvocal exploration of the historical context of artist-led housing and its creative and critical possibilities, and this exhibition, No Going Back, which ran from 20 – 27 April 2024.
No Going Back mapped the activities of ESA over a pivotal early period (1998-2003), curated in collaboration with co-founder Karen Watson, who, after thirty years at the helm has stepped back from day-to-day responsibilities. One key gain has been the opportunity to work with Orlek to explore how the archive might speak to the past, present and future of the organisation. Between them they selected five projects. For Orlek, these allowed for the exploration of various themes that he sees as characterising ESA activities throughout its thirty-year existence. For Watson (and fellow co-founder Jon Wakeman), they represented a period in which their own practices were slowly subsumed by these activities, in which ESA flipped from project to organisation, a period after which there really was no going back…
On the wall as I enter Convention House, below the name of the exhibition, a document listing all those who helped bring the exhibition together has been inserted between the names of the co-curators, pasted over the ‘and’ to neatly emphasise the multiplicity of voices represented here. This first room introduces the methodology and the five key projects. The wall text describes the ad-hoc nature of the archive to date – one hundred turquoise boxes scrawled with pencil descriptions – and the difficulty of joining things up without always returning to the source, to Watson and Wakeman themselves. Alongside are artist statements from various overlapping groups and collectives, each connected to Watson and Wakeman’s multi-faceted practice in this period; opposite, an alternative and expanded mapping of those connections, from deepest roots to newest offshoots, also outlining the thematic links that Orlek has drawn out. During the curatorial tour Watson and Wakeman talk about a previous abortive attempt made to map the organisation’s activities through the people they’ve worked with over the years, which produced such a complex web of connections that the exercise had to be abandoned. It often takes someone like Orlek, invested but distanced, to untangle things without prejudice.
On a desk in a bay window (overlooking the bypass and revealing this spot as a raised island in the midst of continuous development) there is an example turquoise box containing essays around the subject of ‘the living archive’. Next to this are arranged various other texts on related themes, the results of a call out for printed materials to add to a ‘learning library’. Here too is a blue folder with a note titled ‘Echoes from the Future’, explaining the folders found throughout the exhibition, each containing an associated artefact from elsewhere in the archive, expanding the exhibition’s reach and developing thematic resonances.
Over the rest of the sprawling ground floor, each of the five projects are given their own space. ‘Room 1: Cheeky Strategies and Artwork Pranks’ tells the story of a classic art hoax – student collective Leeds13 and their second-year project Going Places (1998). ‘Room 2: Exhibiting in Non-Conventional Spaces’ focuses on the project ‘In-House’ (1998), an exploration of where art might be made and presented by artist collective Ballyhoo (one of those overlapping groups detailed in the first room). ‘Room 3: Programming at the Scale of the City’ looks at Watson’s curation of Leeds Fringe Photography Festival [LFPF] (1998). ‘Room 4: Processes of Participation and Conflict’ revisits ‘A Christmas Pudding for Henry’, a project commissioned by Robert Hopper of the Henry Moore Institute to address a sense of local artists being overlooked by institutional programming. In the corridor that links these spaces – ‘Room 5: Developing Long-Term Support Structures’ – there is documentation of ‘Demystifying Contemporary Art Practice’ [DCAP], an ambitious twelve-month support programme for six artists.
As you’d expect from an archival exhibition there is an abundance of printed material – flyers, posters, stickers, programmes, press releases, strategy documents, photographic documentation – and also an abundance of strategies used to extend and activate this material. In ‘Room 1’, on a table full of re-printed press cuttings, snippets from ESA’s VHS collection play on two television monitors to help testify to the extent to which Leeds13’s Going Places captured the attention of the national press. (The group successfully convinced their tutors that they had spent money drawn down from the student union on a holiday to the Costa del Sol rather than on producing work – later revealing the whole thing to be a stunt and repaying the money.)
Everywhere the visitor is poised between different times, different spaces. Particularly effective in this regard is the curation of the photography in ‘Room 2’, distributed in ways that recall the original intentions of the ‘In-House’ artists – responding to the architecture of this second exhibition site, provoking bodily responses in the viewer bending to inspect images. Convention House is always on hand to lend its own sense of time – its exposed stone work, sanded back paint, exposed utilities speaking of its various past and present usages, future possibilities. An example of how fully the exhibition infiltrates the building is to be found in the bathroom, where a flyer for the LFPF project ‘Six Toilets in Leeds’ is propped on the tiles above the loo. In ‘Room 4’ reprinted flyers and posters are pasted onto the breezeblock wall, the window, and even onto the brick wall in the street beyond. The implication here is of an unruly archive spilling over.
Throughout the exhibition, plants, desks and seating allow for comfortable sifting of the material. In places, the furniture itself is a prized artefact – table and chairs gifted by Jeanne van Heeswijk after the ‘Christmas Pudding’ project reprise their role as a site for meeting and conversation in ‘Room 4’. In 1999, van Heeswijk was enlisted to spend two months in Leeds supporting the emerging visual arts scene, bringing together students from the Jan van Eyck Academy and Leeds-based artists for workshops and discussions, setting them up in spaces at Leeds Metropolitan University and handing over autonomy to produce art interventions across the city – the mixing of the many ingredients required for an art ‘pudding’.
Watson and Wakeman’s brush with the Dutch artist seems to have supercharged their developing vision of artist-facilitators, of what art practice could be and could achieve at scale, and the ripples of this encounter are evident throughout. A blue ‘Echo’ folder in ‘Room 3’ contains documentation of two ‘Situation Leeds’ (2005/2007) impact events that Watson went on to programme and which sparked Leeds City Council into producing their annual ‘Light Night’ festival. The ‘Echo’ folders in ‘Room 5’ trace later activities of some of the artists involved in DCAP, different combinations of who were instrumental in projects such as Artsparkle and Vitrine, and organisations PSL and The Tetley. There is poignancy here, having just lost The Tetley as we know it, but a sliver of hope too in the demonstrable truth that things come apart and reform endlessly. That is not to overlook the trauma done to an organisation by stripping it of their building of course, or to people by uncertainty and job cuts.
Visible through windows at various points throughout the exhibition is a potential sixth case study, Patrick Studios – ESA’s very first capital project, joined later by the Art Hostel and Convention House; a clutch of buildings at the top of the rise that represent most concretely that flip from project to organisation. Where else could this exhibition be held? Not just in the barest practical terms, but emotionally, conceptually? It is a reminder ESA has achieved something many cultural organisations can never hope to: a permanent home – though even this has not always protected them against the vicissitudes of culture sector funding. No artist-led organisation is, in fact, an island.
The possibilities of No Going Back reach in all directions, rich and teeming. There were so many starting points: the book, the archive, the projects, the stories, the people – everything held right at the point of overflowing with tight editorial control and by Orlek’s clarity of vision. Beyond that, No Going Back is a timely reminder of what can happen when people with the will and wit to make things happen are empowered to act in the face of capital’s indifference. Not one person, not two people, but multitudes – an entire city even.
No Going Back ran from 20 – 28 April 2024 at Convention House, East Street Arts, Leeds.
Artist-Led Housing: Histories, Residencies, Spaces is available now from East Street Arts.
Benjamin Barra is a writer and editor based in Leeds.
This review is supported by East Street Arts.
Published 24.05.2024 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
1,580 words
