five wasted years

I only became aware of them around 2005, but I’ve gained enough of value from attending several different workshops organised by Midwest since then that I’m happy to spend most of today and tomorrow contributing to Up, Up and Away: “part of Midwest’s programme for demise”.

Having just spent about 10 hours with a fairly diverse collection of artists and getting a sense of how the Midwest programme has also benefited them, reading this on D’log this evening was, um, unexpected:

Midwest £62,064
[ supposedly a support organisation for artists in the West Midlands, which never really took off — but somehow hung on to funding for about five wasted years ]
The full cuts list

The post goes on to say:

Cuts to the useless Midwest were widely expected among artists.

As I understand it, back in 2002/2003 Midwest were told in no uncertain terms that they had to prove their worth within the first 18 months of operation in order to receive the remainder of their funding for the rest of the initial 3 year planned lifetime. Not only did they do this, but they then went on to extend the programme for about another 2 years. That second segment has now come to an end and, with things in Birmingham having changed a lot since Midwest’s conception, the organisers have decided that it is now appropriate to bring Midwest’s activities to an end.

This decision was made public to the members of the mailing list in early September last year, so, yes, in that sense, Midwest not getting any further funding in the next fiscal year was widely expected!

Comments are currently switched off on the D’log post and with no obvious means of direct communication via the site I thought I’d open up things here to find out more about why Midwest is apparently seen as useless by some artists. It’s fair enough that some people may hold that view, but I’m curious about how this can be built on for things to come in the future.

What was it about the programme that didn’t work for you and how would you have done it differently?

yaribi

After some serious Googling for artist-led projects in and around Tokyo, I ended up following a link to the Yaribi gallery. As is often the case in these situations, I’m following a link from an English-language site to a Japanese one, so I tend to get most of my information from the link rather than the site itself. In this case:

Yaribi is a little wooden hut constructed illegally on the roof of the painting department of Tama University by a number of students. They organise exhibitions in it. …The structure will stay on the roof for a while, and has the support of a number of professors. I suggested they perhaps involve curating and critical studies students as well as artists, to try create a broader public platform. Anyway, it is wonderful to see such initiatives in the normally rather quiet and reserved spaces of art schools.

All the universities here are just closing down for their Summer vacation so I thought I’d missed an opportunity to visit Yaribi, but fortunately they had two Open Campus days just at the time when I was staying at a friend’s house close by.

The campus is on a hillside on what I assume is the edge of Hashimoto. The buildings are that Eastern Asian concrete type of institutional architecture that I somehow simultaneously find quite uplifting but also incredibly bland. Hmmm.

Anyway, I finally tracked down the East painting building and the Yaribi rooftop.

Thanks to the language barrier again, I’m really not in a position to be able to say much about either the show or the organisational set-up but as far as I can make out there was previously a more ramshackle construction on the site that was made more solid in the early months of this year.

Thanks to some sheets of hardboard, some scaffolding, a website and a few judiciously placed tarpaulins, Yaribi seemed to me to be a really viable exhibition space. There are quite a large number of staff (a mix of current and graduated students?) and, judging from their website, a busy programme.

I’m really excited that something like this is happening, although I’m not really sure how autonomous it is and it’s still very much within the ‘safe zone’ of an art university (and probably within the students’ own department at that). I’d love to see more of this Outside, both in Japan and in Brum.

Could the use of scaffolding lend itself to a modular approach and a space that could be quite mobile? …or is it the semblance of something permanent that gives this project its strength?