Pub Conversation: JJ Charlesworth & Josie Appleton

Self Service and Pub Conversations.

In 2006 through to 2008, Self Service initiated a programme of talks taking place at the Lamp Tavern in Birmingham.

Each Self Service member chose an artist or person of influence to their practice who was in turn invited to nominate someone they would like to have a public conversation with. Topics of conversation were held entirely open and reflected the interests and enthusiasms of the artists nominated.

Each conversation was recorded and released as a podcast, however the Pub Conversations website no longer exists so the files are re-posted here by way of an archive. All posts related to the Pub Conversations series can be found at www.npugh.co.uk/tag/pub-conversations/.

Self Service is a constantly evolving group of Birmingham based artists who originally came together in 2004, with the aim of generating projects which would create intimacy and enable the development of dialogue amongst the disparate groups and practitioners in Birmingham who made up a somewhat fragmented visual arts community.

At the time of Pub Conversations, Self Service consisted of Tom Bloor, Jo Capper, Mona Casey, Faye Claridge, Ruth Claxton, Greg Cox, John Hall, Cheryl Jones, Nikki Pugh, Liz Rowe, Charlotte Smith and Matt Westbrook

The talks were supported by Arts Council, UCE and Business Link.

JJ Charlesworth & Josie Appleton, April 2007

JJ Charlesworth has been writing about contemporary art since he left Goldsmiths College in 1996, with a constant focus on the relation between art and political life. He writes regularly in art magazines such as Art Monthly, Art Review, Flash Art Time Out. He has published numerous catalogue essays on emerging artists. He teaches and lectures regularly at art colleges in London, and in 2003 was a selector for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition. He is currently reviews editor at Art Review, and is also organiser of the ‘Artistic Autonomy’ campaign strand of the Manifesto Club.

His guest, Josie Appleton is convenor of the Manifesto Club, a campaigning group that aims to challenge cultural trends that restrain and stifle people’s aspirations and initiative. She wrote the Manifesto Club report, ‘The Case Against Vetting’, and oversees the campaign work on vetting and child protection issues. She is a journalist and writer based in London. She writes regularly for spiked, and has contributed to a number of publications, including the Spectator, The Times, Times Literary Supplement and Daily Express.

[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/pubcon/JJ%20Charlesworth%20and%20Josie%20Appleton%2022nd%20March%202007.MP3]
[Download file]