Vogue, Barbie, and Visual-Kei: after Finnish fashion photographer Ninni West captures our best sides at a shoot in Helsinki, she shares a few secrets about her light-hearted approach, pop-culture obsessions, and how to thrive as a freelancer…

Professional photographer Ninni West was born in Vieremä, in Northern Savonia, Finland, and is now based in Helsinki. After studying BA Arts at LAB Institute of Design and Fine Arts, Lahti, she combined a love of Japanese street-style and make-up knowledge with camera skills to become a fashion photographer, working with slow fashion brand Anni Ruuth and Moomin merchandise brand Nordic Buddies. West continues to work across fashion, promotion, portraiture, and product/still life, and is currently working on a documentary series about Harajuku fashion.

TDN: First question, Ninni: you create a lovely atmosphere on shoot. You had us relax before creating our portraits at the Finnish Art Agency office (thank you), and made the whole process pleasurable (and I usually find having my photo taken absolutely agonising). You told silly jokes, used props, even had us take our shoes off. Where do you think this approach comes from?

Ninni West: I remember when I first started acting like that, and bringing my real personality to the photoshoots, while taking pictures of people at school. Before that, I didn’t realise how hard it is for some people to be in front of the camera and pose. But if I am the biggest fool in the room, and my subjects see me as a real person (not some cool, mysterious, cold artist) they loosen up and tend to trust me. People often say that they are not photogenic or nobody takes good pictures of them. I don’t believe that.

Quite rarely I plan my props for photoshoots in locations – I just use what I find. It is more fun and exciting that way. A big part of my practice is just working with the constant element of surprise.

Also I got bored of taking photography – and myself – too seriously. I just want to have fun. People tend to see when you enjoy something wholeheartedly.

That’s true, the feeling of creative play, of having fun, is clearly visible in the final images, as well as being tangible on set. Another thing I liked a lot about posing for you, was the space you made for us to talk. We shared a lot about our lives and expertise. Can you share with our readers how you got into photography?

Barbie magazine held a photography competition back in 1996 and my aunt wanted for me and my cousin to take part. We just created scenarios for the Barbies and my aunt took the images. It was super fun and I happened to win my first camera; a pink Barbie Hollywood star point-and-shooter. I started taking pictures of my dolls, my mom and my cousin. My late granny always made sure I had a camera and my mom always had my films developed. I had many photoshoots with my cousin where I styled her and we just had loads of fun. It was playing for me. Mom also promised me a DSLR camera if I graduated from high school. I did and took so many pictures for my fashion blog and travels with it.

This is all hindsight, though. I didn’t think photography could be a job, especially not for me. It didn’t exist in my world (being a small town girl from Vieremä). Fashion design was something I was very into. I bought Vogue and just adored the images. I was working as a cashier, I was in a bad space, being clinically depressed, and not wanting to live anymore. One day at the till at work, had an epiphany: someone takes those images in Vogue. Someone took all the images all around us. That someone could be me.

Oh boy, did I Google that night. It all seems hazy now, but it just went so smoothly from there on. I got into one school, then to another. Before I graduated I got an in-house job. At this point, I had that art school curse on me; everything is dead serious, you have to be cool and professional. I fought with that a lot. I didn’t think ‘my thing,’ or my type of photography was good enough. In my head documentarists and photojournalists were the ‘real photographers.’

During Covid, and after having a serious burnout, I started my own business. I had nothing to lose. I had given over so much time to jealousy, anger and victim mentality. Why had nobody chosen me to do their amazing campaigns? Well. I had nothing to show them. That’s when I really started doing what felt the most natural for me; back to the roots, just playing with my model, just like photoshoots with my cousin.

You mention the ‘art school curse”… I think anyone who’s been to art school reading this will understand some of that feeling of the imposter syndrome, or that struggle to make practice pay off outside of education. Can you explain this a bit more? In what ways did it hinder your creative practice?

At least for me, ‘the curse’ was that I knew so little about the field and its possibilities. And in school, you only have a few authorities who tell you about how the future of your profession is going to be. Our school was very focused on documentary and photojournalism. Those became a standard for me and because it didn’t feel like something I would like to do, I felt bad for it. I don’t regret going to Lahti Design Institute, not at all! It was the best time of my life, so far. But I believe students in the creative field should have more people coming to tell them how they can work, and do the things they actually enjoy. And how studying photography doesn’t necessarily mean that you will work as a photographer after graduating.

I chose subjects that I thought were serious enough and important enough. I love using colours and bright lights, and all the tricks I learned while working in cosmetics as my side job. But I had an inner critic who told me it’s not convincing, and people wouldn’t take me seriously as a professional if I’m just myself. I tried to tone down my own clothing style and keeping, for example, my love for Japanese street fashion as a separate thing away from photography.

Now, this could not be further from the truth! I am making a social documentary portrait series about Japanese street-style fashion lovers in Finland. The more I meet the people who dress up in Harajuku fashion, the more I understand what a life-changing thing it has been for them and for me, too. So it is worth documenting.

It is so good to hear you say that, and especially good advice here for recent graduates. I certainly felt that “not good enough” feeling at multiple times after graduating. Starting your own projects, understanding your field, these make you feel tons better about your own voice. 

And on the new work, the Harajuku series, what have you learned so far?

I have noticed how much I like talking to people. One-on-one interactions with my subjects have been amazing, and some of them have left me in tears. I have learned that I have a lot of empathy. There is no such thing as a subject that is not worth photographing – especially when it’s somebody’s passion – and how life-altering and healing something like dressing up can be. We don’t get too many opportunities to express ourselves and take up space. For me, fashion is for that.

Will you share some of the styles that you’ve covered in the studio during this current project? Old favourites or new surprises?

The younger people give me so much. They are so innovative with their style and they make a lot of their own clothing. I rediscovered my love for Visual-Kei [informed by 1980s music and Glam] and Gyaru [‘gal’ style, circa 1990s, epitomised by dyed hair and fake nails]. I love how these styles are making a comeback with all the other stuff from the 2000s. I am super inspired to combine Lolita fashion [Rococo and Victorian influenced, sweet, punk, gothic] with my everyday looks. It’s not possible every day, since I have a toddler, and in photoshoots I need comfy clothes.

You work a lot with upcoming fashion designer Tuuli-Tytti Koivula (who has just won Nordic talent incubator ALPHA’s 2023 Award at Copenhagen Fashion Week). I love that one of the images here was actually shot in your apartment as you were moving out. What’s special about the ongoing collaboration, do you think?

We just really clicked. I saw her works on Instagram, I follow Aalto University and saw her there as a graduate. Her aesthetics and visual language are similar to many of the things I admire, ultra feminine, big flower prints… I met her over coffee and she was wearing full pink and crocs. We connected, our energies, personally and professionally. She gives a lot of freedom during shoots, to see what we can find and do together. In the apartment shoot, we were inspired by my kitchen and the moving boxes, and it was a proper mix of ‘this doesn’t belong here’ so it therefore seems right. It was so much fun. We are already planning more projects so stay tuned. 

Now that you’re self-employed, have you got any advice for those wanting to be a photographer full-time?

I can only speak mostly on the commercial side, but I have few things.

1. Make sure you can make the ends meet financially. Make a budget of your minimal expenses and calculate how much money you have to earn every month. Remember, not all you bill will be in your own wallet. Find out if you are entitled to any benefits or start-up money. Also grants or loans can be helpful. This isn’t very sexy or exciting, but necessary.

2. Have a good work-life-balance and time limits. You have to be able to get work done before the deadline and within reasonable hours. You need sleep, hobbies and a social life outside your work, and photography is no exception. It is a job. It might also be your passion (it sure the fuck is mine), but burnout is not worth it.

3. Showcase in your portfolio only the types of things you want to make. If you don’t want to shoot weddings, don’t put wedding photos on your website. If you don’t have clients, just make them yourself. I started building my fashion and portrait portfolio in my bedroom having a sheet as a backdrop.

Really generous advice, Ninni. 

Laura Robertson

With thanks to Laura Köönikkä and Mikael Pessi at the Finnish Art Agency

More at ninniwest.com

Image credits: all courtesy Ninni West. From top: Mike Pinnington and Laura Robertson at the Finnish Art Agency, 2023. Tuuli-Tytti Koivula shoot, 2023, Maurine is wearing Cumulus Skirt, Flower Stripes shirt and limited edition Gigantic Flower Bag. The belly – The hill, 2022. Self portrait in nature – In my garden, 2021

Arts and culture organisations have been anxiously waiting for their fates to be revealed this morning, as Arts Council England finally announce who gets the 2023-26 round of ‘National Portfolio Organisation’ (NPO) funding.

At 11am this morning, many of our best known and cherished galleries, museums, theatres, publishers, commissioners, project spaces and creative venues across England found out who received (and who didn’t) this significant investment from the national funds, which will see them through the next three years.

It is clear that some have lost this funding completely, making their futures unsure, and others are receiving it for the first time.

The announcement is being broadcast live, here, but was delayed for more than a week, due to the chaotic changes in government.

On this morning’s announcement and selection process for 2023-26, Arts Council said: “The decisions made in this round of National Portfolio funding have been driven by the principles of Arts Council England’s 10 year-strategy, Let’s Create, and by a commitment to creating a fairer spread of investment across the country through a focus on those places where historically, public investment in creativity and culture has been low.”

In a complex application process, organisations wishing to become one of the Arts Council England’s limited list of NPOs have to apply with a ‘realistic and achievable’ business plan every three years. As explained on their website, Arts Council England expect budding and existing NPOs ‘to achieve value for money on behalf of the public.’

A key word in Arts Council’s communication has been the term ‘levelling-up’: suggesting that more should be done outside of the London area. London remains, however, their largest investment, and questions are being asked about whether taking from some to fund others is ethical. Criticism is also aimed at the funding body’s aim to ‘transfer’ their arts organisations (including NPOs and Investment Principles Support Organisations, or IPSOs) out of London, if they wish to remain recipients of Arts Council money.

It was difficult and complicated, but you told us what it feels like to be working class and work in the arts.

Last year, after much umming and ahing, hand wringing, and conversation amongst ourselves and with peers, we published a strand of articles under the title Class IS A Big Deal. The series set out to elucidate the problems faced by working class people when trying to access and sustain a career in the arts.

We were very conscious of the fact that, although this is something that has begun to be discussed, you very rarely hear directly from people who have first-hand experience of the issues, challenges, barriers and concerns that can loom so large; namely, networks, opportunity, perceptions, self-image, time, confidence and money – or a lack thereof. No, you’re not moaning, whinging or complaining without cause, so don’t apologise: it’s crucial to hear your views on this. As you can see from the responses, below, class deeply, irrevocably influences the way we behave and feel about ourselves.

Note that we received private messages via email and social media from people who wanted to comment on Class IS A Big Deal, but felt uncomfortable doing so publicly. After all, how can we talk about class issues without talking about our own, very personal experiences? Similarly, feeling ready to do so, is a personal choice. We (Laura and I) were also anxious about dissecting what it feels like to be ‘working class’; a conversation that often includes our backgrounds, home lives, family, early rebuttals and closed doors. It didn’t help being directly told last year, by an arts professional peer we asked for advice, that anyone who talks about class in the arts has a chip on their shoulder (yes, that happened).

Once published, Class IS A Big Deal nonetheless triggered loads of responses online. We wanted to scoop them together and give a concerted voice to the people affected, because it’s (really) okay to raise such concerns. This conversation, and more like it, are happening now, and people are listening. Ultimately, together, we hope to be able to take it further, to discuss and propose solutions. Who’s accountable and to what exactly? Tonight, we’re at the Preston Playhouse for Art and Class: Is Everyone Welcome?, a free, public event organised by artist Rebecca Chesney. We want to continue to be involved in other, critical discussions like it this year.

Below are a selection of your responses to our Class IS A Big Deal strand, drawn from various conversations. Thank you for speaking up.

Glen Arthur Meskell Brocken: Ah at last. This is something I’ve been tackling and talking about for years and little to nothing ever gets done, except in a tokenistic sense. Mainly because the people asking the questions aren’t working class or from a lower class. So great to see you, Danny Leigh, Arts Emergency and others changing that debate in recent years. I’ve worked in the arts for over 10 years now (not as an artist I have to add) and I can see how difficult it is for working class artists and arts workers to make it and advance within the industry. And it’s not just about networks and not knowing people to put in a good word or open a door, that inevitably helps. It’s also psychological as well.

Almost everyone I know from my background get to a certain position in the hierarchy and suddenly suffer from the dreaded ‘impostor syndrome’ – a syndrome which is caused by striving to get to a career completely different than their peers from school or family and feeling alien in an environment which is organically structured for ‘others’. Getting over that hurdle can sometimes be more difficult than the ‘privilege’ that comes from being simply born into a different class.

The Double Negative: Can you name the barriers (working class bingo)?

Gordon Dalton: Class, money, pay, access, mental health, time, illness, parenting, family, location, elitism, self entitlement, less opp, profile, confidence, back slapping, perception of success, perception by public, perception of ourselves.

Alice Mildred: Is there a distinction between working class and skint?

It is so fuzzy. I grew up mainly in a council flat with an 1st gen immigrant single-mother, lots of asbo style family problems. But I grew up with books. I grew up with ideas and expectation to do well. My accent is more middle than working class. Always skint, cockroaches, cold beans, new stuff may have been stolen. We moved around a lot, so no fixed community to identify with. Never comfortable with any class (or is that just other people?), never ‘accepted’ in either fold either. Did 1 year of Uni as a teen. More recently topped it up with some self-financed open university. What class would you put me in?

Laura Pilgrim: I noticed in my teens that the only people with my accent at a gallery that I was involved with (in their Young People education programme) were the installation team/technicians.

I remember asking them about their jobs and them saying “oh well we only get work here about every 8 weeks” and thinking that it didn’t seem enough (as a teen trying to make life/work decisions).

Also as always identifying as working class from childhood but then went to uni. Getting a Gallery Job, then one day while discussing class with someone they said “you’re middle class. You work in a Gallery, you and everyone who works there are by definition middle class”

Can relate to comments above about not feeling working class or middle class.

Mel Connell: I was a working class artist. Now I’m an imposter… been lifted up through meeting the right person, becoming middle class through partnership.

Prior to this the main things that stopped me being successful when I was working class was working! Having a minimum wage job working all hours in overtime to afford rent I couldn’t afford to buy paint, fabrics, canvas, card, fix my computer for digital work, or even get a set of pencils. I also didn’t have time to produce good quality work or a surface I could dedicate to art (heck I didn’t even have a dining room table).

I couldn’t afford to go to art classes or have the time to commit to go to them on a regular basis. (If they were there, as there wasn’t any that I knew of).

It wasn’t by chance that I did networking and met the right people who showed me where to find and apply for opportunities, it was from pure determination to find out about the local scene and attend every free event that I could.

It did help that I quit my job and went to uni and then progressed onto a teachers degree, that meant I could get more money per hour of work therefore work less and do Art more.

Michelle Dee: I think it is partly about face fitting, if you look like them and sound like them you will get on, if you don’t you won’t. #allthebloodysouthernersinthenorthgettingallthecontracts…

And if they do throw you a bone you better be grateful, if you decide to accept and if you do accept, just make sure you haven’t entered into a Faustian pact that comes back to bite you later in your ‘career’.

Also it’s money, maybe not vast sums of actual money but the smell of money and if you come from that kind of family, you can pull that illusion off with ease. Also sex, if the person handing out the dosh quite fancies a roll in the hay with you then you might get on. #culturalcastingcouch

Chantelle Bennett: The biggest barrier, through experience and observation, is financial. As a teenager it wasn’t the ‘posh’ kids who were the better artists, but they were the ones whose parents paid for tuition, materials, rent, cultural trips and internships etc. My parents actively discouraged me from pursuing art as a career as it wasn’t “for the likes of us”. I’m not talking about fifty years ago, I mean in the mid-nineties! Sadly, I listened to them…

Eugene Evans: If the image fits – it really doesn’t matter where you come from or what social class you position yourself in society.

Sian Hill: As a working-class artist amongst other artists, you’re always made to feel the need to pipe down and get off your soapbox by your more privileged peers. Class seems to make many artists uncomfortable. It’s being laughed at whilst being a student because you can’t go on the study trips because you don’t own a passport because your parents have never taken you abroad and you have never been on holiday anywhere, let alone abroad. It is being treated like the odd one out because you come from a town with so-called bad reputation. As a working-class artist, you are treated like an oddity because to them the working classes aren’t supposed to be cultured and have an interest in anything other than going to the pub and watching the football.

The acceptance of unpaid work within the arts supports inequality. The art world itself is very exclusive and has a hierarchy that the working class simply don’t fit into. Art is dominated by those from affluent backgrounds who went to the right schools and who have the economic capital to work for free.

The Double Negative: Are we actually talking about wealth, specifically wealth inequality, when we talk about class?

Glen Arthur Meskell Brocken: I’m not sure we always are. It’s an important element of class of course, but there’s more a mentality when it comes down to class as well. If you are from a working class background your mentality on how and where you should be in the world is affected. You grow up surrounded by parents, adults and peers who go on to work in industry or services which some might say are less ambitious (although that could be portrayed as patronising view). So if your career is wildly different than those around you it can sometimes affect mentally your perception of if you really should be doing that.

Being an artist, or working in the arts, you see it as a career, whereas your peers and the older generation you grew up with do a job. And there is a difference, it is the language and perception of what you do for work is understood. Is it a job or a career?

Going through schools from a working class background, the type of jobs ‘careers advisers’ traditionally have told children should head towards are more secure work and not careers. Although, I’m sure, done with good intention, that careers advice simply prepares the working classes to become the factory fodder, the service workforce. In more middle class – grammar schools and above – the pressure is put on that a child needs to go into a career, further and higher education.

Both school classes present a level to a child which says “this is what you can achieve” and they are completely different things. So when a child from a more working class background breaks away from that structure and attempts to have a career say in arts (or even if they strive to lets say become a lawyer) mentally there is a real struggle about whether they are doing the right thing, and most importantly whether they are entitled to be going into that sort of career.

Children from a more middle class schooling and background hardly question if they are entitled to go into different career areas, simply because it is the norm (they may question their academic ability or artistic ability but that is universal and not connected to class as much). But it just doesn’t stop at those first steps onto the ladder in a mentality sense.

As mentioned above, once there is a level of achievement there is the ‘impostor’ syndrome chipping away in the mind of an artist or art worker from a working class background. A feeling of “how am I in this position”, “those people are more qualified than me”, “they’ve had more experience than me” and a feeling that you have somehow got into the position by accident or just pure luck.

All artists and art workers (see even I’m doing it calling people with careers in the arts workers instead of professionals… damn) have mental struggles around their ability but I think there is certainly a mental struggle going on with artists and those with careers in the arts (there I said it right this time!!) from a working class background which joined with monetary worries and opportunities increases the barriers to success and longevity in those careers. (sorry I do go on a bit)…

Mike Pinnington and Laura Robertson

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.

Photo by Werner Du plessis on Unsplash

Perma-skint, exhausted, disenfranchised… We need to talk about why working class people aren’t getting ahead in the arts. And as we rarely hear directly from working class people themselves about the obstacles they face, we decided to start asking. Here, creative director and writer Kenn Taylor scrutinises a lingering climate of fear, and the uncomplicated solutions that would nevertheless require huge change…

Is wanting to be an artist of any kind, or otherwise work in the cultural sector, stupid? It’s often poorly paid, if at all, and achieving ‘success’ can be arbitrary, unfair. If you’re from a working class background, it’s even harder. So why would you bother?

For me, art and culture are about ideas. If you control ideas, you control everything. If only a narrow stratum of society controls the ideas, only their views and experiences will be reflected in systems of communication and power. And a far worse society, especially for those with the least power, will result. Art is too important to be left to a privileged few. Yet year by year, it seems to get harder for people from working class backgrounds to find their space in culture, the media and the arts.

It can be a risky option for anyone, but the risks are compounded for those without family money or connections to fall back on. For those who somehow have to generate an income to support themselves and perhaps others. Those who’ve probably been told quite often in life not to dare to imagine other worlds they could enter because of the risks involved.

When architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan, wrote a book about the foundation of the welfare state he called it In Place of Fear. Over the last few decades, what has increased exponentially in this country is fear, and not accidentally. Fear helps to keep people in their place and too overwhelmed and frightened to try to challenge the limited parameters forced upon them. Part of that, despite lip service to the contrary, is to return culture to a field dominated by a narrow circle.

It was difficult enough when I entered the cultural sector in the 2000s. The child of an railway fitter and a cleaner, I grew up on benefits when my dad got sick, in a disadvantaged industrial town in Merseyside. I was the first in my family to go to university. In that era, I got help. I lived in one of the pilot areas for Education Maintenance Allowance. The Connexions service helped with university applications when I’d left education to work. There were waived university fees and top-up maintenance grants for those from poor backgrounds. After uni, paid entry-level arts jobs were available, like the one I got – albeit a low paid and zero hours one.

Now, so much of that has gone, it’s unreal. I can’t imagine I’d have been able to get to where I am today without any of those opportunities – yet working class people in 2018 get none of this support.

The issues are not just economic. It’s important to talk about the invisible barriers that exist on entering the sector and remain even when you’re in. At its best, the cultural field can be a place that welcomes those from different backgrounds; creative, open-minded, full of ideas. However, sadly, at its worst it can be too convinced of its own radicalism that it can be blind to the prejudice and structural unfairness that exists within it. Despite some progress, too many cultural organisations suffer from the ‘groupthink’ that comes from being dominated by people with incredibly similar backgrounds and educations. Earlier this year, the Higher Education Statistics Agency revealed that key British art, music and drama schools are more elitist in their student bodies than Oxford and Cambridge (full report here). This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s a damning indictment of inequalities in the sector.

Many people who have experienced an elite education from a young age are given constant reinforcements of their confidence, get taught how to network and how to ‘sell themselves’. Sadly, some of these things are more respected and important to success in parts of the cultural sector than talent and depth. I mentioned ‘imposter syndrome’ recently to a few people in the sector from a similar background. There was mutual acknowledgement of this and past experiences of being made to feel inadequate, talked over, or willfully ignored by those who think you can’t benefit them in their own ambitious trajectory in the arts.

This is, of course, not to privilege class over other forms of structural injustice within the arts. Intersectionality is vital when looking at diversity in the sector. However, class has been an area ignored for too long, especially as it cuts across other areas of inequality yet is not covered by the Equality Act 2010. Similarly, I don’t mean to privilege one class over the other. Working class cultures at their own worst can be oppressive, prejudiced, and suspicious of difference, but it’s clear that working class people are not well represented enough across the sector. In addition, while thankfully it’s a minority, the sector still has too many people from comfortable backgrounds ‘slumming it’. That is, adopting performative tropes of being working class in some strange grasp for authenticity, who then drown out the voices of people who have actually come from such backgrounds.

It’s important to note it’s not just big cultural institutions that have these issues. The artist-led grassroots sector is not immune. Often relying on tight, cliquey networks and people with huge amounts of free time, it can also be blind to its own unspoken exclusions and prejudices. The self-confidence of members from elite backgrounds often dominating groups despite their supposed ‘fluid’ or ‘no hierarchy’ structures.

Now I am the director of a small arts charity, part of the establishment, albeit at a low level. The air is even thinner in terms of those from working class backgrounds when it comes to leading organisations. Though as I’ve chosen to work regionally and in a socially-focused field, not as much as in some other areas of culture. I have achieved a modicum of ‘success’. What does sometimes keep me awake at night though, is, do I do enough to make a difference for others from disadvantaged backgrounds to be heard in the arts? Is it all just a waste of time when there are so many huge structural inequalities in society over and above that in the cultural sector? Especially now things are even harder than 15 years ago. This is perhaps again an anxiety that comes from being working class. You think that you can never do enough even as those leading some of the largest organisations pay lip service to diversity.

So, what can be done to make a difference? It’s not actually that complicated, but it would require change on a large scale beyond just the cultural sector itself. For example; free higher education at the point of access; arts schools reserving spaces for those from disadvantaged backgrounds; a stop to the stripping out of the arts from school curriculums; the Arts Council continuing to push organisations to diversify (while other areas of culture such journalism, film, publishing, games and heritage should do the same); ensuring volunteering is only supplementary support to paid jobs; serious government funding for multi-year creative apprenticeships and an end to the qualifications arms race in the sector – let’s have proper respect for on the ground experience and not raise the bar too high for entry level jobs.

Listen to people who are working class; employees, artists, fans, participants, visitors and especially those trying to enter the sector. What they have to say is crucial. It’s time to ensure people from all different backgrounds are given decent opportunities. It won’t just be better for individuals and society, it will be better for art.

These things might seem utopian now, but that’s how far we’ve fallen. I spoke to an older man once, who as a young working class boy had applied to art school. He never heard back. So, he got a job, only getting into art after his retirement many years later, to his sadness. Only after his father had died did he find the letter of acceptance from the art school that his parents had hidden. Whose fault was this opportunity being denied him? His parents? Or this country, for creating the climate of fear that to work in the arts is to be destitute and especially dangerous if you’re working class? And here we are in those times again. Let’s start to say no more. Now.

Kenn Taylor

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.

She writes scores for PlayStation and the poet laureate, studied English Literature at university, and has brought gaming to the theatre with electrifying results: BAFTA-winning composer and Dear Esther creator Jessica Curry speaks to Laura Robertson about her experimental body of work thus far…

“Dear Esther”, writes the dying narrator. “I have lost track of how long I have been here… I remembered nothing but water, stones in my belly and my shoes threatening to drag me under to where only the most listless of creatures swim.”

The view pans over a wind-swept Hebridean island, pitted with purple wild flowers and lashed by the sea. The sky darkens. The narrator writes letters to Esther: telling her (and us) about the history of the desolate island, his injuries, his guilt and fear (of what is yet to be revealed). We head down deep into caves, illuminated by phosphorescence. Strange markings and words – possibly biblical quotes – have been daubed on cliff walls; by the narrator, or some other poor soul, we don’t know. This island has been gripped by madness.

This is Dear Esther: a beautifully realised videogame, and an enthralling story of love and grief. Starting out in 2007 as a first-person free-to-play and officially released in 2012, it sent the gaming community into a frenzy; winning Best Audio at the TIGA’s, a GANG award and was nominated for a Best Audio BAFTA. 10 years on, its makers The Chinese Room have very sensibly transformed it into a genre-busting stage show: immersing the audience in the exquisite, terribly melancholy graphics, music and storytelling that brought it fame.

“Gaming is normally done at home, in your living room”, says its co-creator, BAFTA-winning composer Jessica Curry. “If it’s not just you, you’re with people you know. One of the things that I’ve always loved about theatre or film or opera or ballet is experiencing quite vulnerable, visceral, emotional things with complete strangers. It’s so weird, but it’s so beautiful. Having that moment of human connection. And that’s what I was really interested in doing with Dear Esther.”

The live show radically combines piano quintet, soprano, actor and gamer, who sit together on stage performing their own parts. We see the gamer play in front of a huge screen, but we don’t see the invisible ‘trip wires’ all over the island, which secretly inform the performers which segment to play out. So in theory, it becomes a different show every night.

What’s fantastic about the whole Dear Esther Live experience is how emotionally affecting it is; pushing the ambition of gaming to its very limits with a complex and layered plot – part mystery, part tragedy, part memoir – cinematic score, and state-of-the-art digital artwork. Its characters are brought to life through the grieving narrator’s one-way conversation with ghosts; writing letters to the departed Esther, with reference to two other occupants of the island, 18th century historian Donnelly and shepherd Jakobson. For the men, the island is a ‘Road to Damascus’; each experience a turning point in their lives from which they cannot turn away.

Time blurs, blood-ties are revealed, and the audience is left reeling by the narrator’s anguish. “I’ve heard it said”, he recounts with cold intensity, “that human ashes make great fertiliser, that we could sow a great forest from all that is left of your hips and ribcage, with enough left over to thicken the air and repopulate the bay.”

Curry and I speak over the phone, me in Liverpool and her in Brighton, after months on the road with Dear Esther Live. She’s a bloody busy woman: overseeing the last tour dates this week in Bristol (tonight) and Brighton (tomorrow). She’s also been working on the score for So Let Us Melt: The Chinese Room’s new game, it is a fairytale spanning 10 million years, and was released in September 2017 on Daydream VR. They’re in the middle of planning the next game and the studios’ future, but more on that later. She presents a Saturday night show for ClassicFM about video game music, High Score, which is the most popular show on catch-up in the station’s history. She’s preparing for her Sony PlayStation scores to be sung at The Royal Albert Hall in May. And to top it all off, she’s just been signed to Faber Music, who are releasing her portfolio on digital and vinyl and have commissioned her to write a new piece for choir and strings.

“I think it’s going to be a really nice year”, she tells me. “My goal was to write more music – I want to sit at my piano.”

Curry was born in Liverpool in 1973. She studied BA English Literature and Language at University College London, graduating in 1994, before studying Screen Music at the National Film and Television School for three years. How, I ask, did she turn these qualifications into a career composing music?

“I always studied music at school, but then I didn’t want to go to a conservatoire – I didn’t want the pressure. I loved English Lit, it was my other twin passion; I’ve worked so much with text and lyrics, so that has stood me in really good stead.

“I kind of like the idea of being an outsider. My mum is a writer, and she left school at 15. She always said: ‘I wrote a play before I’d ever read one.’ I found that so fascinating from an artistic point of view.”

Curry co-founded The Chinese Room in 2007 with husband and writer Dan Pinchbeck, with Dear Esther being their first collaboration for the studio. The alternative route into composition has obviously given her a completely different perspective, but has it restricted her in any way?

“The advantages are you are going to sound original – a lot of people study under the same composer, and you can hear it in their music. I didn’t have that. The disadvantage is that technically I sometimes feel quite constrained by the things that I don’t know.”

But, she continues, she “didn’t want a relationship with big Hollywood directors; I didn’t just want to serve a vision. I wanted to collaborate and push what music could do. I was really inspired by Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman, in that there’s this amazing relationship where sometimes the music is stronger than the visuals, and sometimes the music takes a step back. That’s what I’ve been interested in doing with Dan; I think it’s really telling that there’s a writer and a composer at the head of The Chinese Room, and that we’re interested in telling stories and that what’s we are good at doing.”

It hasn’t all been plain sailing. Their studio won three BAFTAs (Best Game Innovation, Music and Performer) in 2015 for Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture, in which players have to find out what happened to the inhabitants of an abandoned village. Despite the critical acclaim, the production had been arduous and the studio was under enormous and constant financial pressure. Curry stepped down, describing being broken “emotionally and physically” after difficult dealings with Rapture’s publisher, Sony. At the time, she defined working with them as a “war of attrition… a slow erosion of the soul”.

“They struggle to understand a small company because they come from such behemoth, safe structures”, she says now, of the way clients like Sony work with indie developers. “Often when you’re at the end of a game, when you’re in that manic phase trying to get it done, that’s when you’re having to fundraise for the next project. It’s crazy. It’s a very unhealthy model.”

With the studio costing £40-50,000 a month to run, and no money coming in to fund the next project, an exhausted Curry and Pinchbeck decided to put The Chinese Room on hold last year. You could call it their own Road to Damascus-moment. “Dan and I are having long conversations about what we want for the future of the company… There is no amount of money, or project, that is worth being in that state for again.”

For the last two years, Curry has been careful to work on jobs that don’t stretch her to breaking point – being “very picky and choosy about who I spend time with in my working environment.” That’s included creating a score for BRASS Festival 2016′s Durham Hymns – “a dream” commission – with poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Created to commemorate soldiers from World War I, Duffy chose original source material from the period to form new poetry, which Curry then responded to with a new composition. A local community choir and 60-piece brass band performed the piece at Durham Cathedral.

“She was really inspirational to me”, says Curry of Duffy. “I’m really shy, and find it hard to say what I want without completely going into a Mr Bean/Hugh Grant tailspin. She’s really direct. She’s really friendly, but formidable in the best way. A lot of women get by by being quietly spoken and manoeuvring around people’s needs; she blew that out the water. She was decisive and unapologetic and it felt very honest as a collaboration.”

It proved a lesson learned for Curry.

“The best collaboration involves a lot of trust. Carol Ann gave me a lot of courage and confidence. What I learned is that you don’t always have to be liked; it’s really important to be respected. Often I’m bending my will so far to what people need, I exhaust myself to try to be popular, to please everyone. I’ve really changed since that commission… It sounds pathetic for a 44 year old to say that, but it’s taken me a long time to learn: it wastes your energy.”

We laugh about this and imposter syndrome for a bit – I can definitely relate – and talk more about that piano she’s just bought that she wants to play. I’ve been listening to her soundtracks online, and have now seen Dear Esther Live twice. I can report that Curry’s music burns with a soft intensity; mirrored in potency and vigour by Pinchbeck’s script. I’ll give the last word to Dear Esther’s poor protagonist; a favourite quote from the game in which he describes a rather disturbing dream:

“I dreamt I stood in the centre of the sun and the solar radiation cooked my heart from the inside. My teeth will curl and my fingernails fall off into my pockets like loose change.”

Laura Robertson

See Dear Esther Live’s final performance tomorrow, Friday 2 Feb 2018, 8pm, at the Brighton Dome – tickets £10-18.50

See the world premiere of PlayStation in Concert on Wednesday 30 May 2018, 7.30pm, at the Royal Albert Hall, London — £20-65

Images: Jessica Curry at the BAFTAs 2015. All other images stills from Dear Esther gameplay, courtesy The Chinese Room

Liverpool Biennial – a free festival of newly commissioned contemporary art from around the world – returns this summer, with big names including Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Mark Leckey referencing the past, present and future. As the team reveal their full programme this morning, let The Double Negative be the first to give you the scoop…

The specifics of the ninth Liverpool Biennial have officially been announced this morning. This Biennial will be based on the theme of Time Travel and be split into six episodes: Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children, Monuments of the Future, Flashback, and Software. Each episode, said festival director Sally Tallant at press conferences in Liverpool and London, is a like a fictional genre: confined within itself, but still overlapping with other works to create a mesh of cross-disciplinary art in locations throughout the city. Visitors to the 14-week festival can look forward to a wide-ranging and sometimes bizarre mix of ancient and futuristic sculpture, performance art inspired by medical marvels, a look into the art of smuggling, and an abundance of fantastic fringe events.

Some of our favourite announcements, out of an imaginative programme led by 40 artists, included the news that the Edwardian Adelphi Hotel will be giving full use of their swimming pool to Danielle Freakley for an exclusive set of swimming-costume-clad performances; Coco Fusco will be delivering a TED-style lecture on human psychology whilst impersonating Dr Zira from Planet of the Apes (1967); and the ancestor of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral architect Edwin Lutyens, artist Marcos Lutyens, will be performing — where else? – in the cathedral’s Lutyens Crypt.

Time travel continues via a reference to Liverpool’s neoclassical buildings from the 1800s — which heavily incorporate the distinguished style of architecture produced by the Greeks before the first century AD. The Ancient Greece episode will be exhibited primarily at Tate Liverpool and National Heritage building The Oratory (located in the grounds of the Anglican Cathedral). National Museums Liverpool will be loaning pieces from its Ince Blundell collection to the festival, focusing on how flawed restorations can transform art to give it an entirely new meaning. Described as a “spacetime collapse in the context of Ancient Greece”, pieces include Celine Condorelli‘s time portals, and a permanent wall installation by Betty Woodman (below) which will be unveiled outside the magnificently art deco George’s Dock Ventilation Tower.

The Chinatown episode will be held — you guessed it — throughout Chinatown’s pubs, restaurants and supermarkets, which should make for some interesting eating and drinking experiences. This celebration of Chinese culture, interestingly, draws attention to the speculative future economics that the New Chinatown development will bring to the area — which is home to the oldest Chinese community in Europe. Iranian exiles and artistic trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian (main picture) focus on the themes of smuggling and the trade of illicit objects through the Liverpool docks in their political project The Eighth Of A Kind (2014), which includes shipping all of their possessions over to the city. Meanwhile, Samson Kambalu’s photography of the Welsh Streets will tackle Toxteth’s ongoing abandoned housing struggle with the Council.

The Children’s episode, held at the Victorian Cains Brewery and dockside Open Eye Gallery, will incorporate Turner Prize nominated artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (below), whose bonkers new production, Dogsy Ma Bone, takes inspiration from one of her favourite cartoons: Betty Boop’s A Song For A Day (1936), where she nurses giraffes, hippos and billy goats back to health, and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 socialist critique, The Threepenny Opera. Wanting to star a cast of youngsters, Chetwynd is holding auditions (apply here) for under 14s this Sunday.

In an echo of the ever-popular Dazzle Ferry, produced by Peter Blake for the 2014 Biennial, creative studio Hato have been commissioned to redesign Arriva buses, alongside Ana Jotta and Biennial Associate Artist Frances Disley, which will run through Liverpool and the Wirral for three years. The first bus will be designed in June 2016 with help from the children of Liverpool, so keep an eye on Biennial updates if you have any budding Picassos willing to join in. In sharp contrast, Koki Tanaka will be reflecting upon a photography book he found in radical Liverpool bookstore News From Nowhere, depicting the city’s youth student strike in 1985.

Monuments from the Future, meanwhile, is an episode focusing on anachronisms through sculpture, with the Granby Four Streets, Liverpool ONE, Clarence Dock and Cains Brewery all listed as venues. Expect a planet-inspired piece by Arseny Zhilyaev, and a collection of neoclassical sculptures being flooded atop of a new monument in Clarence dock by Lara Favaretto, which is said to signify the persistence of memories. 

Fittingly, Flashback will also look back into the past, just not in a way you might expect. Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni present The Unmanned 2045 — the year predicted that machines will overtake humans, and how that affects our past and present — at the soon to be redeveloped ABC Cinema (located opposite Lime Street Station) and Open Eye Gallery. Krzysztof Wodiczko will be giving voice to the marginalised through photography at FACT, and the Ellesmere Port-born, Turner Prize winning Mark Leckey will present found amateur footage of a Joy Division gig he went to as a teenager, entitled Dream English Kid.

The final episode, Software, wants you to download the Biennial with the help of Oliver Laric. The artist wants to 3D-scan the Walker collections to create a free, 3D online gallery. Expect artworks created inside the open-world video game Minecraft; an app processing the interactions between humans and non-human species developed by Ian Cheng; and Lucy Beech‘s (above) look at rare medical condition Morgellons syndrome: the delusional belief of having a bodily infestation of fibres. Venues for this edition include FACT, The Oratory, the Bluecoat and, of course, the World Wide Web.

Extra Biennial partner events include a Frieze weekend (8-9 October); 46 Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the Bluecoat; and the 29th John Moores Painting Prize, starring the work of 54 artists (until 27 November), with the grand winner being announced 7 July. Suzanne Treister (above) will be showing her futuristic new work HFT The Gardener at the ERC gallery (LJMU School of Art), starring a fictional character in a high frequency bunker and 174 other scientific and botanical pieces.

In addition to the official programme, The Double Negative will be widely distributing a special Biennial Fringe Edition of Culture Diary to keep you up-to-date on all the alternative Fringe highlights — including a Domino Records’ Portrait of British Songwriting exhibition at Bold Street Coffee; Mexican street art at Corke Gallery; conferences from Goldsmiths University of London and LJMU; a DJ party hosted by the aforementioned Mark Leckey; and an extensive film programme at FACT every Thursday throughout the Biennial, co-curated by Steven Cairns of the ICA and Picturehouse Cinema. Are you hosting a fringe event? We want to hear about it! Please follow this guide and get in contact before 6 May.

Vanessa Wheeler

Read more about Liverpool Biennial 2016 programme here or tweet about it using the official hashtag #Biennial2016

Can’t wait until July? The next scheduled Biennial warm-up event is their Secret Visit @ The Brewery Tap on 13 May 2016 at 6pm as a part of Liverpool LightNight 

Want to add your event to the Biennial Fringe Culture Diary? Please follow this guide and get in contact before 6 May 2016

Biennial will be recruting volunteers and mediators soon; if you would like to get involved, check the website for updates

As they prepare their last experimental arts show of 2015 — a play entitled The Happy Jug — Syndrome talk to C. James Fagan about Proust, the human condition, and replacing actors with concrete sculptures…

Ha ha ha, he he he, Little Brown Jug, how I love thee.

An odd quote to start an interview with, but the latest offering from experimental arts, music and technology performance lab Syndrome – a ‘play’ entitled The Happy Jug — owes its creation to the destruction of a jug. A domestic object: though an object is never just an object, is it? Even the simplest of things can grow complex with the passage of time and the layering of sentiment. Often, you might not realise the power until it is unleashed by the moment of its destruction.

It is this point of destruction – the smashing of said jug — that is the starting point for The Happy Jug’s premiere this Thursday; the final event of Syndrome’s 16-month exploration into the intersection between language, technology, interaction and the human condition. Sometimes nightmarish, always intriguing, Syndrome was instigated in April 2014 by curator and writer Nathan Jones of Mercy – who describes his work as crossing “experimental poetics, textual-noise, glitch and schizo-poetics” – and has been a collision and collusion between poets, artists, musicians, filmmakers… and kickboxers.

Apt, then, that a final instalment of twisted multi-discilpinary arts will be in the same vein; The Happy Jug isn’t ever going to be a traditional play. A fusion of script, electronic musical composition, concrete and plaster sculpture and motion-sensitive video from Liverpool’s best and brightest – Nathan Jones, Simon Jones, Chris Boyd, Jon Davies (Kepla), and Madeline Hall –  we decided to approach them all with some questions, and here are their (group) responses…

The Double Negative: There seems to be a contradiction with the description of The Happy Jug as a ‘post Human drama’. Yet it is based around an object (the titular Happy Jug a treasured family ornament), something that seems very un-post human. To quote Dr Who: It’s isn’t, isn’t?

Syndrome: To quote Tim Morton, whose work inspired some of the thinking behind this play: “There is no metalanguage”. That is, we’re always _inside_ the condition of being human, and so of course any name we give to a play, or anything else for that matter is un-post-human.

Post-human doesn’t simply mean not human anyhow, but it refers to an aesthetic situation which goes beyond the ‘humanist’ to become ‘thingist’. It is a crisis of the human in this sense, something which belittles and anthropocentric ways of thinking by contextualising them among the multitude of other interactions happening all the time.

The challenge with the play is to work beyond the schism of language and the post-human to try and expose the drama that exists between objects, things, as they relate to and withdraw from each other in the world.

In the play, for example, a brain is a thing, it is part of a human of course, but that’s just an aspect of it — things that unfold throughout the play show how things reveal their complexity, going well beyond our relation to them, especially when they cease to work as we expect.

The Happy Jug is also performed by sculptures, so it’s post-human in the sense that there are no actors to share the journey with.

Is this some kind of hardcore Proustian thing? Multiple mediums generating/stimulating multiple memories…

The play is not nostalgic in the least. But the echo that is thrown through Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past by the Madeline biscuit [Proust wrote about how his childhood memories where trigged by the smell of freshly cooked Madeline biscuits] is an example of the kind of communication which we are proposing exists between the central motifs of the play. Just as a small cake often drunk with coffee doesn’t ostensibly have any connection to, but still triggers, the memory of a walk in rural France, so the breaking of a jug has multiple points of relation to the outcome of the general election. The difference would be that there is no central Proustian remember-er to hold all this together, although, we do of course have our own Madeline [Hall]!

Does it matter if any of it is true?

Yes, and it is. In an important sense, the play is biographical and documentary, but also we’re concerned with the experience of things, and these have to be speculated on.

Is materiality still important? Do our memories and experiences need a physicality?

It’s more important than ever that people collectivise, meet, talk and acknowledge how much of contemporary experience we share, despite impressions to the contrary. These events are hopefully part of that — although the performers aren’t people, we still acknowledge the vitality and importance of performance as the meeting place of people, our solutions and our concerns.

Is this really the end?

It’s the last Syndrome show of this season, which has featured a really ambitious series of guests, so yes. But this showing of The Happy Jug is the first of hopefully many. We very much want people who attend on Thursday to help us inform how it develops.

C. James Fagan

See The Happy Jug premiere on Thursday 27 August 2015 at 24 Kitchen Street, Liverpool — get donation entry tickets here

Read all our articles on Syndrome, including C. James Fagan’s glitch interview with kickboxer and artist S. J. Fowler

See all of Syndrome’s past events here

What’s hot this week? Our pick of the listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…

Monday – BBC Four Goes Pop: A Week-Long Celebration of Pop Art @ BBC Four, Radio and Online — FREE

What a way to start the week. Championing all things Pop, meet Andy Warhol’s friends and confidantes (A Day in the Life of Andy Warhol), hear Dr Richard Clay find out why street art has been popular for 30,000 years (A Brief History of Grafitti), and let Alastair Sooke explain why Pop is one of the most important art forms of the 20th century (Soup Cans & Superstars).

Reading Group: Quitting – Stephen Wright/Alex Koch & Brian Holmes 6-7.30pm @ The Bluecoat, Liverpool — FREE

Lead by artist and MODEL co-founder Dave Evans, tonight the topic of conversation is quitting the artworld; inspired, in part, by one of the texts in the Piracy Project Reading Room, currently on exhibition at The Bluecoat. Entitled: There is Nothing Less Passive Than the Act of Fleeing, Evans approaches ”something most artists have thought about (or at least should have)”.

Tuesday – Drawing From The Unconcious: Art Macabre Drawing Salon  7-9pm @ Freud Museum, London — £15/12

Can drawing unlock our unconscious? Part of Freud Museum London’s Festival of The Unconscious, join the excellent Art Macabre team — including live models — to draw surrealist-inspired nightmares and symbolism through sketching exercises, resulting in your own Exquisite Corpse artworks to take home.

Wednesday – Strange Collective, Ohmns, Bad Meds, The Floormen @ The Kazimier Garden, Liverpool — £2 OTD

What can you get for a measly £2 these days? Not even a pint, right? Or, you can enjoy some ridiculously good mid-week fun from a bunch of the best pop-garage-punk bands in Liverpool. Having seen them smash their live sets at Maguire’s Pizza Bar a few weeks ago (swapping Floormen for Mind Mountain), we can confirm this will be a very good night.

Thursday — Cheap Thrills Presents: Videodrome (1983) 7pm (7.30pm start) @ A Small Cinema Liverpool — £5 + Booking Fee

A sexy sci-fi cult classic from David Cronenberg (The Fly, History of Violence, Naked Lunch), prepare to be grossed out as sleazy TV exec Max Renn (played with glee by James Woods) commissions a new type of programme: Videodrome. As the violence, torture and hallucinations get more and more extreme, the signal’s source finally is revealed… Expect drive-in adverts and horror trailers as a bonus.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Premiere: Syndrome Presents THE HAPPY JUG — A Play 8pm @ 24 Kitchen Street — Donation Entry

The finale of Syndrome’s 2014-15 programme, we’ll be sad to say goodbye to their fusion of experimental arts, music and technologies (more next year guys?), all instigated by Nathan Jones of Mercy and always joined by a fresh set of collaborators. Tonight, the team unveil ‘a post-human drama about brain trauma, thing theory and the general election’; expect words from Jones, music by Kepla set to a motion-tracked, video composition by Simon Jones and Chris Boyd, and concrete and plaster sculptures by Madeline Hall.

Friday – Michael White: Machinery of Violence 7-9pm @ Young Team HQ, London — FREE

The first solo exhibition in London by Glasgow-based artist Michael White, who we last saw at The Royal Standard, expect intriguing new sculptures and prints that explore the artist’s fascination with the intricate social structures of Japanese culture — including textile designs with the form of children’s kimonos.

Saturday-Monday — Liverpool International Music Festival (LIMF) @ Sefton Park, Liverpool — FREE

A massive, free festival in Sefton Park this Saturday, headlined by Basement Jaxx, Laura Mvula, Labrinth and more, this years fest also includes Liverpool, Next Stop New York, a weekend-long exploration of Black American Music and its ties to the city, featuring iconic DJ Greg Wilson; Global Routes Mixtape (Sunday), a celebration of  international electronic music from around the world; and more. Worth checking out the full programme.

Sunday — Northern Art Carbooty 12-5pm @ Ancoats, Manchester — FREE

A Bank Holiday car-boot fair with a difference, Art Carbooty does what it says on the tin: affordable arts and crafts, from the boots of cars, plus live performance, live music (a punk reggae party from DJs pRp), and some tasty refreshments. Good fun.

Laura Robertson (Editor)

Keen to hear about the best art, design, film and music events happening in Liverpool July-Sept 2015?

Wait no more! Download the PDF version of our indispensable new pocket-guide, Culture Diary, now.

Dany Louise goes head-to-head with wordy, confusing and alienating ‘artspeak’, finds Aoife Robinson, and as a result, gives us the confidence to take control of our gallery experiences…

‘X’s creative act of dissolution combines stillness and the intimation of motion, leading us to the very edge of identifiable form and playfully subverting minimalist concerns…’

Confused? You should be. This is a real piece of gallery interpretation taken from a British Arts Council-funded institution, and is just one example of interpretation gone wrong in the recently released Interpretation Matters Handbook: Artspeak Revisted. Most people are confused by the text accompanying the art in our galleries — it’s safe to say that only a very small percentage of the population are art experts, and a sentence like that could confuse even the most experienced of art historians. Too often art interpretation is wordy, confusing and alienating, having the opposite effect of what was originally intended: a clear and meaningful reading of art.

Arts researcher and interpretationmatters.com founder Dany Louise has been advocating clear interpretation for years, in fierce retaliation to ‘artspeak’: artistic terminology, as demonstrated above, that actively works to alienate the reader by overcomplicating content. The opening example I’ve used here, found in the first section of the handbook, summarises the impositions of the art world on a larger scale. The shamed gallery, funded by the Arts Council whose raison d’être ’champions, develops and invests in artistic and cultural experiences that enrich people’s lives’ is, in my opinion, contradictory through failing to engage audiences. Louise asks us to consider the enormous potential interpretative resources have on widening audiences just by communicating more clearly.

The Interpretation Matters Handbook is, by all accounts, a physical contribution to Louise’s Interpretation Matters online project. In the first section, Louise effectively demonstrates why we need clearer interpretation by defining the seven problems of art writing as she sees it: excessive information, artspeak, sub-clauses, dumbing down, gaps in information, nonsense writing and, finally, Dead White Male Syndrome (i.e. boring information). The book features interviews with artists on how their works have been textually represented; discussions with curators regarding the different methods that institutions are beginning to employ; and the evolution of how information is relayed — all interspersed with remarks from members of the public, although I was both surprised and disappointed not to find more input from this final group.

The chapters offered by different experts from the sector illustrate the current procedures and debate in interpretation. From Tate Liverpool’s word clouds to the wordless Tate Britain, we are shown the different motivations behind the procedures. Beneath these, Louise highlights the continuing elitist ideals of the sector dating back from the 20th century. In the Curatorial Balance chapter, she describes a ‘crisis of authority in museums’, which has evolved from neglecting the public’s interests in terms of what they’d genuinely enjoy and relate to, instead opting for ‘high art’ exhibitions. The result was an isolated audience and an institution reluctant to relinquish its control as gatekeeper to its collections. Whilst there are now more attempts than ever to engage through the use of art labels, Louise shows that they are often tenuously over-written; pointing to a label from the 2012 Liverpool Biennial:

‘Notions of distance, local matter in global circulation and the fluidity of ocean waters inform and encapsulate the work that takes form as printed material.’

The artwork in question was, in Louise’s words, ‘conceptual and visually uninteresting’ – a shallow water tank with ‘paper drowned’ in it.  Louise shows that the writer has overcomplicated and over intellectualised the work and, as a result, the reader is left feeling both confused and at fault for failing to understand. She argues that whilst there’s been a considerable ‘cross-over’ of the public and private spheres, general audiences are still ‘on their own’ in galleries. To overcome this, we need to demystify artspeak.

Louise goes on to investigate how advances in the gallery-audience relationship now also have to deal with other difficulties, such as ‘destination marketing’ (whereby the cultural offers of a city are paraded to entice visitors; I would liken this to the International Festival of Business’s (IFB) summer takeover in Liverpool last year, hosting an insincere interest in arts activities), and working with biennials (feigned as public facing when really, Louise says, these shows tend to be interested in appealing to art high profilers, ‘their own status and professional ambitions’). According to Louise, the only way, it seems, to remove exclusivity is to reshape art displays from an elitist sub-sector into an accommodating and democratic arena for all to enjoy. This is a point that I completely agree with.

Louise’s altruistic desire to re-establish art as meaningful relies on re-establishing the ability of art to connect with and engage audiences. Louise believes that the point of interpretation is to provide a greater understanding of the art work, because ‘no-one can hope to know and understand everything they see and experience’ in a museum or gallery. This inclusivity allows everyone to respond to works and promote a more positive, non-hierarchical model. Acknowledging variable expertise, she suggests that a dialogue should be just that, and not relying on specialized knowledge or making sense of something that would otherwise be completely disconnected to our lives.

With this reasoning, I found her hypothetical articles slightly odd, although her message was still clear: statements such as ‘His collateral show in the Venice Bienniale in 2013, was widely praised for its playful subversion of sculptural medians, and polemical championing of the ordinary and banal’ are useless, and have no place or purpose in art writing.

Despite questioning divisionary politics and internalised networks (‘why are openings still called private views?’) Louise would present a more convincing argument by including more interviews with the general public. She personally admits that even in her case, as an arts graduate, researcher and professional writer, ‘the more interpretative help the better’. I found that the book lacked conversations with ‘non-experts’: or those that haven’t got a degree in Fine Art. More interviews with the wider public would have certainly improved on interpretations failings.

Bad interpretation is isolating but the visitor experience can be improved in a number of ways and so, in my opinion, Louise is herself offering a closed-book approach. Relying too heavily on interpretation, however carefully written, could be as isolating as artspeak. Louise’s argument would be more convincing if she permitted visitors the freedom to enter into a debate offered by text and artwork, beyond a step-by-step gallery guide. Art interpretation is a reaction; and each of us will have a different experience and insight.

However, I believe that The Interpretation Handbook certainly encourages hesitant viewers to become more actively involved in art, to confront what they find uncomfortable and to enter into conversation — rather than disregarding works based on unfamiliarity or unconventional qualities. Louise’s biggest strength is her conviction that art is for everyone and, by overcoming the shortcomings of artspeak, we can make it more easily available to wider audiences. Recognising varying levels of understanding does not devalue the experience of an artwork but emphasises the human dimension to art: reinforcing relevancy, allowing personal associations and interpretations, enriching involvement and overcoming unfair subdivisions within audiences more successfully. Jessica Hoare, who contributes to the book, supports this idea of a ‘creative exchange’, although admits that it can rely on maintained funding and staff training, a completely separate issue within The Visitor Experience.

The Interpretation Matters Handbook: Artspeak Revisited reflects exciting and changing attitudes towards audience engagement by fashioning more wide-ranging content, educative incentives and re-emphasising personal connections with works. Interpretation is an instrument that makes art more readily available, by emphasising the worthwhile investment of creative education to make art more accessible. Art can, and should, be enjoyed by all, irrespective of prior knowledge, and Louise’s handbook offers an entertaining and playful introductory perspective into the advantages of interpretational content.

Aoife Robinson

The Interpretation Matters Handbook: Artspeak Revisited is available now in paperback from Black Dog Publishing – £15 per copy plus postage and packing (1st Class Royal Mail recorded delivery). Order your copy by emailing talk@interpretationmatters. com

Visit interpretationmatters.com

Further reading: The Guardian’s Users Guide to Artspeak; Triple Canopy’s International Art English… and the Arty Bollocks Generator

How do we read and why? Analysing the act through a broad spectrum of media theory, philosophy, literature studies and neuroscience, Grace Harrison considers the idea of language as art form, political tool and “collective force”…

Reading forms an integral part of how many people come to know the world and each other, from newspapers to the novel, from the façades of buildings to Facebook. The Torque ‪Symposium, programmed by Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner, sought to examine how and why we read. With the invited speakers coming from a broad spectrum of media theory, philosophy, literature studies and neuroscience, the focus continually shifted from the impact of technology upon reading — from cultural and neurological perspectives — to the historical context and political implications of access, and the changing ways we as a society engage.

The final sentence on the days hand-out invited ‘audience and speakers to enter into self-reflexive discussions about what reading means to them, how it has impacted upon their lives and how they envision and want to shape its future.’ With such invigorating and challenging contributions from the speakers it was hard not to take up the mantel.

From the varied contributions, I was especially interested in how we might widen literacy, the capacity for self directed learning and autonomous research, by creating access to the wealth of knowledge increasing enclosed; locked into institutions, journals and by copyright legislation.

In the first talk, the political philosopher Nina Power asserted that to read politically means to “examine both who reads and what.” She gave two concrete images of how the state is currently attempting to dismantle reading as a “collective force”: firstly, the de-funding of libraries across the country under the guise of austerity, which, due the difficulties sustaining something on volunteers alone, will likely spell their demise; secondly, the restrictions the current government attempted to impose on prisoners’ access to books for apparent security reasons — which is particularly symbolic if we allow ourselves to see the prison as the most acute manifestation of societal control. “It is a slow war of attrition, the degradation of hope, the extraction of resources and denial of nourishment” (Prison Abolistion, Never Alone).

Power asked the question: what does it mean to read against power and force?  To read beyond the thought constraints imposed by disciplines? She recalled histories of autodidactic mining communities who established their own libraries and self educated towards greater social and political participation, beyond what some might like to think as their allocated professions; classes were self-organised outside of working hours to learn about subjects such as astronomy, politics and literature.

Power also illustrated the perennial persistence of reading groups and, notably, the resurgence at various points of those who collectively approach Das Kapital, suggesting that one of the reasons could be seeing Marx’s seminal text as destabilising, crossing between economics, sociology, philosophy and political science. Marxism is at best considered as a family of disciplines, which is historically subject to reinvention. Power’s use of ‘transdisciplinarity’ in reading was as a positive breakdown of hierarchies and specialism, opening up room for people to explore beyond a restricted field, and engage in passion-driven reading.

Power had a consistent political framework to her contribution, and she delivered it with a clarity and directness that had great resonance. It brought to mind George Orwell’s short text, Politics and the English Language (1964), in which he wrote of the importance of making one’s language clear, especially when engaged in political discourse. He advocates for political language to be an instrument for expressing and not for obscuring or preventing thought. He proposes the “scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness…. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.”

Power articulated with precision how those who have power control language and urged us to reclaim it, among other ways, through reading. She helped us to see the pervasive fear held by the ruling classes in the “dangerous and corrupting” potential of reading; even within bourgeois society and the attempts to prohibit women reading romance novels such as Lady Chatterley’s lover. Spurred on by Power’s words and Orwell’s text:

“One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”(Politics and the English Language, George Orwell (1946))

By contrast, it led me to think about the work of the writer Hélène Cixous, who produces diverse literary work from a similar perspective of reclaiming power through the written word: “(Cixous) envisions a new form of writing — Écriture féminine (feminine writing) — that is outside of and no longer bound by the rules of patriarchal discourse” (Helen Cixous; Live Theory. Pg3). Cixous identifies the political necessity of developing the territories of the excluded and the marginalised. She poses a vital question as to whether we can write a world beyond patriarchy within the framework of the current structure?

However, Cixous’s approach to writing could also be considered as moving away from the logic of Power’s presentation and Orwell’s text, in the making meaning clear. As she attempts to develop an expressive space, a bodily, visceral and affective language emerges in which something not yet conscious is transmitted. A tension present in revolutionary acts, in this case writing, is the difficulty of escaping known forms while still being received and understood.

Professor of Political Aesthetics Esther Leslie made a poetic and fluid contribution to the day which resonated with Cixous’s space of embodied fluidity and felt like a contrasting approach to form and content when compared to Power and Orwell. Beautifully tracing how the materials we use shape the way we think, from Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s writing on the unique relationship to Chinese and Japanese traditional paper (1933), to Walter Benjamin’s observations on the potential changes to expression brought in by the typewriter, and the effects of illuminated signage which populate our urban spaces. Leslie explored the construction of subjectivity through handwriting as well as what may be below writing on the page, a “scriptural unconsciousness” which might be revealed.

Quoting Benjamin on numerous occasions, she traced an image that appears within his writing of the snowstorm, or the flurry of words. When speaking of the child reader in his essay One-Way Street (c.1920), Benjamin wrote: “the swirling letters like figures and messages in drifting snowflakes… he is covered over and over by the snow of his reading” (pg 463 Walter Benjamin, Selected writing Volume 1). Leslie’s beautiful articulation of the pure experience of immersive reading (which can be seen as an increasingly scarce experience among the pressures of contemporary life) sat in stark contrast to the discussion later in the day around speed-reading software, which allows one to consume written information up to five times faster through ‘silencing subvocalisation’.

Leslie invoked the infinite as she described the snowstorm in Benjamin’s texts, as well as the infinite in the possibilities of books and of reading. She points towards a world that might be, just as the snowflakes of words settle on the lines on the page.

Leslie  followed Benjamin’s words out of writing to his assertion of the importance of visual literacy, for political and social participation through his text The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) where he writes: “The illiterates of the future will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing.” At this point, the link between visual practice and writing is reinforced and the importance of art for comprehension is brought back into the room.

It is here that I’m reminded of Caroline Bergvall’s intensely hypnotic performance at 24 Kitchen Street as part of the Syndrome events programme (also produced by Nathan Jones). Bergvall’s approach enacted precisely the experience of language Leslie was evoking using Benjamin’s snowstorm imagery. For the work entitled Drift, Bergvall had teamed up with Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach and Swiss visual artist and programmer Thomas Köppel. They used live voice, live percussion and 3D text treatments to create a dense, moveable and abstract universe: a drifting, shifting, sounding, language ‘mass’. The performance was invigorating and moving in equal measure, as it was the poetic, spatial components of both visual and linguistic resonance, which were operating on the unconscious.

I’m brought back to the concept of ‘Performative Utterance’, which was introduced by Nina Power earlier in the day, but ran through many of the contributions. As articulated by critical theorist Eve Sedgwick: “performative utterances can be ‘transformative’ performatives, which create an instant change of personal or environmental status, or ‘promissory’ performatives, which describe the world as it might be in the future.” Although this kind of symposium is not unique, one could perceive a form of embodied imagining in which Jones and Skinner open up to the public the process of research in which they are deeply engaged. They themselves seem to be questioning how possible it is for people to really enter into that process, but remain enthused by the multifarious avenues of individual enquiry that may emmerge.

For me, there was a degree of displacement in the experience of the symposium. It was a day of primarily academic talks and detailed analysis, which were organised independent of any educational institution and hosted in a public gallery. It’s possible this created a dis-juncture in the audience’s expectations, or a misplaced reading of performance to the talks. This contributed to the experience of slippage or the transdisiplinarity that was being discussed; this kind of free-form collective learning which is just not as possible within academia. Perhaps we were missing a Bergvall-style enactment of the ideas at play.

As a form of conclusion to the day, and partly in answer to this criticism, there were a series of performances at Static Gallery. Tim Etchell’s Broadcast/Looping Pieces was formed of a live remixing of pages from his notebook, gathered texts of many different kinds. Fragments of overheard conversation, quotations from newspaper articles and web pages, ideas for performances, rough drafts and other notes were repeated many times until emptied of their original signification and given new meaning. In the performance, Etchell “selects, intercuts and remixes material from these texts which he has stored away over the years, creating a torrent of language that often loops and repeats on individual lines, editing and re-writing on the fly, creating new dialogues and juxtapositions.”

Experiencing the work, it did also feel like an act of deconstruction, an attempt to open up a space to a primary visceral language, through his use of intonation, gesture and breath. The form of the piece spoke directly to Leslie’s earlier observations about Benjamin’s “scraps of note books, in which there is no hierarchy.”

The day itself consisted of others engaged in the act of reading, and we the audience mainly listened, often enraptured in that experience, through the clarity of thought and delivery of Nina Power’s contribution to the poetic lucidity of Esther Leslie. Many of the other talks focused on areas of study which were completely outside of my ability to relay here. However, that didn’t in any way hinder the exhilarating pleasure of letting a stream of new and challenging ideas wash over me, grabbing at fragments and making notes for further research. Benjamin’s image of the snowstorm was strikingly resonant for the experience of the symposium in it entirety.

Grace Harrison

This article has been specially commissioned for The Double Negative by Liverpool John Moores University and Arts Council England. Part of the collaborative #BeACritic campaign — see more here

Grace was at Torque Symposium #2: An Act of Reading, 21 January 2015, 11am-6pm in The Box, FACT Liverpool. This second symposium of the Torque project, curated by Sam Skinner and Nathan Jones in partnership with FACT, evolves Torque’s concern with language, brain and technology into discourse on The Act of Reading. With talks by Katherine Hayles, Garrett Stewart, Esther Leslie, Nina Power, Soenke Zehle and Alex Leff

Watch a selection of talks from the symposium on artplayer.tv

Read other articles on Nathan Jones — including the Syndrome project — here