Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Various venues, Leeds
14-27 May
Reviewed by: Amelia Crouch
Inaugurated in 2005, ‘Situation Leeds’ returned this year with an ambitious line-up of over seventy projects. The festival was centrally marketed but artists took responsibility for realising their own work. Following the theme ‘artists and the public realm’, work occupied locations including streets, bus stops, churches, a canal bank, library, pub, art gallery, indoor market and Leeds’s ‘big screen’ TV.
With such multifarious projects it was unsurprising that not all ran smoothly, but the frustration of spending two festival mornings failing to find several listed works led me to question the ways art in public places might be viewed and the efficacy of the festival’s structure.
Certain artworks were designed so that not seeing them was an equally valid experience. Sarah Guildford and Lucy Britton (See a Penny) spent an hour each day searching for stray pennies, cleaning them and returning them to the street. In Another Artwork, a sign on the side of a removal van read ‘Dynamic Dispatch are transporting another artwork by Rhiannon Silver and Emmy Twigge.’ Both projects enact potentially empty aspirations and this is carried into their presentation. I did not see either artwork but walked around the city alert, hoping that I might.
Stumbling on unexpected artworks provided my most enjoyable moments; for example finding Tom Poultney’s Barred, in which danger tape wrapped around public sculptures obliterated them from view, concurrently increasing their visibility. This was the closest I came to the experience of an uninitiated public encountering a work. Projects including Jenni Danson’s Space Spiral (whorled yellow thread in a disused subway) and Charlie Hall’s Public Conversations (posters mimicking the format of a bus timetable, displaying snippets of everyday dialogue) worked well on this level. Highlighting the formal or social aspects of their adopted locations, they were potentially equally engaging for art goers and passers by.
Excepting several online and print publications, most works were made for particular locations or gained significance from positioning. Nearly all, whether by accident or design, led audiences to explore unfamiliar areas of the city or to look at known places anew. The latter was epitomised by Ben Halsall and Megan Smith’s DoGoSee, existing both online and in a gallery. Visitors submitted suggestions of Leeds locations for the artists to visit, the web site displaying photographs from completed trips.
The journeying and searching integral to DoGoSee provides an apt metaphor for my festival experience. The festival guidebook (map included) encouraged this mode of navigation. Though it risks subsuming individual artworks’ qualities within the structure of a ‘tour,’ the benefits given by central marketing outweigh its drawbacks. The appeal of an uncurated yet highly marketed festival is clear, affording opportunities for artists at all career stages and giving visibility in numbers. But the festival’s success was marred by inaccurate printed information resulting from a failure to give projects a tighter rein.
What then of accidental viewers? Certainly each artwork could be enjoyed in isolation without further awareness of the festival. Yet, in a festival aiming to explore relationships between artworks and the public realm, it seems important to engage a non-art public. In some projects, including Donna Walker’s Swap Shop, French and Mottershead’s The Post Echo and workshops run by The Art Market, artists were on the street inviting participation. They provided a human face and opportunity for dialogue lacking in the festival overall.
‘Situation Leeds’ was a great galvaniser for artistic activity. Its publicity conveys a warranted positive image of Leeds’ art scene to both local and national audiences. However any future manifestations of the festival might benefit from an organisational rethink.
Writer detail:
Amelia Crouch
Venue detail:
East Street Arts
Patrick Studios, St Mary's Lane, Leeds LS9 7EH
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