Volunteering at the Grundy is proving an invaluable experience. During discussions with the curator Stuart Tulloch and artist and assistant curator Tom Ireland I have learnt so much. Whether it is processes which define Stuart's career or indeed Tom. They come from quite different professional backgrounds yet both work in the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool in 2010. For me they (and the two other permanent members of staff) are incredibly lucky; it is a dynamic space, small but beautiful. Like any other gallery they struggle under issues of funding, visitor numbers and audience diversity but they are also incredibly lucky in their setting- Blackpool.
Ok, so skip back a few posts and read my moaning about returning to this cultural backwater. If I could I would eat those digital words, now forever ingrained. I have more contemporary arts practice here than in York. Forget etchings, oil paintings and Richter-style paint laden canvases think mesmerizing objects of accumulations, Dr. Adolf Steg who posts his art (through a letter-box rather than online) and an aluminum foil bolder. Crushed and fragmented this shiny and fragile object is a collation of the discarded skin of too many consumed sandwiches. The last object, created by Tom, has been shown in the Grundy within an exhibition of his own Gallery project 'Supercollider'. The Grundy's Art fair included the work 'Supercollider Embassy' which cordoned off an area of the gallery to create a replica space filled with works from Supercollider's past and future exhibitions.
'Supercollider Embassy' really struck me. It's elegance and simplicity is combined with a complex refiguring of gallery space and expo. Of contemporary art spaces merging, of remits colliding and exhibitions morphing together. Its frenzied. Its exciting.
Blackpool is like any other place, it can have exciting and interesting propositions. There maybe money, press and larger audiences in London, Newcastle and Manchester but there is also competition and competitive spirit. In Blackpool these institutions are working together, interacting and supporting each other. They are not disallowing the cultural heritage of the town but working with it. In a town hit hard by the recession, with empty shops and lower incomes the arts provides something beyond consumption, it creeps up in the crevasses.
Art shouldn't be selective on location. Welcome to Blackpool.
www.grundyartgallery.com
www.supercolliderhq.org.uk
(First image 'An Agenda of Type' Samantha Donnelly, Second image 'Beneath the stride of Giants', Brian Griffiths)
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