BasementArtsProject

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
Hunter S. Thompson: The Proud Highway

2023 was, for me, a tale of two birthdays. It was the year that I turned fifty-one and resigned from my job of nineteen years with the Henry Moore Institute. It also represented thirty-four years, to the day, since I took on my first proper job, beyond a paper round, with Sainsbury’s. I have, since my seventeenth birthday in 1989, been employed ever since; so there is a pleasing symmetry to the Thursday 30th March 1989 - Thursday 30th March 2023 timeline, that I hope bodes well for the future.

I can say, without equivocation, that after such a length of time being served a wage for my work, there is nothing more terrifying for a person from a working class background than giving up that safety net to chase what could be a mirage. But, that is what I have done! I have no idea how it will end but, in the words of Elvis, it’s now or never’.

For the last twelve years I have been engaged in the endeavour that is BasementArtsProject; an endeavour designed to push the work of up and coming artists alongside those that are already established, and to increase working class access to the arts. It is the latter which led me to set it up in Beeston, South Leeds, operating out of the house in which I live with my family of five, and the former that has provided the structure that has also taken us and the artists with whom we work to Manchester, Liverpool, Germany, Sweden and the USA.

Colonize exhibition as SCIBase 2014 - Jamestown, New York, USA

The third birthday in question is that of the Henry Moore Institute, twenty-one years my junior, who celebrated their thirtieth birthday on Friday 21st April 2023, shortly before my notice period came to an end. The first exhibition that I looked after at HMI was ‘With Hidden Noise’ curated by Dr Jon Wood and Stephen Feeke, featuring the work of the likes of Tony Oursler, Juan Munoz, Imogen Stidworthy, Nam June Pak and others. The last exhibition that I will be looking after will be the current one, at time of writing, by Michael E. Smith. I have to admit it feels like a good one to end on, a definite favourite from across the years.

I met Michael E. Smith, as I have met most of the artists that have worked here in my time, in the week before his exhibition opened. Smith comes across as something of a good natured and self-effacing prankster with a self-confessed love of hip-hop. On first meeting him he commented that he loved my shirt -a hoodie bearing the Onyx logo. I imagine he would probably have approved of the Public Enemy t-shirt beneath too.

His exhibition is darkly humorous in its creepy assemblages and minimal aesthetic. Whilst the final exhibition is executed in a very minimal fashion his approach to art making is ultimately very maximalist. The design process amounted to a whole series of exhibitions in the week leading up to the opening night, none of which would ever be seen by anyone other than myself, the curators, the technicians, and the cleaners as we opened up each morning.

Michael E. Smith. Henry Moore Institute. 2023

This style of working reminded me of the film Amelie. The eponymous hero of the film decides to play a series of pranks on Colignon, a mean spirited greengrocer, by making imperceptible changes to things in his life, inducing the feeling that he may be going mad. Here at the Henry Moore Institute, every morning for a week, I arrive to open up and find either radically different arrangements of items or things purely moved to different positions. As the opening night approaches one cannot help but wonder what the final exhibition will be.

The final exhibition looks nothing like any of the previous conjunctions of works, the galleries are pared right back. Only that which is essential has survived the final edit. For the last week or so, the Henry Moore Institute has acted like a massive 3d sketchbook, oh to be able to turn the pages and see the evolution of such a site specific project laid out before you. But I suspect this is part of Smith’s raison d’être, to ensure that the final feeling is one of self-assured minimalism, a smooth and graceful transition from the outdoor world of speed and commerce to a rarified atmosphere of contemplation and art for arts sake. Art just being what it is.

Katrina Palmer. The Necropolitan Line. Henry Moore Institute 2015. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones

Numerous visitors have commented since the opening, about how they remember a previous show in which people were made to leave the building via the goods lift, also a feature of Smith’s exhibition. ‘The Necropolitan Line’ by Katrina Palmer was one of my top two shows in the 19 years that I have worked for the Henry Moore Institute. A huge train platform was built through the galleries as part of a sound installation. Charles Dickens’ short ghost story ‘The Signalman’, was a significant reference point for this wintry meditation on the thin veil separating life from death. Outside, the ever shortening days cast a blanket of early darkness in the galleries, and in the gloom, the sounds of the Christmas Fair on Cookridge Street would bleed into the galleries adding to the other-worldliness of this rather magnificent installation.

Having entered the galleries through the front door as always, visitors were ushered by information staff into the goods lift, normally used to move sculptures from street to galleries, where they would be taken on a short but very slow descent to the street outside. A small pair of headphones hung in the lift and a tinny whispered tune titled ‘Is That All There Is’ played as visitors were taken on their one-way journey into the next life. The tune could be taken as a humorous broadside made against contemporary art by the many visitors who look, as they will at Michael E. Smith’s exhibition, and exclaim ‘Is that all there is?”, but here there is no turning back, and the song was without doubt a reference to the one-way journey that is life.

Since the very first days of BasementArtsProject, one of my favourite aspects is that we have never tried to clear away all of the remnants of its previous inhabitants. The walls, floors, ceilings, glitter filled cobwebs are an ever growing accretion of a different type of history. Art merging with the dust of the past, present but obscured and often exerting an influence in not only our direction as BasementArtsProject but also the artists working with us, responding to such archeological remnants as people quite often like to do. It is in these moments that we see the future emerging from the past, knowledge, styles, objects being sampled, remixed and reused. Gradually morphing over time to become something else, something new. A methodology that I am sure hip-hop enthusiast Michael E. Smith would appreciate.

This method of working has been apparent in Smith’s show too, whether intentional or a by-product I am not sure, but it is exemplified by one interaction in particular. An artist that I work with on a regular basis visited the exhibition on the day after it opened. This artist is an obsessive maker and struggles with conceptual art and art that is fabricated on behalf of artists. In conversation a few days later the artist asked me the meaning of the Hebrew text on the wall. I was confused to say the least. After a lengthy discussion it became apparent that the Hebrew text was on a piece of masking tape inside a cupboard without a door on it. The reason why this piece of masking tape was visible was due to Smith utilising the fire escape as a light source for the first gallery.

The corridor ends in an alarmed door so is essentially a dead end except during emergencies, but for visitors who do not normally have access to such restricted areas everything takes on a new significance. The Hebrew masking tape in question was actually a remnant of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019 artwork by Tamar Harpaz. Here the artist had placed the electronic control panel for her kinetic artwork in the cupboard, and left instructions for one of her technicians on how to wire it up -written in Hebrew on masking tape and stuck to the wall above the circuit board. In the absence of objects that the visitor, himself a stone sculptor understood, the Hebrew masking tape became a point of intrigue, recognising as he did the Hebrew script. This has led to many interesting conversations with him about the nature of conceptual artwork. In doing so, he pointed out the similarities to me with how the Basement operates as a site of collaboration through historical traces.

Smith is unquestionably a maker but his work is supremely conceptual and he knows this and expects people to question it. Once again the phrase ‘Is that all there is’ becomes a known quantity. Not only through the Hebrew masking tape in the gallery one fire escape, but also the darkened goods lift that stands open for the second time in thirty years in gallery three.

There is something incredibly freeing in the emptying out of a space and being expected, or asked, to contemplate something that seems so out of place, and in this respect Smith’s art works in spades. And so, as time moves on I prepare to vacate this space that I have occupied for the last nineteen years and take to the helm of BasementArtsProject full-time. It has been a tough experience working seven days a week between BasementArtsProject and the Henry Moore Institute for the last twelve years, with an interlude as Arts Administrator at arts@trinity, but it has been a worthwhile and enriching time.

I have nearly escaped a couple of times in the past but have always ended up coming back, such is funding in the independent sector. Now, as in Katrina Palmer’s ‘Necropolitan Line’ my exit is one way this time. On Saturday, I step out into the blinding rays of some kind of afterlife. It seems appropriate that my first day as a complete independent is 1st May - May Day -aka Socialist Worker Day. I shall of course be continuing to share my experiences on here, ‘The Basement’ Studio Journal, as I have for the last few years.

A BIG THANK YOU to Katrina Palmer and the Henry Moore Institute for allowing me to use the photographs by Jerry Hardman-Jones of ‘The Necropolitan Line’ from 2015.

To all of the people that I have worked with over the years at HMI. Thank you, it has been an enjoyable and memorable time

Big Love, I will stay in touch

Bruce xx