!Xoe and FRED

Two site-specific rural art events, presented by Dr. Mark Haywood

I’ll describe two site-specific rural art events that are several thousand miles and worlds apart, one post-colonial, the other post–agricultural; one had the exotic name, !Xoe, whereas the other is called FRED. Their purpose also differed greatly, but both were located in distinctive locales, rather than the homogenous, non-place of international white box space. My account will be largely descriptive, focussing on context and outcomes, rather than emphasising individual art works. 

(Image and map sequence)

!Xoe-Site Specific was centred on the village of Nieu-Bethesda in a remote, semi-desert region of South Africa known as the Great Karoo. !xoe means ‘place’ in the language of its now decimated aboriginal San people,

(The Karoo)

but the Karoo is also the spiritual heartland of Afrikaner culture, and the setting for some its most powerful literature, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 The Story of an African Farm to JM Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace.

(Approaching Nieu-Bethesda from the Graaf-Reinet road)

!Xoe originated in 1997, shortly after I’d arrived in ZA to take up a professorship in a university art school. The first free elections were a recent event and the blood on the land had yet to dry, or soak into the soil; One felt part of living history after the bland, seemingly ‘post-historical’ UK with its newly elected Blair government. I was contacted by Mark Wilby, a Johannesburg movie photographer, whose practice subsidised a small arts and craft centre in N-B thatg offered his young daughters an alternative to the heavily fortified white suburbs of Jo’burg. Mark was also the custodian of (Helen Martin’s Owl House), a world class outsider art site, which was N-B’s only tourist attraction. Unfortunately it had no economic value to the village and visitors were actually contributing to its destruction. The interior walls were covered in tiny fragments of ground glass, which once have sparkled in the light of Helen Martins many candles, but now, at the end of each day Mark swept up the glass that had been knocked off by visitors brushing against the walls. Meanwhile outside the concrete were being destroyed by the bitter cold winter nights. If this wasn’t enough, tourists seldom lingered, but shaken by the Owl House’s disturbing ambience, they would hurry back to the psychic security of the familiar (though far more dangerous) N1 highway, leaving just a few rand in the Owl House cash box and more powdered glass on its floor.

(Landskip with Plinth)

I won’t describe our struggle with officialdom to preserve the building, suffice to say !Xoe was needed to divert tourists into the veldt, where they could slow down long enough to discover the austere beauty of the region with its deceptively abundant wildlife and flora. We planned an event, centred on the village with site-contextual art scattered over a 20km radius; viewing it would be a lengthy business requiring an overnight stay, with the journey between art sites ultimately being of more value than the art, as it would immerse spectators in the haunting redolent world of the Karoo.

My sole experience of anything similar in a rural context had been a now notorious UK event called the Lost Weekend in Alston, a village high in the Pennine hills. Though the artwork was memorable, the event had been opposed by a section of the local community and on the second night some artists and organisers were beaten up, while the rest ended up barricaded in the press office while drunken locals tried to break down the door and terrified art critics from national papers tried to transmit lurid accounts to the outside world.

(Mustafa Maluka’s grafitti bombed station was the frontier post from which oine crossed into !Xoe)

The Lost Weekend’s shortcomings were self-evident - it was made by metropolitan outsiders primarily for the benefit of other outsiders. Such a conceit in violent, edgy South Africa would be far more dangerous, but we didn’t set out to educate local people in contemporary art appreciation, South Africa had little prior history of site-specific art and we sought to involve local people through practical, economic strategies, rather than interest them in the art directly. Wool and embroidered !Xoe logos were distributed to women in the coloured township, who knitted the official !Xoe beanie hats that were sold through the Ibis Art Centre. The parallel existence of two wholly different economic cultures meant each knitter earned more from the sale of one hat than her husband did in a day as a farm labourer.

(Kobus Kloppers Faith and Water)

The artists were based on farms and fabricated their work in the well equipped farm workshops, the Art Centre ran an accommodation bureau that arranged bed and breakfast on local farms, local teenagers helped install work and acted as runners who overcome the absence of cell phone reception. The event initiated the village’s first bar, which had the village’s first satellite TV, and we spent evenings watching the 1998 World Cup with local coloureds who were football crazy, but had never watched TV before and old Afrikaner farmers who though unused to socialising in mixed race company  were experts at watching sport on TV with a glass in their hand.

(Jennifer Ord, Breaking the Hoop)

The month long event was actually timed to straddle the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the largest event of its sort on the continent with audiences drawn from all over southern Africa. Despite being 200km from G’town and about 700km from both Cape Town and Jo’burg, many Festinos would pass within 30kms of Nieu-Bethesda on the N1 highway and so formed our target audience. The event was well publicised in the national press and on the Festival’s own TV station and over a thousand people made the journey across the mountains to Nieu-Bethesda to see the temporary installations.

(Barn sequence)

Although the artists were mainly from Cape Town or Johannesburg, a lengthy run-in and in depth orientation sessions with local people resulted in artworks, which though often elegiac, drew on both the long history of colonial occupation and contemporary local issues such as water and firewood shortages, harvest failure, housing conditions, rural migration and inter-racial farm violence (but also the local football team’s need for a new strip).

(Bonita Alice, Illusions of Permanence)

After the first !xoe event year round visitor numbers grew steadily, with accommodation expanding to include a backpacker’s inn and luxury farmhouse cottages, with low impact tourism through mountain bike rentals, horse riding holidays and multi-day hiking trails.  A second event was held in 2000 with internationally known artists, but by late 2001 we felt the biennial event had served its purpose locally and if repeated should be elsewhere in the country.

(Karoo Cottage Camera Obscura,  2000)

Sadly this has failed to materialise and a few months ago I read in the Guardian newspaper that N-B’s burgeoning prosperity as a tourist centre meant that just like South African cities it had attracted itinerants from other rural areas, who had created a squatters camp of on the edge of the village and social tensions were rising, as white and coloured residents felt the tourism threatened by an unprecedented need to lock doors at night in response to a local  crime wave.

(Map sequence)

By contrast to the poverty, danger and ‘exciting times’ of the new South Africa, Cumbria, the location of the second event is a wealthy and seemingly prosperous, mainly rural reg which includes the English Lake District, a popular tourist destination since the mid 18th century.

(West’s Guide)

However the tourist industry is now the largest employer and if local hill farming survives it will be largely due to its role in preserving the present appearance of the landscape for tourist consumption. Another difference is that English audiences are much more familiar with contemporary art and FRED came about through the efforts of Steve Messam who runs a tiny contemporary art space called fold in the unlikely setting of  Kirby Stephen, Cumbrian market town, rather smaller than Ennis.

(FRED map)

Unlike !Xoe which was curatorially structured, with invited, nationally established artists. FRED began as an umbrella organisation to professionally co-ordinate and market about forty simultaneous art initiatives and interventions across a rural region by artists who lived mainly in the region.   

(2004 Card )

Since its inception in 2004 FRED has been characterised by emphatic branding which uses humour, marketing and publicity stunts to bring contemporary non-gallery based art to an increasingly less conservative public in a region traditionally associated with landscape painters and amateur watercolourists.

(2005 Cards)

FRED is now a well established annual event which requires increasingly high levels of administration, co-ordination and public funding. It attracts large audiences, but they are mainly drawn from within the region, as it happens at the very end of the main tourist season, after school year has commenced. This is intentional as the Lake District’s old narrow lanes are already choked with tourist cars throughout the summer months

(2006 Cards)

The most recent FRED ended last Sunday and it’s too early for a comprehensive evaluation, but I can make a few general comparisons between FRED and !Xoe. South Africa’s complex and tragic colonial history has more in common with that of Ireland (though South African nostalgia for a rural past is a closeted sentiment and usually only encountered at discreet suburban dinner tables). However both I believe in both countries’ artists interrogate the historical continuum of rural past and present far more thoughtfully and searchingly than is usually the case in the UK.

(Ullswater from Wordsworth Point)

Britain is an urban country whose remaining rural landscapes are products of continuous modification by five thousand years of human occupation. Though often misrepresented as ‘natural’, the Lake District scenery is a product of early deforestation, soil erosion and what today we would call degradation. Like all English landscapes, it’s richness actually lies in it being a palimpsest of historical changes, yet too often the landscape is now perceived as needing to be nostalgically returned to some arbitrary recent past for the benefit of tourists and ‘leisure consumption’ of the countryside. In the post-agricultural Lake District, the prime function of local Herdwick sheep will  not be as sources of meat or wool, but as lawn mowers who maintain the manicured appearance of the landscape.

(Romantic Seduction and Power 1)

The Industrial Revolution and the Enclosure Acts initiated the severing of most of the population’s direct links with the countryside, but today it is where many suburbanites aspire to live.  The rural is now highly contested territory as historically constituted, still living communities, are threatened by second home owners,

(Romantic Seduction and Power Close up 1)

and more insidiously, by homogenous suburbanisation as designer chintz, hanging baskets and hedges replace hedgerows; where grass verges become tidy lawns planted with Dutch tulips in dormitory commuter villages, where local shops have closed and locally born people have been priced put of the housing market.

(Romantic Seduction and Power Close up 2 )

Meanwhile larger debates around global warming, climate change, future energy sources, the implications of CAP all have specific distinct implications for future rural life. Rural English art could be far more, awkward, edgy and issue driven than anything emanating from the metropolis.

(FRED poster 12 sec fade to black slide)

Which is why if I have any reservations about FRED, it is that the general absence of curatorial direction beyond audience expansion through art-lite marketing of art as fun, can make it a difficult vehicle with which to insightfully address these pressing issues. As so often elsewhere art simply becomes entertainment, novelty, or simple eye candy. If contemporary art has any value beyond Baudrillard’s ‘null value’ of  commodification, it lies in helping people look at, understand and question their world with the artist/curator as initiator and the artwork as an intermediary lens to the ultimate object of contemplation. End

Mark Haywood studied at the University of Northumbria (MFA) and Royal College of Art (PhD) in the UK. Formerly Professor of Fine Art, Rhodes University, ZA, he now co-ordinates research at CLEAR (Centre for Landscape & Environmental Arts Research) Cumbria Institute of the Arts, UK. He is a contemporary artist who exhibits in museums from Cape Town to Reykjavik; he also writes on visual culture - mainly the construction of aesthetic values in art and design, metaphysical design, the tourist gaze, theories of place, non-place and wilderness His recent publications include The Wild Blue Wonder: essays on cyanaphilia (2005) and One Body Politic (2004).