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For Image gallery go here
For image gallery go here
The UK arguably led the way with this trend towards the instrumentalisation of culture with funding to cultural institutions and artists becoming strongly linked to policy directives seeking measurable outcomes that, many argue, remain outside the remit of art or culture. In Britain, with the advent of the National Lottery’s role in funding art and culture, debates immediately raged about notions of democracy in arts funding: should the gambling spend of the masses be used to prop up ‘elitist’ art forms such as opera or contemporary art? From positions of actual or believed defensiveness, arts policy appeared to be very eager to put a spin on arts funding that assured an apparently skeptical public that the money given to the arts would yield other benefits.
Walker & Bromwich’s funded “Sci-Fi Hot Tub” project is significantly located within this context of British arts policy. And, of course, for those with a level of critical insight, this is no mistake. The project seeks to ask questions about the context in which it is produced, over and above any specific research premises it laid out at its inception. In the action of seeking to measure the impact of an art piece, it intrinsically engages with the policy context of the (visual) arts in Britain today. Furthermore, it is almost certainly –as is often the case with art- somewhat ambivalent. Its research intentions are certainly both sincere and consistent with the artists’ practice over their working careers. But it is not without a certain performative gesture; a sense of taking an approach completely without irony that, perhaps, through its earnest process, underscores a number of ironies and dichotomies within its very existence.
The artists identify well being or ‘Wellness’ as a key intersection between their practice that of and the medical community in the primary research objective driving the project: “To develop methodology that combines and compares artistic and medical solutions to well being. This will be done by applying the statistical investigative processes used in pharmaceutical trials to create non-biased systems for evaluation that can be applied to testing the effects of an art work on its public.”
Within reasonable parameters of alteration, they have done exactly that. They have collaboratively developed the research methodology and tested it. They worked with a multidisciplinary team in developing a testing methodology that sought to monitor changes that might indicate benefit by measuring qualitative and physical responses in those who participated; who took to the waters of the “Sci-Fi Hot Tub”. Those who took to the tub were monitored, in groups sorted according to fixed durations of exposure, in some cases using the same questions as in standard test trials. A control group who did not enter the tub but, instead, were asked to commune with a forest, was similarly monitored.
For report of findings go here
For project notes go here
© 2010
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