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Creative London

Creating Alternatives

—Loraine Leeson in Dialogue with Carmen Mörsch

Since the mid-1970s Loraine Leeson has been an artist working collaboratively for social change in East London. From 2003-2005 a team of German artists and researchers investigated her practice to put together an exhibition documenting process and products, collaborations with fellow artists and activists and the social and political contexts within which the work was created. Art for Change opened at the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunste, Berlin in November 2005. Over the subsequent two years it has toured to London and Toronto, and tours to Dublin for 2008. Here she is in conversation about her work and the social contexts which informed it with Carmen Mörsch, one of the creators of the exhibition and editor of its catalogue. The dialogue took place while the show was at SPACE gallery in Hackney earlier this year.

Carmen Mörsch: I have been working in Berlin as an artist, educator and researcher for the last 15 years. About 10 years ago I became interested in the organisations Loraine Leeson had co-directed, The Art of Change and also the Docklands Community Poster Project. I realised that for many artists of my generation who were engaged in this kind of participatory work in the 90s, these projects served as a point of reference. However often we just referred to it and perhaps even mystified it, without ever going into depth about what happened with these practices in the 70s and 80s.

Loraine and I have from time to time both been invited to the same round table events and at one of these she told me that in 1975 she lived in Berlin while on a DAAD scholarship. Despite the fact that she had been living and studying in Berlin at that time, I realised that I didn’t know anything about the history of her work. When I came back to Berlin I suggested to some colleagues that we should make an exhibition about her work for 2005, which would be an anniversary of 30 years since she had first created this kind of work in Berlin. We would take her DAAD scholarship as the starting point, go through her private archives and prepare an exhibition that would enable this work to be assimilated into the discourse about participatory art, including what is today described as ‘socially engaged’ art.

So, this was our starting point for the exhibition in Berlin. We were five volunteers from different generations. I think the youngest was in their mid 20s, the oldest was late 50s and I was somewhere in the middle. We made an application to put on this exhibition at a place which I believe to be the only democratic art association in Europe, the New Society for Visual Arts in Berlin. They accepted our application and we started to research and preparation. It took it us two years because (I hope I am allowed to tell this story!), when we first arrived at Loraine’s house and we looked in the cellar, we almost despaired because it was all there, though in a state which needed a lot of work. We tried to, (how do you say?) take out the treasure.

So now we are of course very happy that the show opened in November 2005 in Berlin, and then travelled to London, here to SPACE in Hackney, before going on to Toronto and Dublin. Still, I have to say that when I stepped in here and saw the exhibition I was really surprised because the exhibition you see here is totally different from what we did in Berlin. It shows probably only 10% of the material, whereas our intention in Berlin was to contextualise the work. We didn’t only show the products but tried to (always quite a tricky thing to do), translate the collaborative processes which formed the basis of the work, into an exhibition format. It included an enormous number of newspaper articles, conversations from archives, videos, steps in between, so you could follow through the process of the making of work. We also interviewed people who were involved in it. I think some of those room we interviewed are actually here in this room. Extracts from these interviews were included to make, as one would say in Germany, a ‘cultural historical exhibition’ where the art pieces, the artefacts, are just one small part in the mosaic of the bigger picture. Here we have in fact the opposite. This exhibition concentrates on the art pieces, on the final outcomes of the work, which may be fair enough in an English context where many people may already know the stories behind the work.

Now, Loraine, when we were talking two hours ago, you made a comparison between your practice in the 70s and 80s and that of my generation. We are always talking about the differences, but the first question I would like to ask you is this: lf you look, for example, at the East London Health Project from then, do you see some similarities as well, to what we are trying to do today?

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Loraine Leeson: There is a lot of very interesting work going on now, that relates to social context, and many young artists who are looking for ways to change the world. As we were starting to do this work in the late 70s and 80s in this country however, we also got Thatcherism. A huge backlash then came from the right, and it’s taken almost 20 years to get over it. More recently though a return to some sort of social practice has begun and been going on for about five years now – 15-20 years on from Thatcherism. There are a lot of young artists around doing really interesting work, though sometimes I think perhaps unaware of its political context. It is always useful to see what people have done in the past, even though you may want to do it differently, and of course the times are different. I don’t work in the same way now as I did 20 years ago and why should anyone now work in that way? I do think though that a lot of the impetus for the work being done now by younger artists is coming from the same thing.

Despite some recurring issues, perhaps what isn’t the same, is that there is not the same climate of campaigning. There are indeed campaigns going on, however when this earlier work was made there was a political climate that isn’t there now. To engage with it was I think easier for us then. You knew where you were - with them or against them! Now the politics is much more diffuse. I think some of the pertinent questions for artists working now are: how do you situate yourself within the politics and whose cause are you fighting?

Carmen: So, could you tell us a little bit about the Bethnal Green Hospital campaign and the East London Health Project?

Loraine: Perhaps Peter Dunn would also like to answer this question. We worked together on these projects for the 70’s and 80’s and into the early 90s.

When we started out as artists, we were trying to find a way to be effective, in terms of social change. We soon discovered however through some of our early projects, that what you achieve as an artist working in isolation is very much a drop in the ocean. It became clear through this early work that in fact it was much more effective if you could find ways of collaborating. Peter and I came to East London for the first time in the mid to late 70s on a greater London Arts film/video fellowship, which involved running community film and video workshops, and as we started these, the hospital just down the road went into occupation. This was a result of the first wave of cuts in the Health Service under the then Labour Government, who were beginning to close hospitals, to reduce the NHS costs.

Since our fellowship remit was to run workshops, one of the trade unionists, Dan Jones from the Trades Council [a local committee of union representatives], who was an artist himself and part of the Campaign Committee, suggested that Peter and I work with them.

We were first invited to make a videotape to support the campaign. That was a key moment for us, because in attempting to make such a production through workshops, we discovered a contradiction between an activity that is an enabling process, where people need the possibility of failing and learning on the job, and the production of a campaign tape, which had to be of high quality, effective and rapidly produced. A satisfactory product was in the end achieved with a lot of editing. However we later produced some posters, this time working closely with the campaign committee for ideas, but undertaking the production ourselves, it felt a much better process. Members of the committee knew the issues, and we knew how to represent them. In this way we moved from a participatory to a collaborative approach. I think this was the first time where the process felt effective and meaningful, where the artefacts we produced had real use as part of a wider initiative.

In making the video and posters, we became more involved in the campaign, and started to document what was going on. It soon became clear that there were some issues connected to the occupation of the hospital that local people and patients were not necessarily aware of. One of these was the nature of an occupation itself. The way it happened was this. When the health authority set about closing the hospital, the top administrative staff moved out. However sympathetic medical and nursing staff stayed, GPs kept referring patients, ambulance drivers kept bringing patients. The hospital continues to function, and the government has an obligation to continue to fund it while patients are there. So, that was how they occupied it. However it is also a very complicated process links the national and regional as well as the specific local situation.

Since we by then had documented all aspects of the occupation and related activities, we had a lot of material. When it became clear that more information was needed we were therefore able to put together an exhibition, which was displayed in the hospital foyer. Interestingly, following this, an opportunity came along to show it in a gallery. Well clearly, we hadn’t done this for a gallery, and in fact this was explicitly not what we were doing, and we were not sure it would be the right thing to do. So we took the proposal to the campaign committee and they said “Well, of course show it, because we need publicity.” For them there wasn’t a contradiction. It was only us wondering if it would undermine what we were doing? So the work went from the foyer to the Serpentine Gallery for the Art for Whom exhibition, where it did indeed create publicity.

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Carmen: Could you make clear whether there was discussion about whether it would be right or wrong or difficult or good, to show it in the art context?

Loraine

The campaign committee were certainly positive that it should go there, we also discussed it with a number of different people we were working with and did get very clear directives from some of the trade unionists we were working with, that yes, we should show this. However it wasn’t a big issue for them. At that time, you have to remember, cultural work wasn’t seen as a priority in situations such as this. When the committee has gone through its whole agenda, ‘any other business’ is that some artists are going to make a videotape. Who wants to know?

Carmen: When you saw it in the gallery, did you, yourself, have the feeling that this was alright, or did it change the whole thing for you.

Loraine: I think it was fine.

Carmen: I am still interested though, following some of the discussions we had in the symposium today, what happens to work that is created in a community context and then moves to a gallery? What is possible to translate from one place to the other. Which is why I am pressing this point.

Loraine: It is relevant to the comments you made earlier to the way Art for Change has been shown in the London gallery. One of the most important things is that this sort of work needs to be contextualised. There is also no point in looking at the products of such work against art designed for a gallery wall. If we were going to create art for a gallery it wouldn’t look like the work here. Because the hospital campaign work was well contextualised at the Serpentine Gallery (the show was about artists working around political issues and with campaigns and other external bodies) it worked. It wasn’t in that case contradictory. In fact, it was very positive, because it brought this sort of work to the public’s attention. It also started the first networking we had with other artists working this way. So it was actually quite a positive thing and something we never looked back from. My work has always been produced for a situation that is not a gallery. Whenever the work goes into a gallery it’s about showing something that was created elsewhere. I don’t think people are too stupid to make that link. They just need to have the information.

Another issue is that galleries are where you go to look at what’s going on. A lot of this work becomes invisible if it isn’t in galleries. The important thing is to find a way that still makes sense of the work without undermining or contradicting what it is you are trying to do. Personally, I don’t feel a gallery context of itself contradicts this kind of practice, although I know various people over the years have thought otherwise.

Peter Dunn: The reaction to this sort of work was different then. About the Art for Whom exhibition, Bernard Levin wrote, this is ‘poisoning the wells of art’. And that’s something that has changed. Because at that time when we made our first funding application to Greater London Arts, we were told, this isn’t art, it is politics. So that has changed.

Also at the time when we were working on the health stuff, the issues that we were dealing with were new for us. We were thinking about whether we should show in an art gallery, because we had written articles about gallery socialism, and I have to be fair about this, Vic Bergin, was putting artwork on the streets of East London at the time. He was also doing work in galleries, and we were critical of that approach, because it wasn’t engaged with communities. So we had written articles critical of Vic Bergin. I have to say I have changed my opinion of Vic Bergin enormously since then, because he did a lot of very seminal work which is very important. So that was the background to our feeling of discomfort about engaging with the gallery, because we had taken that stance and it was the campaign committee who said, you know that’s art stuff you are dealing with. Get real, this is publicity.

Carmen: On now to the Docklands Community Poster Project. One thing which keeps me thinking is you just said that in this collaboration there were different forms of expertise; that they had the political knowledge and you were the artists, so you had the aesthetic knowledge. I am interested to hear about the processes of decision making between the two. How did the discussion process work?

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Loraine: It began between making those posters for Bethnal Green Hospital Campaign, and the other posters that you saw from the East London Health Project. I suppose you could say we had been seen to cut our teeth and work for the campaign in a bona fide way. The Trades Councils identified money that could be to put into creating information about the health cuts. Perhaps what they would have done in the past would be to produce some leaflets. However they had seen that what we could do with photomontage, and I think they now thought it might be better to use something more visual.

They approached us about creating some materials to explain more widely about the cuts, and not just about that particular hospital. They had a small amount of money, enough to print to print some posters, and they also knew how to organise. They set up a steering group with members of the Trades Council and a representative from the Tower Hamlets Health Campaign. Through that group we then discussed what we should do, whether a tape-slide, video or posters. We decided on a format in the end that we didn’t call them posters, but rather ‘visual pamphlets’. This was because they contained information that was more than would be appropriate for fly posting. They were to go in doctor’s surgeries and places where you could read them.

The process of coming to that decision and then deciding what went into them was really interesting process because of the way they structured the group. The unions people fed in their knowledge of the issues and we fed in our visual knowledge. People in the art world used to say to us, but isn’t that design by committee? We would say, actually no, it’s like everyone putting in their best skills and of course in other art forms, that’s exactly what happens. You don’t do theatre on your own, do you, or film? People have specialisms which they bring together and make something that neither could achieve on their own. We learnt that very simple lesson through the East London Health Project.

At the beginning of the 80s, a new issue hit London. A Conservative Government had come into power, headed by Margaret Thatcher. We had the most right wing government for many, many years. They saw the opportunity of this partly empty land around the London docks. Containerisation meant that the docks were moving eastward downriver. The remaining land they referred to as the ‘biggest bit of real estate in Europe’.

We were approached by the Trades Council to produce a poster about the Docklands. Having looked into it we could see that the issues were huge. How could we represent this complex situation in a poster?

East London is and was then a place of overlapping networks, where waves of people have immigrated and settled, many through the Docks, bringing with them a richness and diversity of culture. However these people have also had to struggle to survive. To do this they have organised, and in East London there are political networks, cultural networks, economic and social networks. All these overlap, so if you are someone who wants to collaborate, there are plenty of people to relate to.

Therefore, when we were asked to make a poster, we were able to go to the different tenants’ and action groups that were already set up around the Docklands. You have to remember at that time, there was no such word as the Docklands, this was just a series of places around the river around which the Government drew a line and called the ‘Docklands’, the better to sell it off. Where people felt under threat they organised and had already created very good, democratic action groups for different areas, which we were able to visit. What people said was, ‘there are things happening here and what we want are posters, yes, big posters, and also something to tell you in more depth about what’s happening’. We want a document of everything that is happens and of the area before it disappears. We also want some design work to help with our campaigns.

Out of that Peter and I, using the experience of the East London Health Project, set up a steering group, modelled on what we had learnt form the Trades Councils. That group eventually became the Docklands Community Poster Project. Belinda Kidd, the first administrator of the Docklands Community Poster Project, found a company format that would suit us and set us up as a community co-op with community representatives on our board. The Joint Docklands Action Group already represented the different action groups in the Docklands campaigning, and we became the cultural arm of that campaign.

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Peter: One of our representatives was Maureen Davis, who was very prominent in the Association of Wapping organisations and a member of our steering group, right the way through.

Maureen Davis: Without you, Peter, and Loraine, God knows what would have happened to us. You were fabulous for us and we only wish you were still around taking care of us. But I am going to put my order in tonight to the both of them because we still desperately need help. Along the riverside, we have been campaigning for a memorial garden. A memorial park to the 60,000 people nationwide that lost their lives during the Second World War and now what do we see, every year, we see it being hijacked by some of the yuppies there and they don’t even want to see the boats on the river. So, we are the Civilians Remembered Campaign and we are determined to get the land back that has been taken from us by who knows how, the developers. They have used the site themselves for 12 years now. While they put up these sky-scrapers, they used it as a yard for all their materials, and now they are telling us that we can shove off to Woolwich and have what we want there. But they don’t know what we are made of.

Peter: On one of Maureen’s campaigns in Wapping people stopped all the traffic on the main road. They had walkie-talkies and directed all the traffic down along the route of a proposed highway that was going to go through the council estate instead of the main road. They were going to pedestrianise this to put up luxury flats. Local people organised this campaign to stop the traffic, leafleted everybody, and they won. And that was true of a lot of Docklands, that whilst on a larger scale Thatcher won, in terms of selling off the land etc, the communities like Wapping and people like Maureen actually won lots of victories and that’s what we have to remember. It’s that direct action that actually won those victories.

Carmen: This is where we get to Art for Change and cSPACE, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about the shift that happened to take you there.

Loraine: The campaigning in Docklands came to an end at the end of the 80s for two reasons. Firstly because the land had by then been sold off. By the time the land had gone there was almost nothing more to campaign about. The other thing that came to an end, that had supported the campaigning groups and the arts organisations, that enabled all this to happen financially, was the Greater London Council, the GLC. This had gone left Labour in the early 80s and supported the arts. As part of this they set up ‘ethnic arts’ and ‘community arts’ sub-committees, and there was a burgeoning of arts in London.

In the mid 80s, because the GLC was so popular, not just in the arts, but in all areas of its work, the only way the right-wing national government could get rid of it was to abolish it together with all the other metropolitan authorities. They abolished a whole tier of regional government in order to get rid of it. So the land had gone and the financial support had gone. At the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s we looked around and said, “Well, what can we do?”

Some of the funding was picked up by other arts funders. I’m mentioning funding because you know, you can be active but you can’t achieve things without some sort of support. So, we thought, what are the issues that we really wanted to work around that aren’t just the issues of planning - because in a way what is happening in East London isn’t just about what goes where, it is actually about how people feel about their lives, how they see themselves, how they are seen by others. There is a real issue of identity to be addressed in this changing context.

So we transformed the Docklands Community Poster Project into The Art of Change - the same organisation with a different name. We also had to re-think our activities. There had been six of us working on the Dockland Community Poster Project, albeit part-time, then we went down to four. We decided that with significantly less income we would work on a project-by-project basis, raising money for each one. That was when we started working with young people. The first project that I ever did with young people re-used one of the Docklands community Poster Project billboards.

I remember taking some of those processes learnt from working with active communities and applying them to working with young people. I think what I do now still draws on those lessons. Through campaigning we learned that reacting against somebody else gives them power. Much more effective is creating your own models. Projects I am now running continue to be about creating alternatives, which is what draws the power back.

I think this is what they are doing in Tower Songs project we heard about from CityArts in Dublin. The work that people from Fatima Mansions and the Rialto Youth Project, is saying, “This is what we want”, rather than opposing what is being perpetrated.

We had also learned about listening, how you listened to the people you are working with, how you collaborate. The first Art of Change project involved using one of our billboards to work with a school. There was a group of young people, nearly all Bengali girls. My first reaction was, ‘should I work with a group of Bengali girls as a white artist?’ But that was it, it was going to be me or nothing, so I decided to address this by trying to develop processes for these young people to express who they felt they were, using visual means.

You see the final product here, actually no, this is a third size replica of the final product that went on the billboard. Though in fact, as we have talked about today, all this work is a process from which products pop up every now and again. That’s why in a way, it is a bit confusing to see something which is a product displayed as if it that’s all there was to the work. This was the end product of a series of products which were their collages. We engaged in a process which involved them working out a lot of things they wanted to say about themselves, then putting them together visually, and finally working out how those ideas could be put together to represent the group.

All this I learnt from working with communities. What I have come to recognise that I do as an artist, is to provide structure. This approach is still the one I am taking with recent projects using the Internet. It’s about creating a framework within which ideas and images can be held. One of my roles is to ensure it all looks good. The young people’s work has to look good. The aesthetics are very important, because art is a very powerful thing, and I think when Peter and I started working with the Docklands groups and the health groups, we knew that art could bring something that you couldn’t do in a printed leaflet. We knew there was a power that art has to consolidate and celebrate and it can give voice to people whose voice isn’t normally heard.

If I am going to enable that to happen I’ve got to make sure that voice is heard in the best possible way. It has got to be visually powerful but it has got to be theirs (the participants’), and that was the challenge of working with this group: how could we produce something that was both a professional piece of work which meant it could go on the streets and people would enjoy looking at it, and yet it could also be theirs? I suppose that’s the challenge I have tried to take up ever since with my work with young people.

West meets East, the billboard image that resulted from work with this group, turned out to be about the experience of living in two cultures. Unfortunately it did attract some graffiti, unlike previous photo-murals. This may have been a result of the information board underneath in Bengali and English and it was targeting the Bengali writing. I think the group made a very relevant statement. Picking up the issue of the gallery, this work later went to Barcelona and was displayed on the street outside a major art gallery there.

In this project I didn’t set out to represent Bengali culture, but rather worked with a group of young people towards the creation of a series of images to represent themselves. Perhaps one of the most important thing you can do is not make assumptions about who somebody is. Coming from any culture, and in this case Bengali, these young people might be first, second or third generation, and how they see themselves, who knows? I think everyone has a right to be who they see themselves to be. A role that I take is to simply facilitate them being able to express whatever that is.

Loraine Leeson is director of cSPACE and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London.

Carmen Mörsch is an artist, educator, researcher and associate professor at the Institute for Cultural Studies, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany.

Art for Change – Loraine Leeson: works from 1975–2005, will open at Dublin City Library in 2008, hosted by CityArts. Dates to be announced.

This is an edited version of a transcript from video footage produced as part of the Dublin CityArts web-based resource for researchers, practitioners and students www.cityarts.ie

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