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The Big Issue
'Consuming Passions'
A group of contemporary artists in Leeds want to persuade people using one of the city's shopping centres that art can have a place in their lives too. By Wayne Burrows
'Chip Butties' and 'French Situationism' are two phrases you don't find yourself putting together every day.
Yet it's a combination that defines the ambitions of [shift], the typographically eccentric name given to a 'process laboratory' set up by the artists' group E m e r g e D in a disused unit at Leeds' Merrion Shopping Centre.
Here, as organiser Lucy Gibson points out, "we really want to bridge the huge gap between contemporary art and the people of Leeds."
The space itself is nondescript, a plywood enclosure in a far corner of the indoor market where no fewer than 18 artists and 30 volunteers, organisers and assistants are setting out to research and make interventions in the life of the city centre.
People crowd around the tea-urn, books are available in a small 'education centre' and the general air is one of chaotic optimism.
As for the work itself, whether Juliana Capes' 'pavement astronomy', sketching the chalk constellations made by chewing gum on the pavement around the centre, or Gayle Chong Kwan's guided walks through the sensual memories of food in the city, it's all a far cry from the framed oils and watercolours that Gibson reckons are what most people expect art to be.
"Even now, you get in a cab and say you're an artist and the first response is likely to be 'what do you paint'," she says."So you then have to try to explain exactly what it is that you do, which can be hard to define sometimes....But as you can see we don't really have any walls here, so we can't display pictures in that way anyway."
Danny Holcroft's statement of his intention to follow an arcane series of chance rules to lead himself to a particular, random spot each day, and make a piece of work from whatever he finds is represented by a few photographs, and Third Person have been sticking up snatches of footage and text from the DVD they're compiling from interviews around the centre, but by and large anyone turning up her hoping to 'see' finished artworks will find themselves puzzled.
Instead within [shift] , the kind of work being produced can fall into the Martin Creed School of 'so subtle its barely there at all', so it's a bold move to move so far beyond the safe confines of the gallery. Even Amy Todman's relatively accessible three-dimensional collage takes place over time, so is never a completed work in any traditional sense.
As quietly-spoken Dundee native Todman points out, "I spend the first week feeling out the space, filing it,and then the second week editing it, so that the end product is really the process of exploring this space rather than any particular stage of the work.
"I'm really interested in the city as a jumble of associations, textures and materials and using my habds to mediate between those internal and external worlds."
Niki Russell is equally happy to point out the inscrutable nature of his own pencilled squares, obsessive measurements and markings.
"I'm not sure people know what it is I'm doing. Sometimes they think it is something official, like surveying, other times, because of the repetitive nature of the activities , they just assume I'm not quite right in the head. But when it works, people find that what I'm doing draws their attention to things, like the floor, or a corner of space, they wouldn't normally notice..."
For Lucy Gibson, whose own contribution comprises a poster drawing attention to the artificially drawn boundary of the 'grenn zone' used to price bus fares, there is potentially a political dimension to all this:
"The work I've been interested in commissioning," she says, "has in common the fact that it's very much about changing the way we see the everyday things around us, highlighting and drawing attention in subtle ways to the environment we live in."
Russell concurs: "People are so busy they tend to be switched off to the spaces they're passing through."
For Phillip Henderson, meanwhile, an artist intent on taking people out into the streets to play enigmatic 'pavement games', like adopting quasi-strategic positions dictated by the random movements of a ping-pong ball kicked around a pavement, 'it's sort of experimental. It's about the unwritten rules, changing the dynamics of the ways people move in subtle ways."
Quite what the Leeds public think of it all remains to be seen. Gibson is pleased by the response so far, with even the most nonplussed observers pleased to see the 'orphaned' space being occupied and used.
Yet on leaving the space, it quickly becomes apparent that subtle effects have been achieved, as I catch myself looking at things, and wondering if they are part of the 'art' or not. A collage of photographs of wigs in a shop window? The elaborate glass occupied by props from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang out on the Merrion precinct? The chalkmarks on a wall?
As one Leeds matron remarks tolerantly, on having the [shift] ethos explained to her: "Well, it's something a bit different isn't it?"
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