The Koestler Trust is an arts organisation for offenders and secure patients, based at Wormwood Scrubs in London – prison art. Although far from the high end of Fine art, Koestler acts as a microcosm of the art-world in general, involving many artistic and practical decisions and considerations echoed in galleries. It fosters relationships with artists, practitioners and professionals involved in more prestigious art activities. The relevance to the MA and my own practice is that I am interested in schooled and unschooled art, in creativity and the power of art in life.
The main cycle of activity is the annual Koestler awards scheme, where over 6,000 pieces of artworks, writing, and other arts are received from institutions nationwide. Much work would be described as outsider art - some naive, some revealing psychosis. The aim of the trust is to raise esteem and give prisoners new chances - some continue training in the arts after prison and become practitioners.
One thing you have in prison is time, and much work represents that - long hours of sculpting, painting and drawing in intense detail. The work is mainly amateur, although the prison population is diverse, including those with art experience or expertise, making it a particular type of amateur art. The time, anonymity, hope and lifeline it all represents, make prison art a particular genre of art - art for a purpose, framed within a purpose.
The level of accomplishment generally is similar to group shows of adult education to foundation level. What one looks for in prison art is potential. The work is as varied as the people who produce it. What really interests is the creativity and the pursuit of art itself - the inspiration, the way artists at any stage finds inspiration. The impulse to make art, the follow-through to actual artwork, the choice of subject matter out of all the possibilities imaginable, are aspects endlessly fascinating.
Koestler represents a fulcrum of creativity, where art really is a matter of life and purpose. Art is such anyway, outside of prison, and worthy as a pursuit for itself. It serves to show the essential nature of creativity.
The processing and hanging is necessarily swift, efficient and brutal. We price, we hang, we overlap. We may damage the edges because things are hung with pushpins on the wall, floor to ceiling, with no gaps, and in order of the processing number.
Occasionally work comes in several parts with instructions for installation. At least it will be crammed together. There is no possibility of arranging work with any sense of aesthetic outside of constraints. And yet, it looks great. The eye is given a feast, drawn to the best and to the awful by juxtaposition and comparison.
While hanging art, the same issues are replicated in galleries, museums and art fairs at all levels and budgets - the practical and pragmatic considerations which take precedence over aesthetic judgements. Work is not always shown to best advantage, artists’ wishes are not always realised - I've turned up at shows where I have moving image installations showing to find over lit situations, or not switched on.
The contemporary way of showing art - the late 20th century way - singularly spaced out in a white cube, each is paced and considered, is not always possible. Perhaps work is often made assuming it will be shown this way. Probably most artists would not choose their piece to be part of a random collage, where it may end up near the floor, overwhelmed by something inappropriate, yet floor to ceiling gives alot to the viewer if not the artist. Perhaps there is something to be said for forgetting about careful placing and balancing work. In earlier years of life I made a flat a home by adding to my collection of postcards and pictures in a vast cloud on walls. I still remember many of those images, gazing at them, studying and looking into them while thinking about life and everything. We relate to images we collect and become familiar with. When they are rearranged, new relationships emerge between them.
I often look at exhibitions with an eye to how they are hung, the solutions used, and how they could be other. It's so interesting to see a non-ideal solution which is still effective - a collective aesthetic.
Clearly artists go to prison too, so there is evidence of mastery alongside therapeutic outpourings. What offenders have to give to art is time, yet the hallmark of someone who decides to be an artist is that they have gone through a process and commitment of time to their practice. And so what is the difference? There cannot be a true distinction made, since not all art in Koestler is naive, unschooled outsider art, not has all art-school art gone through such a rigorous critical and educational process one might expect. I don't expect to come up with an answer to this, except that it is a question.
Some work is outstandingly beautiful and intricate - pieces to live with, expertly executed and ingeniously resourced. The subjects tend not to be the concerns of contemporary practice, but are retrospective or self expressive. There is censorship in that works are not submitted if they glorify violence or would cause offense. Some are a little racy or gruesome, but alot of works seem like windows, either in, to an inmate's current situation, or out, to a form of wish fulfilment. The range of forms, ideas, materials, media, images, is as diverse, interesting and impressive as one would hope for. There is much invested by the artists in these works, and for some, it is an opportunity not just for self expression and creativity, but for hope.
Another thought that recurs is the impulse to make art in the first place. We don't need to be incarcerated to need an outlet. We all have situations of immobility and frustrations in our lives. Creativity itself can become like a therapeutic drug, perhaps more refined and specific as one gets further involved in the profession. Creativity and making art is a form of self medication. It is more than a pastime or employment, but a psychological necessity. This is true for myself, for artists, and surely for people in general. There are many outlets and forms - partaking as a viewer is a form of participation which can be as satisfying as making. There are political aspects to this. The position of the arts as a human necessity has recently been debated in the UK with recent Arts Council funding cuts. Art and creativity is part of human nature, and essential in a fundamental way to the way we think.
The artworks are necessarily commodities to be dealt with - it is a numbers-game set against deadlines, but there is a sense of fairness which prevails. All artists are equal, all work is equal and anomalies are ironed out with a sense of fair play to participants, contrasting strongly with the usual hierarchical ordering of artists according to invisible rank.
Processing artworks, seeing the divine and the profane pass by, there really is everything here, in some form or another, and any idea or expression artists use. The difference is time, and context, and any critical fulcrum artists go through at art school or in the art arena. At Koestler, all is accepted, from naive to expert, and given an equality of worth. Koestler is about motivating the art principle, with a purpose of rehabilitation and giving hope. It doesn't take incarceration to find the outlets of art and writing, but within prison is where people who may never have contemplated life in a self reflective way before find religion, spirituality, and inner purpose. Koestler is preinstrucional, precritical art.
The criteria for assessing and pricing offender art differs to other art gallery contexts. At Koestler, if a piece is to be sold, we price according to obvious time and effort taken in production, size, worth of materials - in fact opposite to worth in a fine art context where meaning is highly valued: a spare eloquent gesture, or what is left out and suggested - skill may be implied or deliberately omitted. The loose pricing policy reckons how much time and effort have gone into production. In this context there is a point to that - there must be some way of judging. However, as anyone with an inkling of sensitivity may agree, one gesture in a drawing, a spare expressive suggestion, may be the culmination of years and decades of artistic endeavour, and high in that elusive art value.
We have to price quickly, to guess what people might pay, to weigh up one piece in relation to others totally different. It mirrors pricing art in other contexts, and what is valued. An eloquent piece on such issues such as Tracey Emin's "I've got it all", which expresses many dichotomies and conflictions about worth, value, money, and opposing self worth, would have very little monetary value at Koestler because we judge that it is just a photo, a moment, compared to a model that may have taken hundreds of hours to complete.
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSkabGZgcFjPtm2Vy9zBo7hn238E3JIBaSo-ZKNbXfvFSyf7smE (accessed 12th June 2011)
Perhaps the artistic elements of Emin's work would be appreciated and given an award by the judges, but its monetary value to sell, as an anonymous photo, would be relatively little. How are we to compare such work with that of a secure patient who may be performing and recording such acts through psychosis?
Insightful, creative, skilled or unskilled as work may be, it matters where it has come from. We do not usually encounter work anonymously. Even if we see art randomly in what may seem like an anonymous encounter, it is already filtered through galleries, agencies, some sort of system. The art of secure patients and offenders is not usually distributed freely. It n matter terribly to find out the provenance of artworks. Perhaps the goal is complete objectivity, regardless of the history or character or even the personality of the artist. If we do not like the artist, can we like the artwork?
Morality can be the subject of art, but whether art cancels itself out by the immorality or not of the artist is subject to debate. Biographies, especially posthumous, reveal aspects of artists that we wish we did not know about, as objectionable attitudes and acts now edge their way in to our consciousness, spoiling our enjoyment and relationship with their work.
Other people are as complex as criminals are as complex as artists. We are entitled to some of our prejudices and censorships. We generally value morality over immorality and do not regard all things as equal or all art and artists as equal.
http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTrXNbJeXu0IhH2u3bRg2kzofa9VH9NQQWr6qiMwZNiHXp3o2ck (accessed 12th June 2011)
An artist may be any sort of person. Sometimes we are lucky if we see art without knowing about the worse parts of an artist, and other times it is enlightening into darker aspects of the human soul.
The ranking of winners is a process of elimination. It is skill and time which is favoured, rather than economy of gesture, or pieces which are a little abstract. Conceptual does not come into it in any way. While working at Koestler, we speculate about what we may produce if ever we found ourselves in jail. Current art practice does not count. You need to choose something that would take time – sewing, oil painting or a large detailed drawing, and you would have to be resourceful and modest in materials.
Feedback is an important element, requiring something constructive and showing that someone somewhere really looked at their piece. Since artworks range from technically proficient to scribbles, and everything in between, the challenge is to consider each, acknowledge what is there, sum it up, compare it or relate it to something else, suggest a technique or idea, and to be as encouraging as possible, without being patronising, nor assuming any knowledge of art, or in fact anything. It’s meeting the piece on its own terms - a childish scrawl produced by a grown person must be treated seriously, equally, and given as much consideration as the impressive painting which is easier to comment on.
Each year different sets of people are invited to curate the public exhibition - last year victims of crime, this year magistrates. As can be imagined, these choices are utterly informed by specific agendas, resulting in entirely different exhibitions possible from the same works. It is a stark reminder of Koestler as a microcosm of the art-world, where such decisions are played out in another scale, another arena. In the end there is no formula, and comes down to personal choice.
Koestler fosters the hopeful and transformative aspects of creativity. Volunteering a day a week over months has made me consider deeply issues in art such as worth, resources, impulse, the nature of creativity and the value of random presentation in allowing the viewer to make their own relationships within work.
2200 words.
Images from The Koestler Trust 2011.
8th July 2011
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